While most people are aware that things are bad, it seems to me that very few people understand that things are different. This isn’t your typical downturn - when investment bankers are becoming baristas and engineers are child care technicians, you know things are different.

I believe that the next few years will be increasingly hard on an increasingly larger group of people. There will be more unemployment, not less.

And unlike any downturn before it, you’re not just competing with your peers. You’re competing with the guy with 30 years experience who is looking at a much more distant retirement. You’re competing with the former Vice President who’s willing to take a big pay cut and your job. And you’re competing with the billions of people in India, Asia and Latin America who are now an instant message away and a third of the cost.

The good news is that there is still work to get done, and the need for smart, capable people to do it. But you have to stand out - being good enough is no longer enough. You have to transform yourself into a superstar - someone who generates so much value, someone so indispensable that your organization would be crazy to let you go.

What follows is the first in a series of discussions on recession-proofing yourself. My hope is to equip you with the skills you need to become one of those superstars.

It’s important to remember that nothing in here is meant to be a blanket set of rules. There are many people who don’t work in hyper-competitive organizations, or companies that aren’t facing stiff cutbacks. Similarly, there are people who would honestly welcome the change if they were let go. And there are folks who feel as though they’d rather not change their habits and are willing to risk facing the consequences. This isn’t written for you.

It’s written for folks who are worried they might not have a job in six months, who love what they do, and want to prepare themselves for the increasingly competitive world we’re entering into. I hope those who fit this description find this useful in some way.

Part One - Work Harder

I’m sometimes asked by new colleagues how I was able to rise from Account Manager to Creative Director in a year, and to Vice President in three. And while I’d chalk the majority of it up to simply being in the right place at the right time, I also worked harder than most people who were in the organization at the time.

While there are no foolproof strategies to survive and thrive in a recession, the closest “sure thing” I know of is to simply work harder.

You might be saying to yourself, “but I already work hard.” Notice I’m not saying work hard - I’m saying work harder.

Work harder than you usually do. Work harder than anyone else in your company. Become known as the guy or girl who hustles the most and you create for yourself not just protection but opportunity.

Show up early

It’s very difficult to get things done in a typical office environment. A typical worker is bombarded with meetings and other interruptions throughout the day, each of which takes you away from the truly high-value work that will make your company succeed.

Our company was no different - finding even 20 minutes of uninterrupted time was always a challenge. I wanted to make sure I got the things done I needed to get done, and knew that would be tough during the day.

So I started getting up early and heading to the local Starbucks. A few days a week, from 6am to 9am I was sending out emails, planning my day, getting a head start on the week. It was the most productive time during my week.

You don’t have to show up at 6am - even an hour early is great. By focusing on the most important thing you need to do that day, free of distraction, you’re able to start your day off on the right foot.

Leave late

Similarly, the end of the day is a good time to tackle the meaty, important work. Most people start to check out around 5 and is out the door by 6.

If you’re willing to stay an hour later you’ll be amazed how much you can get done. You can take your notes from the day’s meetings and ruminate on them, turning scribbles into coherent, potentially game-changing ideas. That’s a nearly impossible undertaking when you’re running back and forth between meetings and conference calls.

Be fully present during meetings

By tackling your most important work earlier and later in the day, you’re actually able to embrace the chaos of the bits in the middle. You can sit in a meeting with your laptop closed and your notebook open, taking notes and offering ideas, knowing that your work isn’t piling up with every passing minute.

You’re able to work on the more mundane things during in-between times (expense reports, etc.) and eliminate the clutter, since you’ve cleared your deck of your most critical tasks that day.

Embrace the natural current

Ultimately, these things are all helping you do the same thing - using the inherent cycles of a typical work day to be as effective as possible.

By leveraging the times when you don’t have distractions to get your most important work done, you’re able to make progress where previously there was inertia. Which frees you up to tackle administrative details and be truly creative in meetings, since the most important work is being handled when it can realistically be tackled.

And people who consistently get the most important things done, who don’t constantly appear frazzled and out of control go a long way towards recession-proofing themselves.

There is very little difference between a residential real estate agent and a commercial real estate agent. They both show properties. They both depend on word of mouth to grow their businesses. They’re both in hyper-competitive industries. They both work the same amount of hours. But on average, successful commercial brokers make more than residential brokers do.

I know a bunch of SEO consultants. They all do the same things - they write content, they optimize title tags and meta tags, they work aggressively on link-building campaigns. Most of them have moderate success. But in a year, one of my buddies has built a multi-million dollar SEO business, working only with attorneys who are willing to pay a premium to be first.

