On Being a Rock Star

I breakfast today with Kathy Harris, Vice-president and Distinguised Analyst for the Gartner Group. Kathy had more than 20 years experience in banking before joining Gartner 10 years ago. I had seen her presentation on the high-performance workplace which was very interesting-- all about how to manage a mobile work force, global teams, and increasing diversity in an ever-changing world. To me, Gartner Analysts are like rock stars. They spend their days doing research, talking to software and hardware executives, writing papers, doing presentations, and advising higher-ups in quite a few Fortune 500 companies. And so, having always wanted to be a rock star myself, I asked Kathy how she got to be a Gartner Analyst. She told me about her career before Gartner, how she had often taken on new projects and cutting edge technologies, and how she was really good at helping to build new processes and new procedures around new systems. I said, "Me, too-- that's what I'm good at." She then went on to say that Gartner expects high rates of production from its analysts, and that the amount of writing required was often a limiting factor, keeping a lot of bright people from making it as analysts. And so I'm re-motivated. I'm re-motivated to produced written words on the Broadstreet Blog. I consume a tremendous amount of content on a daily basis, much of it valuable. I've got to do better at sharing. I remember from college writing courses that the best way to increase your writing output was to increase your writing output. In other words, you just do it. I used to do free-writing just to force myself to write. At first I would write gibberish but after some time I would produce words with some meaning and value. Yeah, I wanna be a Rock Star.