You must "be the cat"

Wanna drive your cat nuts? Close one door, any door, in your home. You could live in a ten thousand square foot mansion with every door open, but close one and a cat will spend its day trying to figure out how to get to the other side. And eventually it will succeed.

The point is, your career is filled with doors that appear closed. You have to find a way to open them. You must be the cat.

You'll run into two kinds of closed doors as a reporter. The first is the journalism door. Sometimes you'll be stuck on a story; maybe you have a "no comment" when you need a soundbite. Maybe you just can't find the person you need to interview. At times like these, many reporters just throw up their hands and phone in the rest of the story. But just because you run into a closed door, doesn't mean you can't find the open one. Keep looking. Be the cat and you might end up with a better story than you originally considered.

The other closed door is the one you assume has a great big lock; the one that concerns your career. You feel like Harry Potter in that scene where he had to find one key out of hundreds to open the door. It seems like the doors to big markets and networks are closed, than News Directors are inaccessible when they get to a certain level. You think that no one would ever consider you... and make up excuses not to mail a tape. Too young, not enough experience. Not good enough.

In this case the closed door can be unlocked with two dollars worth of postage.

Sorry I had to go through such a long cat metaphor to get you to send the tape. But too many of you don't believe you have a chance, that you're not good enough.

Be the cat, and you might just find those closed doors open pretty easily.