Choosing a Profession and Taking Control of Your Life

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 17, 2014

What one does one becomes.

Anonymous

My son, Alex, is not sure where he wants to go to college, or what to do when he grows up.  I’m still working for an insurance company, still working on what I want to do when I grow us, too.

Single parent, 46, college graduate

I had dreamed of becoming a scientist in general, and a paleontologist in particular, even since Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and seared me at New York’s Museum of Natural History when I was five years old.  I had the great good fortune to achieve these goals and to love the work with fully sustained joy to this day, and without a moment of doubt or any extended boredom.

Stephen Jay Gould, Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999)

Everyone’s Life Unique

Dutch philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believes “the will” exists independently of our perception.  In essence, he argues that all human actions and knowledge are constituted by the human will: It is only in reflection, he writes, that to will and to act are different; in reality they are one. 

This all-encompassing human will is characterized by Schopenhauer as a blind striving power which reveals itself to everyone directly as the in-itself of his own phenomenal being.  He points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist.  Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment have turned out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot.  So who composed the plot?  Schopenhauer suggest that just as an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware composes your dreams, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.

Many readers, especially younger readers, might have difficulty fathoming this philosophy; indeed, they may reject it out of hand.  But I can tell you it rings totally true in my case.  When I was a small boy, I had a philosophical bent, which was fed by my Irish Roman Catholicism.  As a youngster, I read the dictionary as if it were a novel in the interest of developing the tools to express my ideas.  As a student, I was attracted to dead authors that kept reassuring me that I was on the right track.  Even my passion for athletics as a youth never deterred me from this quest to write, although my da derailed me temporarily.  His dying message to me was, “Your mother says you want to be a writer.  You don’t even write a good letter.”  Then he added, “If you persist, you’ll starve to death, mark my words.”  His influence was so great that when a professor in undergraduate school wanted to recommend me for the Honors Program in the

Humanities, instead of the sciences, which were my major, I declined.  The professor, however, planted the seed and introduced me to many authors that I perhaps would not have read. 

The life of a chemist, sales engineer, executive, then early retirement in my 30’s to write, not earning a living, then back to school to become an industrial psychologist, then an academic (as an adjunct professor), consultant, then a management psychologist (organizational development) for a hi-tech corporation, again an executive, and finally retirement to write full-time in my fifties. 

My various professional careers took me to places around the world in all levels of society, and provided me with the empirical data with which to write, otherwise I would have had ideas without legs.  My da was right, however, in that I have never made a living as a writer.  I write because Schopenhauer’s words have proven true for me, blind striving power, which reveals itself to me directly as the in-itself of my being.  It is my vocation. [1]

English celebrated dramatist Ben Jonson (1572-1637) once said: Only an idiot would endure the hardship of writing without concern for the coin.  I am happy to say he is wrong in my case, and in the case of tens of thousands of writers today who are being published by electronic presses.  The irony is that his biographies put a lie to his words as he, too, had a circuitous route to his writing prominence.  It also indicates the danger of taking the words of another to fit one’s own peculiar sense of things. 

Psychologist James Hillman has a theory consistent with Schopenhauer, which he calls the “acorn theory.”  Hillman proposes that each life is formed by a particular image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny, just as the mighty oak’s destiny is written in the tiny acorn.  It is a theory that gets beyond the missteps of youth and collisions of character with desires, family, influences and freedom.  Most of all, Hillman insists we all have a “calling,” or vocation that like an invisible mystery lies at the center of each of our lives.  This calling speaks to and answers the fundamental question: what is it in my heart to do, be and have, and why? [2] He insists every individual is born with a defining image, and that that individuality resides in a formal cause: we each embody our own idea.

The Heart has its Reason

One of the first missteps we make in choosing a career is leading with our head instead of our heart.  Reason looks at what careers pay the most, how long it takes to become qualified, what degrees are the least intellectually demanding, what universities have the most successful students, and on and on? 

Meanwhile, there is an unconscious with its own intentions that even protects us from ourselves.  The head is looking for an insurance policy guaranteeing a good income, rapid promotion, generous disposable income, and a good benefit package.  The best-laid plans often go awry, but something always seems to save us from falling on our own petard, or being blindsided.  Some of us call it “our guardian angel,” others instinct, self-preservation, or a sixth sense.

At the same time, we all know people that disregard this guardian spirit and are self-destructive, accident-prone, or hyper as if perennial children, or use words to rationalize their faux pas in defense of their misunderstandings or missteps.  Still others blame it on their chromosomes by the failure of their parent’s genetic code to give them an advantage of being tall and beautiful and bright and without flaws.  Parents are also blamed, by the same people, for what they did or didn’t do for them in their early years, now of course long past.  The more we are of this mindset the more our biography is the story of the victim.  What such individuals fail to realize is that the victim is the flipside of the hero. 

Regrettably, our culture reinforces this victim complex in the popular press, cult psychology, and even all these scientific queries that claim it is a “gene” issue that causes us to be fat, lazy, and antisocial or mean.  We love justifiers who take us off the hook.  We want to believe it is not our fault that we are unhappy, have failed to grow up, or failed to find our niche.  We are in a cage and chained to the bars, which is the past with more than enough justification to explain away ourselves to ourselves without any help from authorities.

There has been a craze over the last several decades, especially during the last quarter of the previous century on self-fulfillment and self-development.  Over that periods, authors became household words who subscribed to the idea of finding one’s “inner child,” never one’s “inner adult.”  Even then, the onus was placed on or a surrogate or personal trainer to motivate.  We did go to college, earned our degrees, but now it was the company’s job to take care of us in the style to which we wanted to become accustomed.  Daniel Yankelovich writes a scathing report of this mindset:

The predicaments of self-fulfillment seekers arise from the defective strategies they deploy to achieve these ambitious goals.  These strategies are defective, first, in their economic premises.  The typical self-fulfillment strategy presupposes that economic well-being is a virtual citizen’s right, automatically guaranteed by both government and economy.  A strategy built on the presumption of ever-expanding affluence is bound to run into trouble even in a country as abundant as our own.  The most serious defect, however, is psychological.  People unwittingly bring a set of flawed psychological premises to their search for self-fulfillment, in particular the premise that the self is a hierarchy of inner needs, and self-fulfillment an inner journey to discover these.  This premise is rarely examined, even though it leads people to defeat their own goals – and to end up isolated and anxious instead of fulfilled. [3]

Reading life backwards enables us to see how early passions were, in fact, premature indicators of behavior now.  It suggests that growth is less cultural and more genetic, that development makes sense only when it reveals a facet of the original impression.  Obviously, we progress and regress from day to day, see some faculties develop and others wither.  Our person, however, is not a process.  As Picasso says, “I don’t develop.  I am.” 

The code of the soul, as Hillman points out, is in our character.  We are born with a character unique, as well as a distinct calling.  We may postpone or miss our calling and deny our character and suffer for it.  But this defining image, call it a “second self,” saves us constantly from making bad choices or nudges us gently when we should go for it if we would but listen.  The cage becomes our home when we don’t.

