I think my teachers are addicted to self-help.
In high school, we read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens in American Literature (I'll explain later why that's pretty spot-on), and now that I'm in college there are professors and professionals who swear by the self-help books and personality tests.
I've never been much a fan myself. Maybe it's all the career test results that came back not with "two guaranteed fits for my future," but with eight--from artist to writer to engineer to doctor. After about the third one we took my Junior year in high school, I never trusted them again.
Stephen Fry, a British actor and intellectual, attributes the American obsession over self-help and the absence of it in Europe for the difference in humor, where American comedians always end up the heroes and British comedians are funny exactly because they're the anti-hero. My Guatemalan culture is very much like that: we make fun of ourselves a lot and it never destroys our self-esteem.
This also could be why I don't trust tests and quizzes and computer-designed sorcery too plan my future out for me--I've always had an idea of what I wanted to do. My "calling," if you will, was ingrained from the start.
One of the professionals mentoring me this semester, also obsessed with Gallup's StrengthsFinder, gave me an idea. My college is implementing a new program this year, designed to help students find their "calling" in a journey of sorts with different focal points during the different years at Union. One of the main driving forces of the program is the stories of people who have found their calling. All I have to do is collect these stories.
I'm really looking forward to speaking with staff members about this. I will write the interviews on here and see where this will take me: I have the sneaking suspicion that everyone is going to have a different definition for "calling."
In short, this collection of stories are going to be here to get advice from wiser people, help me define what "calling" is, and maybe (hopefully) help someone else along the way.
Who knows, it might turn into a self-help book.
2 comments:
"Calling" ha! That is going to be challenging.
Living in this country where consumerism reigns, where success is so often measured by how much you have (paid in full or not) or worst, how much money you make,I don't think students have time for the "calling".
Mere coincidence, I was just reading a poorly written and even worst supported yahoo news entitled "The 10 most useless graduate degrees" that says:
"We calculated the percent difference in how much more money a graduate degree will bring, as well as how much of a better chance you will have of finding a job. These figures were then combined to determine which graduate degrees are the most useless."
Who cares about the "calling"? Sadly I can not come with a nice English edition of the Spanish play of words: El que no vive para servir no sirve para vivir.
That is "calling".
I'm excited to read these Pablo, go for it!
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