Proactivity is something every professional should develop – 02/17/2023 – Rodrigo Zeidan

Denied. A week later, another shipment of originals. Denied. Next week; same thing. Still, Todd McFarlane didn’t give up and continued producing new pages and sending them to publishers from the biggest comic book publishers in the US at the time.

Until an editor who needed an assignment yesterday offered McFarlane a smaller job. The result? A successful career spanning over 40 years in the field and one of the most successful comic book artists in the world.

His case is not unique. One of the least discussed skills in the corporate world is that of self-promotion. Proactivity is something that any professional should develop, especially in creative careers. But in Brazil we still have the culture of “asking for a job”.

Job interviews are usually based on power relations in which organizations hold all the cards and interviewees are almost beggars, trying to show that they should be chosen. But there is another world, in which work relationships are a search for shared generation of value. There are even examples of executives reaching out to organizations and co-creating a job that is good for everyone.

But, deep down, the main lesson is that we have to take the reins of our careers. This means always looking for job options, maintaining good relationships with people in the industry and even getting in direct contact with other executives to probe whether there are possibilities at other institutions. If you can, always have offers from other organizations on the table so you never get discovered.

I didn’t get into Fundação Dom Cabral or NYU Shanghai by chance. In the first case, a friend asked if I would like to explore the opportunity to work at the institution and I said: “Of course”. Even having an offer from another company in hand.

In the case of NYU, I got the dean’s email from a friend and wrote a message without knowing anyone at the institution: “Hello, I will be in China in two months, as I am a visiting professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo. I would like to visit NYU Shanghai to explore research opportunities with teachers there”. Little did I know that the institution was desperate to recruit professors with my profile. I sent the email to the right person at the right time.

It wasn’t much different in Sheet. After writing a series of columns about China, every four to six months he wrote asking if there was room as a recurring columnist. In the third email, I received a response saying that a columnist was leaving the newspaper to run for election. Would I like to take up his space?

Of course, self-promotion has limits. Recently, a researcher wrote to our dean saying that she had completed a postdoc and would like a job at NYU Shanghai. Well, that’s not proactivity; it’s just arrogance.

If there’s one thing anyone learns at an American educational institution, it’s this: no one is better at selling your ideas than yourself. And, many times, that goes through putting the face to cover. But there would be no other way for someone from Madureira, with no contacts in the academic or professional world, to leave a doctorate in Brazil to become a professor in the best schools in the world. And in a newspaper like Sheet.

The “you build your success” story sounds like something out of a second-rate self-help book. But somehow it works, even if not always.

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