John LeCarre’ is a successful novelist of espionage genre.  In reading his life backward, it is clear that he wants to leave the impression it was all by chance and not design.  He writes:

I began writing because I was going mad with boredom.  Not the pathetic, listless kind of boredom that doesn’t want to get out of bed in the morning, but the screaming, frenetic sort that races around in circles looking for real work and finding none.  I had tried teaching “backward” children, and most of them were suffering from exactly what I was suffering from: boredom.  They had sat at the back of their classes, and been bored stiff.  I had tried teaching at Eton, but at Eton I often felt younger than the boys, and quite as much in need of a good tutor as they were.  And I certainly wasn’t ready to see straight down the corridor to the end of my life: housemaster at forty, retirement at sixty, cottage in Devon, and on God, let me please go gentle into that good night. [4]

While teaching I had dabbled in commercial art during the school holidays, but not with much success.  To satisfy me, everything I drew or painted should have explained the meaning of life.  But you don’t get many opportunities to express your soul when you are knocking out children’s book jackets at eight pounds a crack.

The next chapter of his life was the world of Whitehall and M15 or as a low-level clerk His Majesty’s government’s spy business.  He reflects,

I toiled from morning and often till late into the evening at the dossiers of people I would never meet: should we trust him?  Or her?  Should their employers trust them?  Might he be a traitor, spy, lonely decider, or a suitable case for blackmail by the unscrupulous opposition?  Thus I, who seemed to have no adult understanding of myself, was being asked to sit in judgment on the lives and loves of others.  I was not versed in the ways of the world, only my own.  The only tools I possessed were the possibilities of my own nature.  These were of many sorts in those days, and the imaginative bridges that I built to my paper suspects earned me a reputation for, of all things, perspicuity.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  All I was doing was inventing people out of the meager clay of telephone taps, purloined mail, and investigators’ reports.  What else I gave my suspects came from myself.  It wasn’t good intelligence work, but in that mediocre world it could easily pass for such.  And it turned out to be excellent training for the career I had not yet consciously embarked upon: named that of the novelist. [5]

The paradox of this author was to escape the falseness of his life by discovering life’s truth in writing fiction.  By the strength of his intellect, he forced himself to observe humanity with clinical objectivity.  Moody and self-estranged, LeCarre’ was a sentimental man and the long exile strengthened his deep love of his England, a nation he felt failed to keep pace with a changing world.  He fed hungrily on his school days through the character of George Smiley, its beauty, its rational ease, and the mature slowness of its judgments.  The glory days of England were gone but he could freeze-frame it in his prose.  Unconsciously, his life as a spy was his laboratory for the profession that chose him, that of the novelist.

Were you to take a moment to read your life backwards, my guess is that you would see the pattern unfolding, the false steps, the recovery, the surprised change of direction, a collection of syncopating detours then arrival precisely where you are now.  Where you are is where you were meant to be.   

The picture in the frame shows its face at an early age.  Some fill in the frame with their passions; others look to what brings attention to them in spite of their passions.  The former are inner-directed; the latter are outer-directed.  Golda Meir, who led Israel during the 1970s, found her picture in the frame in the fourth grade in the Milwaukee public school when she organized a protest group against requiring poor people to purchase schoolbooks they couldn’t afford.  Stephen Jay Gould loved dinosaurs as a boy of five telling everyone he was going to be a paleontologist.  When he still indicated such passion when he was ten, other children made fun of him, calling him a “baby.”  It didn’t deter him, going on to become one of the world’s great scholars in this discipline.  Yehudi Menuhin, the renowned violinist and conductor, asked for a violin at four.  When he was given a toy violin with metal strings, he erupted into a burst of tears.  He wanted a real violin!

Hillman’s theory insists each child is a gifted child; every child has a calling.  So, if we’re not allowed to organize a protest group, feed our passion for dinosaurs, or acquire a real violin, and our life spirals into unanswered prayers, whom do we blame?  Our parents?  He has something to say about this:

The fantasy of parental influence on childhood follows us through life long after the parents are faded into photographs, so that much of their power comes from the idea of their power.  Why do we cling to the parental fallacy?  How does it still parent us, comfort us?  Are we afraid to admit the daimon (angel) into our own lives, afraid that it might have called us once, might still be calling, so we hid out in the kitchen?  We retreat to parental explanations rather than face destiny’s claims. [6]

Compensatory Adjustment

Just as the blame game doesn’t work to our advantage when it comes to choosing a profession, compensating for real or imagined shortcomings is not the way to emotional satisfaction in a career. 

Sometimes there is more than a grain of truth to clichés.  For example, an excruciatingly shy person of fragile physique and diminutive size may assert himself to compensate for a sense of inferiority by a menacing superiority.  That was the picture in the frame of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain with an iron fist for more than thirty years.  At fifteen, tiny and baby-faced, he entered the Infantry Academy at Toledo and was handed a light weapon instead of a heavy rifle.  He boldly announced, “Whatever the strongest man is my section can do, so can I.” [7] 

Adolph Hitler had a similar history.  He wanted to be an architectural designer and painter but couldn’t pass the entrance exam at the Academy of Art in Vienna.  One of his pretentious schemes was to design Berlin as the premier city of the world in grandiloquent architecture.  He spent as much time with this obsession as with the war.  Incidentally, for his failure to win entrance into this school, he blamed his Jewish examiners.  His revenge materialized into the “Final Solution,” or the Holocaust.

Psychologist Alfred Adler, the founder of individualistic psychology, claims 70 percent of art students have optical anomalies, and that many great composers such as Mozart, Beethoven and Bruckner had degenerative hearing.  Adler further claims that challenges of illness, birth defects, poverty, or other unfavorable circumstances contribute to high achievers. 

Noble Laureate James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix of DNA, admits to an IQ of 105, which is average, but far from that of a genius.   On the other hand, his colleague, Francis Crick, was very much the genius.  Watson’s ingratiating and intrusive personality, along with his natural curiosity, served him well.  Author Brenda Maddox goes so far as to claim he stole the idea from Rosalind Franklin’s “photograph 51,” which was an x-ray of coal, and clearly showed the double helix.  To add insult to injury, Watson disparagingly called Franklin the “dark lady” in his book The Double Helix (1968). [8]

Compensating adjustment is the stimulus for higher achievement, but not necessarily inner-directedness.  Professor Billy G. Gunter, emeritus, of the University of South Florida, calls this “ambient deficiency motivation,” or we are inclined to be attracted to what we lack: for example, a criminal to be a police officer, a sinner a priest, and so on.

Chances are it is a drive to amount to something, to exercise power and influence, all characteristics of outer-directedness.  By compensating for real or imagined weaknesses with strengths, such people transform inabilities into empowerment and control.  We see this displayed in some chief executive officers of corporations.  They exhibit a single mindedness to reach their Mount Olympus thinking in terms of strengths, and ignoring their weaknesses, then compounding the problem by surrounding themselves with likeminded support people.  The dregs of early childhood embarrassments or wrongs can be detected in the product of their leadership. 

Compensatory adjustment has little to do with passion, inspiration, or the élan of self-forgetfulness.  It amounts to putting a person in somebody else’s frame robbing the individual of an authentic identity and unique life.  Superiority emerges from our lower rather than our higher centers. 

George Washington became America’s first president, not because he was as brilliant as Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, but because he understood the heart and mind of ordinary citizens of the new republic.  Many wanted to make him a monarch, or president for life, but he would have none of that.  He had a vision and a mission, which had no room for self-aggrandizement.  He was the perfect leader because he was the complete follower.

