56 Conversations

Kurt had just completed a two-year fellowship after getting his master’s in design at Stanford— on top of one he already had from Yale in sustainable architecture.

He was serious about landing a job— and fast. So he got busy. He did his homework. He carefully found job postings in the area that fit his résumé well. He identified the most viable openings and submitted thirty-eight job applications, along with his impressive résumé and thirty-eight individually crafted cover letters.

Out of 38 applications, Kurt received terse rejection E-mails from 8 companies and never heard from the rest. 

Kurt stopped applying for jobs and began conducting Life Design Interviews. He conducted fifty-six authentic prototype conversations with people he was genuinely interested in meeting. Those fifty-six conversations resulted in seven different high-quality job offers, and one dream job (the real kind, not the fantasy kind)— which he got.

So if you’re here and you’re reading this, it is 110% likely I want to grab a coffee with you or lunch and get your story, please. 

Burnett, Bill; Evans, Dave. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (p. 129- 130 & (pp. 146-147) ). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Designing My Life

For the past ten years I have been involved in business from data-entry clerk all the way to startup founder. After my last startup didn’t take off I had a conversation with an angel investor who asked me some hard questions. Why didn’t I pursue the fields I had studied in (psychology and engineering)? Was I happy doing what I was doing? Did I really need all that success and wealth to have the life I desired? In the same year the book, Design Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans was published. Ever since then I’ve forged a path directed more aligned with my personal compass. This website is a continuation of that path. 

About

Hi! I’m JC and I’m exploring three life designs. One in the mental health field. One in the software and artificial intelligence field. One as a professional Polynesian dancer. 

THREE STORIES One for each field. 

MENTAL HEALTH     I had a patient I’ll name Edna. Edna was in the hospital for weeks and the staff said she was cognitively unresponsive and essentially a “Vegetable.” As we transferred her from hospital bed to gurney the other EMT’s and some nurses were indifferent to her care. They lacked compassion. I, on the other hand, communicated to her, not knowing if she actually heard me. As caregiver during transport, I would let her know when we would hit a bump in the road and to hold on because we’re almost to her home. I felt the need to treat her as a regular human being and not a transaction. When we transferred care to her family, she looked at me and said, “Thank you.”  

SOFTWARE and AI     It was a couple of years ago when I was searching for a job and the only way I knew how was to write a customized cover letter, a customized resume, and hope for the best. I began to search the internet looking for a faster way to do this when I came across a manual for Applescript, Apple’s automation scripting language. It’s a program to automate repetitive tasks like cutting and pasting text, but the cool thing is that you can use it across most programs on the Mac. So with Applescript I developed a script that cuts data from Microsoft Excel and pastes it to Mail.app and attaches a different resume depending on the job posting requirements. The result would be a hiring manager would get an applicant that appeared to have spent hours on this specific cover letter and resume, thus boosting my chances. It took me about a month teaching myself and testing. Two days of it working pass and I had sent out 220 resumes, had a bunch of inquiries, then had 2 job offers that competed to give me my highest salary ever.

POLYNESIAN DANCE      If money and image were no object, I’d love to just live by dancing. One of my all time favorite things to do while I’m on stage is to slow down and look at the faces of my fellow dancers. Some are very concentrated and some are just smiling. At this point in time I’m the most content and happy. Why wouldn’t I want to do this forever? 

Contact

jc@56convos.com; shoot me an E-mail first and then I’ll message or call you back within a couple of hours.