Career Sanity

Career Sanity Defined

mcl — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:17:37 -0600

Career Sanity means maximizing your career and work satisfaction while minimizing the frustrations, aggravations, and insanity that are frequently associated with work. Note that this tends to increase productivity as well.

(This is true regardless of the economy. In a downturn, as jobs become scarcer, some employers may become more demanding – but as customers become scarcer, smart employers will realize that they can’t afford the inefficiencies and lack of goodwill caused by nuttiness at work.)

It does not mean avoiding work or looking for some kind of free ride. Rather than something to be avoided, using our energies and abilities to support our lives – especially given the amazing choices available in a complex civilization – is one of our greatest gifts. Unfortunately, centuries of wrong-headed thinking have reversed things: career satisfaction is relatively rare, while frustrations related to work are the norm.

Does it have to be this way? Here’s one way to answer that: if nobody gets more satisfaction than frustration from their work, chances are there is no alternative. Since that isn’t the case – no, it doesn’t have to be this way. But achieving something other than the norm generally takes conscious effort, so if you want more satisfaction than frustration from your career you will have to work at it.

Here are some of the ways you can increase your chances of achieving Career Sanity:

1. Stay flexible. Keep obligations minimal, or at least reasonable, while figuring out what to do, where to do it, and how to get paid for it. Set your compass toward financial security early on. When the wind blows you might bend but you won't break.

2. Acknowledge influences. Recognize the various inputs on your decisions regarding how to live your life.

3. Learn the qualitative differences among different kinds of work. Modern societies have many distinct kinds of problems with careers for each. Which kinds of problems do you really want to work on?

4. Attitudes: develop a better attitude than most by being as honest, reliable, communicative and cooperative as possible. The mistrust and hostility our society encourages generally works against career interactions going well. You can benefit by being an exception.

5. Reality. Maybe you want to do what you love - but others will pay you for what they want and need. Figure out where these two shapes intersect and find your career in that region.

6. People. Learn to recognize, as quickly as possible, who you can trust, who you can't, and the various shadings in between. The right kinds of people can enhance your career just as quickly as the wrong ones can wreck it.

7. Take intelligent chances. Our anxiety-prone societies encourage many of us to become "security junkies." If you are willing to challenge this tendency you will increase your chances of getting what you want. No guarantees, but better chances. Since there really are no guarantees, that's not a bad deal.

Careersanity.com will address all of these issues and many more -- including some of the reasons why you might avoid doing some things that would be likely to help. It’s your career and your life; nobody is remotely as well qualified as you to decide how to proceed. You can read about what has and hasn’t worked for others; you can join the discussions if you like. Hopefully this will save you some time and give you some additional helpful information on which to base your decisions.

Somebody said if they can get you asking the wrong questions they don’t have to worry about the answers. At careersanity.com the plan is to help you come up with some real good answers by asking as many of the right questions as possible.

Achieving Career Sanity

mcl — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:16:46 -0600

Everything on this site is an answer to the obvious question: what is “Career Sanity”?

But here is the bottom line on how to achieve it:

Don’t work for jerks. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t go overboard with your spending and obligations.

Decide for yourself what you want to do. Decide for yourself how you feel about what a potential employer is doing, their chances of being or remaining successful, and whether you want to be a part of it.

If you aren’t sure what you want to do – and relatively few are when starting a career – be honest with yourself and proceed from there. Resist – mightily! – any attempts to pressure you into ignoring what you know to be true. You will pay the price if you give in to this.

There is nothing wrong with postponing some of the bigger financial and family obligations until you are sure, or at least reasonably sure, of your career direction. Allowing some time for trial and error, for experimentation, may be the only way to find out what you really want to do. Others may not understand this -- but they aren't going to be living your life.

Whatever you do along the way to your “real” work, do it so well that it brings tears to your eyes. If you wind up flipping burgers for awhile, be the best damned burger flipper that ever breathed. Others will notice. So will you.

