Rewarding Career Quotes

I can imagine no more rewarding a career. And any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction: 'I served in the United States Navy.

Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.

There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they could easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward. So, it’s very asymmetric. It’s then very easy to understand why regulators resist changing the rules. It’s because there’s a big punishment on one side and no reward on the other. How would any rational person behave in such a scenario?

Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am I seeking attention? Showing off? The pain of the cuts releases the mental pain of the memories, but the pain of healing lasts weeks. After every self-harming or overdosing incident I run the risk of being sectioned and returned to a psychiatric institution, a harrowing prospect I would not recommend to anyone. So, why do I do it? I don't. If I had power over the alters, I'd stop them. I don't have that power. When they are out, they're out. I experience blank spells and lose time, consciousness, dignity. If I, Alice Jamieson, wanted attention, I would have completed my PhD and started to climb the academic career ladder. Flaunting the label 'doctor' is more attention-grabbing that lying drained of hope in hospital with steri-strips up your arms and the vile taste of liquid charcoal absorbing the chemicals in your stomach. In most things we do, we anticipate some reward or payment. We study for status and to get better jobs; we work for money; our children are little mirrors of our social standing; the charity donation and trip to Oxfam make us feel good. Every kindness carries the potential gift of a responding kindness: you reap what you sow. There is no advantage in my harming myself; no reason for me to invent delusional memories of incest and ritual abuse. There is nothing to be gained in an A&E department.

Young people, especially young women, often ask me for advice. Here it is, valeat quantum. Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money. There are easier and better ways to reach them. Undertake it only if nothing else will satisfy you; for nothing else is probably what you will receive. Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other.

And so I began my criminal career there in the house of God, with a leaky pen instead of a pistol and books instead of silver for my reward.

I imagined downtime, thoughtful gifts for my parents, the family vacations we’d never taken, their mortgage paid off. I imagined all their hard work finally repaid, all their sacrifices not only compensated but rewarded. I imagined them thinking it was all worth it. Telling me how much they loved me. All my life, when I thought of my future, that was what I pictured. Not a career. The things I thought would come with it. Happiness, love, safety. And that dream had been enough for a long time. What was school if not a chance to earn your worth?

In theory, the risk of business failure can be reduced to a number, the probability of failure multiplied by the cost of failure. Sure, this turns out to be a subjective analysis, but in the process your own attitudes toward financial risk and reward are revealed. By contrast, personal risk usually defies quantification. It's a matter of values and priorities, an expression of who you are. "Playing it safe" may simply mean you do not weigh heavily the compromises inherent in the status quo. The financial rewards of the moment may fully compensate you for the loss of time and fulfillment. Or maybe you just don't think about it. On the other hand, if time and satisfaction are precious, truly priceless, you will find the cost of business failure, so long as it does not put in peril the well-being of you or your family, pales in comparison with the personal risks of no trying to live the life you want today. Considering personal risk forces us to define personal success. We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of "success" from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a seemingly endless line of hurdles extending from grade school through college and into our careers. We constantly judge ourselves against criteria that others have set and rank ourselves against others in their game. Personal goals, on the other hand, leave us on our own, without this habit of useless measurement and comparison. Only the Whole Life Plan leads to personal success. It has the greatest chance of providing satisfaction and contentment that one can take to the grave, tomorrow. In the Deferred Life Plan there will always be another prize to covet, another distraction, a new hunger to sate. You will forever come up short.

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

With young people you have to try to impart a sense of responsibility. If they can add greater awareness to their energy and their talents they can be rewarded with great careers.

Love is a career with its own stages, rewards, and failures . . . a vocation as concrete as a calling in the Church, worth giving a lifetime to.

Our economy now rewards artists far more than any other economy in history ever has.

If other people owe you an apology, and your words of apology to them are proper and heartfelt, you still may not hear from them for a while. After all, what are the odds that they get to the right emotional place to apologize at the exact moment you do? So just be patient. Many times in my career, I saw students apologize, and then several days later, their teammates came around. Your patience will be both appreciated and rewarded.

It is sadly true that most institutions and nations admire and reward sins of the "spirit," and various forms of arrogance and greed often lead to promotions and praise. But pride, ambition, and vanity are still pride, ambition, and vanity; they do not stop being capital sins because someone is pope or president. "Greed is good" in America, extravagant bonuses are envied and imitated, and careerism is rampant among the clergy . . . Sins of the flesh, however, carry shame and guilt and can always be used to bring anybody down in church, culture, or the state.

If you want to do well in school and you’re passionate about math, you need to stop working on it to make sure you get an A in history too. This generalist approach doesn’t lead to expertise. Yet eventually we almost all go on to careers in which one skill is highly rewarded and other skills aren’t that important. Ironically,

Nothing special about me, we've all got our own sacred place, but to access it, your mission must be pure and your aim true. Just a little thought of trying to use it for a power tool, a career move, and the process becomes corrupted. You gotta go for the joy, the pain, the adventure, the search, the journey to love. I learned that from Kurt Vonnegut. You have to be willing to dedicate your life to that journey, not as a means to an end, but just as an opportunity to trip the fuck out. Ya gotta suspend all self-judgement, and embrace all. The reward is the journey itself. And that's how I became the bass player I'm still trying to be. Just exploring for a sense of purpose.

Relief, fear, and humiliation. Her parents paid for a pricey prep school education in D.C. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown with a degree in political science. She breezed through law school and finished with honors. A dozen megafirms offered her jobs after a federal court clerkship. The first twenty-nine years of her life had seen overwhelming success and little failure. To be discharged in such a manner was crushing. To be escorted out of the building was degrading. This was not just a minor bump in a long, rewarding career.

A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate — these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justif your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you've got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.

Some people make friends by wining and dining people with the sole objective of doing business with them. Once the usefulness goes, the friendship also goes. It is unfortunate because it is very shortsighted and insincere. One should keep in mind that just because a person is a friend it does not mean they are under an obligation to buy from you. In my career, I have acquired clients professionally and built friendships later, versus making friends with the intention of doing business. Sooner or later, people uncover the ulterior motive.

Balance when establishing your career, in my view, is largely a myth. “Struggle porn” will tell you that you must be miserable before you can be successful. This isn’t true: you can experience a lot of reward along the way to success. But if balance is your priority in your youth, then you need to accept that, unless you are a genius, you may not reach the upper rungs of economic security.

Care for your infant business or career as you would care for your infant child - with loving attention, with no expectation of any reward, being in the moment with it, accepting it as is, watching it grow, enjoying every step of the way.

