Quest of a Closet Poker Player

This is probably a post I’d rather not write, a look at my career to date and where I am now.  Yet here you go.
This is the third part of a series on how has poker impacted my life, and am I better for it.  The criteria I will use in looking at this question include all parts of my life:

• Spiritual
• Financial
• Career
• Physical Fitness
• Marital Relationship
• Parent
• Intellectual
• Friendship
• Psychological

Here is a quick summary of my career:

• Majored in Biology, pre-med but decided not to pursue this in my Junior year.
• Hired in manufacturing at a textile company; worked in management, process engineering, and eventually sales when Sweetie and I married and moved from G-Vegas to Princeton.  I worked in New York City for a year.
• Consultant for a market research company; here, I gained an expertise in Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction.
• Director of Total Quality for an Aerospace division of a Fortune 500 company.  I eventually moved to the Automotive sector then corporate as Director of Marketing and Customer Excellence.
• VP of Marketing at a $900MM joint venture.
• VP of Marketing and Alliances at a $650MM systems integrator.
• Founded my own company (2000)

I was what is termed a high-pot in corporate HR-ease, an employee with high potential who was excelling.  My pay steadily increased as did my responsibilities, and I traveled 60-80% of the time for probably ten years.  I founded my own company after I laid off 27 of my 32 employees at the systems integrator, this in the midst of the .com meltdown.  It turned out to be a horrible company probably not too atypical for firms in that space, one where executives lacked some basic management practices and capabilities, where staff members were paid 2x what they were worth.

My company has gone through a variety of fits and starts which aren’t too important to document here.  I’ve paid two employees around $100k each trying to jumpstart sales and a division only to see no sales result.  I’ve had a couple of efforts at business development employees without much success.  One of my clients asked me to create an advertising agency, and I served their needs for over two years as their VP of Marketing and agency of record.  We moved them from #6 in the market to #2 in that time.

Today, the company is more flexible as I use contractors to augment staff.  The model gives me much more financial flexibility but has me alone for a good bit of time.  My career has really been pretty stagnant for several years.  We have limped along financially during this time, although my pay has probably been reduced 35-60% from my peak.  When I look at the career paths of those I worked with, they are definitely doing great things.

I’ve made a few passive attempts at a job search in the last couple years, but my network and target market is really outside of the ATL.  Atlanta is more of a services and consumer marketing town, and my expertise is in manufacturing and technical companies.  I have been guided a great deal by not wanting to move, mainly fearing that a move back to the corporate world puts me back on a track of moving every two-five years again.  I’ve been approached previously to return to the corporate world, but I’d been in long-term client contracts with staffs that I couldn’t get away from.

I type these words that have been fumbling in my mind for quite awhile:  my career is in detour mode.  I am not progressing professionally, and while we are making enough to get by, I spend very large amounts of time doing not very much.

How has poker impacted this?  At first, it was a nice distraction for me during my heavy travels.  I spent a good bit of time in Phoenix and several trips to Las Vegas, and it was exciting to play poker while I was there.

The poker parts of my career have been accidental.  I first started this blog just as a way to document what I was going through, and now I write almost daily during the week.  I justify this blog as it keeps me contemporary in a new media area.  We poker bloggers are hardly big fish, and I’m a small fish in our little pond, but I’ve learned a great deal from Linda, Pauly, IGGY, Otis, and others.  I believe it helps me understand how this is evolving, the amount of work required to have a blog, etc.  I started writing articles for PokerWorks after meeting Linda at the Bellagio.  I’ve enjoyed doing it, especially the interviews.

All of this looks fairly benign when we look at how poker has affected my career.  And yet.

And yet, one could argue that poker has become disruptive to my career.  Specifically I speak of online poker and reading and writing about it.   It is a time consumer for me, not because I have these things looming over me but it is my choice for feeding my avoidance tendencies.  I’m an INTP in the Myers-Briggs world of humanity, and one of the few things I took away from that is that I am an avoider.  This isn’t my entire behavior as I’ll jump into most any type of business problem, but in my personal life I will put things aside when I’m feeling pressure or things that I’m not comfortable.

My view is that poker hasn’t been a cause of my career stagnation, but it has been a contributor factor to keeping it in the muck.  I’m able to wander around the blogosphere, open up a table, read 2+2, write stuff, all as a way to get me away from the more frustrating parts of my business and where it’s going.

I’m a big believer in something called Career Management, that each of us should take ownership of our career specifically in the context of where you want to be in five years.  The days of Big Brother Inc. taking care of you, grooming you for this or that, those days are so >10 years ago.  No, this is now the employee’s responsibility.  It means that if you are a bit bored with your current job or not challenged enough or don’t see a future, it’s your responsibility to chart a path to where you want to be in five years.  I say five years as it’s easy to try something for the next month or two only to collapse in frustration.  If you have a destination sixty months out, you really have something you can work toward in a variety of ways.  You can work with your current employer to develop a plan to get to that position in five years.  You can work on your own to achieve certain milestones or hone certain skills that will prepare you for that position.  You can take on tough tasks inside or outside of work to get you there.  You can check of the intermediate steps required to get you there.

I’m a big believer in this, and it should be part of everyone’s individual goals.   I’m in the midst of recrafting these goals for myself, and this series is part of that.  I don’t believe poker has been positive for my career, it has had negligible impact to slightly negative.  I also don’t think it is poker itself, more any online or computer based hobby that can be time consuming.  I’ve made attempts to bridge the gap between the two without much success.  I’ve had a couple of great meetings with one of the large poker tournament circuits only to have budget cuts prevent any future consulting agreements.

If you have any thoughts, just leave a comment or email me at csquard@gmail.com.  Thanks for stopping by, and hope this series will be helpful.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 10:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized.