Dorie Clark shares how she went from selling bikes to becoming a Harvard Business Review writer. A chance encounter led to her first HBR piece, which turned into a long-term writing relationship that changed her career.
I literally used to get paid for writing. And so it was very humiliating. I was raising my hand, I'm like, hi, I would like to write for you for free. And everybody's like, f you. Like, who are you? Like, go away. I'm like, really? Come on. But, but you know, that's, that's the reality. When nobody's heard of you, they really don't care. So you just have to keep putting yourself out there. And so I was writing, you know, to, to Fast Company, to, to, you know, to all, all of these places and saying, hey, please, please, please. And occasionally I would get an editor who would bite in some way and be like, well, that's interesting, you know, send me some ideas. And then I'd send them some ideas and then I'd follow up a hundred times. I'd never hear from them. They'd like ghost me. So it's very dispiriting. But, you know, the plus side was that I had a list of a million ideas because I had written all of these things that nobody ever did anything with or nobody ever wanted to look at. So anyway, I was on Craigslist and I decided that I was gonna sell my bike. So I ended up selling it to a woman who, as it turned out, worked at the Harvard Business Review as like a copy editor. And she's like, oh, I see you do like business consulting. I work at the Harvard Business Review. And so at least at that point I had enough self possession to say, oh, how do you get started writing for you? And she was not the person, but, but she was willing. And of course I had to follow up a number of times, but she was willing to introduce me to the person. And eventually I got my first story in and I now have been writing for them for 14 years.
