I have been a tremendous advocate of self-improvement and personal growth for most of my life, dating back to my mid-20s when I discovered the works of psychologist Nathaniel Branden and others. My early attempts at creating my own offerings in the field were primarily focused on career and work. Several articles in the career section on freedompreacher.com refer to this era.
The following is a brief explanation of my background which I wrote for one of my earlier career-related websites.
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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; many of my articles are based on my experiences in corporate life.
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.