We have all at times been let down or kicked around or just plain disappointed by others in one way or another, sometimes by people who care about us a lot. Your fellow humans can be pretty tough to deal with at times. You’re stuck with this, unfortunately.

What you’re not stuck with is how you deal with it. Some get bitter; some get better. Get bitter, bring some of this crap into your dealings with others, cause them some of the aggravation that you’ve experienced. Be another semi-reliable, unpredictably difficult person to deal with, help reinforce the “good help is hard to find” type clichés. How original.

OR:

Get better. Recognizing that pain and suffering are like golf – lower scores are better – resolve to make your dealings with others as positive and productive as possible. Do your part, and show others how to do theirs. Maintain your flexibility so you don’t get stuck with someone who insists on the “pain and suffering” approach.

The “pain and suffering” is bad business, inefficient, wastes resources, and will usually drive customers to the competitors. Steering clear of these situations, while difficult at times, is one of the best things you can do for your career, your health, and your sanity.

Be kind to your future self. He or she may well have to live with some of the decisions you make now.

Career Sanity is good for you. If it catches on, it might even lead to World Sanity.

Introductory Articles

Background for careersanity.com

mcl — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:04:20 -0600

Most of my experience in understanding career problems comes from my own career efforts and my refusal to accept the seemingly inevitable where career frustrations are concerned. Maybe it’s idealism, maybe it’s just stubbornness, but I’ve always been determined to do something with my life that I considered important.

Ever since discovering, in my late 20s, that much of the conflict and suffering that plagues our societies is not only unnecessary but fixable, I have found it difficult to maintain much enthusiasm for anything else but this information.

Careers are about solving problems. I realize there are many, many problems that can be addressed through work and career. But to me, this problem – our insistence on basing our societies on coercion and violence, which continues to destroy us – combines urgency with a widespread lack of awareness and active resistance to solutions that I find remarkable. I believe Gary North’s definition of a “calling” fits: “The most important thing you can do, at which you would be the most difficult to replace.”

In short, I am determined to add my voice to those who are trying to prevent our species from self-destruction. But where to start? Perhaps because of my own career difficulties, I have long believed that careers could be an ideal entry point for promoting rational behavior.

My academic background is in business – a Bachelor’s in Marketing with some graduate work in an MBA program. The “business world” wound up providing me with plenty of raw material for careersanity.com; many of the articles are based on my experiences in the corporate life.

But the real issue regarding my background is this: what have I done, what have I learned, what have I figured out that can be helpful to you in your attempts to create (or re-create) a decent career for yourself? I will do my best to answer that here.

Like many, I didn't know what I really wanted to do before starting my career. As a result, I wound up with over 10 years' experience in the world of sales and marketing before I admitted to myself that I disliked it. I wound up leaving corporate life for the more independent, if financially uncertain*, life of a freelance computer consultant. But first I decided to find out as much as I could about why my work experience had been so frustrating, especially since it hadn’t started out that way.

Most people I knew seemed to have similar feelings about their work – something they had to do but generally avoided as much as possible. Even getting them to talk about their work, beyond generalities, proved difficult most of the time. I realized that I was by no means alone with my lack of enthusiasm for work.

But from time to time I would encounter the opposite: someone who enjoyed the work he or she was doing, took pride in the quality of the work, and recognized the difference this made to others. I came to realize that enjoying, or at least being comfortable with, one’s work was not impossible. Maybe not easy to accomplish or widely encountered – but not impossible.

Since I had ruled out “impossible” as a reason for my own lack of enthusiasm toward my career, there were only two possibilities -- well, three – left:

I was doing something wrong, or
The world was doing something wrong, or
Some combination of 1 and 2

Investigating all possible alternatives made sense to me. I had never had any illusions about my own infallibility, so choice #1 certainly was a candidate. I had been impressed with psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden’s books so I joined one of his therapy groups. I also took a series of “Career Courses” with a colleague of his which explored career issues.

