Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books (mostly)

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Steve Martin’s First Job

Steve Martin’s First Job

It seems fitting that Steve Martin’s first job was at Disneyland.

I mean, Disneyland might be the perfect crossroads for a career in entertainment.

You can see fantasy/comedy/movies/and stage acting all rolled up into one.

(Of course, bicycles could be left about without locks back then – but that’s fodder for a different kind of post.)

My first job was as a dishwasher…

It showed me behind the curtain of the foodservice business.

I would go home late every night smelling to high heaven, the scraps of every plate recently peeled from my shirt.

But it, above all, impressed on me the idea that I didn’t want to be a dishwasher forever. ✋

I pedaled my bicycle the two miles to Disneyland, parked it in the bike rack—locks were unnecessary—and looked up to see a locomotive from yesteryear, its whistle blowing loudly and its smokestack filling the air with white steam, chugging into the turn-of-the-century depot just above a giant image of Mickey Mouse rendered in vibrantly colored flowers. I went to the exit, told a hand-stamper that I was applying for a job, and was directed toward a souvenir stand a few steps inside the main gate. I spoke with a cigar-chomping vendor named Joe and told him my résumé: no experience at anything. This must have impressed Joe, because I was issued a candy-striped shirt, a garter for my sleeve, a vest with a watch pocket, a straw boater hat, and a stack of guidebooks to be sold for twenty-five cents each, from which I was to receive the enormous sum of two cents per book. The two dollars in cash I earned that day made me feel like a millionaire.

-Steve Martin, Born Standing Up (Amazon)

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Filed Under: PotpourriTagged With: #Entertain, #Jobs

Why You Might Ignore Most Vocational Guidance

Why You Might Ignore Most Vocational Guidance

Most vocational guidance is an enigma, isn’t it?

The only real advice anyone can give you falls into one of two categories.

#1
Is that they think X pays more than Y (which should be obvious, right?).

Or:

#2
Is that they think you will be happier doing A, rather than B.

This is all true if you are looking for a job. But a vocation is something that runs a little deeper.

A vocation is like a calling, I think, for which “money” and “happiness” should play less of a role.

What are you willing to sacrifice and lose yourself in?

I say you should build a useful talent stack, follow your interests, and see where providence takes you.

And yeah – if you seek to be wise, rather than become wise – you will likely never get what you are after.

The former is simply status-seeking, which is always hollow.

But the latter is something closer to enlightenment.

And to bring this immediately home to his audience, comprised largely of students, he continues by noting that the middlebrow “does not wish to become wise, only to be wise, to graduate cum laude.” He thereby drives a wedge between the quest for genuine wisdom and the desire to be academically (and then, of course, socially and economically) successful. To have a vocation, Auden says, is to be in a state of “subjective requiredness”: your vocation is something you are required to do, but the requirement comes from within. You are the one who is called, not necessarily anyone else, and likewise you alone are the discerner of the call. “For this reason Vocational Guidance is a contradiction in terms. The only reasons another can give me why I should adopt this career rather than that are that I should be more successful or happier or it pays better, but such matters are precisely what I must not think about if I am really to find my vocation.”

-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)

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Filed Under: PotpourriTagged With: #Career, #Jobs

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