Scott Adams thinks he can read your mind:

Let’s try a little experiment. I want you to think of one successful person. It can be anyone, famous or family member. Make sure you have just the one successful person in mind. Now concentrate on the first letter of that person’s last name.

Good. I’ll do the rest.

I will now wrinkle my brow and focus all my powers of ESP, trying to discern whether the letter in your mind is in the first half of the alphabet or the second half. Excuse me while I chant…ooom…oooom…okay.

Your letter is in the first half of the alphabet.

How’d I do? Leave a comment with the last name of the person you had in mind.

Seems like a cool trick – my random guess was in the first half. Ben Casnocha notes it jibes with his own name. Except as cool as this seems, I’m not convinced. Names aren’t distributed evenly across all 26 letters. I took some handy-dandy census data with the most common last names, loaded up the 20% that account for abut 75% of the people in the country, and checked out how they broke out by first letter. The first half of the alphabet – what Adams is looking for – accounts for 65% of the names in the list. In other words, it’s not evenly distributed. And the psychological affect of the trick is greater because the first three letters in the alphabet (11.5% of letters) account for the names of about 20% of the people in the list.

Want to check out more? The graph below plots the cumulative percent of those in the list against and what it would look like if letters were evenly distributed. Or you can take a peek at the data yourself and run some even better tests.

Categories: Ephemera
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The best way to land a job or promotion is to work for free. It seems counter-intuitive, because we usually try to find new jobs or earn promotions to make more money, and working for free means not making any money (and has an opportunity cost), but working for free solves one of the biggest problem in the employment process: determining whether or not a candidate really is a good fit for the new role.

Most job seekers say the same thing “I’m a hard worker, I’m talented, and I’m motivated.” Of course, since everybody is saying it, managers have no way of knowing if it’s really the case. For most jobs, they can look at your past history and see if you’ve done the job successfully someplace else, but if you’re new to the job market, new to the industry, or looking for a promotion, you don’t have a history there. The manager is left with nothing but your word, and quite frankly, that isn’t worth much.

When you work for free, you show two things. First, you build a record of doing the job successfully. Second, you demonstrate that you’ve got a passion for what you’re doing. If you’re willing to work hard for no money, imagine what you’d do if you got paid for it. Employers are desperate for people passionate people who can do the job, and when they hire you, they’re usually taking a risk on whether or not you’re really as great as you say you are. The more you can prove it, the more likely an employer is to hire you and pay you a lot.

So how does this work for promotions? If you’re already in a job and you want a promotion, you could go up to your boss and explain that you’ve been a very successful worker, how you’ve been at the company a long time, and blabber about how great you are at your job. If your boss is smart, they’ll shoot right back and say “I know you’re great at this job, but that doesn’t mean you’d be great at the job we’re promoting you to.” A promotion usually requires added responsibility, and if it’s to management, a different set of skills. Instead, just start taking on extra responsibility. Take on leadership roles on projects, succeed, and then take on more. Don’t do it so much they start to take advantage of you, because at some point, you’re going to go to your boss and say “I’ve been doing the work of a manger for the past few months, and doing a great job, I think I’m ready to become one.” Even if they disagree, you now have proof that you can take to another company that you can do the work.

This isn’t just speculation that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Every job that I’ve ever held, whether as a computer programmer, consultant, or web designer, was tied to some activity I had previously done free of charge for friends, family, non-profits, and myself.

While at a conference in Seattle last year, I saw a presentation by a woman who handled marketing and promotions for video games – a dream job.  While in high school, she started writing a music newsletter, with opinions about the industry, stories about local bands, and reviews of CDs.  She’d print off copies, take them to music stores, and leave them there for shoppers to look at.  Eventually, someone in the music industry found it, liked what she saw, and hired the presenter for a dream job in the music biz, from which she transitioned later to video games.  Through the newsletter, she demonstrated not only that she could write, but that she had a passion for the work.  It’s something that employers love, but that’s hard to screen for in interviews.  If you do the work for free, you prove both right off the bat.

If you only do exactly the work you get paid to do, you’re never going to grow.  Nobody is going to take on your risk for you, you need to do it yourself.  As long as you think of it as an investment in your future, and manage it accordingly, working for free can bring massive returns.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Information Asymmetries
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