The inquisitive one traveled to London. It was going to be an exciting adventure!

While in a crowded street market, the inquisitive one saw some postcards. “I could send these to my nephew and niece!” thought the inquisitive one, as a bunch of people jostled into the back, shoulders, and butt. When the inquisitive one went to pay for the postcards, there was a terrible realization: the credit cards, cash, phone, and passport were all missing!

Instinctively, and in a panic, the inquisitive one ran to that timelessly universal haven for inquisitive types, the public library. Frantically, the inquisitive one Googled what to do when lose passport England USA help! and scanned through some websites. Next, the inquisitive one logged into the email account and composed a message.

Here it must be noted that, due to shock and anxiety, the inquisitive one had been stricken with a psychological disorder! The inquisitive one could no longer distinguish fact from fiction, information from misinformation! Furthermore, the inquisitive one could no longer recall a single rule of spelling, grammar, or word usage! Consequently, the email read as follows:

Not knowing whom to put on the To: line, the inquisitive one sent it to every contact in the address book. Then the inquisitive one waited for a reply.

But no one replied! The inquisitive one kept checking the email for hours, but then, night fell. The library closed. The inquisitive one was forced to scrounge through trash bags for food and sleep in an alley.

The next day, the inquisitive one fell in with a band of drug dealers. But the inquisitive one, having no talent for sales, was not able to make any money. As the days passed, the inquisitive one started to despair of ever again eating something that didn’t come from a garbage bag. But then a fellow drug dealer invited the inquisitive one to, along with him, ditch the drug dealers and join a band of political agitators: which the inquisitive one gladly did.

This was a better situation because the political agitators took tea and crumpet breaks 15 or 20 times daily, which filled the belly nicely. These political agitators were pro-Brexit, or anti-Brexit, or anyway they had a very specific stance regarding Brexit. However, due to their use of incomprehensible words such as queue, quid, lift, and mummy dear, the inquisitive one was not able to determine what precisely that stance was.

Anyway, a few days after that, Fortune smiled even more happily on the inquisitive one: someone replied to the email! The inquisitive one collected $10,000 using the bank information sent by a (wonderfully kindhearted!) acquaintance, whom the inquisitive one vaguely remembered having met a couple of decades previously. Oddly, though, at the U.S. Embassy, the inquisitive one learned that, contrary to what the Internet very clearly stated, such a large sum of money was not required.

While the U.S. Embassy was working on issuing a new passport, the inquisitive one (with wonderfully kindhearted generosity!) gave the remainder of the cash, as well as the bank information, to the good drug-dealer-turned-political-agitator friend.

This friend, the inquisitive one had been astonished to learn, was Hamlet, Prince of Denmark! Well, or maybe he was Charles, Prince of Wales. In all honesty, the accents in this city were so thick that the inquisitive one could hardly understand a word anyone said. Or was he a Nigerian prince? In any case, he was a prince, but he had fallen on hard times and lost his throne. He promised to return all the money, and significantly more, to the (wonderfully kindhearted!) decades-old acquaintance of the inquisitive one, and to give the (wonderfully kindhearted!) inquisitive one a sizable pile of precious stones and jewels, once his throne was properly restored. And it surely would be restored within the next few days, due to the temporary loan of the money in the account!

The inquisitive one, strangely and sadly, lost contact with the prince at that point. But the very next day, the U.S. Embassy issued the inquisitive one a new passport! While the inquisitive one was not able to recover the lost credit cards, cash, or phone, the issuance of the new passport was a truly wondrous occurrence: and the inquisitive one’s anxiety faded away. Knowledge of spelling, grammar, and word usage returned. Also recovered was psychological sanity, including the ability to understand what was real; what was possible but unlikely; and what was rabid delusion.

MORAL: Health is better than wealth; and it’s easier, as they say in the wisest countries, to pass a needle through a camel’s eye, Amen.