It took twenty-five years from the prediction of the neutrino to its detection, almost fifty years to confirm the Higgs boson, a hundred years to directly detect gravitational waves. Now the time it takes to test a new fundamental law of nature can be longer than a scientist’s full career. This forces theorists to draw upon criteria other than empirical adequacy to decide which research avenues to pursue. Aesthetic appeal is one of them. In our search for new ideas, beauty plays many roles. It’s a guide, a reward, a motivation. It is also a systematic bias.

At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the center of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are catholics with protestant proclivities, or christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to allow each other to do their own thinking. Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. He should not be compelled to give his opinion as to the inspiration of the bible, the propriety of infant baptism, or the immaculate conception. All these things are private and personal. The people ought to be wise enough to select as their officers men who know something of political affairs, who comprehend the present greatness, and clearly perceive the future grandeur of our country. If we were in a storm at sea, with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism. Our government has nothing to do with religion. It is neither christian nor pagan; it is secular. But as long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power. Just so long will the candidates crawl in the dust—hide their opinions, flatter those with whom they differ, pretend to agree with those whom they despise; and just so long will honest men be trampled under foot.

I consider it completely irresponsible that public schools offer sex education but no systematic guidance to adolescent girls, who should be thinking about how they want to structure their future lives: do they want children, and if so, when should that be scheduled, with the advantages and disadvantages of each option laid out. Because of the stubborn biological burden of pregnancy and childbirth, these are issues that will always affect women more profoundly than men. Starting a family early has its price for an ambitions young woman, a career hiatus that may be difficult to overcome. On the other hand, the reward of being with one's children in their formative years, instead of farming out that fleeting and irreplaceable experience to day care centres or nannies, has an inherent emotional and perhaps spiritual value that has been lamentable ignored by second-wave feminism.

When Opportunity meets Preparation she greets her with open arms and they both say in unison, "Let's do this!

Faithfully doing your best, independent of the support, acknowledgment, or reward of others, is a key determinant in a fulfilling career.

As you go through various stages of your career, you’ll start to realize how much uncertainty there is in the world. It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else. You think you want to work for that cool startup, and you get there only to find it’s a mess. You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected. In all of this uncertainty, the only person you can rely on to pull through it is yourself.

...an external reward can affect one's interpretation of one's own motivation, and interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling. A similar effect may account for the familiar fact that when someone turns his hobby into a business, he often loses pleasure in it. Likewise, an intellectual who pursues an academic career gets professionalized, and this may lead him to stop thinking. This line of reasoning suggests that the kind of appreciative attention where one remains focused on what one is doing can arise only in leisure activities. Such a conclusion would put pleasurable absorption beyond the ken of any activity that is undertaken for the sake of making money, because although money is undoubtedly good, it is not intrinsically so.

On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.

It is, after all, hard to imagine placing a full-time teaching career atop a full-time artmaking career without something going awry in the process. As the old proverb cautions: if you chase two rabbits, you catch neither.

There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they could easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward.

Every great accomplishment has its share of struggle, adversity and pain. Great achievement cannot exist without them. To reap the rewards of success in our marriages, in the lives of our children, and in our professional careers we must be prepared to push through some pretty tough moments. But trust me... on the other side of that struggle awaits an intrinsic reward that is worth more than gold. ~Jason Versey

However, as I observed the lifestyles of the people ahead of me in their careers, it slowly dawned on me that the only reward awaiting me was working more hours, internalizing more stress, and continuing to be salary dependent with no end in sight. I thought I had invested in myself, but really, I had invested in a lifelong treadmill.

But the man who, by dint of long study and sober reflection, has succeeded in training his mind not to detect evil in anything, to consider all human actions with the utmost indifference, to regard them all as the inevitable consequences of a power - however it's defined - which is sometimes good and sometimes perverse but always irresistible, and gives rise to both what men approve and to what they condemn and never allows anything to distract or thwart its operations, such a man, I say, as you will agree, sir, may be as happy behaving as I behave as you are in the career which you follow. Happiness is an abstraction, a product of the imagination. It is one manner of being moved and depends exclusively on our way of seeing and feeling. Apart from the satisfaction of our needs, there is no single thing which makes all men happy. Every day we observe one man made happy by the circumstance which makes his neighbour supremely miserable. There is therefore nothing which guarantees happiness. It can only exist for us in the form given to it by our physical constitution and our philosophical principles. [...] Nothing in the world is real, nothing which merits praise or blame, nothing deserving reward or punishment, nothing which is unlawful here and perfectly legal five hundred leagues away, in other words, there is no unchanging, universal good.

If you want to work for Vogue, produce films, or open a restaurant, you had better get immense psychological reward from your gig, as the comp, and returns on your efforts, will likely suck. Competition will be fierce, and even if you manage to get in, you'll be easily replaceable, as there are always younger, hipper candidates nipping at your heels. Very few high-school graduates dream of working for Exxon, but a big firm in a large sector would give you a career trajectory with regular promotions a sexy industry won't.

To become a person that occasionally, strangers want to reward because they've felt I've given them something, is an amazement. Once a young woman passing by an outdoor booth where I was signing books, burst into a spontaneous jig at the sight of me. And that might be the pinnacle of my career. To be somehow an occasion for someone else's exuberance.

FCC power rests on ... nonobjective law (which) delivers men's lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim.

Remember, being valued and being rewarded are two different things.

Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you.

With young people you have to try to impart a sense of responsibility. If they can add greater awareness to their energy and their talents they can be rewarded with great careers. One

The problem doesn’t lie with the great teachers. Great teachers strive to create linchpins. The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead. Here

I worked hard in school because I liked learning and because I saw school as a perfect little realm of intellectual industry and competition that could act as a litmus test for my own potential. I wanted to confirm my own suspicion that if I put my mind to it, I could beat everyone I knew. I wanted direct evidence that I was not like the other people, and that if in life I did not gain money or professional accolades this was not because I was less capable than others, but because I chose not to engage in systems that presented careers as rewards.

Persistence trumps talent. What's the most powerful force in the universe? Compound interest. It builds on itself. Over time, a small amount of money becomes a large amount of money. Persistence is similar. A little bit improves performance, which encourages greater persistence which improves persistence even more. And on and on it goes. Lack of persistence works the same way -- only in the opposite direction. Of course talent is important, but the world is lit erred with talented people who didn't persist, who didn't put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone. Meanwhile, people who might have less talent pass them by. That's why intrinsic motivation is so important. Doing things not the get an external reward like money or a promotion, but because you simple like doing it. The more intrinsic motivation you have , the more likely you are to persist. The more you persist, the more likely you are to succeed.

