Callings

Forrest ChristianCareers, Finding your purpose, happiness 1 Comment

We religious types talk about callings a lot. Christians of the Calvinist mindset even call all work, “your calling”. Other Americans have caught on, and many spiritual people of various types talk about callings. It’s not a term restricted to people of a particular faith, or even of any faith. Saying that you have a calling seems to encapsulate something important, something big.

I think that Calling is an important topic for most hidden high potentials. We use the term when we talk, seeing many of your frustrations through of the lens of frustrated calling. It’s an important topic, one that I’m now convinced I have to deal with openly. There’s just one small problem.

MQ-1B Predator UAV drone from U.S. Air Force. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Sabina Johnson

US Air Force Feeling the Level-shift Pain In Drone Program

Forrest ChristianCareers Leave a Comment

We’ve talked about how you can level-shift a job down — making it so that it only requires a lower level of work — can change the playing field and let you compete in what seems like a closed market. The Register, online source of all that is geeky news goodness, recently wrote about the US Air Force’s problems in handling how the Predator has changed the face of military reconnaissance flying but the Air Force can’t make the transition.

Fashion painting of models. 52nd Street New York, N.Y., ca. 1948. William P. Gottlieb. Public domain.

How Do You Know What You Can Do If There’s No One Modeling It?

Forrest ChristianCareers, Underachievers Leave a Comment

Dan Ariely, in Predictably Irrational, says “We don’t even know what we want to do with our lives — until we find a relative or a friend who is doing just what we think we should be doing.” Hidden high potentials often never get a model like this. What should they then do?

Should I Move To a Creative Class City?

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The Str4 artist at work: Little Birds. © 2008 Dawn Wheat. Used by permission. Part of Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” theory is that the world has become “spikey”: certain cities draw almost all the top talent in the world, leaving everyone else to languish. (He who has will be given more; for he who has not, even what he has …

Facebook Developer Garage, Paris, 2008 October 9. (c) Ludovic Toinel (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Creative Class Job Interview? Go with Stuff White People Like!

Forrest ChristianCoaching 2 Comments

A client asks the question: What should I do to win an executive level interview? So let’s look at how to manipulate the forms that are expected by today’s uninformed managers. (I’d say “idiot” but there are too many lawsuits these days.) I’ll assume that you’re a heterosexual American guy who wants a job as part of Richard Florida’s Creative …

Illuminated incandescent replacement curly fluorescent light bulb

IQ and Success: What’s the Real Interaction?

Forrest ChristianCareers, Theory 1 Comment

Malcolm Gladwell reports that “the correlation between I.Q. and occupational success is between 0.2 and 0.3.” That’s more than no correlation at all but much less than we often think. (It also isn’t entirely accurate.) But it seems somewhat counterintuitive. Elliott Jaques has an answer. I’m betting that one’s current capacity of work (your level or work that gets measured …

Leadership Is Amoral: Review of Kellerman's "Bad Leadership"

Forrest ChristianCareers, Organizations, Reviews - Books, Wilfred Brown Leave a Comment

I recently ran across Barbara Kellerman’s Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Leadership for the Common Good) (2004, Harvard Business School Press). Kellerman makes the argument that the current thinking on leadership is that it is always positive. Hitler is a bad leader because he did evil. People don’t talk about bad leadership and have …