I have gotten almost every job I’ve ever held in the standard way. First, I would submit a cover letter and resume. Next, I would wait to be invited to an interview. After the interview, I would send a thank-you note. Finally, I would wait for a phone call. At various key points in my life, I was fortunate enough to actually receive that phone call with a job offer. But this is not the only way to get a job! I was gobsmacked by the unconventional talents in job acquisition that Kurt Eichenwald displayed over his long career. Let’s examine how to get a job by using some nonstandard, Eichenwald-inspired techniques.

Background on Kurt Eichenwald

Kurt Eichenwald’s memoir A Mind Unraveled, published in 2018, chronicles his struggles with epilepsy. His story is much broader than just a discussion of a medical problem, though. He faces almost unsurmountable difficulties in navigating the health care industry, getting a college education, and launching the career he wants. These difficulties arise from not just the epilepsy and the medications for the epilepsy, but also the misunderstandings, negligence, and hostility of others. Through astounding persistence and ingenuity, Eichenwald is able to achieve his education and career goals.

For us readers, his memoir is a series of lessons on how to do things in boldly unconventional ways—either because life has thrown us a curveball and we have no options left, or because that’s just who we are.

Employment Strategy #1: Do a 2-Week Task in 5 Minutes

At an unpaid summer internship, Eichenwald is assigned a task that no one else wants to do. It’s a tedious task of locating a tiny scrap of information by placing a bunch of random phone calls. (This was before the days of the Internet.) Eichenwald invented what he thought might be an easier way to obtain the information. His strategy worked, and his supervisors were amazed. As a result, the supervisors assigned Eichenwald a complex, demanding project that gave him invaluable experience, not to mention fodder for his resume, which would help him get the paid job he wanted in the future.

Takeaway unconventional technique:

Don’t assume that you have to do an assignment in the way you were told to do it. And don’t ask permission to do something in an unconventional way; your supervisors will likely say no. As long as you’re not breaking any laws or important rules, just do it, and see if it works. If it doesn’t, you can always switch back to the conventional way.

Employment Strategy #2: Turn a Low-Level Volunteer Gig Into a High-Level One

Not yet having the credentials to get a paying job in the field he wanted, Eichenwald volunteered for a nonprofit. He applied for a particular volunteer position because it seemed vaguely related to what he wanted to get paid to do. The position, however, was at a low level; he would not obtain the experience he sought by staying in that role. But he realized that, once he got the position, he would have the chance to prove himself worthy of a high-level volunteer job. He did this by showing up uninvited to a meeting, presenting an interesting and workable proposal, and offering to do the work himself. His offer was accepted, and suddenly he was building skills and a powerful resume, by doing the job he wanted to get paid to do. Soon he would have the chops to apply for a paying job in that field.

Takeaway unconventional technique:

First, identify volunteer opportunities that are somewhat close to what you want to do. Next, get to know the paid staff, and let them know they can trust you. Then, instead of waiting to be invited to move up, make a bold proposal. Your proposal must be well thought out, and you must come across as highly competent to get the job done. Then get the job done.

Employment Strategy #3: Don’t Tell Them What They Don’t Need to Know

Eichenwald learned that it’s essential to tell the truth, but that the whole truth is not always conducive to achieving your career goals. For example, while working as a volunteer, while he still did not have a college degree, Eichenwald (as part of the high-level assignment he had talked himself into) needed to put pressure on people in government. He decided not to disclose the fact that he was an unpaid volunteer and a college student. While never telling a lie, he persuaded officials that he was a big enough deal that they should be frightened. As a result, he not only achieved his objective, but also received an offer from the mayor to join a new task force.

Later, when Eichenwald was applying for paid employment, he discovered that it was better not to disclose his epilepsy to hiring staff. If and when he got a job, he would let his supervisor know on the first day of work. This significantly increased the chances that he would be able to find a job. In some cases, telling his supervisor resulted in the employer trying to force him out. But even in those instances, he was able to work and receive pay for a short time, while resuming his job search. Plus, working somewhere, even for a short time, bulked up his resume.

