CC4A: Researching careers

Yesterday was my fourth career counseling appointment of six. However, Debbie ended the appointment after half an hour and said that our next appointment will also be 30 minutes, so I infer that I should consider the two together as session number four.

At the previous session she had given me the assignment of looking up various candidate careers in the Occupational Outlook Handbook and assessing the future climate for each. I'm not sure if the shorter session was because I did an incomplete job of this, or if it's just part of the natural iterative give-and-take of counseling, i.e. assign a task, review it when it's completed, and keep moving forward by steps. Either way, I think we're moving forward at a good pace, and her task assignments are helping me pull off the balancing act between taking forever to research EVERY plausible career and not taking long enough hence deciding by impulse.

As I collected the data for potential careers, I assembled them into this table:

	Positives	Questions/doubts
Marketing mgr (specifically, market research or Web marketing)	· Uses analytical skill in a people-focused role. · Strategic planning. · Very versatile – can apply to any geography or industry. · Web experience is somewhat transferrable, esp. SEO. · Web marketing probably lends itself well to consulting/freelancing. · Upward mobility, if that matters to me. · Highest compensation on this list.	· “Corporate” culture? Perhaps less in Web industry. · Long hours. (Not so bad if I’m interested in my work.)
Non-profit manager OOH	Obvious sense of purpose. · Strategic planning. · Moderately versatile – can apply to any geography. Experience is probably transferable to other industries. · Could aim at one of my “real” long-term goals – one day consulting for n/ps whose mission I share.	· Past experience of lots of bureaucracy in n/ps. Are managers able to “see above” the daily BS? · Have to get past negative feelings associated with pursuing this path abortively in 2005.
School counselor	Obvious sense of purpose. I enjoy helping people confront issues or plan their future. · I enjoy working this population, esp. high-school age. · Geographically versatile. · I once read somewhere that this career path can also lead to career counseling for adults. Not sure if this is true. · Academic year would be great! Could I pursue personal projects (e.g., travel; semipro poker; outreach stuff) in my off months? Or is the summer full of conferences, paperwork, etc.?	Unclear whether this involves a counseling or an education degree. I’ve been “warned” that education schools can be less intellectually rigorous than some other disciplines. Is this true? Salary less than some other options although adequate.
Teacher (e.g. high school social science or special ed)	Obvious sense of purpose. I enjoy teaching. · I enjoy working with this population. · Geographically versatile. · Academic year.	Reservations about education schools Lowest salary here.
Professor/researcher, Organizational Behavior (also possible: Soc, Econ, etc.)	Academia might suit me. Raw intellect and curiosity are more highly valued here. Great freedom to pursue my own research interests, subject to guidance. Sense of purpose: Expanding knowledge. Academic year. Sabbaticals are more common here than anywhere else.	Academia is full of bureaucracy Publish or perish. As long as I were researching something I liked, I don’t think that would be so bad. PhD is a lot of work. I need to gain self-confidence that I won’t just get bored and scuttle it two years in.
Industrial/Organizational Psychologist OOH	This is a really intriguing field, and I think I would really love studying how people work best. Sense of purpose: improving the work environment for others. Lends itself to consulting.	Necessary to catch up on a lot of undergrad psych courses, which will take a long time. Any way to shorten this time (e.g., corequisites)?

And finally, an eventual goal that I hinted at above:

Church/non-profit consultant (specializing in issues of religious and cultural change)	Is this a sudden change in tack? Not really. Reading They Like Jesus but Not the Church has reminded me of this big aspiration, but it was already underlying some of my analysis above. Some thoughts about this idea: In a way this is my ultimate goal, but I don’t know how to get there. This isn’t really a well-defined career path, so I may need to follow along with something better defined, gaining in: experience contacts resources (savings) Until I have a clearer idea how to pull this off. Could be a full-time or bivocational goal – hence any other career where I make a living but have time to play a positive role in this way, via networking, writing, etc. is fine. However, a “day job” more closely aligned to these interests is probably a good thing.
	So it might be helpful to assess the above options in terms of how close they get me there. My previous volunteer experience in outreach is closely related to this. It provides first-hand experience, and I would like to do that sort of thing again (possibly bivocationally). However, more important to me than helping a few people in my surroundings is equipping others to help people in their surroundings!

