I love success stories.

I love reading about people who conquered the odds, found new ways to do something, persevered and were rewarded. The bigger the obstacles, the cooler the solution, the more amazing the triumph… the bigger the better. They’re fun to read, and they’re fun to watch.

They’re also a waste of your time.

Oh, I know they’re inspiring and might even give you a good idea or too. I get that. What you have to realize, though, is that these stories play into our desire for quick fixes and shortcuts. As Ramit Sethi is found of saying, losers love tactics.

Harsh, I know, but also totally true. Tactics are a lot easier than working a process, but it’s the process that wins most of the time. The tactic might get a little instant gratification, but the process is persistent, cumulative, and focused on producing a result. Processes are harder to build, but once built, they produce.

I you flip through SSSTLYFJ, you’ll notice that there is only one tactic I advocate: send handwritten thank-you notes. No clever strokes of genius there. It’s just a nice thing to do, and people remember it. It still won’t get you a job. Not by itself, anyway.

The seven simple steps form a repeatable process. Do them over and over, and you will find the work you want faster and more reliably than through any other means (except nepotism, perhaps). The process isn’t magical or innovative, but it is relentless. Do this, and you will be exactly where you want to be.

I’ve noticed lately that success stories sell in the media. The guy who loses his job and finds a way to turn dog poop into moped fuel grabs your attention, no doubt about it. But guess what? He’s already done it. How do you turn that into fame and fortune for yourself? You probably can’t. That’s his idea, not yours.

Take a little time each day to clarify your goal, manage your search, and tend your support team, though? That creates results. You get very specific about what you want to do, you get closer to doing it, and you build on a team dedicated to getting you there. It’s incessant and powerful. It gets you where you’re going.

That’s what I call a success story.

Discussions of jobs and careers inevitably lead to discussions about bad bosses. It’s usually a pretty short walk from what people don’t like about their jobs to who’s fault it is. So, who’s to blame for bad bosses?

You are.

Well, sometimes, anyway.

Everyone who has had a job has a bad boss story. I’ve had a few myself, and I’d like to take a moment to thank every small-minded, psychotic, petty, short-sighted, sleazy one of them. They each gave me a gift, but it took me a while to understand what that gift was. Now I know.

Bad bosses gave me the gift of understanding what matters.

True, most of them showed me what matters by trampling all over it, but I got there just the same. What I recognize now is that I never would have known how important some things were to me without someone threatening them.

Most of us probably know intuitively what matters to us–family, friends, security–but how many of us know precisely what we want from a working situation? I would guess not many. We tend to go straight from school to work, and we rarely have the opportunity to examine the shift in assumptions from the former to the latter.

In school, we show up on time, or we get in trouble. We sit quietly and listen attentively, or we get in trouble. We speak when spoken to, or we get in trouble. We complete our assignments exactly as told and without any pushback, or… you see where this is going? Is there a pattern here?

At work, though, we have choices about all of the things we didn’t in school. Sure, we’ll get in trouble for coming in late or speaking disrespectfully, but very few jobs mandate gracious compliance. When we work, we’re usually part of a big bunch of people working toward something together. It’s less like building the pyramids and more like playing on a team. Everyone brings talents that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Here’s the problem: no one taught us how to make that shift. Our experiences with authority transfer unexamined, and we often fall into the trap of doing as we’re told and not making waves. We assume that the boss is right and we’re wrong. We smile and nod, and we stay out of trouble.

Here’s where the bad boss comes in. A mediocre boss probably won’t push us much, and he might actually unify a team around how clueless he is. The bad boss, though, crosses lines of respect and identity. She humiliates us and takes our dignity. She pushes us out of our comfort zones. Employees might unify around hatred of a tyrant, but the pain is very personal.

This is when we come to see what really matters–what we will and won’t accept at work. Whether we do something about it is entirely another matter, but unlike in school, we have a lot of choices about what we want to do to establish our boundaries of respect and dignity.

We figure out what’s important to us.

Once we know that, tolerating the tyrant is a choice. Are we going to go back and take the abuse every day, hoping that one day it will get better and he’ll be a little less mean, paranoid, and micromanaging, or are we going to do something about it? Are we going to keep our heads down and go along, or are we going to change the game?

So who’s responsible for bad bosses?

