C-Level executives wouldn’t get anything done if they spent all their time going to coffee and lunch dates with job seekers. Though even in the current economy I doubt they need to worry.  Regardless of rumors baby boomers are spreading about millennials, few job seekers would feel comfortable being so assertive. Are the few who do arrogant? My husband and I discussed. What would you be communicating when you skip the ranks and appeal to the top? And what was the best way to do it?

Answering the questions in reverse we agreed that to go straight to the top, the job seeker needed to have at minimum a 3^rd degree connection through LinkedIn or some other route. And that the job seeker should be direct and brief in their approach, stating up front why they wanted to connect. “Could I take you out or coffee to discuss…” versus “I have five years experience…” and getting to the point two paragraphs later.

If a meeting should occur, we agreed that what the job seeker communicated about him or herself was dependent on how he or she communicated it. There is a difference in making a pronouncement and expressing interest. Best to express interest, convincingly, but not to purport you were the best candidate for something you weren’t qualified for.

Opportunities for advancement seldom present themselves without some assistance from the receiving party. Be bold but gracious. Confidence is not arrogance and humility is not insecurity.

Gustaf Dalén was a farmer’s son, born in 1869 in a small village in Sweden. From an early age, he showed a natural gift for mechanical inventiveness, and after inventing, at the age of 23, a machine that would automatically determine milk quality, he was admitted to university and earned his masters and doctorate in only four years. He was recognized as an innovative inventor and, by 1909, was named the managing director of the Swedish gas company AGA. At the time, gas was widely used for lighting, and Dalén created machines to make such use both safer and more efficient. A pair of his inventions relating to lighthouses – a special valve that turned the lamp on at sunset and off at sunrise, and a sort of pilot light that turned the gas on and off at regular intervals to flash the light – increased efficiency by more than 90%, and, given the importance of dependable lighthouses to the shipping trade, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for these inventions.

Gustaf Dalén

Dalén had sensed and followed his natural inventive character from early in life, and this led him to success and satisfaction, even in the face of debilitating circumstance. In 1912, he was blinded in a gas explosion that led to a long convalescence at home. During this time of unexpected domesticity, he discovered that his wife was frequently exhausted by the amount of effort that went into cooking their daily meals. Setting his natural talents and inclination to work, and undeterred by his blindness, he worked on creating a new type of stove that would be much easier to use. The result, popularly known as the AGA cooker, became an iconic culinary tool in the 1930s and 1940s throughout Europe, particularly in England, and are still manufactured today.

One of the people responsible for the popularity of the AGA cooker in England was young David Ogilvy. Unlike Dalén, whose gifts had been recognized at an early age, Ogilvy did not appear particularly promising as a young man. He studied history at Oxford University – on scholarship, as his family could not have afforded the tuition – but did not do well there, and dropped out without graduating. He then went to Paris, moving drastically from the field of history into the culinary arts, as an apprentice chef at the Majestic Hotel. This, too, did not work out for him; he was not inspired enough by the work to devote the years of “fiendish pressure and perpetual exhaustion” it would have taken to succeed. After a year he returned to the U.K. to follow a new pursuit. At least this one was tangentially related to his previous work in the kitchen: he began to sell AGA cookers door to door.

David Ogilvy

Ogilvy could speak the language of the chef because of his work at the Majestic, but, either by happy accident or deliberate contemplation, he discovered that he could speak the language of the salesmen innately. He quickly became such a recognized success, selling the AGA cooker even to “nuns and drunkards”, that his employer asked him to write a sales manual. This manual, still widely considered one of the best ever written, got him a position as an account executive at a London advertising agency. There, he discovered once and for all that advertising was his true calling. Eventually he founded the New York advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather, which was tremendously successful. David Ogilvy became known for his meticulous research, his creative brilliance, and the success of his company’s advertisements, so that today he is considered “The Father of Advertising”. Not “The Father of History” or “The Father of Cooking”; although Ogilvy was always an intelligent hard worker, he did not find true career success until he moved into the field that was truly aligned with his character.

