Breaking: John Roderick Does Not Believe In Unicorns (Advice)

I enjoyed this very, ahem, sincere piece of writing by Mr. Roderick of Seattle Weekly.  It’s about being a band, being a music writer, being a believer of unicorns, being a lady in a band, being a boy in a band, being hip-hop in Seattle and much more. You should read it HERE. Here are some high-or-low-lights:

  • “Keep pushing and striving until you reach your dream!” All massively successful people say this kind of platitudinous horseshit, because inspirational-sounding crap is all the wisdom massively successful people have to offer.
  • Listening to famous people describe the secret of their success is about as helpful as listening to microwaved popcorn.
  • If your “dreams” are to be universally acknowledged as a groundbreaking auteur, may I humbly suggest that realizing those dreams is about as likely as learning to fart rainbows.
  • I appreciated her point but, despite appearances, she wasn’t issuing a feminist battle cry so much as she was calling attention to her new power, humblebragging. “I am being interviewed! It’s so exhausting to be famous, but I’m still ’street’ because I point out hypocrisy! Fight the power!”
  • Sometimes you push and strive and never get a gold-plated unicorn, but it doesn’t mean you’re not talented and might not have a long career if you keep at it. Often it only means that unicorns are fake and if you gold-plated one it would die.

Counseling Cornell kids

I am always glad to help Cornell students, and was delighted to join Cornell’s panel on A New Media Landscape at the Cornell Club in NY recently. Thanks to Magdalena Kalinka Bartishevich and Amanda Christofferson at Cornell for organizing the event and inviting me to join the high powered pack of alums which included Ken Saji, Senior Editorial Director of MTV Networks (Cornell ‘92) as moderator, and panelists Susan Danzinger, Founder and CEO of DailyLit (Cornell ‘86), Scott Schiller, Senior VP of Advertising and Sales at Comcast Interactive Media (Cornell ‘81), and Sheryl Tucker, media and conference development consultant to Time Warner Inc. (Cornell ‘78), pictured from left to right, along with me, below.

We touched on a lot of topics regarding media’s future and the job market, and the Cornell students were an engaged and intense audience. My advice to today’s grads is this: Study the classics but embrace each wave of  technology as it is breaking through…and be aggressive about developing social media skills that you can bring to your career.