on careers, success, and happiness

I always had a hard time imagining myself “grown up.”

My parents encouraged my aspirations, particularly my intellectual aspirations; however, they did not encourage my autonomy. The result was I wasn’t given opportunities to “grow up,” to discover my strengths and to develop the kind of confidence that comes from experiencing success.

I was always an independent thinker, rebellious in my ideas. But I have lived timidly, in fear of making mistakes, with no deep (i.e. experiential) knowledge of my abilities. To this day, I find school easy and life hard (perhaps it’s why I am making a career of collecting degrees).

If I didn’t get much direction in the career department growing up, I did get a strong set of values and an inviolable sense of the rightness and wrongness of things. As I get older, I do find myself making more and more moral compromises, to hold onto my health insurance, my five weeks of vacation, etc. When I was younger, and rents were cheaper, I quit jobs I didn’t like, told people I didn’t respect just what I thought of them.

Living with very little money for many years meant a lot of picking and choosing and in the process I discovered what really mattered to me, namely, freedom (or autonomy) and beauty (the whole aesthetic dimension of life).

I chose jobs where I could be myself, express myself, my individuality, work when I wanted to, take days off when I wanted to, and even with very little in the way of disposable income, I’ve mostly managed to create beautiful spaces to live in.

I waitressed for many years and strangely, for an INTP, I was very good at it (as long as I was working places that let me be myself). It was always a game for me, with a strategy, a beginning and an end.

Individual expression is an aspect of liberty (the sine qua non of a life of meaning), and beauty is what we create in and through the process of expressing ourselves. (Beauty, in my opinion, is never contrived.) The concepts are connected, but freedom is obviously the broader and more fundamental of the two.

I grew up in the 1960s-1970s a in a fairly wealthy New Jersey suburb. My father, an engineer, was conservative, book-loving, immensely intelligent. I’m hesitant to type him as truthfully, I didn’t know him well. But he brought precision to everything he did, and it is with him I learned to argue in the way I like to argue to this day – on the basis of fact. My mother has her qualities – she is beautiful, an accomplished dancer, etc. – but we’ve never gotten along. I suspect she is an ESFJ. (NB: I don’t truthfully put much stock in type theories, except as heuristic devices, to explain or clarify – in this case, my family dynamics) Now, I am an INTP who has gone to Divinity School and I have done more than most people to develop my so-called “inferior” function, but I simply cannot abide someone who argues on basis of feeling. My mother who knows nothing about anything considers herself an expert in everything, from religion to politics to education to child psychology.

The children of an ESFJ are seen as an extension of the family, and all they do reflects on the ESFJ. If things do not go well, the ESFJ may be critical, even carping toward his or her mate and children.

I see now how my concept of beauty evolved -

My mother is someone deeply concerned with appearances, whereas I am someone deeply committed to truth. I could care less what people think of me. For my mother, beauty is mimesis, it originates outside of her, in a magazine, a designer showroom. For me beauty is always about authenticity.

My mother made a career of marrying well – I say that not because she was happy in her marriage – she wasn’t, and she didn’t make my father very happy either – but because it was marriage that enabled her to achieve her personal goals – not happiness but the perfect picture of it.

For obvious reasons, I chose a different path.

When I think of career, I think of the way in which one makes a living while realizing one or more personal goals over/above the financial remuneration. A job, even a job as a laborer, can be a career, if it allows for psychological individuation – if one is invested in the work, and benefiting, personally, from that investment.

People talk of second and third “careers” when they change not only jobs but life direction.

When a job does not permit psychological individuation, when, on the contrary, it molds and shapes us to its own ends, I believe it is damaging. This is why I believe there are jobs out there, in book stores, in yoga studios, in restaurants, that give us more room to accomplish our personal goals than many corporate jobs. Better to choose the “job” in which you can be true to yourself than the “career” in which you have to become someone you’re not.

I think of a career as a path, not a destination. This is why I think that a focus on a goal, or mission, can lead us astray in life. We can choose noble “careers” for which we are not suited.

I believe that our mission in life is to become who we are, and that we accomplish the most good when we are true to ourselves and our calling.

I’m not saying we don’t make sacrifices in life, in our careers, but it changes the calculus, I think, when we construct our careers based on where we’re at versus where we want to end up. When we choose a lifestyle and a job that accommodates our natural rhythms, our temperament, our values versus the alternative, giving up happiness to arrive at a place we find we don’t like very much.

If I were to find myself in the position of giving career advice, I’d say hold the destination lightly. Have an itinerary, but don’t stick to it. Allow yourself to be led.

Write a manifesto. What do you believe in? What really matters to you? The manifesto should be personal, and something you can live by, at least most of the time. If it’s too idealistic, it won’t work to help to structure your life.

Then write a mission statement. Your career should allow you to live according to your manifesto while accomplishing your mission.

There is a distinct advantage to this approach. For many of us, the search for a mission is not so easy, we don’t know what we want to be, do, in the long run.

I’d advise someone who doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life to follow his heart. I don’t think we ever go wrong when we simply do what we love.

I haven’t gotten around to the mission statement, but I did take some time to write out a personal manifesto. I expect it will undergo some revision in the days, weeks, to come, but it’s a start, and it did enable me to define success.

I believe, in the end, the best measure of success is happiness. We find happiness by becoming who we are.