“Character is destiny” is one of those dangerous truisms – simple and appealing and therefore susceptible to misuse. Unquestionably, who we are affects where we end up in life; our social stations, economic situations, and career paths are uniquely influenced by the presence or absence of qualities like honesty, perseverance, intelligence, and leadership. But the assertion that one’s destiny is attributable solely to one’s character can warp the way people view the world. A wealthy scion of an influential American family will experience a destiny very different from that of a child born to an untouchable on the streets of Calcutta, no matter how similar or distinct their individual characters. So if you are unsatisfied with where you are in your career, do not make the mistake of assuming that you have gotten what you deserved and there is nothing you can do to change that. Dissatifaction may be your psyche’s way of telling you that you are not paying enough attention to who you really are. For career fulfillment, the relationship between character and destiny is clear: the more closely your career destiny aligns with your character, the more fulfillment you will find.

Of course, canny negotiators recognize that easy deals generate suspicion, so they inject artificial difficulty. If you go to any market where haggling is well accepted, you will see this. When my wife and I lived in Japan, we visited Hong Kong a couple of times, and enjoyed visiting Stanley Market there – a warren of stalls and shops selling all kinds of clothing and household goods. There were price tags, but everyone knew that you were expected to haggle – that was the allure, getting something with a $400 price tag for only $120. But after a while, you would notice: if you weren’t offering the advertised price, it almost didn’t matter what your bid was – the vendor would bicker with you just as vociferously. Even if you offered, say, 80% of the price on the tag – which obviously left plenty of profit to the seller – they would still persistently make counteroffers. Back then I assumed they were just capitalists working hard to squeeze every possible bit of profit out of a sale, but now I think that at least some of the time, they were only going through the motions so that we the buyers would feel we earned the bargain, and follow through with it. And that was probably right. If we had offered, say, $1400 for a $1600 Louis Vuitton handbag (remember, 8 Hong Kong dollars = 1 U.S. dollar), and the vendor had said, “Sure, I’ll ring that up,” we would probably have conferred with each other in the corner (“Hey, if we can get it for $1400 here, I bet we can find it somewhere else for $1000!”) and then left without purchasing.

If you are negotiating a salary package, you absolutely should feel like it was hard work if you want to walk away satisfied. But here’s the thing: the hard work shouldn’t be at the negotiating table. You should be doing all your hard work before you even get there. Most people know that this includes researching the market – that is, finding out what people working in similar positions locally have been receiving – and as a baseline, that is important. Especially for entry-level positions, where there is a lot less justification for fluctuation, knowing how your offer compares to offers being received by your peers will help to keep employers from taking advantage of you, and may tell you something about the resources or prestige of the employer considering you.

But you can’t stop there. You should also find out something about the qualifications of those people getting hired for similar positions. You can’t fairly compare their salaries to yours, after all, if you have much better (or lesser) qualifications than they do. And if you can, you should see how precisely you can quantify the value of your contribution to the new employer. This may be easier for, say, lawyers, who bill by the hour, than for elementary school teachers, who don’t ordinarily generate cash for their employers. But by examining your own skills and the needs of your employer, you should at least be able to get a sense of how the value of your contribution compares to a typical hiree. And if you can convincingly argue that you can do the work of two ordinary employees, your request for a higher salary is more easily justified. Finally, knowing something about the employer, and the culture it shares with similar employers, will give you a better sense of how much flexibility they might have with respect to salary – or perhaps other benefits that might be more manipulable for them. No matter what skills you have to offer, a non-profit organization with a shoestring budget may not be able to provide a higher salary – but they might be more willing to woo you for those skills with other perks.

If you do all that kind of research and careful consideration in advance, then you’ve done the hard work before the negotiation. And, while you may not be able to move the employer to the place you were hoping to get, at least – when it comes time to decide to accept the final offer or not – you can make that decision without suspecting later that you somehow negotiated a bad deal for yourself.

A colleague was recently telling me how her children were overcome with want every time they saw a commercial for Disneyland. Though, we all know that even the magical world of Disney does not dissipate a child’s impatience waiting in a long line and the frustration of negotiating with siblings which rides should be first on the agenda. As adults we’re not that different. We happily anticipate fulfilling our wants, convinced we’ll finally be happy when our want is fulfilled only to find ourselves still in want when it is. Think of getting into the college that’s first on your list or getting the promotion you’ve been wanting.