Ambition means wanting better for yourself and expecting more out of life and aligning your skills and work ethic to achieve it. Ambition means being proactive about what you do and how you are rewarded.

When chosing what you want to do with your life, don't do what you think you will be highly rewarded for. Chose what you will be willing to do even when you are not rewarded for it. That is a secret for living a fulfilling life.

Imagine that a career is like a marathon—a long, grueling, and ultimately rewarding endeavor. Now imagine a marathon where both men and women arrive at the starting line equally fit and trained. The gun goes off. The men and women run side by side. The male marathoners are routinely cheered on: “Lookin’ strong! On your way!” But the female runners hear a different message. “You know you don’t have to do this!” the crowd shouts. Or “Good start—but you probably won’t want to finish.” The farther the marathoners run, the louder the cries grow for the men: “Keep going! You’ve got this!” But the women hear more and more doubts about their efforts. External voices, and often their own internal voice, repeatedly question their decision to keep running. The voices can even grow hostile. As the women struggle to endure the rigors of the race, spectators shout, “Why are you running when your children need you at home?

The O.T.O. is an initiatory order similar to freemasonry. It doesn't provide educational monographs or standardized tests. Rather, it offers members the opportunity to experience a series of dramatic and magical initiations artfully designed to awaken and unfold the candidates' spiritual potentialities. If a member did nothing else with the O.T.O. career but undergo these degree experiences, they would be immeasurably rewarded. Serious members know, however, that there is much more to the O.T.O.'s magick than a two-hour ceremony performed once or twice a year. So profound are the Order's inner mysteries that to penetrate them requires not only a rich magical and spiritual education, but also a high level of meditative attainment. Members who wish to truly affiliate at this level are expected to seize responsibility for their own magical education and eventually rend the veil of the Order's mysteries for themselves.

But it would be a mistake to assume that the liberal class was simply seduced by the Utopian promises of globalism. It was also seduced by careerism. Those who mouthed the right words, who did not challenge the structures being cemented into place by the corporate state, who assured the working class that the suffering was temporary and would be rectified in the new world order, were rewarded. They were given public platforms on television and in the political arena. They were held up to the wider society as experts, sages, and specialists. They became the class of wise men and women who were permitted to explain in public forums what was happening to us at home and abroad. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a cheer leader for the Iraq war and globalization, became the poster child for the new class of corporate mandarins. And although Friedman was disastrously wrong about the outcome of the occupation, as he was about the effects of globalization, he continues, with a handful of other apologists, to dominate the airwaves.

Throughout history, the life of a businessperson always involves some risk; the higher the risk, the greater the reward. On the other hand, the life of an employee in any workforce involves minimal to no risk at all, resulting in a lifetime full of steadiness with little to no accomplishments during this lifetime. However, there is a crucial factor which can also be considered as a trait or characteristic that made many remarkable men and women throughout history reach high levels of their career paths, which is considered to be “success” in our modern world: Audacity.

One has ideas, does experiments, meets people, seeks advice, calls old friends, runs into unexpected remarks, meets new people with new ideas, and in the process finds a career of shifts and often serendipitous meanders that may be rewarding and rich, but is seldom marked by guideposts glimpsed very far in advance.

Oh, to be sure, there are the get-rich dreams that float in and out of idle conversation. But there are much headier rewards closer at hand - the freedom to be your own boss and chart your own course, the chance to explore the leading edge of some new technology, the career-opening opportunity to take on far more responsibility than any established organisation would ever grant. These are what really drive early market organisations to work such long hours for such modest rewards - the dream of getting rich on equity is only an excuse, something to hold on to your family and friends as a rationale for all this otherwise crazy behavior.

It is sadly true that most institutions and nations admire and reward sins of the “spirit,” and various forms of arrogance and greed often lead to promotions and praise. But pride, ambition, and vanity are still pride, ambition, and vanity; they do not stop being capital sins because someone is pope or president. “Greed is good” in America, extravagant bonuses are envied and imitated, and careerism is rampant among the clergy. (This is not just my judgment but a statement of the Vatican Office for Bishops a few years ago.) Sins of the flesh, however, carry shame and guilt and can always be used to bring anybody down in church, culture, or the state.

There used to be a prescribed path for entering any particular career. This is no longer the case. Beyond a handful of professions, many of the most rewarding jobs today are intrinsically creative. They involve doing things that didn’t even exist when the people doing them were still in school. The prescribed paths are crumbling away.

You will never climb Career Mountain and get to the top and shout, "I made it!" You will rarely feel done or complete or even successful. Most people I know struggle with that complicated soup of feeling slighted on one hand and like a total fraud on the other. Our ego is a monster... Ambivalence can help tame the beast. Remember, your career is a bad boyfriend. It likes it when you don't depend on it. It will reward you every time you don't act needy. It will chase you if you act like other things (passion, friendship, family, longevity) are more important to you. If your career is a bad boyfriend, it is healthy to remember you can always leave and go sleep with somebody else.

I start to worry I’ve become the thing Calista once warned me about: someone who wants a promotion too much. “They can smell it on you, and if they can smell it, they won’t give it to you,” she said. “It’s not fair, but it’s true.” I need to pretend that external recognition is just a cute little extra bonus and that consistently delivering world-changing greatness for Amazon’s benefit is its own intrinsic reward. But everyone I know here is trying to get promoted. True, most of us grew up as hyper-achievers. Amazon didn’t create our yearning for recognition, but it exploits it for maximum return by holding the rat pellet just out of reach and then frowning on any rat who looks hungry.

It should come as absolutely no surprise that research has ignored women for so long because the establishment: the journal publishers, the reviewers and the funding agencies has rewarded it. Although the things are changing for the better in the US federal agencies will no longer fund clinical trials involving humans that do not include women... there is still a long way to go [..] Thoughtful, carefully done research on females still takes longer and costs more and is often times harder to interpret than research conducted only on males. So when people's careers depend on their publication rate rather than the need for answers to the questions they are asking, women and the issues they care about most - loose.