It turned out I was doing something wrong: I had absorbed a somewhat typical view of life that limited my potential accomplishments. I wasn’t getting very far with my career because, deep down, I really didn’t think it was possible.

But choice #2 had plenty of appeal as well. My informal observations indicated that relatively few people felt any real connection to their work, that most saw it as something they had to do to survive… period. Surely something this pervasive must be more than coincidence, huge sectors of the population just happening to make the same kinds of mistakes?

In addition to exploring my own decision-making mechanism via psychotherapy and related techniques, I began to look more closely at career and work in general, along with the impact various societal structures have had on them. This led me to investigate many of the structures themselves, along with some of the philosophical bases involved.

This combined internal / external analysis – examining my own background, motivations, and attitudes from a psychological standpoint AND investigating work and career in society at large – turned out to be quite productive.

I realized that choice #3 above – a combination of individuals’ behavior and a society that puts very little, if any, emphasis on individual career satisfaction – explained the career (and life) frustrations I saw in myself and all around me.

This was very exciting! For one, it explained things rather well: yes, many people were making choices that led to less satisfying careers than they might otherwise have achieved. But how could so many people be making similarly unsatisfying choices? I realized that just as I had “absorbed” a limited view of life’s possibilities from the world around me, quite a few others had as well.

But most exciting of all was this: if at least some of my disappointment in my career progress was due to things that I was doing (or not doing) – this meant that there was hope after all. Rather than waiting for some magical day when the world around me would rearrange itself according to my specifications, there were things I could do that would get me closer to the kind of career and life that I wanted.

Did my own career improve as a result of the things I learned? Most definitely. I began to take my own desire to improve my career much more seriously; more importantly, I began taking action based on my goals. Among other things, I moved into a more technical field, created a position for myself within a company, took a sabbatical, co-founded a local computer publication, and developed a new career for myself as a freelance IT consultant. All of these took a level of confidence and risk-tolerance that I did not have prior to my self-improvement campaign.

Personal Characteristics

Possibly more important than my experiences are some innate abilities I have that help in dealing with others. Everybody has some kind of natural** talent; in my case it is an ability to identify with another person very quickly, to be able to see a situation from that person’s perspective more or less instinctively. This has made an enormous difference to me in numerous situations as an employee, a manager, a “general contractor” of sorts during a large property renovation, an advertising salesman, and numerous other business and social environments.

I don’t think there is anything mysterious or exotic about this, either. All I do is pretty much quit being me and “become” the other person instead for a little while, then I go back to being me again. This can make negotiations almost intuitive: rather than guessing what the other person thinks about a proposal, I can almost know since I listen to the proposal through that person’s ears, so to speak.

For a great example of how this ability helped me in my early days as a "computer guy," see Listening Without "Discounting."

Understanding and empathizing with someone else’s needs, then proceeding to work toward fulfilling them, is at the core of any successful exchange. By definition it is a tricky situation: one party has the need (and, presumably, the resources); the other has the skills. The quality of the finished product, then – in the customer’s terms -- depends to a great extent on the depth of the communication between the parties.

One indicator of the significance of all this in today’s employment climate comes from a recent podcast, “What Employers Want,” by CareerChat of Miami University. Rick Hearin, Director of the Office of Career Services, says that employers consistently mention communication and ability to work well with others as primary areas in which new hires need to improve.

One way to improve communication with another person is to identify more closely, to empathize more, with that person. Skilled entertainers, at least those performing for live audiences, understand this, as do great public speakers and top salesmen. Having the best sense possible of how the audience or the prospective customer is reacting to your presentation gives you the best shot at truly communicating – provided you’re willing to tailor your approach accordingly.

Link: http://www.units.muohio.edu/careers/students/podcast/

* “Lack of security” is one of the main objections many have to doing freelance work. This made more sense in healthier economic times… note the “security” experienced by millions of workers today who have trusted their financial well-being to “the company.”