Takeaway unconventional technique:

While never telling outright lies, strive to make people believe you are strong. Because you are. Maybe you have a health issue. Or maybe you don’t have a degree in the field in which you seek employment. Or maybe people jump to conclusions about who you are because of your age, a physical trait, or another characteristic. None of those things matter. If you know you can do the job, try to hide anything that might make someone turn you away.

On the other hand, if you know something will be an issue, disclose it . . . but wait to do so until it’s absolutely necessary.

Employment Strategy #4: Show Up and Start Working

Upon graduating from college, Eichenwald didn’t land an internship in his dream industry. So he took an internship for an organization in the same building as one of the organizations that had rejected him. At lunchtime one day, he wandered into the offices of the organization that had rejected him and asked someone if he needed help with a stack of papers. The person did not inquire whether Eichenwald actually worked there, but was glad for the assistance. And so Eichenwald began helping out before his internship began in the morning, during lunch break, and after his internship ended in the evening. When the boss finally noticed, weeks later, that Eichenwald was working without an internship, he got angry . . . but didn’t kick him out. Eichenwald had made himself too valuable. So he was allowed to stay on as an intern.

Takeaway unconventional technique:

When someone tells you no, push back. Find a way to make yourself valuable to the organization. Don’t ask permission, just do something helpful.

Employment Strategy #5: Reach Out and Be Available

When Eichenwald wanted to change jobs, he asked his colleagues for ideas on who might be hiring. He eventually acquired the name of a prominent person and gave him a call. The person told Eichenwald that he had no open jobs, but would be glad to meet him, the next time he happened to be in New York City. Eichenwald could have thanked him and hung up; instead, he told the person that he was scheduled to be in NYC the day after tomorrow! Two seconds prior to that, Eichenwald had not been scheduled to be in NYC on that day. But, at that point, of course, Eichenwald was scheduled to be in NYC on that day. Once they had arranged a meeting time and place and hung up, Eichenwald scrambled to come up with the money he needed to get himself to NYC by the day after tomorrow.

Takeaway unconventional technique:

Network like crazy—and with a goal in mind. Continually project competence and confidence to the people around you, and help them in any way you can. Then, when you seek a tip yourself, your network will be glad to help you. When you finally get in touch with someone with the power to hire you to your goal job, make things easy on that person—even if that makes things extremely difficult on you.

Employment Strategy #6: Enlist Others to Advocate for You

Eichenwald was in the running for a promotion: from coffee bringer, etc., to something much bigger. Things were looking promising, but then he heard a rumor that he was not going to get the promotion. Astonishingly, he had had the foresight to prepare a list of names and phone numbers, in case this happened. When it happened, he used it:

“I telephoned everyone at the Times who knew me or who owed me favors. . . . I asked each of them to call on my behalf to the boss of the editor about to hand down the bad news.”

The next day, an assistant managing editor called Eichenwald into his office:

“‘Congratulations,’ he said. . . . ‘You’re a reporter trainee for The New York Times.'”

Takeaway unconventional technique:

First, get yourself hired at the organization you want to work for, even if it’s the lowliest position there is. Next, meet everyone you can, and do them as many favors as possible. Finally, when it’s needed, call in those favors.

A Caveat on Getting a Job the Unconventional Way

The strategies listed in this article are risky! Each of them could have easily backfired. You need mad social skills, intellect, and confidence to pull them off. But there’s good news: social skills, intellect, and confidence are all teachable and learnable skills. If you possess these skills already, take them and run with them! If you don’t, I promise, you can learn them. It might take some time and dedication, but you can learn them. And, who knows? Acquiring these skills and putting them to use in unconventional ways might help you land your dream job one day.