Later on, I scribbled down some more thoughts that I never shared with Debbie:

And finally, an eventual goal that I hinted at above:

Church/non-profit consultant (specializing in issues of religious and cultural change)	Is this a sudden change in tack? Not really. Reading They Like Jesus but Not the Church has reminded me of this big aspiration, but it was already underlying some of my analysis above. Some thoughts about this idea: In a way this is my ultimate goal, but I don’t know how to get there. This isn’t really a well-defined career path, so I may need to follow along with something better defined, gaining in: experience contacts resources (savings) Until I have a clearer idea how to pull this off. Could be a full-time or bivocational goal – hence any other career where I make a living but have time to play a positive role in this way, via networking, writing, etc. is fine. However, a “day job” more closely aligned to these interests is probably a good thing.
	So it might be helpful to assess the above options in terms of how close they get me there. My previous volunteer experience in outreach is closely related to this. It provides first-hand experience, and I would like to do that sort of thing again (possibly bivocationally). However, more important to me than helping a few people in my surroundings is equipping others to help people in their surroundings!

So I'm not sure if the above is really what I was supposed to be doing as I researched, but it certainly felt helpful to compile it!

For the next two weeks I have several more concrete items Debbie gave me to research. For example, how do you become a college career counselor? What sort of degree is needed for that? What's the job outlook for marketing researchers? This is all great stuff to be thinking about, but it's a little overwhelming. It feels like there's no way I can possibly fit in all the research I need to do when I keep coming home so depressed and just worn out by my day job.

Oh well, at least I'm excited about something in my life, and that's way better than being excited about nothing.

Hanging in there -- barely

To try to motivate myself to concentrate on work that doesn't inherently inspire me, I make up a lot of games and challenges. The most consistent one is to keep a daily count of the number of times I consciously shut down superfluous stuff like Web surfing and make myself focus on whatever I'm supposed to be doing, or at least what I think I'm supposed to be doing. Then I reward myself, presently at the tune of 20 cents per point, towards the purchase of some frivolity such as a poker book.

(I'll break in and say that to the non-ADHD this may sound childish, or like I'm lazy or undisciplined or have no compunction about getting paid to goof off. Hopefully by the fact that you're reading this blog, you realize that life isn't as simple as all that for some of us, and that it requires conscious effort for some of us to make ourselves concentrate.)

Some days I forget to keep score, but in general my nadir is something like 5 or 7 -- on days where I come in, do some productive stuff in the morning, then think, "Screw it," and stop making the effort to focus. (I still do some work after that, just that I don't make that same conscious effort.) Until recently my high score had been something like 15 to 20. Lately I've been racking up days of 25 or 30. That's not because I'm any more motivated or excited about my work. To the contrary, I have less and less idea why I'm even here. The higher scores are just because I've been trying hard to "brute force" my way through this lack of motivation. I don't think that approach will work forever, but at least it's getting me through another day at a time.

Question of the day: An eccentric billionaire has offered you a job digging a ditch in his back yard, then filling it back in. What salary would you require for such a quintessentially futile task?

Miscellany / So what’s your story?

I’m struggling even more than usual to concentrate today, for a couple of reasons. One is that one of our co-workers left the company. She was pretty much the person here with whom I most identified, and the operation was six people, so it’s hard not to let that distract me.

Secondly, I had a conversation at lunch that really confirmed and even expanded my sense that I work on a site without a clear purpose. Perhaps it’s just a communication gap, whereby the boss has never clearly expressed the goals for this site. Or perhaps those goals and strategy really don’t exist, and the plan has always been to “Just put up a site on that domain and see if anyone shows up.” At any rate, this gets back to the stuff about me being MBTI intuitive. If I don’t know that there’s a bigger plan, then it’s really hard to motivate myself.

I have my fourth of six career counseling appointments on Wednesday. I think I'll beg my counselor to please please pleeeeeeease give me permission to quit in good conscience!

I’d like to use the blog as a means of communication with the adult ADHD community, and to learn about other people’s experiences. On one Web analytics blog that I love, the author makes a point to end each post with one or more questions. I don’t know if I’ll do that all the time, but I’d like to get in that habit.

So what about you, Dear Reader? What brought you here today, and what’s your experience with working life as an ADHD or INFP or merely jaded and frustrated adult? Or conversely, what makes you happy about your working environment? Let’s start a conversation in the comments.

Whine whine whine

I'm trying to cut down on the mopey, "emo" posts here. I have multiple motivations for blogging, but the biggest one is to document my feelings and actions for the benefit of others in the same boat. Ranting repetitively about how I feel at work probably isn't that helpful to that end. (However, the second-biggest motivation for blogging is to use it as a coping mechanism, and repetitive rants are great for that purpose!)

Just thinking a lot about the need for stimulation.... rewarding myself for not surfing (too much), clapping my hands, imagining a marching band doing circles around my brain, whatever I have to do to survive.

One thing that would probably help, based on my career counselor's recommendation, is to take more (or in my case, clearer) breaks during the day. I goof off plenty during the day, but more important is to actually get up from the computer and walk around a bit.