** Although I have had this tendency as far back as I can remember, it did become much more pronounced after I went through therapy. Becoming more comfortable with myself helped me significantly in my dealings with others.

Why I Created careersanity.com

mcl — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:13:58 -0600

My name is Marc Linn. As Paul Simon said

I had a childhood that was mercifully brief
I grew up in a state of disbelief *

Disbelief is pretty accurate: I remember as a small child suspecting that something was wrong with the world, that the grownups weren’t quite sure what to do or how to do it and they weren’t real happy about that.

As I ventured out into the world, I realized more and more just how correct my evaluation had been. In a part-time bartending position as a student, a manager dragged his feet for months before giving me a promised raise – long after I had taken on the new position and responsibilities. The amounts “saved” by his pettiness had to be trivial to the large company that ran the operation, but they were pretty significant to a struggling student.

In my first “real” job as a young graduate, a Vice President of Sales (at a fairly large corporation) had the habit of flinging his coffee cup – full at the time – across his office when something displeased him. I learned this from his secretary, who wound up cleaning up after him (and was nearly injured by his outburst on a couple of occasions).

Moving on: I enjoyed some aspects of working as a sales engineer, although the never-ending nuttiness of the company I worked for tended to drive customers away as fast as I could find them. I went to work for a competitor; they were even worse. To save money, this multi-million dollar company insisted on putting out proposals using an ancient typewriter (remember those?); they looked awful. I wound up buying my own machine and creating my own proposals. I’m not making this up!

Get frustrated locally, get shafted globally: meanwhile, the U.S. manufacturing base was slowly but surely beginning its emigration to other countries with lower operating costs. Demand for sales engineers diminishes.

Tiring of the corporate world, I became a freelance computer specialist. Things were fine with one client until the owner went to jail for felony grand larceny after bilking the IRS on behalf of her clients. Another client gave up and closed the doors after one manager was caught embezzling and another one sued for unfair employment practices… and California’s anti-corporate political climate became the last straw.

Is it me?

I began to wonder -– maybe it’s just me? Maybe I’m just carrying on the tradition of being frustrated with life that I learned early on? I didn’t think the world really needed one more vaguely unhappy individual all that badly, so I decided to see if I could make some changes, or at least figure out what was going on.

My timing was good: I was living in Los Angeles at the time, right in the middle of the so-called “personal growth” movement. I discovered the works of Nathaniel Branden and decided to give psychotherapy a try.

It turned out that my frustrations with my career were not “just me” after all – although I realized that I had become an unwitting accomplice in my own unhappiness in a number of ways. I became aware of the fundamental disconnect between who and what we are and the kinds of societies we have created. We have evolved into beings that need to figure out for ourselves how to live, how to support ourselves, how to earn our keep; this requires an environment based on internal regulation, or personal freedom.

Unfortunately, our societies are based on an earlier, much more primitive form of existence in which “might makes right,” “dominate or submit,” and similar clichés made sense – societies based on external regulation, or coercion.

One consequence of this is the observable fact that we just don’t get along very well. But our entire civilization depends on just that – cooperating, specializing, and exchanging the results of our skills with others.

No wonder careers are problematic. We haven’t figured out whether to interact peacefully with each other (to mutual benefit) – or destroy each other.

Background

*Think too Much, from the album Hearts and Bones, Paul Simon, 1983

Frequently Asked Questions

mcl — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:00:28 -0600

I have one minute. What is "Career Sanity"?

The purpose of careersanity.com is to provide information and support for those who realize that career health is as important as physical health. We understand what physical health requires, but career health is more elusive in our society. Careersanity.com works hard to clarify the issues.

You probably have to work at something. You don’t have to enjoy your work, find any kind of “fulfillment” or “meaning” in your work, or do anything different than the majority of workers who consistently say they don’t like their work and would quit in a heartbeat if they could.

As a free agent, you are within your rights to choose a career that you wind up hating one day. And for good measure, you are free to join the ranks of millions who are permanently stressed by the combination of financial obligations and uncertain employment in their lives.

But if you want to have a better chance at a career that will have some meaning for you, as well as the flexibility to survive in our increasingly uncertain future, there are some things you can do that can help. Careersanity.com will provide as much information as possible in this vitally important area.

Tell me more.

Career Sanity is not:

Spending your working life supporting activities to which you are fundamentally opposed
Putting unnecessary stress on your career by living beyond your means
Choosing your career path based on somebody else's preferences

Career Sanity is not worrying about personalities, politics, and other petty (but all too widespread) annoyances that interfere with simply doing a great job
Doing a mediocre job in return for mediocre compensation ("We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us")
Giving a customer, co-worker, manager or employee a bad time because something in your personal life isn't going the way you want
Becoming so desperate that you allow yourself to be treated poorly in order to survive
Being held accountable for circumstances beyond your control (also known as "crazymaking")

Career Sanity is:

Career Sanity is efficient! In an era of dwindling resources, it makes no sense to waste resources -- including our own time and energy -- on office politics, personality conflicts, and other silliness.
A good match between your interests and abilities and the various wants and needs of others. Since “wants and needs” are infinite and constantly changing, there will always be plenty of potential choices.
A realistic relationship between your earnings and your expenditures. An engineer told me years ago that the way to make an engine last is to make sure its capacity is significantly larger than the load it will carry. This works for careers as well.
An excellent way to show your children how to live well. We know talk is cheap, and we know kids learn best by example. Don't tell them about living a good life and being happy -- show them.
A foundation for living the kind of life you want.

One of the best things about Career Sanity is that it is possible. Many of us want to do “what we love” for our career… understandable, and also dependent on the market for whatever it is that we love.

Career Sanity is achievable regardless of the market. It requires a commitment to rational behavior on your part and an insistence on the same from others, combined with the willingness to back up your requirements with action when necessary.

Maintaining your Career Sanity will go a long way toward sustaining you while you work toward finding the work that you love and that will pay your bills. And in the meantime you can stay sane. Not a bad deal.

What about careersanity.com? What is the purpose of the website?

There is a ton of information available about the obvious aspects of developing a career: skills, aptitude, education, networking, resumes, career fairs – no shortage. Much of it is excellent and provides essential information.

But there is not as much information or discussion about the less pleasant facts about careers – primarily, the fact that they don’t work very well for a big percentage of the human race.

Careersanity.com will provide information and discussions about the reasons so many people are dissatisfied (or worse) with their careers. The goal is to increase the likelihood of having a meaningful and productive career for anyone with the willingness to take a serious, open-minded look at the situation -- and the courage to act on any new decisions.

Can anyone benefit from your site? Or do you have an intended audience?

Anyone can begin evaluating their career choices based on the principles discussed here.

In practical terms, it's usually easier to implement policy-type decisions earlier in life when we probably have fewer commitments and obligations. Many of the articles, therefore, are geared toward younger people just starting out on their career search.

I also have a personal investment in the career decisions faced by young people: my own memories of the frustration I faced as I began to explore my career choices, discovering my own lack of understanding of the issues and the relative lack of information about many of the real issues, are my primary motivations for everything that has led to my creation of careersanity.com.

But career, like life itself, is a moving target -- and "young" is a relative term. I'm certainly not "young" in a clinical sense but my career is evolving faster than ever. So once again, anyone can benefit. All you need is an open mind, along with enough nerve to maybe try some new things.

As lousy as the economy is, I'm more concerned about finding -- and keeping -- a job.

No argument -- survival is the first priority, obviously. We have to cover the basics before we can move beyond, as psychologist Abraham Maslow pointed out. All the more reason to dispense with time-, energy-, and resource-wasting behaviors where work and careers are concerned.