Abraham Lincoln, unlike Washington, elicited neither the respect nor admiration of those around him, yet they were both inner-directed.  Every member of Lincoln’s presidential cabinet felt superior to him culturally, intellectually and politically.  They saw him as a country bumpkin, unsophisticated and unfinished.  True, he rose out of the soil of mid-country where conflicting values and beliefs were painfully in evidence.  His own wife was a southerner with biases similar to her people with a sense that she married below her station.  What Lincoln showed, as did Washington before him, is that almost every extraordinary life encompasses a vision, an ideal that calls them to the fore.  It is often a vision that eludes them like a ghost in the night, or an unknown sense that this is why they were born.  Adversity, criticism, fraudulent claims against them, and even embarrassing defeats, fail to deter them from their course.  It is bigger than they are, a vague presence that walks with them all their days. They persist simply because the calling is not an echo chamber from the disenchanted, but a drum roll from within. Extraordinary people are not different people.  That is a myth.  Where they differ is that they are driven by motivation whereas others are driven by distraction. 

Imagine, if you will, a world in which a profession is chosen only on the basis of the greatest earning power, the most prestige, greatest distance from the hoi polloi, or the best opportunity to power and influence.  Then imagine further if these professionals determine their decisions only on the basis of polls, employee surveys, profitability, and customer preferences irrespective of ethics, morality, or long-term consequences.  Such professionals, should that be the case, would epitomize outer-directedness.  For these compensatory adjustments, the attention is likely to kill the spirit, as there is no apparent authentic inner life, while feigning glory in the cage of mediocrity.  

We live in a time when we allow pundits, soothsayers, gurus, experts, statisticians, scientists, celebrities, mass communicators, educators, and the religious to simplify the extraordinary complexities of modern life, and prescribe piecemeal what we should think, feel, believe, eat, drink and how we should behave without so much as a fairly well protest. 

How many reading this believe a cell phone is an absolute necessity, a new automobile every three years in a prudent move, who are down on their favorite team if it has a losing season, who only read books on the bestseller list, and watch television currently in the top ten, who escape their own lives through soap operas, celebrity games, people magazines and films of the rich and famous, and who think Bill Gates is a genius? 

People say television is garbage, but any television program needs a 37 percent share of the television audience to stay on the tube, and some programs display some pretty horrific stuff, so somebody must be watching. 

If someone asks you, what you think about rap music, hard rock, reality television, funky clothes, and you are not into that culture, chances are you will pause, not only not to offend but to give the impression you are “with it.”  The same goes for tattoos.  And so we say nothing or lie. 

Everybody is in a hurry.  Time is money!  So, we hurry.  We can’t stand to be alone; can’t stand a noise free environment where there is no radio, no television, no talking, just silence.  Silence is imposing, threatening, boring.   This suggest we are unable to stand our own company. 

We want to fit.  Want to belong.  Want to choose a profession where we will be accepted, admired, even envied, and then others will want our company.  Then we will be somebody.  This implies the somebody we will be has no room for the somebody we already are. 

We have no room for ourselves.  We want to belong to everyone else without belonging to ourselves.  We have turned off the light of inner-directness and are bouncing off the walls psychologically blindfolded in outer-directedness.  We need a fresh start of looking at the importance of our own lives before we can choose a profession that will fit us, bring us satisfaction and peace, and most of all, fulfillment. 

We don’t seek self-fulfillment by going after it, as the gurus would suggest.  We find it by staying home and getting acquainted with ourselves as ourselves.  We discover the poetry of our soul, not in a scientific report, but liking, and yes loving who we are, not who we are going to be, but who and what we are right now. 

Our Western mind is programmed to time.  We have trouble stopping the clock.  It is inconceivable to us to think in terms of psychological time when the only time we understand is chronological time.  Consequently, our minds geared to psychological time, convince us that we are too young to have a career, say at seventeen, and too old to change careers, say at seventy, when neither is the case. 

At seventeen, we’re not supposed to know our own mind when we might perfectly well know it, but are afraid to assert it.  I know a lad who was forced by his farmer parents to be a dentist, when he wanted to be a farmer.  He became a dentist, and most unhappily so, and dreamed all the way to retirement to be a farmer, which he now is at age seventy. 

There is an artist who three years ago preferred painting to schoolwork at age 16, and now at age 19 she is selling her paintings for upwards of $100,000.  She scoffs at the idea she is a genius.  She sees her Maker working through her, and gives Him all the credit.  At this moment, her inner-directedness is healthy and in charge.

Restructuring of Perceptions

The first order of business, it would seem, in this business of choosing a profession consistent with one’s calling is to be introduced to oneself as a unique human being.  This amounts to restructuring perceptions relative to two primary sources: our desires and our interests. 

From an early age, each of us are “turned on” by certain things and “turned off” by others.  Not infrequently, what is a "turn off" is equally a turn off to our peers, and perhaps our parents as well.  The tendency is to find a way of deadening our desires to be consistent with those important to us, failing to realize these maybe inconsistent with what is importance to ourselves.  We’re back to the “fitting in” business again.  Neglect of what really moves us can lead to all passions spent.  Then there is little fun and even less humor to existence.  We are leading secondhand lives.  Mythologist Joseph Campbell, echoing the Buddha tradition, puts it simply, follow your bliss.

The irony is such a state of rejection of our normal desires leads to an obsession with “finding ourselves.”  We become self-help junkies with a tranquilizing addiction for soothing anodynes for our troubled souls, which go into cold storage.  Our heads become filled with quotation marks around such words as performance, growth, creativity, thresholds, continuum, response levels, integration, synergy, identity, development, synchronicity, validation, boundaries, coping mechanisms, programming, operant conditioning, variance, subjectivity, adjustment therapy, verifiable results, value-free analysis, test results, emergence, hope, biofeedback and limits. 

Closely tied to interests are our values.  The source of our values are perceptions including spiritual, or our relationship to a higher power or creator, social or our relationship to others, and personal or our relationship to ourselves.  These form our character and personify, and reveal our motives, which, in turn, express our interests.  Just as desires can be deadened by attack, so also is the case with interests. 

The well-motivated person is interested, meaning passionate about something, about life, work, study, nature, people, science, sports, literature, religion, philosophy, something.  The more intense the interests the more purposeful the behavior.  Should a person’s interests be constantly rained on, the spark is lost, and apathy replaces interests, and with it purposefulness.  Whatever interests are displayed, they are confined to extrinsic interests, which often become translated into “what is in it for me!”  Such a person draws a line between the head and the heart, between work and play, between things he has to do and things he wants to do.  In a most compelling way, the person becomes outer-directed rather than inner or self-directed. 

Conversely, intrinsic interests dominate the inner-directed person.  These refer to interests in in and of themselves.  Play and work are transparent.  Play encompasses all of those things the person does, on or off the job that he finds intrinsically interesting, and renewing, while work includes all of those things the person does on or off the job that he has only extrinsic interest in doing, or that deplete him.  He does them only because they must be done or because of what they may lead to.  Obviously, neither intrinsic nor extrinsic interests, but a combination of the two drive a person.  That said there is a relationship between what is expected and what is being accomplished, and what holds the interests of the individual who is constantly growing.