Additional Resources on Being Bold and Unconventional

Read the memoir for the full, fascinating story: A Mind Unraveled by Kurt Eichenwald.

Check out my other blog posts on the memoir: my blog posts on A Mind Unraveled.

See also my blog posts on Dare to Lead, a book that provides research-based guidelines on how to be courageous in the business world: my blog posts on Dare to Lead by Brené Brown.

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What do women really want? Flowers? Chocolate? Doors opened for them? To be tied up on a train track and saved in the nick of time?

Honestly, I have no idea. I have a hard enough time figuring out what I want—let alone all women on earth!

So let’s talk about something I do know about: what you want. You, apparently, want to read a blog post called “What Women Really Want.” Furthermore, it’s likely that at least some of you want to read such a blog post not because, ten minutes ago, you were thinking to yourself, “The best use of my time right now would be to read a blog post about what women really want!”—but, rather, because you saw the title and felt mildly intrigued, while also feeling disinclined to do something more cognitively demanding than clicking a link.

In other words, it’s possible that some of this post’s readers—not you, of course!—fell for the clickbait I so slyly threw out there. But, trust me, they’re not alone! I succumb to clickbait all the time. I mean, it’s called “bait” because it lures us helplessly in! Moth to a flame! Nonetheless, however you ended up here, I’m genuinely glad you did, because I want to tell you about a great book called Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

Newport dedicates three separate chapters of the book to three different ways that we can spend the free time we will acquire if we stop mindlessly clicking around on the Internet. According to Newport, these three uses of time are essential to human health and happiness, and yet are often neglected in the digital age:

• Solitude
• Conversation
• Demanding activities

At this point, I’d like to share a passage from Newport’s book. It’s from his chapter on demanding activities, but, in my opinion, it applies to all three of his recommended uses of time:

“The value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested. We might tell ourselves there’s no greater reward after a hard day at the office than to have an evening entirely devoid of plans or commitments. But we then find ourselves, several hours of idle watching and screen tapping later, somehow more fatigued than when we began. . . . If you instead rouse the motivation to spend that same time actually doing something—even if it’s hard—you’ll likely end the night feeling better.”

Obviously, demanding activities are hard. (I’m trying to learn French at the moment, and facile isn’t exactly a word that applies.) But I would argue that solitude and conversation are also hard, at least for us moderns. With various technologies filling every waking moment, carving out time for solitude and conversation is hard to do. It’s also hard to learn how to enjoy being alone, or how to enjoy being social, if those aren’t activities that come naturally to you. But I agree with Newport that the hard work does pay off.

And if you have made it through this entire, 500-word blog post? Congratulations: that counts as a demanding activity! Will you also make time to be alone and to be social today?

You travel to the tropics and arrive at your beachfront lodging. Tired, you take a 20-minute nap. You awaken and decide to go out into the hot sun. All your stuff is laid out before you, as in this photo. Which of these items do you reach for first—before touching any of the other items?

Don’t think about it too much. Just look at the photo, pretend the stuff is yours, and envision reaching for one of your things. What do you grab?

If you grabbed your phone—so you could check whether you’d gotten any texts, emails, or social media notifications during the past 20 minutes—you may, according to Cal Newport in his most recent book, suffer from a particularly subtle, invidious, pervasive, and modern addiction.

Three years ago, Newport brought us the book Deep Work, which elucidates truths about the human brain, as regards getting things done. As it turns out, to be maximally productive, we need periods of deep work—that is, sustained concentration on difficult tasks—but also breaks from deep work. Trouble comes when people’s schedules become unbalanced one way or the other. For most people, the scales tip toward too much time doing mindless things like Internet surfing, and not enough time in sustained concentration.

In his newest book, Newport examines the causes behind why so many people have difficulty carving out time for deep work. Unsurprisingly, he identifies digital devices, their applications and apps, and how we incorporate them into our days as key culprits. Also unsurprisingly, he uncovers evidence that large, web-based corporations that profit off people’s time (through advertising revenue) actively strive to foster addiction among their users. Newport then recommends remedies for us hapless addicts (and I def include myself in that category!).

