This is Career Magic
A few years ago, I saw a kerfuffle on social media.
A brilliant new novelist on the scene took to Twitter to accuse a very established literary icon of plaigiarizing her book title.
You can imagine how the rest goes.
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Here's the thing: book titles cannot be copyrighted.
There are often dozens of books with the same title. Anyone in the publishing game should know this. Certainly any writer with an agent, like the brilliant up-and-comer, has access to this very common knowledge.
And, it turns out, the book of the Famous Established Writer was in the works long before the youngster's novel was. So now the young novelist had publicly gone after someone on Twitter -- a very famous someone -- and was doubly wrong.
This kind of thing can get you sued. It can ruin your reputation and career.
And it was totally avoidable. If the young writer had run the scenario by some of her friends in the publishing industry, or some peers or mentors, BEFORE she went on Twitter, this whole career disaster could have been averted.
I saw author Roxane Gay comment on the whole debacle. She wrote, roughly, that this is why everyone needs a group of girlfriends --peers, mentors -- in their corner. Before you take to Twitter to torpedo your career, you check in with them; someone will tell you book titles cannot be plaigiarized!!!! and prevent you from making a terrible career mistake.
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This is about more than not making a mistake.
It's also about accessing the unwritten rules and secret strategies for navigating careers in spaces not meant for us. It's about building each other up.
Cindy Gallop has talked about it when it comes to women negotiating salaries: you need to ask for and share numbers with each other. We need to have places to go to get the REAL information; we also need private places to "off-gas"
It's how we shake off the slings and arrows of outrageous microagressions (h/t Will Shakespeare). (This is especially critical for people with multiple marginalizations.)
Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom specifically talk about the importance of having a network and how essential the group chat is for growing your career in an episode of their podcast, Hear to Slay.
I joke about this with my clients all the time: I call this the life-altering career magic of The Group Text (h/t Marie Kondo/Roxane Gay/Tressie Cottom).
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Whenever people ask me about my "secret career weapons", I say therapy, and The Group Text.
I would also add to that: being part of feminist networks, and knowing each other, personally.
We are each other's greatest champions and career-builders.
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Gloria Steinem, for example, brings young up-and-comers to events and speaking engagement with her. She uses her celebrity to help other young feminists get established, and start building their personal connections and relationships.
The web of relationships and support is what lifts us up and what prevents us from falling.
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Related: Once upon a time, 10 years ago, a Very Well Known Woman invited me to lunch with some other women who were movers and shakers. I was totally flattered (I cried, privately, in surprise and delight) and no way was I going.
She had to phone and email me repeatedly to get me to go. I only went so as not to let her down.
Here's what I didn't understand until recently: that lunch wasn't (only) about hanging out together. It was about career and power building. She deliberately set that lunch up so that I would meet people and start building a network of folks who would hire me.
I only figured that out years later, when another brilliant, generous mentor did the same thing for me. Only this time, afterwards, the mentor explained what she was doing. She was invested in me succeeding and she knew that I need a network to do that.
She explicitly taught me that planting yourself in a feminist ecosystem is an essential power move that is good for everyone in the network (not just you!). It doesn't have to be smarmy: your network can be people you are inspired by, truly adore, and WANT to be around. In fact, that's the only kind of 'networks' and ecosystems that are sustainable.
Real community is glued together by bonds of care, tight and loose, and that’s where the information and opportunities are. We need to know each other in order to help each other.
We are each other's greatest champions and career-builders. We are each other's career magic.
Because the truth about power and success and a future in which we all flourish is that we grow it, together.