Growing Down while Growing Up!

Using Hillman’s metaphor, like the acorn, we grow down establishing solid roots in our core personality, and out of that core personality inner-directedness.  Then, we are ready to grow up to embrace our opportunities.  What seems fundamental to career selection and success is recognition of who is in charge and why.  This is the difference between being in a reactive mode, and having others or circumstances dictate the choices we make in life, and being in charge. 

When we avoid the burden of choosing a career, we are like a willing passenger in somebody else’s vehicle.  We have no idea where we are and no control over where we are going.  Given this situation, it is easier to plead the victim than the victor, play the blame game than launch ourselves into another direction, more convenient to say we are too old, can’t afford the risks, or are saddled with responsibilities than admit we lack the courage to take charge.

It is admittedly difficult to develop a solid core personality with conviction when we grow from the outside in rather than the inside out.  Parents, peers, priests and professors are bombarding our psyches with what is right and proper for us to do, and we often are listening with rap attention, while disregarding that little drummer inside suggesting a different cadence.  Not only can we lose our momentum we can become absolutely stuck.  Our anxiety level increases as we fight a war between pleasing others and pleasing ourselves.  This is a conflict that can never be won.  It is a stalemate not unlike the recent wars we have had in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan as a nation.  What am I suggestion?  Am I suggesting it is a national problem?  Indeed, I am.  We have become a leaderless society with no one in charge, staying the same, missing the changes, burning up energy in relentless polarity, leaving the future up for grabs.  We cannot solve a national malaise, but we can resolve it at the personal level by establishing that we will be engaged; we will listen to our heart and what it tells us, and politely disregard the voices of distraction.   

It is so easy to drift unconsciously into a job and make it a career as if we were sleep walking through life.  Wishes are the dreams we dream when we are awake.  Never be afraid to dream.  If you can visualize a career, you are already in the frame but don’t know it.  Relax and let it happen, and it will.

If you look at friends and colleagues happy in work, chances are you will find they are self-pleasers without making a case for it, creatively involved in work without worrying about conforming to a standard, performers rather than concerned about making an impression.  You sense they have a moral center guided by a moral compass.  Morality for them is not a matter of being goody good two shoes, but a balance between what serves others serves them as well.  Such people have discovered that what serves others serves them as well.  Moreover, they have no reluctance to say “no” when it is prudent to do so, and to say “yes” when it serves the situation.  Nor do they have any trouble abandoning ship when the culture is not conducive to their purpose.  They don’t make waves but quietly move on to a more appropriate climate. 

They behave in this way because they don’t confuse motivation with money, or mindset with mentality:

Motivation is a drive within.  It is concerned with the “why of behavior,” and consists of two facets, motives and incentives.  Motives are found in the person’s character or value system, while incentives relate to the work environment including pay, fairness issues, and so on.  Motives and incentives are the two sides of the same coin, which are fueled by our desires and lubricated by our interests.  What motivates us may not be what others desire for us.

Money is a common justification for doing and being whatever.  Money is a poor motivator.  It can demotivate if we are paid too much or too little for what we are doing.  A justifiable raise has a short-duration as an incentive.  When money is the only arbiter to performance, it can derail desire and diminish interests.

Mindset is the way a person thinks things seem to appear, not how they actually are.  Perceptions can be flawed.  Since the workplace culture represents an attitude, if your mindset is not in sync with the culture either it is wrong for you or you are wrong for it.

Mentality is not an intelligence quotient but an index of the prevailing norm.  Is the workplace supportive of learners or knowers, listeners or tellers?  Are doers consulted for the answers because they are thinkers as well?  If so, it is a place where problems will be confronted and solved, not avoided and denied.  It is a place for learners to grow.

The seed you plant is pride in what you do, passion in the doing, patience when growth and development are slow, persistence in staying focused on plan, recognizing you are the fertile soil that must grow down to grow up, not unlike the acorn that must let go its code to become the giant oak.

 *     *     *

Notes

[1] Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel, TATE Publishing (2nd Edition), 2014.  It is the portrait of a young man as he struggles to grasp his place in space.

[2] James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996.

[3] Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Search for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down, 1981, p. 10.

[4] John Le Clarre, Call for the Dead: The First George Smiley Novel (reissue of 1961 novel, 2004), p. xii.

[5] Ibid, p. xiii.

[6] Op. Cit., Hillman, p. 20.

[7] Ibid, p. 23.

[8] Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, HarperCollins Publishers, 2002.

Job Security in an Uncertain World

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 16, 2014

Since the future is unknown and not directly knowable, while the present is a fleeting instant that cannot be fixed in order to make it serve as our guide, our future actions must be based on what is in the memory, not as isolated items, unchanging and unconnected, but as chains of past consequence whose trajectory can be projected into the future.  In that sense, we all drive forward by looking into our rearview mirror.

Garry Wills, Saint Augustine’s Memory (2002)

You want to be happy, to forget yourself, and yet the more you try to forget yourself, the more you remember the self you want to forget.  You want to escape pain, but the more you struggle to escape, the more you inflame the agony.  You are afraid and want to be brave, but the effort to be brave is fear trying to run away from itself.  You want peace of mind, but the attempt to pacify it is like trying to calm the waves with a flat-iron . . . We know that worrying is futile, but we go on doing it because calling it futile does not stop it.  We worry because we feel unsafe, and want to be safe.  What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful, and that when we imagine we have found it, we don’t like it . . . there is no safety or security.  One of the worst vicious circles is the problem of the alcoholic.  In very many cases he knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk, and even dislikes the taste of liquor.  And yet he drinks.  For, dislike it as he may, the experience of not drinking is worse.  It gives him the “horrors,” for he stands face to face with the unveiled, basic insecurity of the world.

Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (1951)

Who is in charge?

We all know the nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty sitting on, and falling off the wall, “and all the kings horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpy together again.” 

Whether we will admit it or not, we are all broken, split apart in some fashion with our head separated from our body, while being driven by fear, and in the cage of memory.  The contemporary mind has been haunted by the feeling that in some mysterious way the one struggling for security is nearer to hell than heaven, that the mazes of self-deception, and the subtle mockeries of hypocrisy hide behind masks and reality is lost altogether.  St. Augustine has something to say about this split-mindedness:

The past is not dead, it is not even past . . . we cannot properly say that the future or the past exists, or that there are three times, past, present, and future.  Perhaps we can say that there are three tenses, but that they are the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future.  This would correspond, in some sense, with a triad I find in the soul and nowhere else, where the past is present to memory, the present is present to observation, and the future is present to anticipation. 

  No One Promises You a Living, No One Owes You a Job!

In an uncertain world, where job security is vital to our self-interests, we often do all the wrong things to put ourselves back together again.  Instead, we panic or become traumatized when made redundant, when our place of work closes, when the skills we have that once were in demand are no longer, when we are asked to take a 10, 20 or 30 percent cut in wages and benefits for the company’s survival, and are barely making it on our current income.  How could this happen when we’ve done nothing wrong?  Turns out we’ve done a lot wrong, starting with waiting for someone to rescue us from our predicament and ourselves.  

Author Alan W. Watts sees us in such circumstances consumed with the law of anxiety looks at nature backwards:

When we try to stay on the surface of the water, we sink; but when we try to sink we float; likewise, when we try desperately to save our job we lose it. 

