How to land a good career.

Last updated on December 26th, 2023 at 01:24 am

Let’s go ahead and establish two truths out of the gate. 

1. The title of this post is not intended to be clickbait.
2. This isn’t a personal brag session. 

As with every article I write, the goal is to inspire and instruct men to reach their God-given potential the right way. Chances are, if you were to YouTube or Google the title of this post, you’d find a lot of people trying to tell you the wrong way.  They may indeed show you how to land a good career. They’d give you a way that is built on the foundation of pride and greed. If you really applied yourself to their approach, it might even work in the short term!  But you’d come out on the other side feeling hollow, tired, and empty with a big paycheck in your pocket.  So rather than wade through all that garbage, let’s talk about some practical tips that I put in place that helped me get into a career that provides financial and personal fulfillment. 

Academics, academics, academics

Do you want to know what one of the biggest tragedies of today’s educational system is?  The emphasis on sports.  Hands down.  When you think about how to land a good career, you need to remove sports from the equation.  WAY too much time, money, and attention has been devoted to this pastime in our modern generation.  Shoot, when I was in school, we had teachers fudging grades so athletes wouldn’t fail out, thereby staying on the team and playing for the school! It seems like as times evolved, and life was made easier by new inventions and new technology, men got away from working and started spending more time playing.  Back when my grandaddy was in school, he’d go through all of his classes, come home, work the fields until dark, study, and then go to bed. Day in and day out. There was no time for sports, except maybe a pickup game or two on the weekends.

Fast-forward to today, we’ve got little boys wanting to grow up to be basketball stars and esports champs instead of architects, engineers, doctors, and lawyers. We’ve got college football players buying Maybachs instead of focusing on how they’ll actually contribute to the world once they graduate.  This is the travesty that no one is talking about.  In fact, the majority of America encourages it.  I hear 60-year-old men talking about “how we’re doing the playoffs” knowing dang well they haven’t touched a football since sophomore year of college. They try to relive their glory days through their sons and the boys they watch on television every Sunday afternoon and Monday night.

It affects every age group of men, not just the old ones. Middle and high school kids watch the basketball star walking around with the prettiest girl in school. And they’re watching Dad at home carry on about so-and-so in his Fantasy Football team. Or maybe they go home at night and watch gamers stream on Twitch for hours on end.  What do these boys do then?  They want to be like that. So they put all their time and attention into useless things like sports and video games, seeking the approval and validation of people they admire.

Then they get to college.  The ones who play the game often get drunk on the fame, NIL deals, and attention from women. The ones who don’t decide they can still join the frat, go to all the games, drink the borgs, and attend the after parties. It becomes an all-encompassing lifestyle that pulls them away from more important things.

I saw a video of Carolina Gamecock fans doing the white t-shirt wave thing to the Sandstorm song a few weeks ago.  It was almost cultish.  Everyone moving in sync to the thundering beat of the drum. Don’t get me wrong.  Nothing is wrong with some fun and some team spirit, but kids who live and breathe this stuff have their priorities mixed up.  If you’re one of those guys, and you are currently in school, one of the first things you need to do is knock sports down a few rungs on the “ladder of importance”. 

Don’t peak in high school.

It’s not even funny anymore when I scroll through Instagram and I see the big shots of my high school years.  The idea of “peaking” is real, and it hits some quicker the others. These are the boys who never thought about how to land a good career. Instead, he lived it up in grade school.  Suddenly, the fella who was homecoming king and the star quarterback of the class is working the front desk at the local pizza joint a couple blocks from the high school.  He still goes to the games every weekend and still wears his varsity jacket.  For all intents and purposes, he’s a washup.  He lives in the past trying to regain his glory days.  It’s sad, and it’s not a position that any of us should seek to be in.

Do you want to get ahead?  Academics is key.  Always has been and always will be. Statistics don’t lie. 0.023 percent of high-school football players make it to the NFL.  That’s not accounting for the absolute GRIND that you must partake in, and the inevitable injuries your body will endure on account of training.  On the flip side, you want to know how many computer science students have job offers before they finish school.?  68.7%. Many of those are 6-figure opportunities too!  What about Accounting majors? 61.2%.  Teachers? 99%.  It’s almost as if pursuing something that actually matters increases your chances of success.