A very lame entry

Need stimulation.... badly. Blue Valkyrie is about to die.

No joke -- sometimes during the day I just start clapping my hands because I feel the incredible need to do something. I'm sure my coworkers must wonder what that's about. A saner alternative that I've tried a couple of times is to bring in a few poker chips to stack and play with, but they became such a conversation piece that I stopped doing it. Maybe if I just used generic chips instead of real casino chips from my collection....

Actually, it's more interesting to sit here and ponder why the couple of coding tasks I could be doing don't get me more fired up. I mean, I have evidence galore that coding just isn't what I should be doing, so in some ways I'm gilding the lily here. If someone tells you Career X isn't ideal for you, and wouldn't you prefer Careers A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J?, it's sort of silly to invest more time thinking about why Career X isn't ideal.

But still, I like some things about coding, and self-knowledge is valuable, so I sit here pondering why I can't get started on these tasks. Blame the boss is way too easy, but I really think it's because I have no clear priorities set for my time. I know that I used to perceive one of these projects as really important; then it became clear that my perception was "misaligned," and so I stopped thinking about that one for a few weeks. The other one is just finishing up some work so we feel like we're getting our money's worth from a vendor, but frankly, it's a feature that won't have a dozen users by the end of its season in a couple of months. It's very hard to motivate myself to do either of these.

Tilt

One of my coworkers is convinced that I need to be more direct in expressing my views to our boss. I've been trying for, well, for the better part of the last six months to suggest that we need to think more about the content that's lacking on the site I work on, and less about writing code to produce bells and whistles. I've been suggesting this diplomatically, and it hasn't gained any traction. Her premise, if I'm understanding it, is that I should go to my boss's office and say something tactful but direct along the lines of, "No offense, but we need to think about why people aren't using this site."

This just does not compute.

I'm trying hard to be open-minded enough to consider that she could be right. Perhaps the boss just isn't sensitive to subtle hints. But what I've learned through bitter experience is, you're never going to win in the workplace trying to convince someone that they're wrong. You're just not. Especially not your boss. Obviously our boss has a lot invested in this strategy of "hire software developers to put neat applets on the site." Trying to talk him into adapting that strategy, to seeing the value of anything besides hiring software developers, is sort of pointless. (Never mind the aspect of talking myself out of a job; at this point I'd be delighted to get severance and unemployment if they decided they needed something besides a developer.)

People in power don't care for those who question their fundamental assumptions, do they? I suppose I need to learn to present the idea in such a way that the boss thinks it's his idea. I don't know how to do that.

The whole situation is reflective of the tension that this work generates for me. Normal people can just turn this whole drama off, can be happy they're paid to dig a hole and then happy they're paid to fill the hole back in. If only. I'd love to be able to turn my brain off, to literally not care whether there's any point to my work or not, to really be apathetic to whether anyone uses the site I work on or whether people who see it for the first time consider coming back. I wish the big picture didn't always matter to me. But I'm cursed to be MBTI intuitive, so this matters to me greatly.

Teenage Rebellion Has Become a Mental Illness

Teenage Rebellion Has Become a Mental Illness by Bruce Levine

I found this article a few days ago reposted here and it reminded me of fairlane's Jonestown blog -- thanks for the link by the way -- in its theme of suppression of those who question the status quo by labeling the mentally ill.

Throughout American history, both direct and indirect resistance to authority has been diseased. In an 1851 article in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright reported his discovery of "drapetomania," the disease that caused slaves to flee captivity. Cartwright also reported his discovery of "dysaesthesia aethiopis," the disease that caused slaves to pay insufficient attention to the master's needs. Early versions of ODD and ADHD?

In Rush's lifetime, few Americans took anarchia seriously, nor was drapetomania or dysaesthesia aethiopis taken seriously in Cartwright's lifetime. But these were eras before the diseasing of defiance had a powerful financial ally in Big Pharma.

In every generation there will be authoritarians. There will also be the "bohemian bourgeois" who may enjoy anti-authoritarian books, music, and movies but don't act on them. And there will be genuine anti-authoritarians, who are so pained by exploitive hierarchies that they take action. Only occasionally in American history do these genuine anti-authoritarians actually take effective direct action that inspires others to successfully revolt, but every once in a while a Tom Paine comes along. So authoritarians take no chances, and the state-corporate partnership criminalizes anti-authoritarianism, pathologizes it, markets drugs to "cure" it and financially intimidates those who might buck the system.