Lastly, since the greatest room for each person's growth lies in his areas of greatest strength, you should devise ways to help each person grow his career without necessarily promoting him up the corporate ladder and out of his areas of strength. In this organization 'promotion' will mean finding ways to give prestige, respect, and financial reward to anyone who has achieved word-class performance in any role, no matter where that role is in the hierarchy. By doing so you will overcome the remaining two obstacles to building a strengths-based organization: the 'even though I'm now in the wrong role, it was the only way to grow my career' problem and the 'I'm in a pass-through role that no one respects' problem.

According to the long-term studies of Walter Mischel of Columbia University, and many others, children who were able to refrain from immediate gratification (e.g., eating a marshmallow given to them) and held out for greater long-term rewards (getting two marshmallows instead of one) consistently scored higher on almost every measure of future success, in SATs, life, love, and career.

A good thought sets you up for a great deed. A good desire sets you up for a great feeling. A good intention sets you up for a great act. A good feeling sets you up for a great experience. A good word sets you up for a great reception. A good mind sets you up for a great fortune. A good deed sets you up for a great reward. A good attitude sets you up for a great life. A good heart sets you up for a great destiny. A good soul sets you up for a great afterlife. A good teacher sets you up for a great lesson. A good job sets you up for a great career. A good education sets you up for a great occupation. A good school sets you up for a great future. A good character sets you up for a great relationship. A good mother sets you up for a great wife. A good father sets you up for a great husband. A good parent sets you up for a great marriage. A good beginning sets you up for a great conclusion. A good today sets you up for a great tomorrow.

You could have chosen any number of career paths, but this one is exciting. It’s creative. It requires deep thinking and rewards you with a sense of being able to do something that most of the people you meet each day can’t imagine being able to do. We may worry about progressing to the next level, making an impact, or gaining respect from our co-workers or our peers in the industry, but if you really stop to think about it, we’ve got it really good. Software development is both challenging and rewarding. It’s creative like an art-form, but (unlike art) it provides concrete,measurable value. Software development is fun! Ultimately, the most important thing I’ve learned over the journey that my career in software development has been is that it’s not what you do for a living or what you have that’s important. It’s how you choose to accept these things. It’s internal. Satisfaction, like our career choices, is something that should be sought after and decided upon with intention.

When I went back and compared motivation styles to performance improvement over each athlete’s career, one factor stood out. Those who scored high in a particular type of extrinsic motivation called external regulation had lower improvement rates. External regulation is defined as when “the sport is performed not for fun but to obtain rewards (e.g., praise) or to avoid negative consequences (e.g., criticisms from parents).” The five highest-ranked athletes in external regulation were five athletes who showed the least amount of improvement.

This was the experience that taught me that wherever you go, whatever job you take, you always want to be working on boosting your career skills, not in the hopes that you’ll get a reward from your current company or boss—because they might not be there one day. Instead, you almost need to see yourself as a freelancer, building skills and capabilities to take with you to the next job and the next job and the next job. That’s your toolkit, and you should be adding to it all the time, because you can’t rely on a company to take care of you and nurture you and bring

A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many walks of life, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making the world much less good than it could be. Elected officials ignore long-term problems because they must pander to the short-term interests of voters. People working for insurance companies rely on technicalities to deny desperately ill patients the care they need. CEOs and investment bankers run extraordinary risks—both for their businesses and for the economy as a whole—because they reap the rewards of success without suffering the penalties of failure. District attorneys continue to prosecute people they know to be innocent because their careers depend on winning cases. Our government fights a war on drugs that creates the very problem of black-market profits and violence that it pretends to solve. We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us more honest and ethical than we tend to be. The project of building them is distinct from—and, in my view, even more important than—an individual’s refining his personal ethical code.

The same is true for those who do not work hard to find a good and rewarding job, perform the kind of work they like to do, and secure a good position in their chosen career. Even if they achieve a good standard of living, no amount of material wealth can relieve the emptiness in their hearts. They experience the same anxious spiritual state. They live a life of discontentment because they are so passionately attached to this world, they remain ambitious for wealth and possessions, and they regard everything and everyone around them as simply another opportunity for personal profit.

These guys are sadists at heart, Gabriela. In their pathetic, perverted minds, their sense of self is rewarded when they can control life and death. It's power addiction--the more they see their victims suffer, the greater the satisfaction. But if you disappear, his toy will disappear, your pain and terror won't feed his craving. He'll go ballistic and make a mistake while tearing apart the countryside in order to find you. That's when we'll pounce and catch the bastard." "And take all the risks," she said, understanding what he'd left out. "In a nut shell." "Some career you've got," she snickered.

Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.) Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.) Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. Thank you.

Revitalized and healthy, I started dreaming new dreams. I saw ways that I could make a significant contribution by sharing what I’ve learned. I decided to refocus my legal practice on counseling and helping start-up companies avoid liability and protect their intellectual property. To share some of what I know, I started a blog, IP Law for Startups, where I teach basic lessons on trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, and patents and give tips for avoiding the biggest blunders that destroy the value of intellectual assets. Few start-up companies, especially women-owned companies that rarely get venture capital funding, can afford the expensive hourly rates of a large law firm to the get the critical information they need. I feel deeply rewarded when I help a company create a strategy that protects the value of their company and supports their business dreams. Further, I had a dream to help young women see their career possibilities. In partnership with my sister, Julie Simmons, I created lookilulu.com, a website where women share their insights, career paths, and ways they have integrated motherhood with their professional pursuits. When my sister and I were growing up on a farm, we had a hard time seeing that women could have rewarding careers. With Lookilulu® we want to help young women see what we couldn’t see: that dreams are not linear—they take many twists and unexpected turns. As I’ve learned the hard way, dreams change and shift as life happens. I’ve learned the value of continuing to dream new dreams after other dreams are derailed. I’m sure I’ll have many more dreams in my future. I’ve learned to be open to new and unexpected opportunities. By way of postscript, Jill writes, “I didn’t grow up planning to be lawyer. As a girl growing up in a small rural town, I was afraid to dream. I loved science, but rather than pursuing medical school, I opted for low-paying laboratory jobs, planning to quit when I had children. But then I couldn’t have children. As I awakened to the possibility that dreaming was an inalienable right, even for me, I started law school when I was thirty; intellectual property combines my love of law and science.” As a young girl, Jill’s rightsizing involved mustering the courage to expand her dreams, to dream outside of her box. Once she had children, she again transformed her dreams. In many ways her dreams are bigger and aim to help more people than before the twists and turns in her life’s path.

