Forget the Ladder

This morning when I opened my email at work, I perused through the daily e-newsletter the university sends to all employees. Among the headlines in the newsletter was this:

Tonight: Journalism graduates discuss climbing professional ladder

Naturally, being a journalism graduate, I clicked the link to see what it was all about. Basically, tonight there will be a discussion panel of very successful folks ranging from a CBS broadcaster and voice of an NBA basketball team, an award-winning journalist for a Washington, D.C., TV station, a photojournalist and our university vice president for communications and marketing.

It got my wheels turning, as this is a question I’ve struggled with for the last several years:

Is climbing the corporate ladder what we truly aspire to?

Clearly, these graduates are enticing because they have big titles. After all, how often is someone without a big title asked to share their secrets? I’d argue the answer is not very often because our society values the title.

When we’re choosing career paths as teens, no one ever says they want to be the vice president of such and such or the global director of this and that. We choose careers we’re interested in, but usually don’t worry about titles, unless, of course, you're considering a career as a doctor, veterinarian, etc., wherein the career path itself is often the title. So why, when we get older, does it sometimes seem that having a fancy title is the primary indicator of our success?

Furthermore, it’s that whole ladder analogy that’s really got me pondering. Granted, I didn’t make it very far up the ladder before getting knocked back a rung or two, but when I was at my highest status on said ladder, I was also my unhappiest. I know plenty of folks who have ascended to much higher ranks than I have, and those folks work their tails off with lots of extra hours and sacrifices of their personal lives. Is that what we’re destined for?

Somewhere in the middle there’s a balance where we are able to merge our calling with our career, where we find our dream job – the one where we can’t wait to go to work because we’re doing something we are so passionate about. And there's also an appropriate balance of work and leisure time. Finding that balance is a whole other story. When someone gets it figured out, let me know.