It would certainly be a dream of Big Pharma and those who favor an authoritarian society if every would-be Tom Paine -- or Crazy Horse, Tecumseh, Emma Goldman or Malcolm X -- were diagnosed as a youngster with mental illness and quieted with a lifelong regimen of chill pills. The question is: Has this dream become reality?

It certainly applies to more than just teens, but I suppose most deviance is "diagnosed" and "treated" at that life stage, especially if the doctors and authority figures have their way.

Now, I'm not quite this cynical about where we stand. I'm really not sure if overmedication and labeling of dubious mental illnesses is something that's been plotted in nefarious back-room meetings for decades, or if it's just something that developed organically. Certainly the pharmaceutical companies have a huge financial stake in overmedication. Therefore I think they're just seeking their best interest, totally orthagonal to any desire by authoritarians to keep the serfs docile and somewhat happy.

But still, when you think about fascism beyond people just throwing the word out at someone they don't like -- well, what exactly is the union of government power and corporate power if not what we're seeing nowadays? It really creeps me out, because I think Americans are generally too stupid and addicted to bread and circuses to realize where we stand. Just give me some sweet narratives about freedom and democracy and leave me alone to watch the football game or American Idol; I'm certainly not awake enough to really question whether I'm free or my country is democratic.

Anyway, I'm off on a rant, but.... yeah. If things aren't as bad as Bruce Levine suggests, they could easily get that bad.

Why software isn't the worst possible career for me

In a message to a fellow INFP approaching career change, I wrote down a few thoughts that I think are worth posting. The premise is that I like some things about my present field, software development. In fact I like just enough to keep bringing me back to it, even though another career would probably be better suited.

As long as I'm learning something new, actually software is kind of cool. I can think to myself, "Wow, so THAT's how that works!" But when it comes time to plow my way through coding something that's not new or innovative, I lose patience very quickly and have no focus....

Making a change is hard and risky. I've been just unhappy enough to blame specific bosses or to otherwise think that my next experience in software will be the one that fulfills the potential to excite me. Now I realize that it's far more likely that I just need a career change.

Of course it hasn't helped that every time I've contemplated a career change and attempted to act on that contemplation, something really bad has come out of it:

• My disastrous experience marketing for the "Christian" college in which a rather sadistic boss fired me after a few weeks despite the dean's (her boss's) assurances I had nothing to worry about.
  
• My entry-level social services job, where I realized that individual contributors can't do much in that field without at least a masters.
• Applying to business school with the idea of specializing in non-profit management, only to have my star recommender disappear on me leading me to give up the whole thing in disgust.
• That abusive "ministry internship" that had my boss, a missionary whom I had earlier respected, screaming at me never to do ministry.

So much negativity. Sigh.

Therefore, it's repeatedly seemed easier just to shut my mouth and plod on through with the software work. At least I know I possess the skills. I just don't possess the motivation, not for more than a few months at a time.

It's hard to have faith that this time, the transition will be smoother.

CC3: Fresh ideas, renewed enthusiasm

Yesterday was my third one-hour phone session of six with my career counselor. I came out of that very enthusiastic and excited about writing up a post about it, but in true INFP+ADHD form I got busy with other things and am only getting to it now.

The first session was mostly me telling her my work history, and the second was largely her reading and "interpreting" the fancy reports from the MBTI, Strong, and 16PF. This third session was the first one where I felt like her role was to really provide substantial amounts of new information to help me pare down my list of prospective careers into something manageable. She also helped me assess the steps that would be necessary to pursue each one.

Per her instructions I had marked up the page from the Strong with the ten top careers, highlighting the aspects of each role that would appeal to me. I had also done some written exercises on values, work/life balance, etc. After this third session, I've pared my prospective careers down to four:

Marketing: This was a suggestion from Strong, "Marketing manager", that i had thought about but not really taken seriously. I'm really warming up to this because I'm finding that I enjoy learning and thinking about how to use Web analytics, and that's clearly a marketing question. If I go this route the obvious next step is an MBA. It's worth noting that some of my efforts on that horrible abortive effort to apply to business school back in 2005 could be useful here; for example, I already have great GMATs. Debbie stressed that I would need to be sure to get an internship, rather than just assuming that the degree itself would be sufficient to help me break in. She also suggested focusing on the international aspects of marketing in light of my cross-cultural interests and skills, which I think is great advice.

Non-profit management: After publishing the first draft of this post I realized that I left out another topic we had discussed briefly, non-profit management. I think it probably involves the same career path as the marketing, i.e. an MBA, but perhaps with a different mix of schools.

School counseling: This is an old favorite, one of the Strong's ten, and still a very viable one. We didn't talk too much about how I would get there, but I gather it would involve getting at least a masters in some sort of education or counseling program.

