Leadership Essays
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Russ RheaVice President, TateAustinHahnLeadership Austin Affiliation: 2008 Essential Class Member |
"This I Believe"
It is my nature to turn my back on uncertainty and play it safe with everything I do. However, I learned a valuable lesson from one critical decision I made 20 years ago. I now strongly believe that people should follow their dreams and passions, no matter how uncertain the situation might be.
As long as I could remember, I wanted to be a TV news reporter. I dreamed of having a job like Dan Rather’s, being a witness to history and talking to famous and important people.
I ended up going to college to pursue that career and landed a job right after graduation in small town radio. While the job wasn’t bad, TV is what I really wanted to do. I sent resume tapes all over the country in hopes of landing that very important first job in TV news. The first offer that came along was in a place I’d never heard of – Rock Island, Illinois. I think there was an old country song about the “Rock Island Line,” but I had no idea where it was.
The job paid just barely above minimum wage, certainly not enough to live on. It was in a town 1,500 miles away from my family and friends. Worse yet, I’d have to take the job “sight unseen.” The station wouldn’t pay for me to travel out there for an interview. For most people, that uncertainty probably would have been a signal to wait for the next offer to come along. But for the first time in my life, I went for something I didn’t research thoroughly and was “sure” it was the best decision.
I loaded up my little pick-up truck and U-Haul and hit the road. Upon seeing the TV station, my first thought was “what did I get myself into?” The blue-collar town was a total culture shock for a Southern California boy. The station was a dump. It was in a decrepit old building, they still used manual typewriters in the newsroom and I had to be a one-man-band covering stories. That means you’re the shooter and reporter.
But that first job forced me to learn how to shoot and edit video. The station was too cheap to pay for a weathercaster on weekends, so the reporters and anchors had to do weather. That forced me to learn how to do TV weather. And talk about dealing with stress? There’s no stress like coming back to the newsroom from shooting a story less one hour before show time and having to not only write and edit my story, but produce the entire newscast, plus make all the weather graphics then run up four flights of stairs to get to the studio. There’s no worse feeling than to say, “Good Evening, our top story tonight is…” and be totally out of breath. I didn’t catch my breath until the first commercial.
The pay was lousy, the stress was intense, but it turned out to be the best decision I’ve ever made. Most people in the industry are one-dimensional. After that experience in Rock Island, Illinois, I could do every job in the newsroom. Those skills helped me get my next two jobs in larger markets, and eventually to a city where I’ve always wanted to live – Austin, Texas. I’ve met Presidents, movie stars and some of the most interesting people in the world. And I often think I owe it all that day 20 years when I decided to get out of my comfort zone and go to an unfamiliar place and an uncertain situation.