I do believe that for most everything in life that goes wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself. You may not be able to control what happens, but you are in control both of how prepared you are and how you react.

You are afraid of losing your job in an unstable job market? Perhaps you should rally to make it legally impossible for your employers to fire you? No. If you are afraid of being fired then you should carefully work to gain more skills to make yourself flexible, useful, and indispensable. Even if your current employer for his or her completely unfathomable reasons decides to let you go, your talent will be easily recognized elsewhere. Are you certain that your current employer will not recommend you to others, because he/she is a "huge jerk" who is "completely irrational"? I recommend turning the magnifying glass upon yourself, and wondering why it is that you find most supervisors difficult or irrational. No matter the odious nature of your supervisor, no matter the way your personalities "clash", each and every interaction with another person is an opportunity for self improvement. Your supervisor may be exceedingly dull, but excellent at networking. Your adviser may be very smart but lacking in social skills. Your coworkers may disgust you at the way they gossip about others. Anyone could use improvement in networking skills or book smarts. Coworkers can be a very stunning reminder of how bad you look when you continually speak badly about others; this situation also serves as a way to practice diffusing such "negativity tornadoes".

In this day and age, we are more likely to build an enormous fence around the swimming pool than to teach our children how to swim. We would rather keep all knives away from children rather than to teach them to use these knives safely. However, some day children will grow up, and they will have to swim, they will have to use knives, and they will have to experience pain, rejection, and disappointment. Worse, they will be unprepared to deal with these dangers, leaving them especially vulnerable and making the damage that much worse.

People who have not experienced much change are vulnerable to change. People who are not continually gaining skills are vulnerable to having their skills become obsolete. People who allow their fear to affect what they accomplish will continuously be disabled by their fears. Additionally, people who blame others for their failures will consistently avoid success, because whether or not you are to blame, the only person's behavior that you can change to make the situation better is your own. If you constantly look beyond what happens today, your frustration and short temper will be modulated by your long term goals, to which neither of these things is helpful.

So you're trying to talk me into taking yet ANOTHER three hours so I'll have a BS CPE/EE and a math minor. Thanks.
» ikimashokie on 2008-05-16 11:17:40

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