You could offer two clients the exact same service, the exact same amount of work, the exact same results. But the value of the service is worth considerably more for some customers than for others.

Now, there are certainly other factors to consider when drafting a marketing plan or defining your target market. Would you enjoy talking to attorneys all day? Perhaps not.

But it’s important to remember that in just about any industry, there are segments of the market that are more attractive than others based on their temperament and their pocketbooks. My buddy, for example, has found that attorneys are actually great to deal with. They are bottom-line focused, don’t get wrapped up in details, and will generally leave you alone as long as you’re getting them results. And they pay on time, which is always a plus.

Contrast that to a venture I worked on in a former life that went after bed & breakfasts. The price point had to be low because they didn’t have a lot of money. Because it was their baby, they were extremely hands on with all aspects of the process.

In the years since, I’ve worked on projects with major universities that were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, had giant committees, etc. And in comparison, the university clients are a walk in the park relative to the clients we had in the B&B industry (this isn’t to say that they all are, but enough of them were to convince us in fairly short order to get out of the industry.)

The point is that there is a segment of the world who will love what you do, will pay you well, and will offer a minimum of headaches. And there’s a segment that will cost you significantly more in time, money and energy, with less upside. Same amount of effort, dramatic differences in revenue and general well-being.

The choice is yours.

You have to be willing to turn some people off. You have to be willing to step out on a ledge and say “I’m sorry, we don’t do that.”

Unfortunately, a lot of companies (and freelancers) seem unwilling to do that, particularly in the tech and design communities. They’ll reach for any opportunity they can get, whether or not they have an ability to execute on it.

Even though the economy is in poor shape, chasing money in areas outside your expertise is often a recipe for bad things - you do a mediocre (or terrible) job on it, and it takes you away from what you’re best at.

It’s tempting to be known as a graphic designer or programmer or consultant or whatever.

But I think it’d be better to focus and leave a lot of money on the table. Become the best display advertising designer in the world. Or logo designer. Or environmental designer. Or “peat moss packaging” designer.

Become known for that - charge a premium for being the best. Pursue only the projects that you’ll knock out of the park consistently. And send any other requests for work to your network of people who are the best at what they do, taking a small cut for sending them the work.

You’ll be walking away from lower margin, higher risk projects and taking a much smaller piece of the pie on work you refer out. But you’ll build goodwill with your partners (and your prospects), receive some revenue without losing your focus on what you do best, and will likely find the favor returned.

Be willing to say “I don’t do that.”

I roll in young, tech-savvy circles, and I’ve noticed that a lot of those things my mentor told me about business aren’t present in folks my age (myself included). In the hurry to put everything online, I worry that we’ve abandoned some of the old-school ways of doing business in the interest of progress.

Below are some of the things my mentor told me - most of them might sound obvious at first, but I’d challenge you to seriously consider whether you do these things consistently.

Show up on time

A lot of folks my age schedule meetings or appointments, only to show up late (or not at all, leaving a voicemail at the last second.) Respect other people’s time and attention by showing up when you say you will.

Do what you say you’ll do

It’s shocking how often people make commitments lightly, without considering their other demands (I’d definitely put myself in this category unfortunately.)

Don’t skip out on commitments you’ve made, don’t leave people in a jam, don’t come up with excuses for why you didn’t do something. Just do it, or don’t commit in the first place.

Work hard

A lot of folks my age work hard, as long as it’s something they think is “fun.” But the second their interest wanes, they decide to procrastinate, or try to get out of doing what they promised they’d do. And in the interest of “Four Hour Work Weeking” everything, they’ve tried to come up with clever ways of getting out of doing stuff.

We’re created to work. The natural state of man is to build, create, organize, do. When it’s time to rest, by all means rest. But when you’re supposed to be working, work as hard as you can.

Say please and thank you

One of my big problems with traditional networking has always been the ungratefulness of it all. People ask for something immediately, often rudely, and very often without having a genuine relationship in place first. And rarely, if ever, do you receive a thank you.

In the history of my company (to my knowledge, but I know most of what happens), there have been exactly two people who’ve sent a hand-written thank you card after a job interview. Both of them got the job. One of them became the Creative Director a year later :)

Saying please and thank you pay tremendous dividends in your professional career.

Dress the part

I get a hard time when I go into the office these days, because I tend to try and dress it up a bit. Part of that might be because I work from home most of the time and wear sweatpants and my “John Tesh rules” headband.