But, in order to get into a good college (for free with scholarships), and then complete a good degree, I had to focus on academics first and foremost. But Sammmmm, I can get a sports scholarship. Once again, you’re not wrong. However, we’re talking about the highest probability of success. We’re talking about what is most likely to actually take you somewhere in life. A sports scholarship tells me you’re good at sports. An academic scholarship tells me you’re good at learning. In the real world, learning is way more important than playing sports. Learning to learn can take you way further than learning a perfect hook shot or a perfect execution of an off-tackle offensive play. There’s a big difference.  As I said earlier, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying sports, but they should never take priority over your academics. If you have a big test coming up, you need to hit the books rather than hit the ball. 

Don’t fall for the name-brand school trap.

Schools aren’t like ketchup. Off-brand ketchup is (more often than not) absolutely disgusting. If it ain’t Heinz, it probably wasn’t grown on a vine. However, “off-brand” schools are usually fine, provided they have proper accreditation. As such, I didn’t get tied up on what school I ended up at. A key strategy to financial success quicker is eliminating debt. The less debt that you can accrue, the better you position yourself for financial fulfillment and stability.. Many kids will start off their careers in the hole by choice when they choose to go to a  “name brand” college as opposed to a local option. College isn’t cheap no matter where you go, but big-name schools charge premium prices because they know that immature and inexperienced students are attracted to the extras. Often, many students make college decisions based on factors such as college sports, Greek life, location appeal, nightlife, distance from parents, and a bunch of other unimportant things that detract from the main purpose: to get an education that will qualify you for a job that can afford your lifestyle.

My college didn’t even have a football team. There were only about 4,000 students on campus. Our Greek life was almost non-existent. The beach was like an hour and a half away. For all intents and purposes, the school is nowhere near a “big city”.  When I graduated high school, there was a stigma associated with all of us who had committed to this college. We were all homebodies that couldn’t stand to move away.  We were the kids who couldn’t get accepted into a “better” university. We were the kids who couldn’t afford a better university. I just smiled to myself. I got offers from big schools (anybody ever heard of Clemson?), and I turned them down to go to the good ol’ Funky Monkey, Francis Marion University. I was thinking about how to land a good career, and not how to have a good time.

Why?  I got paid to go to school at FMU. My scholarships more than covered my tuition and books. I was able to save money by crashing at my parents’ house and eating their food. My class sizes were so small I had direct access to all my professors for all 3.5 years I was there.  Because my professors actually KNEW me (rather than just being another name on a paper that their TA graded) I was able to get specialized tutoring during office hours.  This personal connection (sometimes) resulted in leniency and special consideration in regard to quiz and exam grades. It was absolutely legendary.

That’s the kicker about academics.  When you are all focused on sports, you have to be in a fancy school that pipelines directly into the professional league.  With academics, it doesn’t matter where you go, as long as that piece of paper you get at the end of 4 years has the proper accreditation.  My BA in Computer Science with a minor in Math carries just as much weight as if I’d gotten it from Harvard.  Even though FMU doesn’t have the same name recognition as Harvard, both schools have the same accreditation.  This means I’m eligible for the same type of career options.

Don’t choose a dumb major.

I’ll harp on this until the day I die. I’ve written a whole article on this here, so I’m not going to go major in-depth on this point. Do your research when deciding what to pursue.  Don’t expect to be an anthropology teacher and make $100k annually.  That’s dumb. Get a degree in something that has a future.  If you major in Native American studies or General Journalism, then you’re probably not going to have the same opportunities as if you’d majored in Biophysics, Computer Science, or Accounting.  This is common sense.

Focus on people, not processes.

I focused on the people when I went through the job search process.  This isn’t taught in school as it should be, but during my interviews for various companies, I made sure to connect with the people first.  Soft skills are ESSENTIAL if you want to land a particular job. When I was interviewed, I told the GM that I wanted to use technology to improve the lives of people, not just improve the efficiency of the process.  He stared at me without speaking for 15 seconds, then said he’d never heard an engineer say that. Usually, they just bore him with technical talk about improving algorithms to improve efficiency and increase revenue. 