Management gurus push employees in large companies to be bolder and more entrepreneurial. The reality is: employees tend to be risk-averse. From their perspective, this aversion makes perfect sense: why risk something that brings them, at best, a nice bonus, and at worst, a pink slip? The downside is larger than the upside. In almost all companies and situations, safeguarding your career trumps any potential reward. So, if you’ve been scratching your head about the lack of risk-taking among your employees, you now know why. (However, if employees do take big risks, it is often when they can hide behind group decisions.

What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto

We celebrate the dedication of Olympic athletes who diet and train and exercise daily for years in order to prepare for the games. They give up not only physical comfort but also any hope of a normal social and family life. When police officers or firefighters die, often thousands turn out for their funerals. We honor our children who die in military service in much the same way—often arranging public ceremonies and holidays. We expect television celebrities such as actors, news correspondents and musicians to sacrifice any kind of normal life in order to entertain us around the clock—and they are paid millions of dollars to do so. The names of astronauts become household words because they risk their lives in order to forward the conquest of space. But the minute a Christian young person starts to fast and pray, consider the mission field or give up career or romance for Christ—concerned counselors, family and friends will spend hours trying to keep him or her from “going off the deep end on this religious stuff.” Even devout Christian parents will oppose Christian service when their own son or daughter is about to give up all for Christ. Discipline, pain, sacrifice and suffering are rewarded with fame and fortune in the world. Why then do we refuse to accept it as a normal part of giving spiritual birth in the kingdom of our Lord?

Why do we trust men who have sought and attained high office by innumerable acts of vanity and self-will? When a work colleague makes a habit of insisting on his own competence and virtue, we may tolerate him, we may even admire his work, but his vanity is not an inducement to trust him. Why, then, do we trust the men who make careers of persuading us of their goodness and greatness, and who compete for our votes? Catherine Zuckert makes this point powerfully in an essay on Tom Sawyer. Tom, remember, is brave and clever and has a firm sense of the right thing to do, but he is animated mainly by a hunger for glory. He is, in short, the essence of an able politician. “People like Tom Sawyer serve others not for the sake of the others,” writes Zuckert. “They serve because they glory in receiving glory. . . . We should reward such people with the fame they so desire—if and when they perform real public services. But we should not trust them.”II I feel the force of that last sentence now: we go badly wrong when we trust them. Indeed much of the hand-wringing commentary about the loss of trust in government resulting from Vietnam and Watergate is simply, I now think, a failure to appreciate the simple truth that politicians should never have been trusted in the first place. They may be lauded when they’re right and venerated when they’re dead, but they should never be trusted.

A young woman faces the decision of whether to marry a certain man whom she loves but who has deeply rooted, traditional ideas concerning marriage, family life, and the roles of men and women in each. A sober assessment of her future tell the woman that each of the two alternatives offers real but contrasting goods. One life offers the possibility of a greater degree of personal independence, the chance to pursue a career, perhaps more risk and adventure, while the other offers the rewards of parenting, stability, and a life together with a man whom, after all, she is in love with. In order to choose in a self-determined mode the woman must realize that the decision she faces involves more than the choice between two particular actions; it is also a choice between two distinct identities. In posing the questions "Who am I? Which of the two lives is really me?" she asks herself not a factual question about her identity but a fundamental practical question about the relative values of distinct and incommensurable goods. The point I take to be implicit in Tugendhat's (and Fichte's) view of the practical subject is that it would be mistaken to suppose that the woman had at her disposal an already established hierarchy of values that she must simply consult in order to decide whether to marry. Rather, her decision, if self-determined, must proceed from a ranking of values that emerges only in the process of reflecting upon the kind of person she wants to be.

A goddess is born and discontentment dies in this relatable tale of self-discovery. Christine Roberts is quickly approaching the “midlife” age bracket and experiencing all the typical rewards and regrets associated with it. Her adult life has followed a traditional path-marriage, career and starting a family. But when the pillars of her identity as a mother and wife begin to crumble, she decides to reinvent herself. This awakening exposes her to new temptations but also reveals new potential. Christine soon encounters an irresistible and married man from her past and together they discover a new realm of sensual pleasure. The thrill of their forbidden relationship becomes erotically addictive and their reckless behavior quickly leads to danger.

That’s the fear of missing out (FOMO for short). It’s the anxiety we feel at the prospect of being unable to take advantage of opportunities. And it’s a common reason many of us say yes even when we realize saying no would be a better decision. For example, at the workplace, we take on new projects because we fear that declining them will impede the advancement of our careers. With our friends, we commit ourselves to activities because we’re afraid to miss out on rewarding experiences. Social media only reinforces this tendency. We’re constantly reading Facebook on our phones and tablets, watching others post about their experiences, and chiding ourselves for not having our own to post. We end up saying yes to things just so we don’t feel left out.

Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete, as I do all the time in locker rooms, in hotel coffee shops and hallways, standing beside expensive automobiles—even if he’s paying no attention to you at all, which is very often the case—he’s never likely to feel the least bit divided, or alienated, or one ounce of existential dread. He may be thinking about a case of beer, or a barbecue, or some man-made lake in Oklahoma he wishes he was waterskiing on, or some girl or a new Chevy shortbed, or a discothèque he owns as a tax shelter, or just simply himself. But you can bet he isn’t worried one bit about you and what you’re thinking. His is a rare selfishness that means he isn’t looking around the sides of his emotions to wonder about alternatives for what he’s saying or thinking about. In fact, athletes at the height of their powers make literalness into a mystery all its own simply by becoming absorbed in what they’re doing. Years of athletic training teach this; the necessity of relinquishing doubt and ambiguity and self-inquiry in favor of a pleasant, self-championing one-dimensionality which has instant rewards in sports. You can even ruin everything with athletes simply by speaking to them in your own everyday voice, a voice possibly full of contingency and speculation. It will scare them to death by demonstrating that the world—where they often don’t do too well and sometimes fall into depressions and financial imbroglios and worse once their careers are over—is complexer than what their training has prepared them for. As a result, they much prefer their own voices and questions or the jabber of their teammates (even if it’s in Spanish). And if you are a sportswriter you have to tailor yourself to their voices and answers: “How are you going to beat this team, Stu?” Truth, of course, can still be the result—“We’re just going out and play our kind of game, Frank, since that’s what’s got us this far”—but it will be their simpler truth, not your complex one—unless, of course, you agree with them, which I often do. (Athletes, of course, are not always the dummies they’re sometimes portrayed as being, and will often talk intelligently about whatever interests them until your ears turn to cement.)