Insecurity, he maintains, is the result of trying to be secure in a topsy-turvy world in which the normal order of things seems to be completely out of order.  Everything is the reverse of common sense turned inside out and upside down.  Suddenly, circumstances have forced us to be in charge of our lives and no one has prepared us for that ordeal, leastwise ourselves. 

We think we live in a time of unusual insecurity.  This is not the case at all.  In the past hundred years, or throughout the past twentieth century, long established traditions have broken down continuously: the traditional family, social life, government, economic order, religious beliefs, values, ethics, and most notable of all, morality. 

We have seen society stagger out of the Industrial Age only to be caught in a breathless dance in the Information Age, as manufacturing assembly lines have become a shadow of the former status.  This watershed moment of the early twentieth century was the backbone of the spirited working middle class, now replaced by quick minds and fingers on computer keyboards all but obliterating the blue-collar working class. 

There is no longer certainty.  Actually, certainty never existed, but it remained a myth perpetuated by a society deep in denial.  Institutions denied the reality by failing to pay attention, workers denied it by failing to learn new skills, and companies denied it by failing to press for change as the metamorphosis of the workforce went from blue-collar to college trained white collar.  Meanwhile, schools and universities continued to teach as if locked in 1945 nostalgia, even as private and public workplaces managed as if the color of the workers’ collars had not changed.   If blame is the game, there is more than enough to go around, but that doesn’t get us off the dime.

That said, for far too long the majority were willing to put up with lives largely doing jobs that were boring and inconsequential, content in earning the means to seek relief from the tedium with periodic respites of drinking and partying in expensive pleasure, or going on shopping sprees with reckless abandon.  Saving for a rainy day was not in the specs as the weather ahead was full of sunshine and promise with no dark clouds.  Neither workers nor employers were looking ahead.  It wasn’t anybody’s job!

We often refer to assembly line blue-collar working jobs as boring.  Nothing can compare to the boredom of managers and administrators who spend 50 to 75 percent of their working day in inconsequential meetings.  These meetings take away from meaningful work, and consistently have no purpose other than they are scheduled.  Meeting for meeting’s sake is a corporate disease that has been institutionalized to produce a report that few are likely to read. 

A survey of a monthly sales report went out to affiliates and manufacturing facilities in 13 countries involving some 14,000 employees.  When asked, first, if they were aware of the report, second, if they had read it, and third, if it was useful, most confessed they didn’t even know the report existed.  Yet, several people spent a good deal of time each month preparing it.  Further inquiries found that the report was redundant as all the information was accessible on a daily basis electronically to these same operations.  

Sad as this is, nothing is more egregious than performance appraisal meetings.  These are designed to bring managers and workers together to assess performance and create a developmental roadmap for workers to build on their assets and manage their liabilities.  Any organization has 15 percent hard chargers, who manage themselves, 70 percent followers who are management dependent, and 15 percent who are foot draggers, or essentially beyond salvation. 

In this one instance with which I am familiar, some 4,000 professional workers and 350 managers dedicated several hundred hours to the performance appraisal process.  Six workers were found to be declining in rating, and four were designated to need improvement.  All others received automatic merit increases. 

Given the normal bell curve breakdown of the working population, at least some 600, or 15 percent of the workforce should have been confronted with poor performance and treated accordingly. This cavalier disregard for the obvious is the endemic disease of the Culture of Comfort, which results in a company taking two steps backward for every step forward. It can ultimately derail a company and eventually lead to implosion in the process.

Performance appraisal did these workers no favors.  That was 2005 and the company is only a shadow of its former self today.  Hundreds of these workers, once well paid and comfortably employed in ostensibly lifetime employment jobs, are now out of work.  Unfortunate as this is, no company promises workers a living or owes workers a job. 

In an ideal world, these workers, engineers, administrators and managers would acknowledge this fact, and take charge of the situation.  Unfortunately, they had no incentive to do so.  Poor as they might perform they had job security and their income was not in jeopardy.  Incredibly, in many cases 20 percent of the workforce was doing 80 percent of the productive work, yet there were no protests from the contributors.  Nobody wants to make waves when the tsunami has not yet hit the shore.

Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world.  Workers have come to be dependent on the company to do for them what they should best do for themselves.  When the company fails, workers derive satisfaction accusing the company of failing in its function, unwilling to see their tacit complicity in the act.  It has always amazed me when a company is struggling and needs the full support and cooperation of its workers that they call in sick, or go on strike literally cutting off the hand that feeds them.

In the 1950s, after World War II, General Motors’ blue-collar workers earned as much as many practicing physicians in the medical field.  I was often a guest in their Detroit homes, and played baseball with their kids during my summer visits.  In many households, both parents worked for GM, Ford or Chrysler, and spent as much as they made.  It was evident in their fine brick homes with new automobiles in their driveways.  Their children expected to follow being employed by the “Big Three” automakers right out of high school with no break in the continuum. 

Then came the late 1960s.  The Rising Sun of Japan entered the auto market and cut deeply into these automakers’ customer base and profits, producing better, cheaper and smaller automobiles. 

Tom Brokaw hosted an NBC television program in 1980 with the program’s crying complaint, “Japan Can! Why Can’t We?”  Japan was using American technology that American manufacturers scoffed at as too costly and not necessary. What was the technology?  It was statistical quality control with production workers operating in decision-making teams, identifying and solving chronic process manufacturing problems. 

Detroit’s economic hemorrhaging forty years later has still not stopped despite using these new quality control tools.  The auto industry’s workers and managers continue to lock step to the mindset of 1945 when they held all the cards and could do nothing wrong.

Brett Farve, former NFL quarterback for the Green Bay Packer has it about right: “We get paid for practicing all week, playing on Sunday should be for free.”  Yet, one of the main complaints of professional athletes is the reverse of this: they hate practice, don’t think they need it, and believe they get paid for Sunday’s performance only.  Many workers in other professions display this same attitude.  They acquire a quality degree that speaks for itself.  They think, why do we have to take orders from someone “less qualified” than we are?  They don’t want a job; they want a position, and an automatic pass to a satisfying career.  After all, what other reason would we have for busting our butts in college for four, six or eight years?   The reality, of course, proves a little short of the mark.

  

A Case in Point!

Using The Fisher Paradigm © ™, I conducted a study of 1,000 engineers in a high tech company.  The demographic profile revealed staggering results.  Of the engineering population, 72 percent were over 35, 50 percent over 45, and 15 percent over 55.  Fully 60 percent were working on technology developed after they had left college.  Despite this technical gap they were doing little if anything to upgrade their skills. 

Complicating the picture further, it was evident that job performance decreased precipitously as job complexity increased for veteran engineers.  Yet, their salaries continued to increase.  At age 45, salaries for veterans peaked reaching a plateau with no noticeable decline for the balance of their careers.  This represented, in some cases, a $20,000 delta or differential with neophyte engineers, many whom had advanced engineering degrees with state-of-the-arts technical acumen.

