Rebounders by Rick Newman

Author:Rick Newman [Newman, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-52785-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

HOW TO IMPROVISE

Most career advice focuses on setting goals, developing skills, gaining advantages, and overcoming other bad career advice you might have gotten. But many Rebounders, I discovered, also end up doing something else that gets a lot less attention: improvising. As a musician, Tim Westergren understood the art of playing notes that weren’t written on any page, developing improvisational instincts that he ultimately applied to his own career. Majora Carter learned that there was no linear path to success, not for her anyway. To find fulfillment and stability, she had to keep trying new things and learn how to heed the signals telling her it was time to move on. There’s mounting evidence throughout the workplace, in fact, that the kind of predictable, single-channel career that many baby boomers enjoyed will be far less common in the future. To be successful and turn change to their advantage, many twenty-first-century Americans will have to move quickly from one field to another, without much of a map to guide them.

I thought I might hear some entertaining insights about career improvisation by talking with John Ratzenberger, and I was right. A lot of people don’t know Ratzenberger’s name, but they know his work. If you’re over forty-five or so, you probably know Ratzenberger as Cliff Clavin, the pompous, know-it-all postman who had something irrelevant to say about practically everything on the hit sitcom Cheers, which ran from 1982 to 1993. If you’re younger, you may not recognize his face, but his unforgettable voice has animated characters in every Pixar film, going back to 1995, including Hamm the Piggy Bank in all three Toy Story films, P. T. Flea in A Bug’s Life, and the villainous Underminer in The Incredibles. I tried to avoid Hollywood celebrities while researching the Rebounders for this book because the media slathers so much fawning attention on them already. But Ratzenberger is an unconventional celebrity. He considers carpenters, plumbers, welders, and other practitioners of the industrial arts to be “the might of civilization,” while regarding actors like himself, plus sports stars and other celebrities, to be filling “nonessential jobs.” Instead of supporting worthy but trendy causes like orphanages in Africa or disaster relief in Haiti, Ratzenberger put his modest celebrity weight behind organizations such as The Center for America, which promotes skilled trade, ingenuity, and the tinkering spirit. He’s also an apostle of self-sufficiency, an underappreciated trait that’s likely to make a comeback.

It will probably come as no surprise that Ratzenberger grew up in a blue-collar community, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with a father who was a truck driver, a mother who worked in a factory, and two grandfathers who were carpenters. Some of the neighborhood activities when he was a kid were the types of things that today’s parents are likely to find too risky or unstructured. Ratzenberger’s mom would buy him old radios at yard sales, encouraging him to take them apart and put them back together, without fretting about the odds that he would get electrocuted.

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