Born in 1873, long before happiness become a legitimate and popular topic of research, Howard R. Garris, the American author most well known for his creation of the gentlemen rabbit, Uncle Wiggily, correctly wrote that “Half the fun of nearly everything, you know, is thinking about it beforehand, or afterward.”

Happiness researchers advise us we should slow down and appreciate the now. That we should take deep breaths and mediate for a few minutes each day. And that we should make a practice of writing a unique thing we’re thankful for each day. For those of us – the majority – who are not good at being satisfied in the now, these are good suggestions to help us live in the moment. Employ every trick you can. Career fulfillment, as with our larger lives, is most certainly a series of moments. If we valued fulfillment by only our turning points and achievements, our fulfillment would be so loosely constructed it would come unraveled. Finding fulfillment in the moments between our successes can be as great of a challenge as figuring out the most fulfilling path for our journey.

To be clear: I never thought, then or now, that taking care of a home and five children wasn’t demanding, worthwhile, or exhausting, and I believe that any work-life balance discussion should hinge on the fair availability of choices to both women and men, not on judgments of the relative values of such choices. So I never thought of my mom as “merely” a stay-at-home mom. We were a straight-up working class family, but the kids were all safe and well fed, and we grew up polite and respectful and more open-minded than a lot of more “privileged” people I would later meet at Harvard, and I give both my parents the credit for that. But I certainly couldn’t help noticing, especially as I grew older and met friends’ moms who were employed, that my mom was increasingly unusual, although apparently quite content, in being only a stay-at-home mom.

Mom and me

I’ve written before about my father and his career and how it affected my assumptions about work as I was growing up, and as Mothers’ Day approached I began to consider whether my mother’s career had also affected my outlook on work. As I played with the idea, it occurred to me that perhaps I was making an unwarranted assumption. Perhaps my mom wasn’t content as a stay-at-home mom. What if she had had a particular ambition as a teenager, one that she had chosen to abandon when she married my dad and then spawned us? How tragic would that be? My mom, a secretly frustrated ballerina or closet biochemist, hiding her light under a bushel for the sake of her kids. I had to find out the truth. Perhaps, even now, it wasn’t too late for her to begin anew!

So I called and asked her. When she was young, was there something she had dreamed of doing? Something she had never done because she’d been a housewife all her life?

No, she said. Not at all. In fact, she reminded me – for I had heard this part before – she and my father had started dating when they were 14 years old, and she knew then that all she wanted to do was marry him and take care of him and their home and their children.

That seemed a little anticlimactic to me. No ambition at all? No unfulfilled dreams? Where’s the drama in that? My mind played it out, anxiously starting to regret my commitment to writing a special Mothers’ Day post. Maybe a lack-of-ambition theme? Maybe if my mom had been a little less content, I might have been the one to create Facebook, except twenty years earlier, so I would also have had to create the Internet, too. Thanks to my mom’s serenity, Zuckerberg and Gore reaped all the rewards. Mom!

Meanwhile, as I pondered, my mother continued her story. She was explaining why she knew she would marry my dad. One day the comic wrapped inside her piece of Bazooka bubble gum included a fortune that read, “You will have two false starts before you get what you really want.” See, before she met my dad, she dated these two other losers –- one guy from her school who turned out to be a jerk, and another guy who went AWOL and disappeared -– and that’s how she knew that my dad was going to be the keeper.

Aha! The magic telegram! Had she told me this story when I was young, and maybe I had forgotten it? But I had remembered the message: someday Fate will deliver a mystical sign, and from then on, your life will be perfect! How many years had I wasted, waiting for the magic telegram to be delivered, rather than exploring the world and discovering myself what my perfect job would –-

Wait a minute. Did she say “AWOL”? Was my 14-year-old mom dating someone in the military?

Mom snorted. Yes, she had been, because her mother didn’t care what my mom or her brothers and sisters got up to. They could run around chasing whoever they wanted, as far as my grandmother was concerned, because that’s basically what she did all her life. And then my mother went on to remind me about some of the things she had told me about my grandmother, and to tell me a few more startling things that she’d never mentioned to me before. Oh, I had grown up knowing that my mother and her mother didn’t get along – as kids, we saw my paternal grandmother every couple of weeks, but we visited my mother’s mother maybe five times in my whole life – and when I’d reached adulthood my mom explained enough for me to understand that, while my grandmother obviously liked something about the process of conception enough to have had seventeen children, by fathers who came and went, it wasn’t the childrearing she enjoyed. She was absent from their lives often enough for the siblings to have essentially raised each other, with the support of a kind-hearted neighbor or two.

