Thursday, September 10, 2009

At a staff meeting yesterday we discussed how the job environment has changed in the last twenty years. Back then, one was expected to remain in the same job for almost all of your working life. Ten years later, people were predicted to have 6 to 7 jobs during their lifetimes. Nowadays, we are likely to change careers at the same speed and number. This sounds both scary and promising. We could still choose to become filmmakers, environmentalists, restaurateurs or graphic novel writers. What scares me the most is our inability to stick with one choice, and make it the center our existence. Victor’s Mom has been a Classic Ballet dancer since she was a little girl. I can’t picture her doing anything else besides designing choreographies and training children with the techniques she learned in Russia during her youth. Everything in her life is inspired from her discipline and artistic elegance. Somehow it is monothematic. On the other side of the spectrum, some of us are still trying to define precisely what drives us. It might be that our mistake is looking for something in particular that probably doesn’t even exist, and our richness relies on our flexibility to adapt and find beauty and excitement in too many things. I guess one of our eternal dilemmas is to choose between digging deep into one specific subject, or superficially learn about a wide variety of them.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have only met one person in my whole life who feels so realized working in what he really loves to do, that in fact, he told me once that he has the impresion that the has never had a real job since he is just having a good time, enjoying working until late hours at night.
This is admirable, if you get to reach that balance and satisfaction in your life, it doesn't matter if you are just being monofacetic, you are just being yourself.....

Dare Devil Pancakes said...

I agree, and I have met several people like that. Twyla Tharp or other similar artists provide examples of how far you can go if you dedicate your life to a sole idea/project. My questioning is around the fact that most of us aren't like that, and we feel sometimes frustrated by it. So I propose to stop the quest to find the single most important issue, and assume we are interested or even distracted by a millon things.