But part of it is because dressing up makes people think of you differently. It demonstrates that you respect them, that their opinion is important to you, that you took the time to actually get out an iron and clean your slobby self up before meeting with them.

It may sound superficial, but people really do treat you differently when you dress like someone who belongs at the conference table vs. the poker table.

How many of these things do you do (honestly?) What areas might it make sense to work on? What other rules from the old school do you think would be helpful to remember?

Thanks as always to The Autumn Film for the music.

Resources mentioned in this podcast:

• The Ladders provides resume critiques (100k jobs only unfortunately.) If you have suggestions for other services without the salary requirement, feel free to include in the comments below.
• I’ve actually created online resumes for buddies of mine in the past - you can see an example for my buddy Greg. Feel free to use for inspiration, or if you’d like one yourself, drop me a note.
• How to make any resume better.
• Euro Pacific Capital is run by Peter Schiff, who was the economic adviser for the Ron Paul campaign. His books are extremely useful (and very contrarian) for developing an “oh crap” plan yourself.

But actually the devil is immensely beautiful. Like Brad Pitt times a billion. Or me, times ten.

He was one of God’s greatest accomplishments. He was smarter, more creative, more charming than we can imagine. And even after the fall, his outward beauty never diminished. Nor did his creativity, intellect or charm.

It’s a difficult thing to wrap our minds around, that the personification of evil would be contained in a thing of beauty and brilliance. And yet when you think about the concept of temptation, it makes sense. If you really did live in a world where you were being silently opposed, prodded, tempted to do things that weren’t in your best interest… you’d probably trip up a lot less if your tempter was an ugly dude with a snarl, wearing tights with mustard stains going down the front.

I think one of the points of that story is that a lot of the things we think are good can be very bad for us. Hard work can be good. Hard work that leaves your family lonely and your life out of balance is not. Money can be good. Money as an end to itself, or used to buy another BMW when there are families living in tents outside the city, less so. Beauty can be good. Beauty that is used as a tool to manipulate, or as a basis for exclusion, not good.

C.S. Lewis talks about how one of the best ways to tell people a lie is with the truth. And while we live in a world of broken economies, broken families and broken lives, it’s hard to find the culprits, the ones who cause all the pain. That’s because the culprits aren’t wearing red tights and holding pitchforks. It’s actually pretty hard to find people who are overtly evil and ugly and mean. Most of the bad stuff that happens in the world is the result of lies masked with the truth.

Our markets lie in ruin and global commerce is threatened because while hard work and innovation are good… unmitigated, perpetual growth and expansion are ultimately destructive and unsustainable.

Because we think beauty and nice things are good, we create and consume as much as we can, willfully ignoring the consequences on our planet’s resources and on the gross inequity between us and our brothers and sisters on the other side of the world.

Because we believe in the importance of the self, we ruin countless relationships and marriages because we refuse to compromise or truly put the other person’s needs before our own.

Because we want families to be safe, we train our children to avoid people that don’t look like them, perpetuating cycles of racism, sexism and classism (which is particularly egregious because, according to spell check, “classism” isn’t even a word.)

When we look into our own lives, it might make sense for us to examine how things that we might have once thought of as good (or that others might still consider good) could be harming us or those we love.

It might make sense to consider whether our workaholic tendencies are a good thing if our relationships are suffering.

It might makes sense to examine whether our desire for more requires that other have less.

It might make sense to think about whether hard work drive are always good, considering they might be driving us in a direction that is ultimately destructive.

It might make sense to think about whether our love for country masks us to the injustice and pain others feel at the hands of our military or economic systems.

But to do so will take work, because it’s very likely the worst part of ourselves isn’t wearing red tights. It’s probably hidden in plain view, inside something beautiful but ultimately deadly.

Love it? Hate it? Find my voice nasally and grating? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or via RSS. Thanks for listening.

Special thanks to The Autumn Film for jazzing it up with the tunes - you can download four free songs from their most recent album at http://theautumnfilm.com/share, and you can follow them on Twitter.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

The result is a discussion about your Personal Image, a concept I first wrote about five years ago when I created my (suddenly timely, equally obscure) book A Bright Red Package. With so many people out of work, looking for work, etc. I decided it might be a good time to dust off the material and see if any of it was still relevant. Turns it it was.

So put on your headphones and take a listen. If you have feedback on how to improve it (make it shorter, make it funnier, never do it again, etc.) please let me know. I’m looking forward to exploring this with you!

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