I owe Mark Twain the title of this week’s blog. His career
makes an interesting case study and attests to the wisdom of his dictum,
because the famous writer had little formal education. He never went to college
but instead apprenticed as a printer. While working as a typesetter, he took up
writing as an avocation, contributing humorous articles to a newspaper owned by
his brother. He learned his next occupation, Mississippi riverboat pilot, again through on-the-job
training, but eventually the Civil War put an end to most civilian traffic on
the river. Next, taking advantage of his brother’s appointment as secretary to
the governor of Nevada
Territory, he spent a
couple of years pushing papers in government offices.
After failing in his attempt to strike it rich as a miner
(later detailed in Roughing It), he fell back on journalism in Virginia City. Then, while working as a journalist in San Francisco, he published his first big commercial
success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and over the
following years he evolved from a journalist with a knack for travelogue
writing to the novelist who now ranks among America’s greatest. He had a
parallel career as a lecturer that grew out of his travel writing. He also
pursued an avocation as an inventor, perhaps an outgrowth of the technical
skills he had learned in his boyhood, but he had only mixed success. As an
investor, he was particularly inept and at one point had to declare bankruptcy.
Nowadays, a career path like this would be hard to follow.
Nevertheless, we can learn certain important lessons from it.
First, many skills can be learned informally, perhaps
through leisure-time pursuits, and these can later be the basis of a career
change. Although formal educational credentials (and the technical skills they
represent) are more important now than ever before, employers often express
frustration at being unable to find job candidates who have the right soft
skills. Therefore, although I recognize the importance of a college degree, I
urge young people to round out their college educations with activities that
will cultivate soft skills. These may be part-time jobs, internships, student
organizations, or volunteer activities. Probably the most important
characteristic to look for in these extracurricular activities is collaborative
work, because it builds people skills and communication skills that are rarely
central to academic coursework. This is the core of the message in the title of
this week’s blog.
Second, be ready to take advantage of unexpected
opportunities. Growing up in a small riverfront town, Mark Twain became aware
of the opportunities that being a riverboat pilot offered for high pay and the
chance to escape small-town life. But when that livelihood dried up, he was
ready to use a personal connection to shift to a new occupation that led him to
unanticipated career opportunities. These did not always work out, but because
Twain had a fund of skills and the resilience to recover from setbacks,
he eventually found his way to his main claim to fame. He was able to reinvent
himself several times. In fact, he even reinvented his name from Samuel Clemens
to Mark Twain.
Finally, if you change from one industry to another (whether
willingly or from necessity), try to find ways to use your accumulated fund of
knowledge in your new field. Mark Twain based his jumping frog story on an
anecdote he heard while working as a miner in Nevada. He drew on his riverboat experience
when he wrote Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn, and
the mechanical knowledge he acquired as a printer’s apprentice figures in A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court.
Few can achieve the immortal fame of Mark Twain, but we all
can benefit from emulating the traits that allowed him to grow and advance from
his initial job as a small-town printer: a constant love of learning, alertness
to opportunities, resilience, and the resourcefulness to exploit what he had
already learned.
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