Consider this: your career has shape...actual dimensionality....I mean like depth, bredth, linearity, curvature, peaks and valleys, flatlines....all maybe, if you are one of the lucky ones and you seek it....leading to that moment in your life when you experience the Blueflash...in one short moment the flash of the very idea that will be the central project of your life...
What is a flatline career? Maybe it is a narrow path, with little promise of any peaks or upside..get into a company and you can't get out...you feel trapped...you cannot leave because maybe your whole family depends on you. You feel occupationally brain-dead.
What is a career "silo"? Maybe someone gets so deeply devoted to one passionate thing, they go so deep...the musician who masters the instrument, but who cannot ever get employed to play it...
Then there is the professional culture trap....where you get so deeply committed within one culture, your chances of being global get less and less...you cannot leave your culture because your skills and passions cannot bridge to another place...this is OK if you want to be wedded to that culture, but what if you see yourself as a person who wants to live and work in more than your home culture...you become dependent on your company to treat you as a local or as a cosmopolitan...
Sociologist Wilensky separates out the two categories as profoundly different, and many corporate people eventually track one way or the other....locals are those who never leave where they started from....cosmos are folks who have a need for and are lucky enough to find travel and multiple locations in their careers...
Who determines what?
I have found in watching so many hundreds of students I have known well that people get tracked so often not by their choice but by their company....
It seems to say, "Look before you leap" into a company,let alone a career track. Make sure it feels right.
Check out your exits in case you need to leave. You are never truly "married" to a company, a career pattern, or a culture, without your consent, whether you are conscious of this or not....
Some careers, like medicine, demand complete adherance to a specific series of steps, without exception, without a "time-out", a breather, or the consequences become "fatal"...step out and you are finished...
If you choose that, be aware of it.....you may live in a "free country" but you are not at all a free agent!
Blueflash is neutral. Many medical doctors are extremely happy and have found their life purpose.
The differences in occupational patterns and what they demand of us become huge control factors in our lives....
Blueflash is neutral, remember, it is there for everyone to find, somewhere,sometime, and, more often than not, it finds you!
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
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