Special education: This was another of the Strong's ten. Honestly it excites me less than the counseling and seems to have a lot in common with it, although I'm not sure why it excites me less. I love teaching, and some past experiences with special-needs adults have been extremely positive. Debbie mentioned that in this field, there are so few males that my sex would probably work to my advantage. It's a viable option, but probably the least exciting of these four.

Organizational behavior or industrial/organization psychology: I first mentioned OB as an academic subject that fascinates me. I suppose it would involve getting a PhD in business, and then becoming a professor at a business school or perhaps some sort of consultant. I don't know a lot about OB as such, but I sit around thinking about questions like, "If Scott Adams knows enough about what's wrong with Corporate America to ridicule it in Dilbert, and if all his readers viscerally know that he's on target, then why don't corporations fix these obvious problems?" Stuff like that.

IOP was Debbie's suggestion after I mentioned OB, and the more I look into it the more it intrigues me. I found the USN&WR list of top schools with that specialization, although I could only see the top three without paying to register. Michigan State, Minnesota, Bowling Green -- hmm, a very Midwestern flavor. Is this just to improve the productivity of manufacturing workers, e.g. in the auto industry, even as their jobs go overseas, or does it also apply to knowledge fields like software development, law, whatever? Unclear, but that's one thing I'll be researching. Alas, it does appear that you need some undergrad psych courses to apply to grad programs, so I'd have to work at making up that deficiency. So it seemed natural to lump OB and IOP together.

So I came out of the conversation enthused about several ideas. My task for the two weeks until our next talk is to research some of these careers.

A fellow INFPer, Meyers-Briggs prayers, and more!

For work I'm learning about Google Analytics, and that's lead me to start checking these metrics on my own site to see who's out there reading this blog. One great thing GA lets you do is see those search terms that lead people to your site, and by running those same searches you can find some fun and quite relevant content.

Apparently a couple of people have found my blog partially using the search term INFP, which is awesome. Hi there, folks. One of the searches also led me to this post: cybette's blog: INFP = ADD = Depression. Very interesting stuff, and I like her hypotheses about different reasons why our personality type may correlate with depression and ADHD, especially this one:

So what causes depression? Stress (among other factors). Feeling the need to "fit in" a world dominated by ESTJ/SJ's, or at least a world where ESTJ type is encouraged (many U.S. presidents are ESTJ's, including George W. Bush). Also, a lot of gifted and creative kids are mis-diagnosed with ADD, simply because they are misunderstood.

Count me shocked, shocked!, that GWB would show up as a J. Anyway, it's very interesting stuff.

She also cited short "prayers" for each of the 16 MBTI types. Here are a couple:

• INFP: God, help me to finish everything I sta
• ENFP: God, help me to keep my mind on one th -Look a bird- ing at a time.

Pretty much, yeah.

Danger, danger

Feelings of worthlessness and self-pity are strong today. Trying to trust God with it.

Nutrition or delicacy?

I started to entitle this "OK-ness", which would be ironic since the overuse of the suffix -ness is one of my millions of peeves. Then I wanted to entitle it "Hope," but I got off topic.

Yesterday I had a session with another counselor, not the career one, and I kept trying to present a balanced view between the fact that I'm incredibly frustrated during my workday but generally optimistic about the direction in which things will soon be headed. I actually was surprised that he kept summarizing the conversation in generally positive terms, because I don't think I sound very cheery when I'm on that topic. But I really do have to remind myself that as difficult as I find it from day-to-day, things really are headed toward getting better.

It's hard to recall that now, because I'm really struggling again today. It dawned on me that one reason it's really hard to explain excruciating boredom to normal people is because I really don't know if they have a category for it! Perhaps they see boredom as merely the absence of something interesting. So if you're bored, well, it's not as good as if something really wonderful is happening to you. Conversely, it's not as bad as something awful is happening to you. I mean, it's really neither bad nor good, just... boring. Right? I really don't know if other people see boredom that way.

This comparison may be a bit contrived, but it strikes me as somewhat akin to the difference between food -- any food -- and some particular delicacy, say, chocolate cake. I suppose that most people desire some sort of intellectual stimulation, much as they might desire chocolate cake. If they happen upon a piece of cake every week or two, great! If not, nothing really cataclysmic happens. They're missing out on something desirable, perhaps, but it's clearly a desire, not a need.

When I go without intellectual stimulation, I feel starved, desperate to rectify the situation. For me it's a need, not a desire.

I don't think other people can get that. When I imagine them saying to me, "Just suck it up! It's work. It's not supposed to be fun," I have the feeling they think they're talking about chocolate cake, not realizing that I'm dying of malnutrition.