We are. You and me. We don’t create them, but we sustain them by doing nothing and letting them win. You don’t have to do that. You might not have had a say in how things got to this point, but what happens from here is up to you. Show the bully the door. Whether it’s now, next week, or next year, figure out what matters to you and make your plan to do something about it. You might need your job today, but you don’t have to accept a life and a career of abuse.

Homework: What’s the one line you won’t let anyone cross? Write it down and guard it with your life.

This question came up during an interview with a local television morning show: what are the biggest mistakes job seekers make? I listed a couple–being unfocused about what they want, overlooking small details like sending a thank you note–but I later realized that these all roll up to the biggest mistake job seekers make.

They make it hard to hire them.

That might sound counterintuitive since most people who don’t have a job will take just about anything and start right away. The problem is that they haven’t thought about what happens once they start, and that’s what employers care about. It’s easy to make an offer, but what’s the point when everything that follows is a huge question mark.

People are hard to hire when it isn’t clear what they are going to contribute. A great many job seekers get wrapped around the axle of revising the resume and crafting perfect answers to hypothetical interview questions, but very few put thought into what employers really care about:

• what are my priority challenges?
• what will you do to help me handle them?
• what will be different after you have been here for a year?

Anyone who’s been on a few bad dates knows what happens when that person who was so attractive on paper runs out of things to talk about before the appetizers arrive.

You become easy to hire when you view the job you’re after as a relationship rather than a deal to be closed (a better date, too, but that’s another matter). Your job as a candidate is to take an interest in the person you’re meeting, to anticipate what they’ll care about and show that you care about those things too. Remember–they’re not there to do you a favor; they’re talking to you because they have a need. Explore that need and show that you can fill it better than anyone else.

Job seekers unwittingly put a lot of obstacles between themselves and good gigs, and a lot of those obstacles come from being too concerned about themselves. If you want to make yourself easy to hire–and trust me, you really do–take the time to understand what an employer wants, and demonstrate that you understand the want and can handle it better than anyone else.

Homework: before your next interview, take the three questions above and answer them on a single sheet of paper for the person interviewing you. When the time is right, take out that sheet of paper and talk through their challenges, your solutions, and what results you would deliver in the first year. Keep it brief, and ask listen closely to make sure you got it right. Easy, right?

When I first announced that I was publishing Seven Simple Steps to Landing Your First Job, a close friend asked, “Why do you care about that?” Fair point. It’s been over twenty years since I had my first job. I have a job and plenty of options. Why would I care?

And yet, I care a lot. I want to see bright, enthusiastic people sporting that look you get when you first hear you got the job. I love seeing that.

I have three big reasons for caring a lot about you getting a job: strength, balance, and emotions.

First, in every way I can think of, more people doing work they love means strength–strength of the economy, strength of employers, and strength of families. When people are happy and secure, society is more robust in every way.

Second, a healthy match between employers and employees creates balance. Right now there is a fundamental imbalance in the job market. There are over 15 million people out of work with another 2 million coming out of college and grad school each year. This is before graduates of high school, trade school, and other institutions are even considered, and those numbers fail to take into account several million more people who have just given up. This would be cause for dismay if there weren’t jobs out there–but there are. There are millions of jobs to be had, employers making do with positions left vacant. Whether through better awareness, skills development, or a better process for finding work, there is an imbalance that is causing unnecessary suffering, and that imbalance needs to be corrected.

Finally, the thing that really gets me going is the emotions you face when you need a job and don’t have one. I have seen so many talented, educated, passionate people struggle to find work. I have watched Ivy League graduates take a year or more to get jobs for which they’re overqualified. I have watched masters of trade circle want ads in the newspaper. It’s tough dealing with everything that goes along with watching your savings run out, having too much time on your hands, not getting to do what you love and are good at.

So yes, I care a lot about whether you get a job. I know there are jobs out there, I know there’s a better way to get them, and I know everyone’s happier when we can do work we love.

The book is now available at Amazon.com and other fine retailers! The Kindle version is also available.

Seven Simple Steps to Landing Your First Job: The Shortest Path from Here to Hired is a unique addition to the range of career books. Rather than discussing resumes, interviews, and job sites, Seven Simple Steps shows how to brings these elements together into a manageable process. As this book goes into print, 15 million people in the United States are unemployed. About 2 million people enter the job market from undergraduate and graduate programs each year. Without some advantage, most of those graduates will be wading into a sea of numbers that are overwhelmingly against them. This book is that advantage.