Aging offers certain rewards that youth cannot. It represents the culmination of our efforts in building self-knowledge, families, friendships, careers, and the sense of self that comes from facing whatever adversity we may have encountered. Aging is to be honored. Youth certainly has its own set of rewards, but to dwell on them to the exclusion of those that come later in life causes a stagnation of the self. It keeps us from experiencing an appreciation of living an entire (ital) life, not just the beginning. When we're really old we will likely measure our lives by how well we loved, how well we were loved, and by what we created, whether that be family, work, art, or friendships. Even if we have chosen to have them, we will probably not measure our lives collagen injection by collagen injection.

A Taurus’s imagination always involves building. Whether it be a career or a lifelong love, a Taurus rejoices at the idea that if you put effort into something for a long time, you will be rewarded with something strong and solid that you can hang your hat on. This extends into expectations for everyone else around them, too. You must be a solid figure, someone dependable who also is able to spark their interests, and with your own solid sense of fire and passion. A Taurus’s imaginative landscape includes an endless sense of fire. Not a fire that would burn anything up, but one that brings warmth, that fuses things together, that solders pieces and melts things when necessary, that provokes and cajoles and pranks but is also good for lending itself to endless conversation and camaraderie. A real working fireplace. The imagination of a Taurus is a place where things get done, rather than happening on their own.

Once they’re admitted, we instill our students with hope, and we promise them challenging academics, close student-teacher relationships, and a nurturing and supportive environment—and we mean it. Further, with their admission, we extend a seemingly equitable opportunity for a diploma, itself an implied “passport to a better life.” This is the parents’ and students’ aspiration, and it’s the aspiration for which we, as overseers of these schools, have pledged our support and have dedicated our careers. However, when our young students actually enroll, against our best intentions but driven by our own fears, we overschedule, overwork, and sometimes overwhelm them. We set them up for frustration and failure when we expect them to think and act like adults long before they have actually developed those capacities. We reward high achievement over effort, and most of all, we overfocus on the college process almost from the moment they arrive.

Imagine that a career is like a marathon—a long, grueling, and ultimately rewarding endeavor. Now imagine a marathon where both men and women arrive at the starting line equally fit and trained. The gun goes off. The men and women run side by side. The male marathoners are routinely cheered on: “Lookin’ strong! On your way!” But the female runners hear a different message. “You know you don’t have to do this!” the crowd shouts. Or “Good start—but you probably won’t want to finish.” The farther the marathoners run, the louder the cries grow for the men: “Keep going! You’ve got this!” But the women hear more and more doubts about their efforts. External voices, and often their own internal voice, repeatedly question their decision to keep running. The voices can even grow hostile. As the women struggle to endure the rigors of the race, spectators shout, “Why are you running when your children need you at home?” Back in 1997, Debi Hemmeter was a rising

At the outset of his career circumstances seemed to authorize the most sanguine of these expectations. For at twenty-seven, after two years of advanced theology and philosophy, young Father Grandier received his reward for so many long semesters of diligence and good behavior. By the Company of Jesus, in whose gift it lay, he was presented to the important living of Saint-Pierre du Marché at Loudun. At the same time, and thanks to the same benefactors, he was made a canon of the collegial church of the Holy Cross. His foot was on the ladder; all he now had to do was to climb. Loudun, as its new parson rode slowly toward his destination, revealed itself as a little city on a hill, dominated by two tall towers—the spire of St. Peter’s and the medieval keep of the great castle. As a symbol, as a sociological hieroglyph, Loudun’s skyline was somewhat out of date. That spire still threw its Gothic shadow across the town; but a good part of the townspeople

Thanks to all that struggling and learning, I have done everything I wanted to do, gone everywhere I wanted to go, met whomever I wanted to meet, gotten everything I wanted to own, had a career that has been enthralling, and, most rewardingly, had many wonderful relationships. I have experienced the full range, from having nothing to having an enormous amount, and from being a nobody to being a somebody, so I know the differences. While I experienced them going from the bottom up rather than from the top down (which was preferable and probably influenced my perspective), my assessment is that the incremental benefits of having a lot and being on top are not nearly as great as most people think. Having the basics—a good bed to sleep in, good relationships, good food, and good sex—is most important, and those things don’t get much better when you have a lot of money or much worse when you have less. And the people one meets at the top aren’t necessarily more special than those one meets at the bottom or in between.

Even more tragically, change has always been in their (white men’s) best interest. The occupations they cling to so desperately-the factory jobs, the mining jobs, the manual labor jobs-were awful in the first place. Men who toil in these careers are underpaid and miserable. They suffer horrific injuries, die prematurely, and are exploited by companies that hardly ever reward their labor or loyalty. But men have long fallen for the great myth of American capitalism. They strive to make it and when they fail they find solace, no matter how dismal, in their pursuit and their work. They’ve been tricked, and to admit now that the lie isn’t real, after generations of buying into it and basing their identities on a fraudulent and faulty worldview, would be one of the greatest emasculations of all time. So they double down nearly every single time….No ground can be given to the forces of progress here because with each case of men being held accountable for their actions the whole house of cards could come tumbling down.

After many years and hundreds of interviews with workers in every conceivable profession, she has found that employees have one of three “work orientations,” or mindsets about our work. We view our work as a Job, a Career, or a Calling.14 People with a “job” see work as a chore and their paycheck as the reward. They work because they have to and constantly look forward to the time they can spend away from their job. By contrast, people who view their work as a career work not only out of necessity, but also to advance and succeed. They are invested in their work and want to do well. Finally, people with a calling view work as an end in itself; their work is fulfilling not because of external rewards but because they feel it contributes to the greater good, draws on their personal strengths, and gives them meaning and purpose. Unsurprisingly, people with a calling orientation not only find their work more rewarding, but work harder and longer because of it. And as a result, these are the people who are generally more likely to get ahead. For

The narcissistic love match is inherently unstable. Any intrusion of reality can destabilize the relationship, leading to chronic or intermittent conflict, misery, trips to the couple counselor, or traumatic ruptures that bring the union to an end. When the narcissist can find support outside the relationship – career, family, friends, or other interests- that keep him or her feeling pumped up, the pressure on the partner may be minimal. But frustrations at work, job loss or retirement, disruptions in other needed relationships, and losses in status or rewards from other pipelines usually lead to more demands on the partner to pick up the slack. It is the nature of human beings to seek more satisfying solutions to life’s challenges over time and to strive toward a fully realized evolution of Self. Even a seed of emotional health wants to grow. Just as primary narcissism is a transient state in early childhood, so may narcissistic relationships be way stations on our journey to mature love. But sometimes the hard part is figuring out if, when, and how to move on.

