This is a story about cold emails and that talking robot from Rocky Four.
I'll clean it up for you. Paulie.. My name's Phil Edwards. I'm a senior producer at Vox. Vox.
That's not the jingle for Vox, but you know, why not?
This is a personal channel. So normally I talk about personal stuff or history, whatever I want.
However, this is kind of becoming a time management issue for me to have to share my
life story with so many people. I've got a lot of people trying to get in touch on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn.
And I get so many queries about how I got my job. And then I explain the long tortured story and
I've done it so many times that I'm sick of hearing it, but I do think it's kind of
useful. So now I can send a link to this video and then if people still want to talk to me,
they can, but they'll at least know where I came from.
This has become an entire subgenre of YouTube content. You can find videos from Johnny Harris,
Joss Fong, Cleo Abram, Estelle Caswell, Joe Posner all talking about their careers. Those
are just the people that came to me off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more who have
talked to conferences and been on, uh, fancy panels.
I have not, but I think that is actually one of the reasons that my input might be kind of useful.
And I'm way too close to the paper.
And I think it's helpful to hear from somebody who is a little lower down
on the food chain, somebody without quite so much natural talent. As sad as that is to say.
So I'm going to tell you my story and what I think it means with the
help of some history too, because, hey, this is personal and history.
So I want to give you that, and I'm going to do it with the help of three famous lackeys,
the little people, because I can identify and I think they can give us all some help.
Have you heard of Norbert Pearlroth?
Before I started at Vox. I had a blog, it was called Trivia Happy, and it was ba- that's right.
We're doing two camera angles. Kaboom. Watch it and learn.
I cared about trivia. I went to the Harold Washington Library
in Chicago every single week. I checked out the maximum number of books that you could check out
and I read them and did research and I blogged. My beat was trivia. We're about Taft’s bathtub,
and fast food in foreign countries, and Grover Cleveland's wedding cake.
This was kind of a Norbert Pearroth’s job too. You know, Robert Ripley of Ripley's Believe it
or Not? It's museums that are everywhere. And also it was an iconic newspaper column that was really,
really famous at the time. It was all sorts of weird stuff that happened around the world, mixed
in with trivia and historical facts that sounded untrue, but turned out to be miraculously real.
The person who found those was Norbert Pearlroth. Pearlroth went to the New York Public Library,
Monday through Friday, and he searched for facts.
And that is basically what I was doing every single day
at Trivia Happy. I reported too, I interviewed the guy who created the robot in Rocky Four.
I talked to the graphic designer behind Idiocracy. All of this stuff ended up being pretty popular.
I got thousands of hits and was mentioned from places all over the web...and I made $0.
Here's where it's important to mention that I am not independently wealthy.
Uh, I need money to buy things like goods and services.
And so I took that success that I had with Trivia Happy. And I
went looking for somewhere that might pay me to actually do the same thing.
So I cold emailed a few different places, including a newish site called Vox.
I told them that I really liked some of their articles that had found a lot of success on
the site. I said that I had basically designed my site as if Vox Media had made a site about trivia
and that was totally the truth. And improbably, amazingly, somehow, I got a call back.
I got an interview and I ended up getting a job.
Pearlroth is the lesson. You've got to pick a beat to slog through, through thick and thin,
through lots of traffic and zero traffic, through all the hits, none of the hits, through big money,
no money. And somewhere in between where you have some health insurance.
You've got to find the thing
that will keep you going through all of that because you love it so, so much.
For me, the most interesting stories are history and trivia and all the other forgotten things that
pervade our culture. But for you, it could be anything, it could be foreign policy,
it could be, uh, taxes on corporations. It could be new dental technology. I
don't know what your passion is, but find the thing that you are Pearlrothy about.
And chase after that, because that is the thing that is going to sustain you long enough
to actually get a job doing it.
This is Thomas Edison's electric pen.
Uh, just so you don't go crazy, basically what it did was it punched a bunch of holes
in a piece of paper. You'd roll ink over it,
and you'd be able to effectively create copies of the same illustration a ton of different times.
That's what it was. It was a copy machine. As far as I understand it, Francis Jehl was
a clerk in an office and he loved the electric pen and he basically said, ah,
God, I got to meet this dude who invented the electric pen, Thomas Edison, whoever he is.
One day Thomas Edison came into the office. Francis Jehl says, whoa, Edison, what's up?
Pleasure to meet you. I'd love to work for you because your electric pen
is great. Francis Jehl became Thomas Edison's Lackey.
He wrote his autobiography about his time at Menlo Park. He's in videos where
he re-enacts big moments in Menlo Park history.
Back to me. I had this job as a writer in Washington, DC. I was working for Vox now,
writing about these crazy things, but I was not just a writer.
I was also a fan boy and I was a fan boy in particular of
Vox video. I saw these early videos and I thought, Ooh, these are polished. These are
good. And I wanted to associate myself with these people in any way I could.
So I was always pitching them ideas. I was always
trying to give them scripts or interviews that I thought might be cool. And eventually
they thought that I was such a fan boy they wanted me to write scripts for them. Suddenly
I went from being a writer to being a part of the video team. It wasn't totally out of the blue.
I'd done a lot of stuff with charts and graphs. And I was always interested in visuals, but I
didn't have experience. I had passion. I was Francis Jehl in this situation. That is going to
keep you doing the grunt work at the beginning. I mean, I did tasks at the beginning that
weren't necessarily what I wanted to be doing, but I was happy to do it
because I was learning constantly about how to be a better writer and how to make better videos.
So how could I turn that down? And hopefully you will have the same opportunity.
Part three, that gets us to the last person, Thomas A. Watson.
Do you recognize this name? You might. I will play you a clip.
“I first met Alexander Graham Bell in 1874.”
That's right. He's the dude who Alexander Graham bell said,
come here, Mr. Watson, to when he invented the telephone. Thomas A. Watson was Alexander
Graham Bell's lackey. And how he got his job is actually a pretty useful lesson.
“When he came to the shop in Boston where I was working
to have his harmonic telegraph constructed, the work was assigned to me.”
So that is how we met Alexander Graham bell. Basically all these inventors were
coming through this machine shop cause they had big ideas, but they didn't know how to
execute on them. So Watson got a front row seat to every single inventor's big idea.
And that's why he got to meet all those amazing people.
That is kind of how I approached my video experience. When I came
on as a video producer, I was a script writer, but I was anxious to learn all of the tools.
I knew a bit of Photoshop. I knew a bit of Illustrator. I knew nothing
about Premiere. I learned how to use those applications. I learned how to use a camera.
I learned how to record voiceover and it was, it was painful.
The way that Thomas Watson said Bell, I can help you realize your idea,
I found a way to help realize my own ideas, and I think it helped give me more freedom to pursue the
things that I was Pearlrothy about. That's a word now.
Every place needs a Thomas Watson, what Thomas Watson does, that could vary a lot.
I don't, I don't know what your Thomas Watson skill is. Maybe it is some podcasting technique
that I've never even heard of. Maybe it's Tik Toking. Learning skills made me someone that
they wanted to keep around and that let the Pearlroth and Jehl parts of me shine.
I just got sick of being in the same place the entire video. That's it for this, typically I
do personal stuff and history stuff. If that interests you, subscribe to this channel, uh,
and like the video, if you can. We're early on so every little bit helps. All right. Thanks a lot.