The 2019 book is called Digital Minimalism. In its opening pages, Newport defines the term digital minimalism:

“A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”

FOMO is not permitted in Newport’s philosophical world! To cure readers of its pull, he recommends taking a one-month hiatus from all nonessential digital use. Only then, he says, can one break the compulsive habit and gain enough perspective to make rational decisions on how to reincorporate nonessential digital activities into one’s daily life.

And so, I took the month-long journey. I did not use social media for the month of February, with some exceptions for essential activities. For example, I manage the social media accounts for the company I work for; naturally, I continued to perform this paid work. There were also instances in which I needed to log in to the sites to access information or communicate with people whom I could not conveniently contact another way. In addition, I deleted some of my most tempting phone apps and used only my laptop to access those sites. I also turned off, or restricted by time of day, my phone notifications. And I used an app blocker to prevent me from accessing certain apps at certain times of day.

I wish I could say that taking this journey cured me. I still struggle to control my urge to check, check, check, all day long. I am still experimenting with different phone settings and personal codes of conduct, in an attempt to hold on to the biggest benefits of owning a smart phone, while also avoiding disruption to more important life activities. However, even though digital minimalism is still, for me, an unrealized goal, I have seen big improvements in my quality of life. I do have more time in my day when I’m not being constantly sucked into the digital app vortex. I do feel better able to concentrate on deep work tasks. And the next time I take an actual journey, maybe—just maybe!—I’ll reach for the flip-flops first.

Have you taken any minimalist journeys lately?

My phone rang, and “The Inquisitive One” appeared on the screen.

“Hey you!” I said, upon answering.

“Hey Liza!” said the inquisitive one. “I’m calling because I’m concerned about something, and I want to discuss it with you. Do you know?—people keep saying you and I are the same person!”

“Oh, well, it happens,” I said. “Honestly, I’m flattered when they think that.”

“Well, I’m not. Plus, it bothers me. It’s as if they think I don’t exist!”

“If it makes you feel any better, I’ve explained to several people that you and I are different. Hopefully word will get around!”

“Thanks, Liza! But why do people sometimes think we’re the same person?”

“Hmm. I guess I learned that in college. None of the characters in a work of fiction should be confused with the author. Not even when there’s a narrator using the word I to describe him- or herself. And not even when it’s an autobiographical story with a protagonist with many similarities to the author.”

“Oh yeah—I learned that in college, too! So, when the author Tim O’Brien uses the word I in the short story collection The Things They Carried, these narrators should not be confused with O’Brien himself, even though the narrators experience many of the same things O’Brien did during and after the Vietnam War!”

“And the character Ivan Denisovich experiences many of the same things the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did when he was imprisoned in a Soviet gulag, but not everything mentioned in the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich matches Solzhenitsyn’s actual history and memories!”

“And when the foreword to the novel The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux details evidence that the opera ghost really existed, this claim is not being made by Leroux, but by the fictional narrator!”

“Actually,” I observed, “that one’s a bit more complicated.”

“In any case,” said the inquisitive one, “please continue spreading the word. I really—”

“Hold on a sec,” I said, staring out the window at a flying saucer coming to a gentle landing on my front lawn. As I kept watching, the door slid open.

“Oh my gosh!” I cried out. “Three little green aliens are walking on my lawn!”

“What?” said the inquisitive one. “Wait, that’s super interesting to me, because—”

“I’ll call you back,” I said, hung up my phone, and ran outside.

“Take us to your leader!” said the little green aliens.

“Okay,” I said, “but I don’t know where Lady Gaga lives!”

“Take us to your leader!” said the little green aliens.

“Okay, follow me,” I cried, hopping into my car and thinking like crazy and realizing—

But that’s another story.