How had I come to this? I had kept unswervingly to the path placed before me, had tried to be exactly what I was expected to be, had done exactly what I was expected to do -- yet, instead of winning the expected reward, here I was stumbling along, holding on desperately to one of my eyes in order to keep from bursting out my brain against some familiar object swerved into my path by my distorted vision. And now to drive me wild I felt suddenly that my grandfather was hovering over me, grinning triumphantly out of the dark. I simply could not endure it. For, despite my anguish and anger, I knew of no other way of living, nor other forms of success available to such as me. I was so completely a part of that existence that in the end I had to make my peace. It was either that or admit that my grandfather had made sense. Which was impossible, for though I still believed myself innocent, I saw that the only alternative to permanently facing the world of Trueblood and the Golden Day was to accept the responsibility for what had happened. Somehow, I convinced myself, I had violated the code and thus would have to submit to punishment. Dr. Bledsoe is right, I told myself, he's right; the school and what it stands for have to be protected. There was no other way, and no matter how much I suffered I would pay my debt as quickly as possible and return to building my career . . .

On August 21, 1931, invited to address an American Legion convention in Connecticut, he made the first no-holds-barred antiwar speech of his career. It stunned all who heard it or read it in the few papers that dared report it in part: I spent 33 years . . . being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. . . . I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. . . . In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. . . . I had . . . a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. . . . I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents. . . . We don’t want any more wars, but a man is a damn fool to think there won’t be any more of them. I am a peace-loving Quaker, but when war breaks out every damn man in my family goes. If we’re ready, nobody will tackle us. Give us a club and we will face them all. . . . There is no use talking about abolishing war; that’s damn foolishness. Take the guns away from men and they will fight just the same. . . . In the Spanish-American War we didn’t have any bullets to shoot, and if we had not had a war with a nation that was already licked and looking for an excuse to quit, we would have had hell licked out of us. . . . No pacifists or Communists are going to govern this country. If they try it there will be seven million men like you rise up and strangle them. Pacifists? Hell, I’m a pacifist, but I always have a club behind my back!

In all these battles the Labour right has enormous reserves of political power. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn. Of the 232 Labour MPs no more than 20 can be relied on to back him. Back bench revolts, leaks, and public attacks by MPs opposed to the leadership are likely to be frequent. Some Labour left wingers hope that the patronage that comes with the leader’s position will appeal to the careerism of the right and centre MPs to provide Jeremy with the support he lacks. No doubt this will have some effect, but it will be limited. For a start it’s a mistake to think that all right wingers are venal. Some are. But some believe in their ideas as sincerely as left wingers believe in theirs. More importantly, the leading figures of the Labour right should not be seen as simply part of the Labour movement. They are also, and this is where their loyalty lies, embedded in the British political establishment. Commentators often talk as if the sociological dividing line in British politics lies between the establishment (the heads of corporations, military, police, civil service, the media, Tory and Liberal parties, etc, etc) on the one hand, and the Labour Party as a whole, the unions and the left on the other. But this is not the case. The dividing line actually runs through the middle of the Labour Party, between its right wing leaders and the left and the bulk of the working class members. From Ramsey MacDonald (who started on the left of the party) splitting Labour and joining the Tory government in 1931, to the Labour ‘Gang of Four’ splitting the party to form the SDP in 1981, to Neil Kinnock’s refusal to support the 1984-85 Miners Strike, to Blair and Mandelson’s neo-conservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy, the main figures of the Labour right have always put their establishment loyalties first and their Labour Party membership second. They do not need Jeremy Corbyn to prefer Cabinet places on them because they will be rewarded with company directorships and places in the Lords by the establishment. Corbyn is seen as a threat to the establishment and the Labour right will react, as they have always done, to eliminate this threat. And because the Labour right are part of the establishment they will not be acting alone. Even if they were a minority in the PLP, as the SDP founders were, their power would be enormously amplified by the rest of the establishment. In fact the Labour right today is much more powerful than the SDP, and so the amplified dissonance from the right will be even greater. This is why the argument that a Corbyn leadership must compromise with the right in the name of unity is so mistaken. The Labour right are only interested in unity on their terms. If they can’t get it they will fight until they win. If they can’t win they would rather split the party than unite with the left on the left’s terms. When Leon Trotsky analysed the defeat of the 1926 General Strike it was the operation of this kind of ‘unity’ which he saw as critical in giving the right the ability to disorganise the left. The collapse of the strike came, argued Trotsky, when the government put pressure on the right wing of the Labour movement, who put pressure on the left wing of the movement, who put pressure on the Minority Movement (an alliance of the Labour left and the Communist Party). And the Minority Movement put pressure on the CP…and thus the whole movement collapsed. To this day this is the way in which the establishment transmits pressure through the labour movement. The only effective antidote is political and organisational independence on the far left so that it is capable of mobilising beyond the ranks of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy. This then provides a counter-power pushing in the opposite direction that can be more powerful than the pressure from the right.

It takes a certain kind of man willing to work long, grueling hours in a career offering few rewards.

Our culture sends some amazingly contradictory messages about what an ideal mother is like. Mothers try to live up to these ideals without recognizing the contradictions or the improbability of the task. As mothers, you are often expected to have a fulfilling career, time for personal interests, a rewarding marriage, involvement in your communities, a thorough grasp of current events - and be able to provide baked goods at a moment's notice.

Generation Y is said to have a sense of entitlement. Many employers complain of the demands their entry-level employees often make. But I, as one observer, do not believe it is a sense of entitlement. This generation wants to work hard and is willing to work hard. What we perceive as entitlement is, in fact, impatience. An impatience driven by two things: First is a gross misunderstanding that things like success, money or happiness, come instantly. Even though our messages and books arrive the same day we want them, our careers and fulfillment do not. The second element is more unsettling. It is a result of a horrible short circuit to their internal reward systems. These Gen Yers have grown up in a world in which huge scale is normal, money is valued over service and technology is used to manage relationships. The economic systems in which they have grown up, ones that prioritize numbers over people, are blindly accepted, as if that’s the way it has always been.

