Jack of all trades. Yep, that’s me. After you’ve worked for start ups, companies with bare bones staff and as a scrappy freelancer for over 20 years, it makes sense. But marketing yourself as that is another story. After my latest stint at a start up, I was laid off and found myself back out on the job market after 8 years of solid work. I was interviewing with companies, but my background was so diverse…I was having a hard time marketing to a specific role. One day I was interviewing with a company and was called a generalist. The term felt so ordinary. Plain. Lackluster. I didn’t like it, but it stuck with me. The interviewer referred a book to me called Range, and told me to stick with what I had. So I picked it up.
I identified with the book from the first chapter, that discussed the difference between Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. Tiger Woods was born to play golf. Was swinging clubs before he could walk and was trained to be only a master of one thing: golf. Federer was a different story. Although his mother was a tennis coach, she didn’t see him excelling in the sport. Federer was into it all. The eye/hand coordination of baseball, the speed of soccer—Federer excelled at every sport he tried. And as he got better at tennis, instead of moving up in the sport, Federer wanted to stay with his friends, more interested in having fun than perfecting the sport. Yes, he was competitive. But while other players were working with strength coaches and nutritionists and the like, Federer just wanted to meet Boris Becker or maybe get to Wimbledon someday.
Tiger Woods was a specialist at golf. Federer a sports generalist. And a successful one at that. I chewed on that thought for quite some time and decided to run with what I was…a content generalist. I was more than a writer, a strategist, a manager. I did them all, I excelled at them all…and I enjoyed them all.
The common denominator was content. I was more than the words on the page. I was the research and data that went into the decision of WHICH words would go on the page. I was the structure and strategy that went into WHERE the words went on the page and beyond.
