Life Ownership

One of the very good ideas that I've never been able to apply in my own life is this one: you own your career, and you can control where it goes. I'm sure that its possible, but I don't know of anyone who has actually done it.

I first heard this concept back when I was enlisted and in the Air Force. The idea was that you could tell the Air Force what you wanted to do, and if they wanted to keep you around, they would figure out a way to do it. Want to go to a specific school? Tell your career advisor, and they would tell you what you would have to do in order to qualify. When I became an officer, that song was even stronger: officers had specific people who you were encouraged to talk to, by name, who would help you arrange your career. They wouldn't guarantee anything, but they would give you a sense of control of what you were doing and where you were going.

Never worked for me. Tried it twice, and it didn't work either time. Only much later did it occur to me that perhaps the problem was that I believed those articles, which were written not about the people who'd made mild or moderate changes in their career but really astonishing ones (they make a better story, after all). I thought that if it was possible for them, then it must be possible for me, too, and when that didn't appear to be the case, I stopped trying.

Later, I went to work for a company that stressed that all things were possible, that if you worked hard you would succeed handsomely -- in fact, the company founder was fond of saying that if you worked hard, in twenty years you'd be working as a hobby, not because you needed to. Okay, he was a renowned salesman, but the possibility was enticing, nonetheless. As it happened, it did happen there, for some people, but not many, and not me.

What brings this to mind is an article in today's Post about deciding whether it is time to leave a bad job -- one where you aren't using your potential, one where you aren't happy, one where you don't see yourself doing something great. Okay, the article doesn't use these phrases, and in fact they use as an example a woman who really should leave what she does. She loves her job, finds it fascinating and challenging, a job thats better than she could have hoped -- but she hasn't been paid in several months. She knows she should leave, she just doesn't want to.

The article makes several interesting and thoughtful analogies between job situations and relationships, as well as this general observation: "When people feel like they're in charge of their lives, they're much more likely to be proactive, realize they have choices and to make good choices for themselves."

It took me years just to figure out that my working stule was that I needed to take challenging things and break them down into really small pieces before I could get the gumption to do them, and almost as much time to figure out that I perfer to work early in the morning and late at night, and that I'm most likely to solve a problem after I've gotten up and walked around for a while. I'm not kidding: years. I once went to a couple of sessions with a psychologist because I was getting angry at work (not postal, but pretty damn touchy), and she told me something that I'd never realized: I have no idea how to relax. None. I just sit quietly and hope it happens. Weird, huh?

And even though its just about a moot point for me now, I still don't know how I'd get the courage to bail on a job I really didn't like.