Concomitantly, engineers ages 21 -- 39 represented a spiraling upward linear curve of increasing job performance and job complexity, but modest salaries compared to veterans.  In an environment dedicated to the gospel of “pay for performance,” they clearly weren’t.  What did they do about it?  They complained among themselves, or retreated into the “six silent killers” of passive behaviors? [3] In a word, they took no initiative or action to redress this issue.  They were being paid a dollar more an hour than they felt they could afford to rock the boat. 

The Fisher Paradigm©™ of Personality Profile provides evidence of their proclivity:

Engineers choose an engineering education because they have talent for and an interest in solving technical problems.

Research indicates that this gives engineers only 3 to 5 year window of competence before their technical talent is eroded if they are not exposed to a significant continuing education program.

The burden in the past has rested on engineers for continuing engineering education, which is another way of saying it is not likely to have been initiated.

Engineers who have become key contributors to long-term programs are often protected from more diverse experience and therefore suffer greatly when programs reach completion, or assume the next iteration in sophistication.  They are likely ill prepared to take on new engineering assignments.

Engineers, who cannot contribute meaningfully, may become anxious, frustrated, angry, hostile, passive, and eventually alienated from work and their associates, exhibiting the tendency to coast and drift into apathy.

Engineers, once realizing they can’t keep up, may also show initiative by going back to school, asking for specialized training, attempting to find on-the-job mentors, or by going to another company.  This is more the exception than the rule.

Confrontation, managing conflict, indeed, interpersonal relations are not high on the list of preferred activities of engineers.  The social content of the job is the least appealing to many engineers.

This assessment center process was able to convince management of a need, which resulted in a comprehensive continuing education program.  Management initially pledged $1 million for this program on the strength of The Fisher Paradigm Report.  The program has grown in sophistication to where technicians can now earn their engineering degrees in cooperation with the local university while attending engineering classes and laboratories at work.  Meanwhile, veteran engineers continue to upgrade their skills concurrent with new technology.  Once the seed was planted, engineers took control of the technical education program with a rotating engineering chair providing its continuity and enhancement.  This was accomplished with no interference from management.  Engineers now owned the program and the process. [4]

The New Reality

A job is a sacred trust between employee and employer.  It is a contract, a bond.  We have moved into a climate where workers must exercise more control over the process than ever before. 

Opportunities are limited only by the perception of their horizons.  If prudent, workers will make a representative assessment, or appraisal of where they are, what they are, and where they want to go, and what they need to get there. 

They will create their own career roadmap, not wait for management to create one for them.  Likewise, they will seek out mentors and exploit the opportunities available.  They won’t wait for opportunities to present themselves, but will create them by taking the initiative.  They will study their jobs as if they owned them, as indeed they do, and assume the role of leadership of their function.  They won’t waste energy or time campaigning for the next position at the expense of what they are being paid to do.  Nor will they spend countless hours chatting on the Internet or cell phones, texting or tweeting, entertaining themselves when they should be working.  They won’t bad mouth colleagues or the company because they consider their jobs boring, but instead will put effort in to bring new life into them.  They won’t look for fantasy jobs beyond their recognized limits.  Fantasy jobs are positions in which they have no stomach for the pain, frustration, commitment, sacrifice, or risks involved to realize the return.  Boring as the job might be, fantasy jobs require moving from knowers to learners, from tellers to listeners, from persons comfortable in knowing all the answers to students of the discipline.  

In this new reality, some see others less able prospering because they are less afraid to venture outside the box and embrace the unknown.  They are not only students of what they do, but find ways to complement the skills of associates so that they might be more successful.  They look for opportunities to make the company stronger without fanfare.  They are not on the make but on the making.  They are systemic thinkers consistent with Russell Ackoff observations:

If you take a system apart to identify its components, and then operate those components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possible can, there is one thing of which you can be sure.  The system as a whole will not behave as well as it can.  Now that is counterintuitive to Machine Age thinking, but it is absolutely essential to system thinking.  The corollary to this is that if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can, none of its parts will be. [5]

If this describes you, and your approach to work, there is no reason to worry.  Should the company be forced to downsize or relocate, it would find a place for you; if not with that company certainly with another.  You are poised to look at opportunities in your industry because the misfortune of one is likely to lead to the good fortune of another. 

This new reality forces many companies to make hard choices.  Some workers critical of the company’s relocating plans refuse to admit they wouldn’t move under any circumstances.  They insist on the company providing security for them when the company is in a survival mode teetering on bankruptcy.  Not to worry, these workers expect to be treated from birth to death by the company, as surrogate parent to meet their economic and emotional requirements at any cost, reality be damned! 

This is not to make light of the fact that many lives have been disrupted if not destroyed by plant closings.  By the accident of their birth, workers today have come of age in a transitional and transforming period when the definition of work itself is in a state of change, when a place of employment is no longer an assumed fixed place, when brains are much more in demand than brawn, when the role of worker and manager are in flux, when working hard has been replaced by working smart, when a manufacturing based economy has been eclipsed by a service based economy, when information technology disrupts provincial stability with global fluidity. 

It was bound to happen.  It just happened during your working years.  Now, you must deal with it, or it will deal with you.

Much criticism has been directed at companies such as Wal-Mart and others who have forced their suppliers to manufacture their finished products in China and India.  The downside is that it takes away jobs in the United States.  The upside is that it produces cheap consumer goods that the less fortunate can purchase.  It is an old cliché, but the world is getting smaller and more interdependent.  In time, as the standard of living of third world countries improves, somewhere down the road equilibrium will be reached. Then cheap labor will not be the bargaining chip that it is today. 

That trend has started and is gaining momentum.  The dominance of the West is now being challenged by the emerging economic powers of the East.  That said the days of the fictive belief in the economic and political dominance of one nation over others seems to be in the twilight.  The combination of technology and population growth is forcing yet another reality on workers.  The onus is on them to be contract consultants and their own agents in a most competitive, but opportunistic marketplace, where it will be necessary to hone workers’ skills and match them to the demands of that marketplace.  Here is one story.

Not for Everyone!

When he was a boy, he discovered he was dyslexic.  School was difficult for him, and he had to work harder than most to earn average grades.  The problem wasn’t any less difficult in high school, as schoolwork remained a challenge.  He met it with every ounce of energy he could muster without complaint.  Some thought college was too high a hill for him to climb, but he persisted, and graduated with a B.S. degree in criminal justice from Michigan State University. 

His first job out of school was as a police officer in Tampa, Florida.  That soon appeared a dead end as he could see seniority controlled your destiny.  So, he went back to school at the University of South Florida, and earned an MS degree in criminal justice.  He continued to be a police officer, gradually separating himself from it to become an assistant professor in criminal justice for the university. 

As a professor, he met a number of rising legal minds in the community.  This spiked his interest in the law.  He took to studying law at night school.  Reading was always a challenge, now it was the main requirement as law school meant reading scores of books.  Undaunted, he persevered and graduated with a law degree, and promptly committed himself to taking the bar examination.  He studied so hard that he lost weight, but it paid off, as he passed it on his first try.

Everything changed.  He became a junior lawyer of a law firm in which much of the work was pro bono or handling cases others took a pass on.  By nature kind and generous, unassuming and even humble, he noticed that in his new work environment that there was a distinct pecking order, which included preferred billing hours, client exploitation, and amoral arrogance.  He remained stoic, as unhappy as he was, and refused to complain.  Instead, he studied diligently for his doctor’s in jurisprudence, which he again passed on his first try.  At this point, he changed law firms.

