Frequently Asked Questions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

See Hazmat for Career?

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.

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.

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.