Reason #46: I can make things sizzle

Hey Facebook,

Some say that men should be judged by the quality of their work.  I don’t say this, because my work is sloppy and haphazard at best.  Instead, I say that we should be judged on our ability to make the work that we do seem awesome even if the quality is crap.  And in this, I am a master.

The banner that sits over these words was made in an hour or two using grainy camera phone pictures and hacked together with a fake white background and a drop shadow effect.  Is it a quality job?  Absolutely not.  Does it sizzle?  HECK YES.

And, really, isn’t that what separates the good from the great?  Job openings always ask for detail oriented people, but I personally think that’s a stupid requirement.

Where is this stupid forest?

The question is never whether the person can keep his eye on the details, because there are always an infinite number of details.  A person can get swept up in the mundane details and utterly fail to accomplish the task he has set out to complete.

If you work a 60 hour week, does the minor detail of whether you show up at 8:00am or 8:15am matter?

For example, if you are laying a trap for the hell-spawn of the old one Cthulu, and you don’t get there to stand in your spot on the mystical hexagram in time, then have you made a pretty big mistake that will cause you a thousand years of suffering and misery in the icy bowels of unspeakable evil because you’ve allowed him to escape his magical bounds and wreak havoc upon the Earth?

Well, yes.  Perhaps that is a bad example.

OK, here’s a better one: a TPS report can just as easily be filed at 8:30 as it can at 8:00!

On the other hand, if you notice that some minor change in your advertisement for zombie baby hunting equipment increases sales by 45% AND has the double bonus of reducing the Ragnarök-like swell of evil zombie babies, then you have cut through the riffraff and done something extraordinary by just keeping an eye on the minor details.

And that is what sizzle really is.  It’s the ability to focus on the details that matter.  The ability to focus on the details that might go unnoticed, that seem almost to blend into the background.  And it is the creativity of drawing those details out and turning something that is OK into something amazing.

Job openings should not list “detail oriented” as a requirement.  They should say, “has ability to identify and react to important details.”  They should say, “knows what’s what.”

They should say, “sizzle oriented!”

With that in mind, I believe you’ll agree the following video totally proves that I can make almost anything sizzle!

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNOlhTjI8Lk&feature=player_embedded