This week is the first week since I’ve been out here that I haven’t been committed to working from home for an extra couple hours a night. And what do I find myself doing? Working.
Well, not technically. But all the time I haven’t had to spend researching a lot of the ins and outs of my industry have gotten to me, and tonight I’ve actually spent — fully out of desire to do so in my own time — a couple hours reading some stuff that’s piqued my interest and checking some things out that I’ve been meaning to check out. And it’s all tip-of-the-iceberg.
I think I’ve known this without thinking about it too much, but it hit pretty hard today. I had my “employee evaluation” with the director of my department. I wasn’t up for a raise or anything, but they do bi-annual reviews, and after you’ve been there for six months, you essentially get a raise every six months. So, this was just a review without a raise.
It’s the type of review where you review yourself, then give it to your boss and he reviews you. So, for the “expectations for myself” part or whatever it’s called, one of the items that I put was “Become an authority on [insert job title] at [insert my company name]”.
When he filled out his comments, he altered it to: “Become an industry authority on SEO”. So, essentially, in the next six months, he’s expecting me to rise to the absolute top of my food chain — not within the company, but within the industry as a whole. And he’s a pretty sharp dude with a ton of experince at this. My response was, “well, hmmm. Do you consider yourself an industry authority?” And he replied, “in some things, yes, in others no”. So essentially he made it a goal of mine to be better than him — in six months. We laughed about it a little, and we both know there’s obviously no way I’m going to soak in enough information and have enough time to do R&D myself in six months to actually become a leading SEO — especially with all of the client deliverables that I’m going to be working on which will prevent me from spending large sums of time learning all the odds and ends I’d need to learn to propel myself to such a position.
But it’s nice to know that I’m not the only person who thinks I have the ability to kick a lot of ass. Or maybe everyone gets that thrown into their reviews to keep the standards set pretty high.
Either way, this stuff is fun. It’s way more of a competition – with the potential for big wins and huge losses – than programming or training or anything of the sort that I’ve done in the past. And I hate losing. So it’s time to beef up the defense and swing for the fences. And to keep my fingers crossed that I don’t get pulled in too many directions to be able to spend the time I want to getting good at this shit.
=hot dog the rapper
PS. I really hate the saying, “Another day, another dollar”. It should be, at a minimum, “Another day, another thousand dollars”. That’s a better goal. I can make a dollar a day checking vending machines for orphaned nickels.
It’s not very often that Home Team + Bubz gets together at the same time. And it can be pretty dangerous for the area we congregate.
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