But I was writing to Marie today about a new job that has come open in my same company -- an internal transfer that would mean moving halfway across the country but that I think I'm seriously interested in ... if they'll have me. And as I wrote the letter, I realized all of a sudden that I already knew why career decisions have always been so difficult for me. In other words, I figured this out a while ago. Only I don't know when, or where, or anything like that. All I knew was that. as I wrote the words below, I had already known them for some time.
They want the candidate to be "ambitious" and I wonder what they mean by that? .... [snip]
- Maybe they want someone who has mapped out his future and knows exactly where he's going next. That's not me either. (As a side note, I've long realized that my biggest professional weakness is that I have enormous difficulty planning my professional future -- deciding where I want to go next. It's odd, because in other venues I have worked hard to allow myself to see what it is that I really want. So why not in this one area? A while ago it finally came to me. The reason I can't tell what I want in my professional future is that at a deep level -- the level of what I "really want" -- I find the whole thing preposterous. As far as my subconscious is concerned, it's obvious that in reality there's no way I'm going to make a career in the business world, where I am ... right? This is just a job to fill time until I take up a professorship somewhere. Somehow my subconscious never got the memo that yes, in fact, this is Real Life and it's time to adjust. My subconscious can be kind of stupid sometimes. End of parenthesis.)
The letter went on from there, but this is the part I wanted to share with you. Understanding this part is golden. The rest? Meh ... we'll see how it goes.