I believe my different, AUTHENTIC, approach is part of the reason I actually landed the job.  A few months after I had started working at my job, I had a performance review with my boss. He told me straight up that I wasn’t the strongest coder he’d ever seen. I wasn’t even close to being one of the best on our team.  However, I had the social skills.  I was able to interface with different departments, and teammates from different backgrounds, better than some of my peers on my team. The stereotype holds that many software engineers are logical and introverted. They’d rather work with algorithms, numbers, and machines rather than people.  I was the opposite.  I had enough of a grasp on the code to get the job done, but where I really excelled was in talking to people who had no idea about code.  

When I first was hired, the shift team I was assigned to support was leery of me.  I was told they’d had bad experiences with “my type of people”. To them, I was an out-of-touch office guy. They thought I’d be standoffish in the same way the support engineers that had come before me had been. However, I had the special ability to act as an intermediary and go-between, and I leaned into that.  I built relationships. I’d figured out how to land a good career, so now I had to figure out how to keep a good career. I learned my teammates’ interests and the names of their kids. I asked them about their college days and their favorite restaurants. I got to know them as people, and not just coworkers. People are people first and employees second. Always remember that. 

Now, I go to work every morning earlier than I am required to in order to attend the shift team’s toolbox. I wear blue jeans and boots like they do rather than dress shoes and slacks.  I get out in the mill, rather than just sitting in my air-conditioned office.  Most office guys are allowed to leave before shift personnel.  I choose to not make that a habit.  As a result, I’ve become a part of THEIR shift team.  I’m no longer just an outside support role, but I’m an inside teammate. I’ve garnered the respect of that team, and the respect of my direct superior because I am doing the job he has assigned me.  Everyone wins, even though it is a little bit more effort on my part. But, because of that effort, I’m now on a leadership track that I wouldn’t have been able to be on otherwise. Balancing the spreadsheet the fastest, or creating the most optimized greedy algorithm isn’t what is most important. Focusing on your people skills will almost always take you further than raw technical ability in whatever field you choose.

Follow consistency, not hype.

I landed a good job because I looked for something consistent.  I didn’t apply to Google, Facebook, or any of the other hype places that offer HUGE salaries for CS grads.  I looked for the “smaller” players when I went on the job hunt. I wanted companies that had a lot of capital, a lean management structure (meaning I’d have the freedom to learn and grow at my own pace), and a good culture. I didn’t want the company that was making the news every week, I wanted something solid and steady. If companies were like stocks, I want an ETF rather than a “get-rich-overnight” type of stock.

The people who tell you to “follow your dreams” above all else in regards to your career aren’t giving you proper perspective. They’re selling snake oil. They’re just hyping you up. You need to be realistic. You don’t need to work a job you hate, but you don’t need to take the mentality of “my dream or bust”.  As men, we have responsibilities that must be taken care of first and foremost. Being in a position to provide is at the forefront of this list.  If you get an absolute thrill from busking on the street, but you can’t make enough money to support yourself, then you need to stop busking full-time and get another job. You can follow the hype of being a local celebrity and try to get on America’s Got Talent, or you can be productive and go get a job that provides consistent support in terms of pay, insurance, healthcare, etc…

In my opinion, I want to excel in a measured way. When I initially started thinking about how to land a good career, I realized that I didn’t want to skyrocket to the top.  If I did, I knew my ego would be inflated and my pride would be out of the wazoo. Rather, for personal development purposes, I think the best way to succeed is to follow the Lord’s plan and “rise above” in a measured way. You need to mount up with wings like an eagle and fly, but you don’t need to strap yourself to a missile.  All of God’s men went through times of preparation. Moses, Elijah, Jacob, David, Peter, Paul, etc.  None of them, with the exception of Adam, were just placed at the top right off the jump. 

So, even if you don’t land a dream role at the beginning, keep pushing.  Don’t give up if things don’t fall into your lap.  Anything in life worth having requires you to put in work. You wouldn’t appreciate it nearly as much if it was just handed to you.  Keep your eyes on the long-term goal and keep pushing ahead. 

1. Focus on academics.  
2. Focus on people skills. 
3. Don’t follow the hype. Make smart, consistent decisions.

Your career opportunities will exponentially broaden if you put these simple tenets into serious practice. Then, you’ll eventually be able to pass your experience on and help the next generation of men understand how to land a good career.