Page 31 - Sorry, We're Not Hiring Any Visionaries Today

CHAPTER 6
ANDREW: The jobs that I had in office administration and project coordina- tion. I’m proud of the fact that I left the companies or organizations in much better shape than when I started. Their data, documentation and processes were either non-existent or a mess. For example, you wouldn’t think fishing baits could be so complicated, but I added a tremendous amount of valuable data to the product database to more accurately and completely capture at- tributes of all the products, and then set up systems to improve the mainten- ance of the database itself. I figured out a way to describe all the columns, organize them and automatically count which cells were missing based on the type of product.
I also worked on Zendesk, their customer support ticketing system. Cus- tomers would buy products from the company’s website. If they had a prob- lem with an order or they had questions, they would email us, and I would see all these emails as support tickets. I had to respond to all of these.
At first, it was overwhelming because of all the different types of questions, but I created a library of about a hundred response templates that, for the most part, answered all of these questions.
MICHAEL: But why are you proud of this work?
ANDREW: It’s the idea of making things better, of going into a very disorgan- ized place and making it organized. It even applies to physical things, like a whole shelf of office supplies that was a mess; I tidied it up, and I enjoyed doing that.
MICHAEL: So what is it about bringing order to stuff that’s either chaotic or disruptive or just not right? What is it about that that compels you?
ANDREW: There’s no clear answer to that. It’s like asking why some people like chocolate or vanilla or why people have certain tastes. People are either designed that way or just born that way.
The compulsion is driven by belief but the action by conative preferences.
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