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.

Good Reading

The Dargis sisters featured in March 2011
issue of The Furrow

I just finished reading the cover story from this month's issue of The Furrow, an agricultural magazine published by John Deere. It's about a family of five young women who have taken over the family farm after losing their parents in a plane accident in 2007. These girls were orphaned by the ages of 15 to 22, and managed to keep their family's Canadian farm intact. Their family farmed 7,000 acres and had 4,000 cattle when their parents passed away. The daughters continue to farm 4,000 acres and keep a large cow herd. Holy moly! That's impressive. And they're doing it all despite many folks' initial doubts about their abilities to run a farm, let alone a quite large farm. Very inspiring.

So, as I paged through the rest of the issue, I stumbled upon more inspiration in the Fun & Philosophy pages. Fun quotes, cute stories, a cartoon about beavers. What's not to love? A few highlights that are worth sharing, if nothing more than to remind myself of these quotes later.

• Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing -- Theodore Roosevelt
• Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset. -- Francis de Sales
• Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom -- Marcel Proust
• Procrastination is like a credit card: It's lots of fun until you get the bill.
• Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.
• Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
• Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

My Big Fat Elephant

I have an elephant problem.
My elephant is out of control. It throws its weight around to always get what it wants. It is stubborn and lazy, sitting on its giant wrinkly elephant derriere all day long. It’s got a horrible sweet tooth and has eaten chocolate chip cookies for breakfast for the past three days. And it is grumpy … definitely not a morning elephant.
See, my elephant is my emotional side, and the darn critter is holding me back from making a much-needed change -- the get healthy change. I was doing so well before the holidays, but it really got to me -- the vacations and family get-togethers and the flat laziness I feel I'm entitled to in such times of joy.
In the view of Dan and Chip Heath, authors of Switch (read it, it’s worth your time!), the elephant is just one of three factors involved in making a change. The others are the rider and the path. Think horse racing on steroids.
The rider is your rational side, and mine is a fiesty little jockey toting around a briefcase full of facts. He displays posters of inspirational quotes and a Photoshopped likeness of myself 30 pounds thinner next to the shower so I have to see it every day. He creates Excel spreadsheets showing an just how long it will take to lose the weight at various per-week weight loss rates. He follows all sorts of health resources on Twitter to show the elephant why it needs to change. Everything makes such perfect sense to my rider with his well-thought-out arsenal of information.
But all the good intentions in the world are not enough to steer the elephant down the path, or for that matter, kick it its lazy butt into action to leave the starting line.
My elephant needs an extreme elephant makeover. So, as the Heaths suggest, I'm starting by looking for the bright spots. Like this afternoon, I took a dollar out of my wallet, ready to head to the vending machine. Then I asked myself, "Are you really hungry or just bored?" and answered (honestly) bored. Yes, that is one small step in the right direction. There have been more wrong steps this week than I'd like to admit, but the fact that I championed in one small way is pretty awesome.