Every Book Has A Title - Grasshopper

In most cases a book title gives us a hint as to what’s covered in the ensuing pages, but sometimes it makes us scratch our heads as to what lies ahead.

I’m reminded of the English idiom: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” That phrase reminds me to look for something deeper in people and dig past the headline and discover it doesn’t fully define who they are.

I’m pretty good at sizing people up. It’s my lame super power. It’s nothing I ever worked at; it just seems to come to me naturally. It quickly allows me to put someone into a category, but I’ve found from experience it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My snap judgements are usually on point, but they don’t point me in the direction of a person’s depth. I have to remind myself to get past my instant impressions and plumb for the treasures that lie deeper than their outward demeanor.

Reminds me of a story . . . Back during my days in radio, we often took on interns who were interested in broadcasting as a career. I remember having this thought about this one, young trainee: “I wouldn’t hire her to announce at a taxi cab stand.” That was my snap judgement based on her vocal qualities.

But this woman immersed herself in the position and was like a sponge soaking up all the expertise she was surrounded by. She memorized the entire music library, nothing any of us on staff had done. She asked lots of questions and worked on applying the answers to improve her skills.

I admired her spunk and started to coach her towards being an on-air talent. She would bring me taped samples of shows she had done at her broadcasting school. I would ask her to do “more of this and less of that” on her next show and she took the ball and ran with it. Each of her performances was better than the one before. I hired her to be a producer of our Saturday night request show. She would dig out all the requested songs lickety-split from the library and have them ready for the show’s host. He would tape many of the requests and have her play them back so he could go home early. It sounded like he was still there to the listener.

So this one Saturday night I got a call at home just before midnight. She told me the host had gone home and she only had about 10 minutes of taped requests left. The person who was scheduled to be on at midnight called her and said he had overslept and would be there in about 40 minutes. She asked me, “What should I do until he gets here?” I had the word “segue” form in my mouth. That meant to play the scheduled songs back-to-back without any announcing until he got there. I instead said, “Show me what you can do.”

She blew me away. She executed the format to a tee, was engaging and entertaining on her introductions, and delivered a totally polished performance. This led me to hire her to do a weekend show and eventually moved her up to co-hosting our highly successful morning show.

Her book title shrouded her amazing talents. Had I stuck with my instant reaction, we may have never been treated to her stellar career.

I hope this serves as a reminder to dig deeper with the people you meet. They may turn out to be a tasty treat.

All the best,