Make Em Laugh
Second attempt at Dream Job complete. I don’t think I got it but I think I made excellent use of the opportunity, which is what playing the long game is all about. I left them with a better impression of me than they had before. I totally screwed up on one question (and naturally came up with the perfect answer 10 minutes after the interview had concluded) but I still consider it knocked out of the park.
It was a home run, but not a grand slam. To beat out my former boss I would have needed a Grand Slam…and then some. So I’m more than satisfied with how things went. I’m still king of the interviews. I never met an interview I didn’t like, with the exception of my former boss’s former boss.
Hold on, baseball metaphors? That interview must have shaken me up more than I thought. Okay, it’s like when you’re down 5-0 and score a goal in the last three minutes. You still lost but you made an effort that makes the team feel a bit better and might just get you noticed.
But here’s why I know it was a success: I made them laugh. They all laughed at least once. And that’s no easy feat, in 10 years I think I’ve seen one of them laugh maybe 4 times.
Why was that so critical? Since getting the job at this point was never my goal it was all about making a good impression. The laughs tell me we connected on some level of mutual respect but more than that they’ll have positive memories of my futile attempt.
Much like a coach in hockey (that’s better, getting back to being myself now) I decided I needed to neutralize the enemy’s strongest advantage. In this case it was one eccentric person’s ability to intimidate. I made a choice not to let him, no matter what happened. But how do you defeat a superior player in a better position? One trick I’ve used to great success in the past is to change objectives. How does that work? Here’s 3 examples:
Needing a minimum 75% to stay in the honours program I made 80% my goal.
Handling an angry guest my goal would be to do something nice that would surprise them, whether it related to the problem or not - whether I could solve the problem or not.
Not being intimidated in an interview? Forget getting the job and make it my goal to get some laughs.
Eccentric may be many things but one thing I’ve been forced to admit recently is that we have a similar sense of humour.
And Burton was right, I DO over think things. If I thought about breathing too much I’d probably suffocate. So, not quite like Kirk, I changed the rules. More like Data going for the stalemate in stratagema. But more than that I set my overactive mind on a bonus goal so that I didn’t focus on my primary objective. The fact is I suck up quite well on autopilot, it may be genetic or just habit but thankfully I remembered to trust in my inherently brown nosing nature.
But things got pretty personal. Facing off against them I quickly had to give up playing the interview game and just honestly speak from the heart.
So now they know what I’m all about, where I come from, and where I’m headed.
I figure the end result of all this was them liking and respecting me a bit more but at the end of the day saying something like “we’ve got a True Believer on our hands; we’re lucky to have him but he’s just not ready for this yet“.
I’ll find out Wednesday.
