Thought 1: Bodybuilding has always struck me as an odd activity.
At a very basic level, it’s about people wanting to look good and feel good about themselves.?
Most young (and not so young) men would be happy to look like that. But if the aspiring bodybuilder decides to take it to a more competitive level, odd poses, fake tans and oils come into play.
Most men wouldn’t want to look like that.
And the fascinating thing about bodybuilders is that they generally only look good to other bodybuilders.
Thought 2: Google offer a range of certification programs, one of which is the Google AdWords Certification Partner scheme.
In a nutshell, our company is certified because one or more people have taken and passed a couple of exams, and we handle more than $10,000 a month in total budgets.
The issue that niggles me is that the exam is little more than a memory test, and doesn’t actually measure a person’s competence in Google AdWords. In fact we’ve received a couple of job applications from qualified individuals who clearly didn’t know one end of an AdWords stick from another.
So the certification is more or less meaningless. More people are becoming qualified, and less of them know what they’re doing.
So a part of me is tempted to abandon the whole thing, and not jump through Google’s hoops any more. But then doing so may imply that we’re not capable of becoming qualified, which might put some people off working with us.
Thought 3: I recently tried a local networking organisation and attended two of their breakfast events. Aside from the awfulness of explaining who you are and what you do to complete strangers at 7:00 in the morning while trying to eat, everyone wears a suit. I hate wearing a suit.
In hindsight I feel that I sold out. I should have gone in jeans and a t-shirt, and explained to the other suits that my type of work doesn’t require a suit, and that if they didn’t like that, they shouldn’t work with me. But I didn’t. I went in a suit because “that was how these things work“.
True, my jeans would have put some people off. And many of them would have dismissed me as amateur and clueless. But I don’t want to work with that sort of people anyway.
And now I have to take two more Google exams to get a qualification that I no longer believe in because this is how these things work.
But at least I don’t have to tan myself and rub myself in oil.
