Nostalgia Will Poison Your Job Search
Your One Shot
On “Mad Men,” Don Draper’s nostalgia meme for the Kodak campaign sold products.
For your job search, especially if you’re over-50, reaching back into the past can be fatal.
Think about it. You had been a top corporate speechwriter. That was before presentations moved on to slide decks. You interview at a McKinsey or a Paul Weiss for a position creating slide decks. Those are their platform for developing new business. You bet, they’re important. During the process you go off on a self-indulgent tangent about how speechwriting used to do this or that. Those interviewing glaze over.
That journey circling back into an earlier time sends out several negative messages about you:
You are old.
You can be distracted from the process at hand, which is to convince those hiring that you’re the one to transform what they do with slide decks into a more effective and more cost-efficient approach.
You don’t properly value the interviewers’ time.
Psychology Today puts it this way about nostalgia:
“Clinging to the comforts of the past can hinder personal growth. If we’re fixated on reliving history, we may resist adapting to the present or embracing the future.”
That darkness came through in the biographical film of 60s musical icon Bob Dylan “A Complete Unknown.” The nasal crooner had started out in folk music. There were the well-meaning and those who had a commercial interest in that genre who were determined to keep Dylan there.
Yet the music scene was changing. For instance, the British Invasion - The Beatles - was taking over. Despite the risk in alienating his supporters and certain kinds of fans, Dylan did shift out of what was. That saved his career.
When Bob Iger returned for the second round at CEO at Disney he seemed to be caught in a force field of what the corporation had been in a very different time for media. He stumbled, badly.
More recently Iger seems to have shaken off nostalgia and embraced the raw realities of streaming, the power of influencers and the marketability of family-unfriendly entertainment. Most of the moving parts of Disney are back humming.
After a relatively short heyday as a genre, memoirs have become poor sellers. An example is UK politico Boris Johnson’s. Despite a nosebleed advance it had sold under 45,000 copies. Johnson might have nostalgia for the past but not many seem to care what had been.
Beyond the issue of commercial sales is the message implicitly sent by memoirs: My best work is over. One wonders why a prolific acting genius like Al Pacino would issue the memoir “Sonny Boy.” He could have had plenty of runway left. Meanwhile some critics pan the narrative for not providing surprises.
In my career coaching I hammer the ethos of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself." That is, lose yourself in the moment. You only have one shot. That entails purging the mindset and memory of the past.