Most scanners' careers suffer immensely from their dabbling. Focus, relentless focus, becoming expert at something you care about is key--something you care about that has a reasonable chance of being remunerative.
I believe that the previous sentence may be the most helpful career advice I can give to anyone.
A generalist is someone who, for example, knows a good amount about all aspects of ONE line of work. For example, an art director has good if not superlative hand drawing skills, graphic design skills, management skills, and knowledge of principles of effective art communication and of aesthetics. That's a valuable person.
But even a generalist in many ways is less contributory to the world and feels less good about himself than a real expert say, in used CAD to draw anatomical illustrations in 3D.
Similarly, I have more respect for a career counselor who specializes in a certain type of client, for example, midcareer disenchanted internists than a generalist career counselor.
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. ... At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. And it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world. That’s one. Now add to that whatever your passion is, and you have two, because that’s the thing you’ll easily put enough energy into to reach the top 25%. If you have an aptitude for a third skill, perhaps business or public speaking, develop that too.
It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25%.
If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.
The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.
The kind of intelligence that Montaigne was really keen on he called "wisdom". Importantly, he said that one could be wise without ever going to a university. All you need in order to be wise, he thought, is a humility, a modesty, and an acceptance of your intellectual limitations. Wise people don't need to know everything. They can also accept that many events are outside of their control. They accept the limitations of their minds as much as their bodies.
What Montaigne was telling us is that if you come to university, you get very good at remembering lots of facts, you will pick up a lot of information, but you won't necessarily be able to apply it to your life.
Montaigne of course recognized that some people are cleverer than others; it is just the way our society identifies them which is wrong. In particular, there is something wrong with the exam system; it rewards the wrong thing: learning rather than wisdom.
Statistically it seems unlikely, there is little/no actual evidence, and admittedly it doesn't really fit in with a divine spark I think is needed for creation.
Through all problems of my life, my awareness of the love that I have felt, that I am being loved, that I love others, that I have been loved by others, this, to me, has been the supreme factor that has carried me though many critical moments when I might have otherwise phased out. Love is it. The cosmic support of love, the great mystery of love.
The twentieth century physicists,
In defining the physical universe
As consisting only of energy,
Deliberately excluded the metaphysical universe—
Because the metaphysical
Consists only of imponderables,
Whereas the physical scientists
Deal only with ponderables—
Wherefore their physical universe
Excluded for instance
All our thoughts,—
Because thoughts are weightless—
But thoughts are experiences—
Wherefore I saw
That to be adequate
To the intuitively formulated
And experience-founded controls
Of my ever bigger
Question and answer routine,
My answering definition
Of UNIVERSE
Must be one which
Embraced the combined
Metaphysical and physical
Components of UNIVERSE.
Thus my self-formulating answer emerged,
And has persisted unshattered
By any subsequent challenges
From myself or others
As:
"By universe I mean:
The aggregate of all humanity's
Consciously apprehended
And communicated
(To self or others)
Experiences."
And later I discovered that
Eddington had said "Science is:
The conscientious attempt
To set in order
The facts of Experience."
And I also discovered
That Ernst Mach said:
"Physics is:
Experience
Arranged in
Most economical order."
So I realized that
Both Eddington and Mach
Were seeking to put in order
The same "raw materials"—
I.e. Experiences—
With which to identify
Their special subsystems
Of UNIVERSE.
Wherefore I realized that
All the words in all dictionaries
Are the consequent tools
Of all men's conscious
And conscientious attempts
To communicate
All their experiences—
Which is of course
To communicate
Universe.
There are forty-three thousand current words
In the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
We don't know who invented them!
What an enormous, anonymous inheritance!
Shakespeare used ten thousand of them
With which to formulate
His complete "works."
It would take many more volumes
Than Shakepeare's to employ
The forty-three thousand—
Logically and cogently.
People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.
[...] the Penn researchers defined the quality as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”
They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way. [...]
But in general, people who share this kind of article seem to have loftier motives than trying to impress their friends. They’re seeking emotional communion, Dr. Berger said.
We look at the world through the eyes of Matt LeBlanc, an efficiency expert (or lean expert), who runs around with a stopwatch and equations, trying to figure out how to eliminate waste in our economy. He finds it everywhere.
Birth from antiquity through the Middle Ages was an all-girls affair orchestrated by men who had never seen a baby born. It was considered obscene for a man to enter the delivery room, yet they wrote the guidebooks, doling out advice based on hunches handed down over generations. (In 1522, Dr. Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room.) [...]
In any event, you were surrounded by a gaggle of women. Oddly enough, expectant women were not supposed to be catered to, but to cater. You were expected to act as hostess and serve the aptly coined "groaning beer" and "groaning cakes."
Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved -- and are still grieving -- when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?
This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say.
It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.
I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.
I've never regretted stopping when I did.
It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness.
We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery -- it recharges by running.
Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems. For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity.
I eventually admitted that I didn't have what it takes to be a good political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics.
It's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.
To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work. Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work.
We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential -- as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.