The new law firm was more of the same.  Only here the partners were treated like royalty, or as “crown princes or princesses.”  They talked about him behind his back because he didn’t spend the hours billing as they did.  What’s more, to their chagrin, he didn’t seem to feel guilty about it.  He couldn’t see billing clients excessively because you could, feeling this was as good as fraud.  So, he moved on again, this time opening his own law firm.

He invited more than one hundred lawyers and former clients and friends to celebrate the new opening but only a handful showed up.  It had to hurt, but he said nothing, going about his business working as hard as ever to make a go of it.  The firm prospered. 

Fortunately, years earlier, he had purchased five acres of prime real estate on Thonotosassa Lake, in Hillsborough County, Florida, which had a large house, and a smaller one on the property.  He moved into the larger one and rented out the smaller one. 

The economy changed and with it his law firm’s fortunes.  Business deteriorated and then things got so desperate that he had to split his property down the middle and sell half.  He also sold the little house on his side of the five-acre split.  This kept him solvent, but barely so.  Not dissuaded, he was still not through pushing the envelope. 

He decided to create an entertainment center in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, a Cuban community of historic significance modeled after the French Quarters in New Orleans.  Never a timid spender on projects, he brought in a cadre of entertainers and investors from St. Louis.  They seemed interested until it was clear there were no guarantees.  He scuttled that project, and looked about for another.  None were on the horizon so instead he bought an office building, renovated it, and then rented a good share of it out to small businesses, while keeping his law practice afloat.

Some twenty years ago, he married a model and now has a family of two children, a boy and a girl, both are in college.  A family is what he always wanted, as his parents and brother had died, and only a sister was left.

It was during this period that he met a number of entrepreneurs who were restless for a project, but lacked the capital to seed it.  He had the capital.  Starting on a small scale, and paying his partners and his small staff out of his pocket, he operated the business like this for several months, nearly to the point of going broke again. 

Then, with his partners, he created a website and the business took off.  It grew every week.  More people were brought on staff.  Additional expertise was needed, so he sold part of his interest, bringing in another partner, still remaining the majority stockholder.  His generosity continued.  Operations were opened in other locations, and they took off as well.  But again, his generosity and over optimism came crashing down on him as the economy changed and so did regulations. 

       

During his affluent days, he designed an estate on his property of eye catching delight.  He had sold his little house, and now had to buy it back at twice what he paid for it, and did this without complaint or regret.  The new estate was in the Miami style with a two story white alabaster house with twenty foot windows overlooking the lake with a French stucco patio, an entertainment center, a gymnasium, and bar, a winding marble staircase, and floors a combination of marble and carpeting, large contemporary kitchen, ornate fireplace, and enough original artwork to fill a gallery, gated with a quarter mile landscaped serpentine driveway with fountains and dolphin sculptures snaking along the way, a tennis court and swimming pool, three car attached garage, and a separate four car garage for his automobile collection, which included an auto workshop.  He had a pier built on the lake with a cover boat hangar for his boat, and two wave runners, and other toys of a man with the disposable income to recapture his youth at age, fifty. 

He is now sixty three, and was set back again even prior to 2007 as were many others, and has never regained his momentum.  But his optimism has not faded neither has his fondness for taking risks nor looking for new opportunities.  He has opened a new business here in 2014, and with the same enthusiasm and élan that is part of his DNA. 

I suppose he could be described as a visualizing investment capitalist.  His estate is of his own design, and has aged as he has aged, and doesn’t match his optimistic perspective, but he remains undaunted. 

Contrast his bumpy ride through life with people who never metaphorically ever get out of bed.  He is a handsome powerfully built man, but never shows anger, a man more generous than anyone I have ever known, and a man who has frustrated me with that generosity, and with his picking of friends and business associates, people whom I don’t think deserve the time of day with him.

He is family man in the truest sense of the word, and has a beautiful wife and two adoring children.  But he frustrates them, too, because he is not into work as work is defined; is not into security as it is defined; and certainly is not into a logical, consistent, rational approach to making a living as some would expect from him. 

My sense is that he was burned out on work early in life, working at his father’s automobile dealership after school and of a Saturday for hours washing and polishing cars, leaving little time to play sports or just hang out with other friends. 

Parents can stimulate or kill our appetites for life in many different ways.  I suspect this was what killed his for work as we know work.  I’ve never heard him utter a negative word about his parents, or the ordeal I have just described.  It is not his nature. 

If you see him on the street, chances are he’ll be in a polyester warm-up suit, or an open polo shirt and stone-colored Timber Creek Wranglers and loafers or sandals.  I’ve seldom seen him in a coat and tie, although I know he wears them occasionally, but always looks uncomfortable.  He once belonged to a country club but didn’t play golf.  He was known to swim a hundred laps at the country club’s Olympic sized pool for warm-up to a workout with his body builder physique without the steroids. .   

One day a person said to me, “Why does he not work like the rest of us?  It’s not fair.”  I said nothing.  Whatever I might have said wouldn’t have made sense.  How do you explain someone who has overcome mountains of difficulty, and only creates new mountains of difficulty, seemingly in a never ending drive to what, I don’t know?  

Few of us have the courage or the appetite for such a life on the edge.  Most people want to play it safe and dream of winning the Lotto.  They don’t think of creating their own wealth, or heaven forbid, once earned, to put it into immediate jeopardy as has this man.

The irony, and paradox if you will, is the quest is, indeed, for money when money is not that important to him.  What he wanted, achieved, then lost more than once, was master of his own time.  I once advised him to invest when he was making money in the seven figures.  He looked me as if I was clueless as to his motivation.  Later, I thought about it and came up with this: he doesn’t invest because those who do constantly think of nothing but money, and he doesn’t want or plan to enter that cage.  I’ve watched him.  When he is broke, he doesn’t lose a step.  I believe this because I know him.  He’s my son-in-law.

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Alan W. Watts explains insecurity is a given, we best accept it.  Once we in fact do, he insists, we miraculously overcome it.  We are able to act and do, to be and take the initiative, to take control.  Insecurity, Watts discovered, is a mania for control of things we cannot control at the expense of the things we can, but don’t.  Control all starts with recognizing the only person, circumstance, situation, or predicament that we can change, if we but find the will, is ourselves.  No other.  None. Nada. 

Many of us are waiting.  We are waiting for the boss to change; to be promoted or demoted, retire, or die.  We think he or she is the problem.  Absent our nemesis, we think, our anxiety will vanish.  “He” or “she” is the problem.  It couldn’t be “me.”  We attempt to escape through pleasure only to find it kills what we love.  We delight in music, in its rhythm and flow, but should a note or cord be held beyond the flow, the rhythm is destroyed, and so our comfort.  But the discordant is part of the rhythm.  A tonality is life.

We want certainty when life is full of dissonant music.  Our anxiety is not new.  Read The Confession of St. Augustine (397 A.D.), the Bishop of Hippo, a man who straddled the fourth and fifth centuries, and you hear your own mind spinning as he says:

I am toppled back to earth, weighted with heavy burdens, plunged into compelled ways, netted, wailing strongly but strongly netted still.  So great is compulsion’s heavy baggage.  Here I can abide but do not wish to; there, I wish to abide but cannot – miserable either way. [6]

How many of us have been in this state of mind when our careers have gone awry; when an expected raise or promotion did not occur; when out of the blue made we were made redundant, when we thought our job was secure and were given a pink slip, when our world crashed and burned and we thought we had finally made it? 

