As
a self-employed translator, I can honestly say that running a business has
changed me as a person in some rather fundamental ways, even though I’ve only
been at it for three and a half years. A good thing too, as there’s every
reason to believe that I’ll need to apply every lesson I’ve learned to weather
this new recession.
In
all candour, there was once a time when I didn’t have any “real” ambition.
Every day was purely a matter of accepting my accumulating responsibilities as
best I could; I had a basic idea of what was important (by any thinking person’s
reckoning) and what wasn’t, only to remember time and time again that I’d long
since learned to be happy with what I had… or so I thought. It’s just that, if
you ask me, it’s only a matter of time before most of us are not only labelling
our working life and our private life as such, but affirmatively segregating
them. The bottom line is that, whatever anyone says or thinks, you’ll always
have the latter to look forward to.
Those
who work lower paid jobs for which there is no need for any genuine concern for
anything other than not leaving a bad impression on potential customers who are
already in your presence i.e. no need for any genuine concern for anything outside
the boundaries of the premises where they work – cleaning and waiting being
good examples – probably think nothing of this (I’ve done such work myself,
I’ll be honest). But when you move up the career ladder to get a job with a
manager’s responsibilities or higher, part of you starts to view the notion
indicated in the previous paragraph as a recipe for professional suicide, even,
to use a harsher term, a “bad attitude”.
Today,
what I do for a living has me working from home. Considerations about salary
aside, I do work some very long hours, and I’m happy with that. But I do feel
the need to be more innovative marketing-wise. Yet my personal opinion is that,
given my line of work, there is relatively little room for clarifying what my
business goals or strategies should be (unless you count “make more money”).
Chris
Cardell was quick to remind me about the UK entering recession again in his
latest emails to me in which he told me all about his latest marketing offer.
The truth is that I’ve only ever bought from him once or twice since his last
seminar in London – the reason why I feel I don’t need him as much as some
people is because my line of work is just seldom subject to customers’
opinions. The staple of translation work is just flat academic knowledge,
accuracy and reasoning; I’d say that there’s hardly that much scope for
suggestions on how to provide a better translation service, or for customer
recommendations. Compare that to a company which sells bathroom products and
solutions, which decides to add a “bath step” to their range of products. Or,
as a more exaggerated example, the music industry.
But
it’s not all frustration. Imagine, just for a moment, that you run a company
and someone rings up and makes an order that you cannot fulfil without the
availability of another service (outsourcing, if you will). I find that what I
do is relatively infrequently of direct relevance to other lines of work. I
agree that the service I offer is a type of service which people are not afraid
to ask for customers’ suggestions about in the interest of meeting their
requests for fear of making the customer lose confidence in them, appearing
unprofessional or negligent. Who else can you ask, anyway? I’m sorry, I take
that back; I’m just one of those people who wonders how people coped before
they had the Internet and online facilities like LinkedIn with which to expand
professional networks.
So
what does the future hold for me right now? I have often pledged to treasure my
memories lest they become all I have left, but the hard truth is that even that
has its limits. Whereas I once turned my back on ambition, I today think of
that as a curse. It’s natural to have no ambition when you’re first born, as it’s
like literally nothing makes sense – was I really no less vulnerable than that
when I shunned ambition? At this time, I know it makes sense to try harder than
usual to avoid going out of business; however, I have faith that my new “ideas”
(however defined) will live on even if I won’t. But I hardly need someone like
Chris Cardell to tell me that it’s all up to me.
