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.