Create Your Own Job

Find your niche. Create something out of nothing. Don’t wait for a job; create your own.

Cliche phrases with very little instruction. How would you even start to create something where there was nothing? How exactly do you create your own job?

I don’t think there is one answer to this question, so I will just explain what I did to forge my own path and create something out of nothing.

First, a little context. I came out of college in 2008.

The market had crashed, jobs were drying up, and I wanted to get into one of the industries that had been hit the hardest: journalism. Two things hurt the business side of journalism, the market and the Internet.

Sure, the Internet was not new in 2008 but people began to utilize it in new ways and social media was one of the newest forms of information. MySpace was already on its way out. (The) Facebook was only four years old. Twitter was a mere toddler, at two.

I tried a bunch of different things those first couple of years out of school. I worked door-to-door sales. I worked for an after school program. I worked at a gym. I did what was necessary to pay my bills, all the while trying to find my path to journalism.

That’s when I started blogging about sports. I loved watching sports and was pretty knowledgeable. All I needed was a place where I could post and have eyes on my reading.

Enter a new and quickly growing website called Bleacher Report.

I wrote and edited voluntarily. I didn’t care. I needed clips to use for real jobs in journalism. I emailed newspapers and websites relentlessly… and it worked. I turned that into my first paid gig, which led to the next, and the next, and so on.

Eventually, I knew I needed to grow more and branch out. That’s when a passion and a coverage gap presented itself. I loved my college’s men’s basketball team and the conference was small enough that no one person was covering the league as a whole.

I saw an opportunity and, for three years, took it upon myself to fill a gap and it worked. People took notice. My writing got better. My networking skills got better. I even started to learn new skills, e.g.: photography, video shooting, editing, on-camera skills.

It was an unpaid risk but it created opportunities that I would not have had otherwise.

This was also the beginning of reporting via Twitter. Not everything had to make it into an article anymore. When you had news and could confirm it, send the tweet. Don’t wait for the article

Since then, I have been in two roles that did not exist before me. I was able to create my own job description, layout my own goals and expectations.

The essential message is this: opportunity doesn’t knock. You have to go to its house and kick the door in. If you want something, don’t wait for it to come to you. Go out and find it.