A great thing about Career Sanity is that it is efficient. When unnecessary stress and aggravation are removed from a work environment, when people communicate clearly, and the various politicking and jockeying for position are kept to a minimum, an amazing thing happens: much more energy becomes available for getting the job done.

Customers, who also become scarce in an economic downturn, benefit from this kind of efficiency, giving the more efficient organizations a competitive advantage.

It’s good business to run a harmonious organization. As competition for everything – customers, resources, good jobs and good employees – gets fiercer and fiercer, a competitive edge becomes more important than ever.

Career Sanity principles can give you a big competitive edge by showing you how to be a highly efficient asset to a similarly motivated organization – and how to communicate that fact clearly and well.

I’m just starting my career. Why should I think about all this negative stuff?

See Hazmat for Career?

I just want a good job. What good will all this stuff do me?

It will give you a competitive edge.

Everybody realizes that competition for the good jobs is getting more and more intense; higher percentages of recent graduates are “settling” for work that is far from their first choice.

Obviously you’ll need the required skills for the field you choose. This is, in a sense, the easy part. Because of this, you can be sure that plenty of others will also develop the required skills. Hence the competition, most likely in proportion to the desirability of the job.

The other ingredient – the one that can put you ahead of the pack – is attitude.

Attitudes are shaped by cultural values. As our societies become more and more contentious, our attitudes toward each other become more suspicious, if not openly hostile – the exact opposite of what is required for successful working relationships.

This leads to the old saying about good help being hard to find. (For the record, good bosses are hard to find as well. Maybe harder).

The better you understand this, the better you’ll be able to be sure that your own attitude is as conducive as possible to getting a job done well. When you communicate this to a potential employer it just might increase your chances of getting the job.

I say "just might" because it's not universal. Someone with a lousy attitude can be threatened or otherwise "put off" by you -- if you show up with a much healthier attitude.

This can be good, as you probably wouldn't want to work for someone with a bad attitude anyway. If you have the courage to do what it takes to develop a great attitude toward others, you deserve to have it reciprocated.

Why isn’t there more awareness and discussion of the kinds of issues you mention here?

Fish, the saying goes, are not aware of water. It’s just there, has always been there, hopefully always will be. So they aren’t conscious of it.

I think it’s that way with many of the attitudes and values we take for granted in our societies. It’s just the way things are.

But it goes deeper than that. Psychologist Alice Miller talks about the cultural amnesia that develops as a result of our need to distance ourselves from early pain and frustration. Build a civilization around massive denial of unpleasant truths and individual well-being becomes the exception rather than the rule.

I hope this isn’t about blaming others. I am tired of the blame game.

No, blaming others is the opposite of what I’m advocating. Scapegoating is an age-old way of avoiding facing the real problems by focusing attention on other issues.

But acknowledging the impact of past experiences is not the same as blame.

Let’s say you’re looking to buy a used car. You find one that you like so you decide to get some more information. When you start discussing the car’s history with its current owner, you find that the car has been in several accidents, has had its oil changed maybe twice in several years, and has never been waxed.

When you express some concern over this, the owner becomes upset. “You’re like all the rest, blaming me for not being a responsible car owner! I did the best I could,” he assures you.

How would you respond?

Would you be tempted to say “Wait a minute! This isn’t about you – it’s about the car. I’m not judging you or anything you did or didn’t do. But the fact is that everything this car has been through has affected it, and I need to understand the end result of all that in order to decide if this is the car I want.”

Human beings, of course, are a lot more complicated than cars. All the more reason to have as complete a picture as possible of our service records and any accidents or maintenance lapses we may have experienced.

Feeling Lucky?

mcl — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:57:12 -0600

Maybe your career won't be affected by the economic meltdown. Maybe.

“When most people playing a game wind up losing, maybe it’s time to rethink the rules.”

This is a quote, more or less, from a book I read years ago on some of our social problems. I don’t think the author was referring to careers but he could have been.

