So you want to be a professional?

Posted on by Llewen Leave a comment

A lot of years ago I had one lesson with a real professional vocal coach. It was life changing. I probably learned more from that one hour long lesson than I learned from any other single hour in my entire life. Decades later I am still absorbing the lessons I learned in that one hour. This is one of those lessons.

What does it mean to be a professional?

It means that no one cares. No one cares if you are tired, or sick. No one cares whether you are having a bad day or a good day. Do your job. Do that job to the best of your abilities.

It means you are an adult. Stage fright is for children. Fear of heights is for children. Being “grossed out” is for children. Some day, if you reach that place in your career, someone may ask you about your struggles. You can talk about them then.

Right now you have a job to do. Do your job. Do that job to the best of your abilities. Your struggles haven’t magically vanished, but right now you have a job to do, and they are, for the most part, irrelevant.

Ask that person whose job it is to climb poles and work with the lines attached to those poles. They may tell you that they are afraid of heights, but they do the job anyway. Ask a nurse if they are “grossed out” by vomit and excrement. They may tell you they are, but they do their job anyway.

Your performance isn’t about you.

If you are a performer, and you are a professional, your performance isn’t about you. Your audience has payed to see a show, and your job is to deliver your lines, play your instrument, sing, or whatever it is you do on that stage, to the best of your ability, without excuses.

Your job is to be consistent, and to provide every audience with a show they will remember and talk about for the rest of their lives, no matter how you are feeling, no matter what kind of a day you have had. No one buys tickets to a show to make fun of the performers. Fans don’t attends a show to see their idols fail. They come to see a show and walk away with good memories.

Your job is to make sure they walk away with what they payed for, and it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve given the same performance, or how you feel about the material you are working with, or the people you are on the stage with. If you ever arrive at that place in your career, you can save those complaints for the tabloids.

But, but, but… Where’s the love?

That professional vocal coach didn’t say what I’ve said here out loud. But what I’ve said here was woven into every second of that lesson. When you learn that lesson, far from destroying your love for what you do, it empties your performance of everything that would distract you. It allows you to fill that space with your technical skill, and with your love for what you do.

Confessions of a writer: Pet peeves in reading technical documentation (RFPs)

Posted on by theothersullivan 2 Comments

I recently learned something that set off my language alarm bells (and set off my pet-peeve-o-meter).

It is standard practice when scoring submissions from a company to base the score solely on technical criteria with no consideration for how the submitted document was written. I am told that the use of proper spelling and grammar are too subjective to score and that if we did score them, we’d be left with no bidders.

So, one is not allowed to adjust one’s score based on any known measure of readability or structure. If the proponen’t’s writiung is chuck fowl of jargon, spellung; punctuation grammatical errors and you must consider the technical aspic of the dulcimer only.

Yes, that includes when the document is ridiculously hard to read because of PPE (Piss Poor Editing). I am not concerned with one-off mistakes, like the writer who spelled through, as ‘thru.’ No, I’m talking writing so bad it’s laughable.

For example, the author of one document claims that their company has, “rigoroush quality Assurant’s measures in place to insure our product meats the Agencies needs.” Because I know what that means, and QA is one of our technical requirements, the proponent is to get full marks.

At what point did this become acceptable? At what point did we decide that copy editing was no longer a valid skill in business? When was it decided that effective written communication was not an evaluation criterion for a company applying to win a seven figure contract?

More importantly, why are individuals held to higher standards than corporations? If a person submits a resume written with the language errors present above, that resume is on the reject pile–no hesitation.

What makes corporations special?