Buell - Corporate survival guide for your twenties: a guide to help you navigate the business world

Copyright 2016 by Kayla Buell

Published by Mango Media Inc.

Front and Back Cover, Interior Design, Illustrations, Theme and Layout: Laura Meja

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.

ISBN 978-1-63353-345-5

There will be a few times in your life when all your instincts will tell you to do something, something that defies logic, upsets your plans, and may seem crazy to others. When that happens, you do it. Listen to your instincts and ignore everything else. Ignore logic, ignore the odds, ignore the complications, and just go for it.

Judith McNaught

Dedicated to young people everywhere with big dreams.

Table of Contents

There you arearmed with a coffee mug and a smile, you walk into a small village of cubicles, hopeful that youll make a difference, make some money, or maybe just hopeful youll make it past the first six months.

As you enter into the corporate world, youre excited, nervous, anxious, hopeful, and overwhelmed with the idea that you have no idea what youre doing, which doesnt take too long to confirm.

You realize that most of what you learned in school didnt exactly teach you how to succeed in the office. You cant even figure out how to properly adjust your office chair, let alone master the nuances of office culture complexities that make you feel like youre working in a different country.

So only months later as you consume yet another piece of office birthday cake, co-workers pressuring it on you like the cool kids giving you a cigarette behind your high school, you realize that the Freshmen-Fifteen is nothing compared to the Cubicle Cincuenta. Now the cubicle chair you struggled to get just right becomes something youre struggling just to get up from.

The job you were so excited about just months before starts wearing on you like each email in your inbox is a brick, encasing you in something with little chance for escape.

So you start secretly beefing up your LinkedIn profile, fantasizing about finding your dream job that wont have any of these problems. Yet, with each job change (and most twentysomethings have quite a few) you start realizing that the same work problems are following you around like a sick dog that wont go home.

How do you actually succeed at work? How do you thrive in the office and in your career, instead of sitting at your desk dreaming about taking a never-ending road trip where youll blog about avocados and somehow make enough money to never have to work again?

For years, I felt like crappy jobs were a quicksand I couldnt escapethe harder I struggled, the more they sucked me in. I yearned to figure out the secret to truly finding career success, but how?

The Secret to Succeeding at Work?

It took me far too long to realize the secret to truly finding your dream job: Stop worrying about finding the right job and start worrying about your job getting the right you.

I felt like I couldnt escape working numerous crappy jobs because every job I worked, I brought in a fairly crappy effort. I mastered the art of Cubicle Workspreading thirty minutes of actual work to fill an entire day.

It took me far too long to realize that you can learn a lot even in a job youre loving very little. But you have to be intentional. Stay focused. Millennials need to combine their love for innovation, creativity, flexibility, and meaning, with time-tested qualities like perseverance, grit, humility, and service. A twentysomethings best ally in the office is quiet confidence and humble consistency to show up every day and get the job done well.

Millennials anthem should be HYBOHustle Your Butt Off. As a generation, I believe we have huge dreams of making an impact, making a profit, or most of the time, doing both. Our big dreams are not the problem; the timeline for how quickly we think those dreams should come to fruition is. Dont chase your dreams. Plant them in the best soil you can find and then water them every day with old school values.

Dream big, and be faithful in the small. Kick those millennial stereotypes in the butt before your employer throws you out on yours. Success happens in the details that no one notices. Thats why Kayla Buells Corporate Survival Guide For Your Twenties is so important and an instant leg up for any twentysomething Millennial looking to do much more than master Cubicle Work like I did. Having now spoken with hundreds of corporate leaders who are desperate to find twentysomethings who get it, Kayla Buell saves you needless hours and hardships in helping you understand, survive, and thrive in any office setting. Buells work-wisdom runneth over like a waterfall in this new book and it should be given out in every HR new hire orientation.

Dont make the same mistakes I did in my twenties. Grab an army of highlighters and reference this book every day. Your dream job will someday thank you.

Congratulations! You made it! You got yourself a job! You worked on your resume for weeks, networked your butt off, and after a million and five interviews, someone decided to give you a shot!

The hardest part is out of the way, right? Now you can kick back, relax, and post all over Facebook the fact that youre finally employed. You can dress up in nice suits, go to work, collect that paycheck, and life is going to be awesome!

Hah! Not so much. Hate to break it to you, but the hard work is just starting! Yea, you heard me correctly. Now is when things actually get tough. You landed the job, but now you have to live it every day, and doing that isnt always easy.

Welcome to the corporate world, my friend! A world where things arent fair, some people are mean, and if you want to succeed, your boss has to like you.

Lets face it, no one prepared us for corporate life. No one taught us the difference between carbon copying and blank carbon copying, and if you dont know what Im referring to by carbon copying, thats exactly my point.

Should you speak up in meetings? Should you stay quiet? Are you allowed to be friends with your co-workers? Should you eat at your desk? What should you wear? And what do you do when someone blasts you via e-mail?

Youre going to have all these questions and more, I promise you that much. And while its not your fault that college didnt teach you this stuff, there are things youre going to have to know if you want to kick-ass in your career.

Ive been surviving in the corporate world since I was 18 years old, and no, it hasnt always been easy! A lot of this stuff Ive had to learn the hard way, and by hard way I mean Ive been called into the Human Resources office one too many times.

But Ive learned a lot these past few years, and my goal here is to share with you some basic survival skills for the corporate world. Because when I landed my first job, I really wish someone had handed me a survival guide. Heck! I would have settled for a simple 30-minute advice session with anyone whod been working for over a week.

But you dont always get that, and youre thrown off the boat expected to swim. Im going to make sure you do. Im not going to let you sink, because I want you to succeed. I want young professionals everywhere to show anyone whos ever doubted us that we know what were doing and were going to make a difference in this world.