Career stories: narrating your professional journey

This is a story about cold emails and  that talking robot from Rocky Four.

I'll clean it up for you. Paulie.. My name's  Phil Edwards. I'm a senior producer at Vox. Vox.

That's not the jingle for  Vox, but you know, why not?

This is a personal channel. So normally I talk  about personal stuff or history, whatever I want.

However, this is kind of becoming a time  management issue for me to have to share my

life story with so many people. I've got a lot  of people trying to get in touch on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn.

And I get so many queries about how I got my job.  And then I explain the long tortured story and

I've done it so many times that I'm sick  of hearing it, but I do think it's kind of

useful. So now I can send a link to this video  and then if people still want to talk to me,

they can, but they'll at  least know where I came from.

This has become an entire subgenre of YouTube  content. You can find videos from Johnny Harris,

Joss Fong, Cleo Abram, Estelle Caswell, Joe  Posner all talking about their careers. Those

are just the people that came to me off the top  of my head. I'm sure there are more who have

talked to conferences and  been on, uh, fancy panels.

I have not, but I think that is actually one of  the reasons that my input might be kind of useful.

And I'm way too close to the paper.

And I think it's helpful to hear from  somebody who is a little lower down

on the food chain, somebody without quite so  much natural talent. As sad as that is to say.

So I'm going to tell you my story  and what I think it means with the

help of some history too, because,  hey, this is personal and history.

So I want to give you that, and I'm going to  do it with the help of three famous lackeys,

the little people, because I can identify  and I think they can give us all some help.

Have you heard of Norbert Pearlroth?

Before I started at Vox. I had a blog, it was  called Trivia Happy, and it was ba- that's right.

We're doing two camera angles.  Kaboom. Watch it and learn.

I cared about trivia. I went to  the Harold Washington Library

in Chicago every single week. I checked out the  maximum number of books that you could check out

and I read them and did research and I blogged.  My beat was trivia. We're about Taft’s bathtub,

and fast food in foreign countries,  and Grover Cleveland's wedding cake.

This was kind of a Norbert Pearroth’s job too.  You know, Robert Ripley of Ripley's Believe it

or Not? It's museums that are everywhere. And also  it was an iconic newspaper column that was really,

really famous at the time. It was all sorts of  weird stuff that happened around the world, mixed

in with trivia and historical facts that sounded  untrue, but turned out to be miraculously real.

The person who found those was Norbert Pearlroth.  Pearlroth went to the New York Public Library,

Monday through Friday, and he searched for facts.

And that is basically what  I was doing every single day

at Trivia Happy. I reported too, I interviewed  the guy who created the robot in Rocky Four.

I talked to the graphic designer behind Idiocracy.  All of this stuff ended up being pretty popular.

I got thousands of hits and was mentioned  from places all over the web...and I made $0.

Here's where it's important to mention  that I am not independently wealthy.

Uh, I need money to buy things  like goods and services.

And so I took that success that  I had with Trivia Happy. And I

went looking for somewhere that might  pay me to actually do the same thing.

So I cold emailed a few different places,  including a newish site called Vox.

I told them that I really liked some of their  articles that had found a lot of success on

the site. I said that I had basically designed my  site as if Vox Media had made a site about trivia

and that was totally the truth. And improbably,  amazingly, somehow, I got a call back.

I got an interview and I ended up getting a job.

Pearlroth is the lesson. You've got to pick a  beat to slog through, through thick and thin,

through lots of traffic and zero traffic, through  all the hits, none of the hits, through big money,

no money. And somewhere in between  where you have some health insurance.

You've got to find the thing

that will keep you going through all of  that because you love it so, so much.

For me, the most interesting stories are history  and trivia and all the other forgotten things that

pervade our culture. But for you, it could  be anything, it could be foreign policy,

it could be, uh, taxes on corporations.  It could be new dental technology. I

don't know what your passion is, but find  the thing that you are Pearlrothy about.

And chase after that, because that is the  thing that is going to sustain you long enough

to actually get a job doing it.

This is Thomas Edison's electric pen.

Uh, just so you don't go crazy, basically  what it did was it punched a bunch of holes

in a piece of paper. You'd roll ink over it,

and you'd be able to effectively create copies of  the same illustration a ton of different times.

That's what it was. It was a copy machine.  As far as I understand it, Francis Jehl was

a clerk in an office and he loved the  electric pen and he basically said, ah,

God, I got to meet this dude who invented the  electric pen, Thomas Edison, whoever he is.

One day Thomas Edison came into the office.  Francis Jehl says, whoa, Edison, what's up?

Pleasure to meet you. I'd love to  work for you because your electric pen

is great. Francis Jehl became  Thomas Edison's Lackey.

He wrote his autobiography about his  time at Menlo Park. He's in videos where

he re-enacts big moments in Menlo Park history.

Back to me. I had this job as a writer in  Washington, DC. I was working for Vox now,

writing about these crazy things,  but I was not just a writer.

I was also a fan boy and I  was a fan boy in particular of

Vox video. I saw these early videos and I  thought, Ooh, these are polished. These are

good. And I wanted to associate myself  with these people in any way I could.

So I was always pitching them ideas. I was always

trying to give them scripts or interviews  that I thought might be cool. And eventually

they thought that I was such a fan boy they  wanted me to write scripts for them. Suddenly

I went from being a writer to being a part of the  video team. It wasn't totally out of the blue.

I'd done a lot of stuff with charts and graphs.  And I was always interested in visuals, but I

didn't have experience. I had passion. I was  Francis Jehl in this situation. That is going to

keep you doing the grunt work at the beginning.  I mean, I did tasks at the beginning that

weren't necessarily what I wanted to  be doing, but I was happy to do it

because I was learning constantly about how to  be a better writer and how to make better videos.

So how could I turn that down? And hopefully you will have the same opportunity.

Part three, that gets us to the  last person, Thomas A. Watson.

Do you recognize this name? You  might. I will play you a clip.

“I first met Alexander Graham Bell in 1874.”

That's right. He's the dude  who Alexander Graham bell said,

come here, Mr. Watson, to when he invented  the telephone. Thomas A. Watson was Alexander

Graham Bell's lackey. And how he got his  job is actually a pretty useful lesson.

“When he came to the shop in  Boston where I was working

to have his harmonic telegraph  constructed, the work was assigned to me.”

So that is how we met Alexander Graham  bell. Basically all these inventors were

coming through this machine shop cause they  had big ideas, but they didn't know how to

execute on them. So Watson got a front row  seat to every single inventor's big idea.

And that's why he got to meet  all those amazing people.

That is kind of how I approached  my video experience. When I came

on as a video producer, I was a script writer,  but I was anxious to learn all of the tools.

I knew a bit of Photoshop. I knew a  bit of Illustrator. I knew nothing

about Premiere. I learned how to use those  applications. I learned how to use a camera.

I learned how to record voiceover  and it was, it was painful.

The way that Thomas Watson said Bell,  I can help you realize your idea,

I found a way to help realize my own ideas, and I  think it helped give me more freedom to pursue the

things that I was Pearlrothy about. That's a word now.

Every place needs a Thomas Watson, what  Thomas Watson does, that could vary a lot.

I don't, I don't know what your Thomas Watson  skill is. Maybe it is some podcasting technique

that I've never even heard of. Maybe it's Tik  Toking. Learning skills made me someone that

they wanted to keep around and that let  the Pearlroth and Jehl parts of me shine.

I just got sick of being in the same place the  entire video. That's it for this, typically I

do personal stuff and history stuff. If that  interests you, subscribe to this channel, uh,

and like the video, if you can. We're early on so  every little bit helps. All right. Thanks a lot.