Centralight

Rick Sykes: Ramping up your street value I love it when students tell me, "I'm done with school. I'm done with education." And I say, "No, you're not." It doesn't matter which arena you're in. You will be doing three or four different jobs throughout your career, and the third or fourth job probably didn't exist when you first got out of college. You have to develop a mindset that you are your own franchise, just like an NBA player or a movie star or a musician. You are responsible for your success. The bottom line is: your success is based on your street value. Street value is the value that others assess when you're out there looking for a job. If you're not constantly assessing where you need to continue to grow, then that street value starts to decline. Success and failure are not opposites, they're along the same line. You're not going to be successful unless you have failures. Failures tell you what's working, what's not working and what areas you need to continue to work on. This means that you have to be willing to take risks. "You have to be willing to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation to grow. You periodically have to say, 'Am I doing what I still want to do?'" to do something different. I got an opportunity to go in as an agency's vice president. I understood some aspects of public relations, but it still was pretty scary. I was switching out of what I had been doing for 17 years. I was fretting over it and talking to my wife, and she's like, "Well, if that's what you want to do." I then sat down to have this serious discussion with my son, who was at that time 12 years old. I told him, "You know, I'm getting ready to make this really big change in my career, and I just wanted to let you know it has a risk to it and it may not work out, you know?" I got through this sort of soul-searching conversation, and he looks at me and says, "So, who's going to take me to school?" I said, "Well, I'll continue to take you to school." And then he said, "Fine," and walked out of the room. And I sat there thinking, "Geez! I just spent 30 minutes telling him all of this stuff, and he really didn't care other than who's taking him to school?" That was his point, and he brought my scary decision back into perspective. But I was continuing to learn. Taking risks. Enhancing my street value. I remember the words of a public relations mentor of mine who said, "You have to decide your future because if you don't, somebody else will, and you won't like it." • You have to be willing to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation to grow. You periodically have to say, "Am I doing what I still want to do?" and then, depending on the answer, make some decisions. And the older you get, the harder it is to make those decisions. I remember when I went from news to public relations. I wanted 12 centralight fall '13 Rick Sykes is a professor and assistant director of the School of Broadcast and Cinematic Arts who spent nearly 24 years in the communications industry. Since 1996 he has served as faculty adviser for News Central 34, CMU's studentrun live television news program. As told to Dan Digmann

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