I joined ABC News in 2003. In the 2004 presidential race, I was not assigned a candidate to cover. I can still list the reporters who were, by the way. I remember every one of them. I got nothing.
So I did the only thing I could do. Complain? No. I worked so hard in those intervening years to establish myself as a good and tireless political reporter, so hard they HAD to assign me a candidate in 2008, for their own good. It worked, and in 2008, I was finally assigned a candidate. My goal then became to be the White House correspondent. And I knew, again, there was only one way I would get that job. I had to be so skilled and tough and industrious and vigilant that, if my bosses at ABC News made anyone else the White House correspondent, they would look like idiots. I had to force them to give it to me out of their own best interests.
Now, I’ve come up with a lot of bad strategies and made a lot of bad decisions in my life. I’ve made enough bad decisions to fill five other commencement addresses. But this was a good one.
Have something that they want. And show it to them – over and over, every day. Make them need you. Work twice as hard as the job requires. Make sure they know that you will show up and act like a professional, that you don’t feel entitled to anything.
Make them hire you for their own good, not yours.
Now, a word on the inevitable rejections that may soon shower upon you like a monsoon. Dr. Seuss’s first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected 27 times before he found a publisher. As a young man, Robert Frost, Class of 1896, received a rejection letter from the poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly with the note: “Our magazine has no room for your vigorous verse.”
【CNN记者杰克·泰普尔在达特茅斯学院2017毕业典礼上的演讲】相关文章:
最新
2019-11-14
2019-11-09
2019-11-09
2019-11-08
2019-11-08
2019-11-07