Preparing Yourself: Finding a Vocation
In this fourth part, we return to questions of personal growth. The important questions we need to answer are: what do I want to do, or what am I doing, with my life? Who do I want to be? And Augustine’s question “What do I want to be remembered for?”
You cannot answer the questions overnight. Drucker illustrates this:
Joseph Schumpeter, one of the greatest economists of this century, claimed at twenty-five that he wanted to be remembered as the best horseman in Europe, the greatest lover in Europe, and as a great economist. By age sixty, just before he died, he was asked the question again. He no longer talked of horsemanship and he no longer talked of women. He said he wanted to be remembered as the man who had given an early warning of the dangers of inflation (2012, 158).
Drucker’s memory of the last interview is inconsistent, as he gives another reply elsewhere:
Schumpeter said, ‘… I want to be remembered as having been the teacher who converted half a dozen brilliant students into first-rate economists’ (1997, 110).
Both versions are consistent with an ongoing refinement of our answers. Marcia Baxter Magolda has followed some of her students through to their mid-30s and recorded their growing sense of what she calls self-authorship. She has identified ongoing changes as to what they believe, and how they see themselves and others. We will look in Chapter 12 at some theories on what changes can occur.
Both versions of the Schumpeter story are also perhaps a little presumptuous, and contain something of what Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit order, called vainglory—and not just the horsemanship and loving. We can recognize Schumpeter as a great economist, but his early warning of the dangers of inflation appears to have gone unheeded and forgotten, while I am uncertain whether anyone can convert their students into anything. What would it have meant if he had failed at all three objectives through no fault of his own?
Ignatius’s concern with vainglory was that he found himself constantly tempted to overestimate the importance of what he was doing and to dream of great things. If you also face this timewasting fault, you may find some help in Ignatius’s “remedy for that spiritual illness”: acknowledge that our lives are a gift. Call it luck if you prefer, but if you find it difficult, read Daniel Kahneman and put more feedback loops into your life. When I am daydreaming about my superior insights, I find it salutary to go through my card playing with my bridge partner—over a coffee the morning after we have played. That doddery 80-year old—she had me fooled!
The question of what we want to be remembered for should also not be a burden. At school, teachers and visiting preachers frequently told us that, as rich white youths, we had enormous privileges that came with responsibilities. They told us that our generation could change the country. For some of us this became a burden that reduced our ability to enjoy life, and created an unwarranted sense of guilt. Of course, the adults who pressed these points upon us were suffering from the same burden, which they perhaps tried to alleviate by transferring the responsibilities to us. The problem was that we, like they, did not know what to do.
Part of the problem was then, and is now, the enormity and urgency of the challenges around us: reforming the financial system, removing unfair discrimination, ending poverty, stopping violence, overpopulation, and climate change. We look at a small selection of them, feel helpless, and either give up or join the first cause that allows us to develop enough enthusiasm to hide from our helplessness.
However, if we cannot start with the problems, we can start with developing the solution—our own selves—where we do have some power, however feeble. This work of developing ourselves includes clarifying our vocations. Tim Hall and Dawn Chandler (2005) report that it is widely agreed that finding your vocation requires identification of your personal skills and strengths and a strong sense of involvement or passion. What is also necessary is that the purpose needs to be to meet some real societal need. Figure 4.1 below provides an outline of what is covered in Part 4.
Clarifying our vocation means growing in ourselves. It means developing our understanding and our skills (the head and hands in the diagram) and directing our interests and passions (the heart). It also means growing externally and playing an increasingly fruitful role in the communities in which we participate.
John Zenger and Joseph Folkman use a similar diagram to help people discover what they call their “leadership sweet spot” at the intersection of three circles of competence, organizational need, and passion. As with many in their field, their focus is on helping managers develop their effectiveness, while taking organizational needs and passions as given. The intention of Figure 4.1 is to suggest that we can develop ourselves in all areas, and that applications will occur in a wider community than the workplace.
Figure 4.1 Clarifying our Vocation
Chapter 12 considers the heart, covering the relationship between our passions and the virtues, and how we can develop them. Chapter 13 discusses developing the strengths of our head and hands, and Chapter 14, how it all can be applied in the outer circles for the good of the community. We will all contribute beyond our jobs in finance, but the contributions in these other circles are beyond the scope of this book!