My work was interesting and rewarding, but still I had to be careful not to let it consume me. I felt I owed that to my girls. Our decision to let Barack’s career proceed as it had—to give him the freedom to shape and pursue his dreams—led me to tamp down my own efforts at work. Almost deliberately, I’d numbed myself somewhat to my ambition, stepping back in moments when I’d normally step forward. I’m not sure anyone around me would have said I wasn’t doing enough, but I was always aware of everything I could have followed through on and didn’t. There were certain small-scale projects I chose not to take on. There were young employees whom I could have mentored better than I did. You hear all the time about the trade-offs of being a working mother. These were mine. If I’d once been someone who threw herself completely into every task, I was now more cautious, protective of my time, knowing I had to maintain enough energy for life at home.

The transition to managing a larger team reminded me that when everything is going fine, management is easy. Thousands of managers around the world inherit healthy teams in healthy companies, do little of merit, and get great rewards for just being in the right place at the right time. The real story behind some people you meet with fantastic reputations isn't notable talents or skills, but merely an exceptional ability to choose the right time to join and leave particular projects. The work of managers everywhere is rarely evaluated with enough consideration for the situation they inherited and the situations they faced that were not in their control. We all make judgments of ability at the most superficial levels. If the results are good, we give praise. If the results are poor, we criticize. We rarely give credence to the feeling in the back of our minds that the winner or loser doesn't quite fit the part. We know in our careers people who were shafted, taking the fall for incompetence that wasn't theirs, and also people who slide through organizations as if coated with Teflon, causing misery and frustration at every turn, yet they move into promotions unscathed.

Asked what we do best, few of us would say 'doing a great job interview.' Yet this is one of the most highly rewarded abilities in life.

try to picture yourself becoming more like this—like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill only to see it fall back down, knowing you will do this for eternity. Learn to work without hope of reward. That is, learn to push for the sake of pushing.

If you get hurt every time someone misunderstands or demonstrates their unwillingness to learn, you'll never build the experience needed to get truly good at teaching and, therefore, will never experience the rewards of doing it well.

When evaluating a new client for degree of independence, I consider four factors: 1. Emotional issues: Does the person have good resources within himself or herself for coping independently with emotional issues that come up, or does he or she turn to parents not only for advice, but for cues as to how to react to the event in question? 2. Financial issues: Does the adult child earn an adequate living on his or her own, or does he or she rely heavily on parental input for things such as job contacts, supplemental funds, or housing? 3. Practical issues/interactive situations: Can the person manage day-to-day living, finances, nutrition, exercise, and housekeeping? 4. Career/Education issues: Does the person have a rewarding job or career that is commensurate with his or her abilities and offers the potential for further success? Is the person willing to learn new things to increase his or her productivity or compensation? These are the basic skills of living, many of which are addressed in the social ability questionnaire. Just as there are levels of social functioning, so too there are levels of independent functioning. All three of the following levels describe an adult with some degree of dependency problems. A healthy adult is someone who is independent financially, is able to manage practical and interactive issues, and who stays in touch with family but does not rely almost solely on family for emotional support. Level 1—Low Functioning Emotional issues: Lives at home with parent(s) or away from home in a fully structured or supervised environment. Financial issues: Contributes virtually nothing financially to the running of the household. Practical issues: Chooses clothes to wear that day, but does not manage own wardrobe (i.e., laundry, shopping, etc.). Relies on family members to buy food and prepare meals. Does few household chores, if any. May try a few tasks when asked, but seldom follows through until the job is finished. Career/education issues: Is not table to keep a job, and therefore does not earn an independent living. Extremely resistant to learning new skills or changing responsibilities. Level 2: Moderately functioning Emotional issues: Lives either at home or nearby and calls home every day. Relies on parents to discuss all details of daily life, from what happened at work or school that day to what to wear the next day. Will call home for advice rather than trying to figure something out for him- or herself. Financial issues: May rely on parents for supplemental income—parents may supply car, apartment, etc. May be employed by parents at an inflated salary for a job with very few responsibilities. May be irresponsible about paying bills. Practical issues: Is able to make daily decisions about clothing, but may rely on parents when shopping for clothing and other items. Neglects household responsibilities such as laundry, cleaning and meal planning. Career/education issues: Has a job, but is unable to cope with much on-the-job stress; job is therefore only minimally challenging, or a major source of anxiety—discussed in detail with Mom and Dad. Level 3: Functioning Emotional issues: Lives away from home. Calls home a few times a week, relies on family for emotional support and most socializing. Few friends. Practical issues: Handles all aspects of daily household management independently. Financial issues: Is financially independent, pays bills on time. Career/education issues: Has achieved some moderate success at work. Is willing to seek new information, even to take an occasional class to improve skills.

Anxiety does not exist to control you. You exist to control it. It is, as I said, a simple fact of life that can be managed. In fact, used properly, it can actually give you an extra boost by heightening your energy and awareness. If you have social anxiety about such things as giving a presentation, speaking up at a meeting, attending a social gathering, initiating plans, developing intimacy in friendships and dating, then learning to manage your anxiety will help. This book will teach you how to channel your anxiety—not how to eliminate it. The twelve chapters delineate a five-step program that essentially works like this: Step I: Identify your anxiety symptoms and recognize the ways in which they interfere with your life. Your social fears prevent you from doing things you would like to do (pursue friendships, date, achieve career success). Pinpointing your stress responses and noting what causes them give you the information you need to move on to Step 2. Step 2: Set short- and long-term social goals. Having identified the situations you have trouble confronting, you can identify immediate goals to work toward, and start to form a vision of your ideal social self. Goal-setting is a valuable way of letting your imagination offer a reward for your hard work. Next, you will begin to learn skills that can make your dream a reality. Step 3: Learn stress management and self-awareness. The techniques outlined in this book will allow you to control your anxiety response and tune in to your own desires and strong points, giving you more to share as you become more comfortable interacting. With your anxiety in check and your self-awareness guiding you toward fulfillment, anxiety becomes positive energy and will be the base of your self-empowerment. Now you are ready to polish your social skills. Step 4: Learn or refine social skills. Your fear has diminished, making it possible to refine social skills and enhance your interactive productivity, which will make the difference between social success and failure. Good conversation, active listening, an awareness of what behavior is appropriate—all of these skills will add to your overall social ability and self-empowerment. Step 5: Expand and refine your social network. At this point, you are ready to roll. You understand your anxiety, your stress is manageable, and you have learned the finer points of interacting in a positive, productive manner. The final step is to use your community’s resources to create, expand, or refine your social network to best meet your interactive goals. No matter who you are, you can improve your social network to better suit your needs. From here, anything is possible!