Take Your Medicine

As a child, I remember medicine having weird colors and tasting awful. We were urged to, “Take your medicine,” as a way of getting better, even though it tasted really bad.

Today, like the culture at large, we have progressed to such a degree that medicine usually tastes good. The meaning of the phrase is different now but its history is important.

Take your medicine historically means, “You have to do what you need to do to get better.”

I can’t think of a more obvious professional example of that than networking.

Like children, we have the idea that it tastes bad.

We don’t like to do it.

We don’t want to do it.

We have to do it.

We make the mistake of waiting until we need to do it as part of the job search but, like good health, if we take preventative measures, we don’t get sick, do we?

We stay healthy professionally because opportunities come to us instead of us always having to chase them.

Chasing opportunities is the worst thing that you can do because companies have all the power under those conditions.

We foolishly keep acting like children instead of acting like the professionals we profess to be.