Those experiencing the greatest difficulty adjusting to new circumstances live in the illusory world of false expectations, not the reality of the times.  This is most troubling for workers who live only to make money.  They are forever worrying about losing their jobs, and frequently do. Instead of earning a living, they are living an earning, and thus when the time comes to relax they are unable to do so.  They are likely to be bored and miserable when they retire, because all they know is work and making money.  They think nothing of returning to work and taking a position away from a younger person.  Their whole identity is work.  Their essence is tied to making money. 

The sad irony is that many of them have more money than they could ever spend the rest of their lives.  Money isn’t the point, they say, but they have made it so.  They are a machine that has no other function than to make money when they no longer need to make a living.  There is no one to master or to be mastered, no one to rule or to surrender to.  The purpose of life is what we do.  When what we value is only money, we are bound to live in misery when money no longer has a purpose.  Watts sees such people caught in their own honey:

It is as if we were divided into two parts.  On the one hand there is the conscious “I,” at once intrigued and baffled, the creature who is caught in the trap.  On the other hand there is “me,” and “me” is a part of nature, the wayward flesh with all its concurrently beautiful and frustrating limitations.  “I” fancies itself as a reasonable fellow, and is forever criticizing “me” for its perversity – for having passions, which get “I” into trouble, for being so easily subject to painful and irritating diseases, for having organs that wear out, and for having appetites, which can never be satisfied. [7]

The wisdom of insecurity is that truth, life, change, movement, and beauty are many names for the same thing.  The rhythm of life in all its uncertainty produces its own music and makes all things lovable.  Life and death, career and retirement, security and insecurity are all simply ways of looking at the same thing through different eyes.  We are at once all builders and destroyers, growing and dying, reaching high and low notes, all in the rhythm of life.  I could not write these words if I had not known pain and loneliness, love and wonder, failure and success, pride and humiliation, science and religion. 

It is difficult to realize job security when we compartmentalize work from life, and life from work; when we drive a wedge between the head and the heart, between thinking and feeling; when science, which covers the empirical realm of what is (fact) and why does it work this way (theory), is separated from religion, which questions the ultimate meaning and moral imperatives of why we are here; when pain and pleasure are on a collision course instead of being treated as normal fare. 

It may sound absurd but the highest pleasure is to be unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people, to be lost in life.  In that mindset, there are no thoughts of what’s in it for me, no concerns are others carrying their load, and no considerations am I getting credit for this? Incidentally, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to feel unabsorbed in the greater community or, indeed, the greater good.

If we are obsessed with security, traumatized with the possibility of losing our job, then we are back to Humpty Dumpty, suffering split-mindedness between “me” (self-demands) and “I” (role demands), between the job at hand, anxiety concerning it.  If I am afraid of losing my job, my efforts to feel and act bravely in the face of that possibility are moved by fear, for I am afraid of fear.  This is simply to say that my efforts to escape from my insecurity are moving me in a vicious circle compressing my perspective, shrinking my options, and giving me a blinding headache.  I know because I’ve been there.  Unless we break this cycle it can surely become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Creating Job Security in an Uncertain World

You can no longer expect to place your faith in a company.  Companies are struggling against the most competitive odds to stay afloat in a shrinking world.  You must awaken and take charge of your work, which is the only way to take charge of your life.  You can do this by creating your job security by taking small steps.  These are some that might be considered:

Embrace the reality of your situation.  It no longer is enough to do your job, to put in your time and let management worry about the health of the company.  You are the company!  Without you, there is no company.  Managers and workers are the arms and legs, brains and backbone of the same body.  Nothing of sustaining value happens unless this body works together and moves in the same direction.  There is no point in complaining.  Ask yourself: why am I frustrated?  What can I do about it?  Needy people need not apply.

Pay attention to what is going on beyond the rhetoric and rah rah!  Long before a company is in crisis, there are indicators that something is awry.  New competitors are on the horizon, orders fall off, quotas aren’t met, and schedules are late.  It suddenly gets very quiet.  Some of the hard chargers resign.  The rumor mill goes into high gear.  Workers who pay attention know when the workplace culture gets a cold.  It is not enough to generate feedback, but to take personal action.  You don’t wait for management to resurrect a survival strategy, or for the workplace to develop pneumonia.  You create innovations in your own function.  Once this momentum starts, on a personal level, it flows out in concentric rings touching all operations, and then miracles do sometimes occur.  But it starts with attention and proceeds directly to action on a personal basis.

Organize your work and work your organization.  Transparency is in as the vertical organization collapses into horizontal teams, where managers and workers are on the same page.  Transparency is also in as the boundaries between disciplines blur and specialists promote user-friendly tools for all.  At the same time, and this is new, workers and managers have more discretionary control of what they do than ever before.  The problem is not that this power suddenly exists.  The problem is that it has always been there, but no one has taken advantage of this fact, first by using it, and second, by using it effectively.  Functions and disciplines have complementary relationships, but to benefit them requires creative initiative.  Put another way, it means asking for help when it is required.

Promote the mature adult in your personality and take action.  The purpose of a company is what it does.  The function of your job is what you do.  The company’s mission and your function must be clear, understood and mutually supportive.  If they are not, it is your responsibility to make your case politely and as often as necessary, instead of infrequently and violently.  The company is a human group made up of conflicting, contradictory and sometimes colliding issues, all of which can be resolved with mature adult dialogue.  Managed conflict is actually the glue that holds the company to its task, not harmony.  A company that works hard to create the myth of harmony is a company in trouble.  Confusion is bound to occur periodically; failure is parent to success; and sustained success is endemic to a Culture of Contribution where problems are never denied but worked out. [8]

Shakespeare has Macbeth saying:  And you all know, security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.  It continues to be, but need not, especially in work if we recognize the wisdom of insecurity, and embrace its possibilities.  All problems contain their own solution, and the highest happiness is found in our awareness that impermanence and insecurity are inescapable and inseparable from life and work. 

There is a new movement afoot.  Maturity is gripping the workforce despite all the uncertainties of the times, perhaps because of them.  Workers are remaining resolutely committed to the job, rolling with the punches.  These workers, which are only a small contingent, are massing to become a large army as they show the way to going from being taken care of, to taking charge, leaving their cages behind.

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Notes

[1] Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, TATE Publishing, 2014, Chapter 9, The Culture of Contribution.

[2]Ibid, Chapter 5, Echoing Footsteps.

[3] Ibid, Chapter 6, Six Silent Killers: The Mad Monarchs of the Madhouse

[4] James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., “Combating Technical Obsolescence: The Genesis of a Technical Education Program.”  Presented at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education in Orlando, Florida, May, 7. 1986.

[5] Russell L. Ackoff and Fred E. Emery, On Purposeful Systems, Intersystem Publications, Seaside, California, 1972, p.1.

[6] Garry Wills, Saint Augustine’s Memory, Viking, 2002, pp. 7-8.

[7] Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Vintage Books, 1951, p. 39.

[8] Op. Cit., Dr. Fisher, Culture of Contribution