You need a career. Maybe you know what you want to do; maybe you’re not so sure. You want to earn enough to pay your bills; you’d probably like to enjoy your work, or at least not dislike it too much.

And here are some things I’ll bet you don’t want:

To get stuck in a low-paying job -- possibly as a result of a terrible job market -- with very few opportunities for advancement
To wind up hating your work, or perhaps being bored to death by it
To choose a career path based on influences – family, friends, instructors -- only to realize later that it wasn’t right for you
To build a career only to have it disappear due to poor decisions made by others
To realize, after years in a given field, that you have no respect or admiration for your employer’s objectives – and this matters to you, perhaps very much
To achieve a standard of living based on your income, then see your income diminish due to changing global competitive economic conditions
To spend much of your time at work dealing with someone’s psychological issues rather than simply getting the job done

Unfortunately, these are regular occurrences for all too many people, many of whom started out with enthusiastic hopes and dreams for their careers.

And it’s not just a nuisance for isolated individuals, either: I believe that some of the core issues that cause frustration at work are also responsible for the global economic crisis we are seeing today.

What does this mean to you?

That depends on you.

If you believe that the massive problems faced by our world, many of which directly impact your job search and likely results, are either random or caused by “evil people” over whom we have no direct control, you probably won’t be very interested in what I have to say here. There are plenty of excellent career resources today that will help you prepare your resume, locate a potential employer, suggest how to best handle an interview, and so on.

However, if you suspect that some of our problems have to do with more fundamental things, such as how we structure our societies and how we learn to interact (or not) with each other, you might wonder if these problems can affect your career. They certainly have affected plenty of careers so far, but maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones.

If you don’t want to leave it to luck, though, you can learn more about some of these career- and happiness- limiting issues right here.

Luck is fine, especially when you do everything you can to put the odds in your favor.

What is "Career Sanity"?

mcl — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:12:00 -0600

Do these three statements sound reasonable to you?

Most people want to enjoy their work and find some meaning in it, or at least be comfortable with it.
The majority of people wind up disliking their work and living for weekends, holidays, and vacations.
Unlike defying gravity or living forever, being comfortable with one’s work is not impossible – some do achieve it. And those that do are not all from wealthy families or world-famous Nobel Prize winners.

“Career Sanity” is a way to begin resolving the massive disconnect regarding work and careers indicated here. While work is seen by many, if not most, as something to be avoided, some people actually enjoy what they do for a living.

Allies or adversaries?

Career Sanity is based on a powerful but counterintuitive principle: in any transaction with another person, it is in your best interest to see that both of you are pleased with the results. The best transactions are those in which both parties are determined to do the best they can for each other. There is no conflict: your self-interest expands to include the interests of the other person.

This goes against the grain, of course. Our reptilian brains still carry the “dominate or submit” message, even though specialization and exchange has proven to be an infinitely more effective – and efficient – means of survival.

We humans are in transition: from the old way of eking out an existence with the other beasts on the planet, to the new way that has transformed our world and made civilization possible. Maybe one day the “old way” will be a distant memory but today we have enough practitioners of this outmoded type of existence to wreak some pretty serious havoc with our lives.

Just good business

Is it unrealistic to think about liking your work when the economy appears to be headed off a cliff and millions are worried about their future?

Smart organizations are realizing that it is just bad business, especially in tough economic times, to waste resources on old-style corporate nuttiness. The ones most likely to survive will be the ones that maximize their efforts to do the best possible job for their customers.

One definition of sanity is “soundness of judgment.” The organizations and individuals most likely to survive our economic and social challenges will be those that utilize sound judgment. Careersanity.com will explore ways you can join their ranks and make the most of your career.

Achieving Career Sanity

Who's Invited?

mcl — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:07:09 -0600

(From FAQ regarding intended audience)

Anyone can begin evaluating their career choices based on the principles discussed here.