Years ago, following the path of my peers (and some early indications of aptitude), I enrolled in science classes at senior high school and in first year university. Then a bright light clicked in my mind. “I’m not really that good at science, so maybe I should switch to Arts,” I thought. Suddenly, the course load seemed incredibly easy — in one course, I missed the entire second term’s lectures and didn’t bother completing the final paper, and, gulp, passed!
The University of British Columbia invited me to participate in the Honors History program, supposedly designed for the brightest history scholars destined for Graduate School and professorships. Our classes met in small classes in a tall, white tower (appropriately colloquially named at the University, The Ivory Tower). I didn’t do so well here. My classmates, well, seemed, stupid. Besides, I was spending virtually all of my waking hours as a struggling journalist on the student newspaper.
Here, I most likely would have received failing grades if the profs were marking my work. Time after time, the senior students who acted as my editors turned my writing back for redos. Simple stories took hours to write — my peers wouldn’t let anything go through without edit after re-edit. Compounding my problems, I had severe social and personal relationship skills limitations; a major challenge when you want to make journalism your career.
Somehow I obtained summer employment on a daily newspaper in Vancouver (my student newspaper peers were flabbergasted that I had achieved this coveted opportunity, because they certainly didn’t recommend me to the newspaper managers) and then somehow, again, a few years later I found myself working on a daily newspaper in the real-life world journalism laboratory on the sub-editor’s desk in Bulawayo, Rhodesia turning to Zimbabwe. One of my Ubyssey student newspaper peers who thought me incompetent and totally unsuited for a career in journalism remarked (and this was a genuine, heart-felt complement!): “Mark, I now think you are sane.”
We all have our own life laboratories combining experience, mistakes, success, surprises and sometimes a healthy dose of the scientific principles (with a dose of artistic creativity.)
Success, I learned, occurs when you combine a base of natural talent (I could always write well, and am an exceptionally fast keyboarder — rather essential for daily journalism) with something else: Passion, determination, Will. Mix in some luck and things work out well.
If you are in “Construction Marketing” because it is a job and you have to do it, change careers. If you a contractor, architect, engineer or trades person who loves your work but are reading this blog because you need to find some clients, read on, learn what you need and then decide, when you have the time and resources, to either contract or hire someone with a genuine passion for marketing. In the residential sector, consider Mike Jeffries.