Business Week features my blog, sparks contact from my secret mentor

Business Week features my blog, sparks contact from my secret mentor This weeks Business Week just hit the stands, and what do you know? My blog is featured. Lindsey Gerdes wrote a great summary of my blog, proving to me that other people can write a better summary of our work than we can write ourselves. (Yes, this is why you should hire someone to write your resume.) Anyway, for you Business Week readers who are stopping by to check things out, Gerdes highlighted these posts: Navigating the quarterlife crisis How to turn down a job offer How to manage your image The first person to congratulate me about the piece in Business Week was Joyce Lain Kennedy. This was no small moment for me. She was my silent mentor for years. I say mentor in the loosest sense of the word because (violating one of my own pieces of advice) I never contacted her. I thought she was too big to pay attention to someone like me. (Note: Dont ever do this. Try contacting everyone. Most people will give you advice if you ask a specific question.) Joyce Lain Kennedy is the most widely syndicated career advice columnist in the country. Probably in the world. Newspaper syndication is very complicated. Not that you shouldnt try it. You should. But beware, because people like Kennedy have been there forever and sit on small empires. I studied her patterns, trying to figure out syndication. And, to be honest, I studied her column topics trying to figure out what the heck a career advice columnist writes about. The problem was that I started out writing about my own career. Sort of like a well written diary. But then my company went bankrupt in the dot-com crash. Business 2.0, the magazine that was running my column, told me I was no longer that impressive unemployed and pregnant did not look good. So I took my editors advice and stopped writing about myself. (Well, I tried to. You can imagine how hard that must have been.) Instead, I started writing straight-up career advice, like how to write a resume. But my ideas ran dry after two or three, so I started stealing Kennedys topics: How to interview, how to write a cover letter They are all classics, all good. She is a pro. I would write them the way a non-pro would write them adding, for example, references to sex at the office that my editor would delete. So then, five years pass, blah blah, and here I am, receiving an email from Joyce Lain Kennedy herself. And she sent her book to me. Autographed. Its Resumes for Dummies. And its on a special, sentimental spot in my bookshelf, next to this weeks edition of Business Week.