YM&S: Professional ambitions, part 1 part 2 – Publishers Lunch

When I first got on to Twitter about 3 years ago, I made a comment about some business and how their product was disappointing me. That business responded to me personally and publicly, asking me what they could do to improve. There are a number of ways any given person could respond to this—what I would have called at the time at least atypical—interaction with a business; my reaction was surprised distrust. But businesses use Twitter as a low-cost customer survey system all the time—my reaction was only a sign of what a n00b I was to the network.

Again, my existence has recently been acknowledged by a business I mentioned by name: Publishers Lunch. (Such is a symptom of the power of blogging plus Google Alerts: if you mention them, they will browse.) I said in my last blog post that to get mentioned by them by name was one of my professional ambitions. Well, they mentioned me by name!

I’m decidedly excited about this because I’m refusing to react as I reacted as a Twitter n00b back when. I could construe the actual mention, “[Keep trying, Greg Freed]”, as sarcasm, something I would otherwise be likely to do because a lack of context defaults to snark, my primary form of casual communication. But instead, I’m taking it as at least one of my previous employers took it: as a light hearted joke and maybe even encouragement.

I mean, I don’t know the Publishers Lunch people (I met one at a barbeque once) and they don’t know me, but we both take publishing seriously, which is where the ambition and mention both find their source. But something I consider strange happens when I tell people in publishing about this particular ambition: the general reaction is to kind of sneer and ask why. And I can understand this reaction from people who have received the honor before: like any award, it must lose its luster after you win it. And I can understand this reaction from people who assume they’ll be worthy of a legit mention some day: publishing is small, and insulation can give rise to snootiness bordering on arrogance.

But I am neither of these types of people; neither established nor confident of my coming establishment in the industry. I am a southern semi-intellectual who bought access to this particular echelon through a master’s program, and there’s every chance that if I don’t assign goals for myself, nothing will ever happen for me.  And if one is going to begin assigning goals, baby steps are the best way to start. Leaps and bounds only occur once you’re really settled, really rooted to your place.

I want to thank Publishers Lunch for this mention. Getting mentioned by the industry-leading news magazine is only a baby step to someone like me, someone who consistently over-reaches, constantly takes bites bigger than they can chew. But what Publishers Lunch did here was to divide one of my first steps into more manageable pieces and then give me one of them as a gift: I have been mentioned by name in Publishers Lunch. Now I just have to get mentioned in earnest, which was the only goal I saw before.

You see? Now, because of their generosity and humor, I feel like I’ve made a kind of progress and success, which I wouldn’t have otherwise felt. And that’s the outcome of attaining an ambition. If this were a video game, this would be an achievement I’d have earned through just playing the game.

Have you ever set a professional goal that’s been looked down upon by others? Have you ever achieved part of a goal that you didn’t realize before was a goal in parts? Tell me about it in the comments below!

YM&S: Professional ambitions, part 1 – Publishers Lunch

Now that I’ve found a niche of publishing to call my very own, several professional ambitions have become defined in what was previously a very vague landscape. Planning things out before hand isn’t really my style: one of the reasons that I fared so poorly in academia qua academia—I have habituated myself to solving any problem I find myself, and I can precipitate problem I’ve suffered before, but solving a hypothetical problem that hasn’t actually appeared yet always feels to me like an utter waste of time. Not that doing so doesn’t have its place—I certainly appreciate others who have this tenacity for precognition—it’s just not something I spend time on or could succeed at if I did. Like painting: I love the visual and appreciate what I can understand of what I see, but the rest is lost on me though not without its own purposes outside of my biases.

So then, too, my professional ambitions. Being in publishing for a good many years now and having studied it both as a professional and academic, one of my ambitions is to make it I to Publishers Lunch, the primary form of industry news, an email sent on a daily basis with a summary of the news available on Publishers Marketplace.

This ambition has already split into steps, or degrees. My first goal was just to get mentioned in some way. Well, not only has my employer received several mentions since I started working there, projects over which I’ve had direct professional control have ended up there as well. And I had an increasing level of control over each project, so each mention is more satisfying than the one before it, a pleasant escalation.

So what’s the next step of this single ambition? To get mentioned by name, of course! Something like “The brilliant Greg Freed who has shown an unerring tenacity for generating book-quality books for the ebook market, has hit another homerun with this series, showing e-publishers and electronic producers everywhere that not only can high quality be attained but soon will be expected by customers everywhere.”

Like most of my dreams, an unmitigated delusion of grandeur, of course, that I do my damndest to live up to. And I won’t be sad if I fall a little short: falling a little short inversely implies quite a lot of successful movement. Which connects this next step in the Publishers Lunch ambition to another ambition of mine, which I’ll address in my next post!

Have a great day doing whatever it is you do, and DREAM LARGE. Share your ambitions in the comments below.