Now, on the phone, my mother was providing me with additional details about the extent of the neglect, and about the effects that it had on her brothers and sisters. Bad things happened. Some of the family – the uncles and aunts I remember visiting regularly as a child – stood up in the face of them, stood up for their younger brothers and sisters, and carved paths through the wilderness to reach safe and sane adulthood. Others, mostly the ones I never knew well, surrendered under the weight of the neglect and succumbed to various forms of dissolution, one daughter even echoing her mother’s footsteps.

I was not expecting stories like this to come out in our conversation. But then I realized: she was just answering the question I had asked. I don’t think she realized it consciously, but she was. “When she was young, was there something she had dreamed of doing?” She had said “no”, because the way I had asked the question was flawed, but the answer was obviously “yes”. She had dreamed of being a mother unlike her own mother. She had dreamed of being there for all of her children, of keeping them safe and well fed, of teaching them to be polite and respectful and open-minded, and of caring enough about what her children got up to, to let them know when it was wrong. To her, “stay-at-home” was what made her the mom she wanted to be, because her mother never did.

Happy Mothers’ Day to everyone out there whose mothers – stay-at-home or go-to-work – gave them the gifts of security, discretion, and care. Let your mothers know you are as grateful as I am to have been given the foundation of stability and self-worth that makes it possible to even have career ambitions. And to those, hopefully few, people reading this who suffered from the kind of parental neglect my mom suffered from: know that, like my mother, you can still give to someone else the gift you never received yourself.

Work does not encompass our entire life, but the choices we made in work, in large part, define who we are. Did we settle? Did we take risks? Did we respond to our setbacks with resilience, making the best of our circumstances, or did we respond with fear? Did we seek environments that reminded us of those from which we came? Did we embrace being part of an established group or did we create something of our own? Did we live day-to-day or embrace a larger vision of what we wanted our life to be and make the necessary sacrifices to achieve it?

Many memoirs began with a detailed account of the storyteller’s origin, though the reader knows it’s the life of work where the writer’s life culminates. Even the memoir that focuses solely on childhood, such as Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, is full of her calling to come, a love of books and language. Childhood sets us on the path to adulthood; the way in which we spend most our adulthood, work, is where our legacy is made.

Those of us that dismiss work as something we only do during the day should look again.

“But do you want to do that?”

“No.”

And therein lies one of the biggest dilemmas of figuring out fulfillment – we sometimes don’t want to want what we want, a job that pays less but that we know we’d find more fulfilling, a job that offers greater work-life balance but lacks prestige, a job outside of the scope of our family or origin – outside of what we were raised to believe to be a realistic choice. Though choice is exactly what we do have. We can choose to compromise what we want or make peace with the wants we’ll never forget.

Making peace with what we want and setting on a path to pursue it, of course, does not mean getting where we want won’t be more complicated than we initially planned, or that we will be exempt from the irritations that come with the day-to-day routine of working. But making peace does mean we will gain the peace of knowing we overcame the superficial and freed ourselves to live.

The first might be termed “rightful authority”, and it is nice work if you can get it. This is authority based on relationship or position — it’s “rightful” not because it is correct, but because it is grounded in the holder’s right to demand certain actions of others. This is the authority of kings and bosses — the clout that many people think of when they hear the word “authority”. If you hold the reins of power, however long or short, you usually have more opportunity to steer people in the direction you want them to go. Acquiring this kind of authority takes time and often long-term planning — developing a strong network of support, establishing a track record of success, etc. But much of that work can be approached in the context of developing your other forms of authority.

“Reasonable authority”, for example, is something you can start working on now that can also prepare you for advancing in rightful authority in the future. Reasonable authority is based on principles and their sensible application, and it relies not on the office of the decisionmaker but on the soundness of the decision. What is often called “moral authority” fits into this category, as would something like “scientific authority”. No matter where you are in the food chain, you can begin cultivating reasonable authority right now. What are you passionate about? What matters to you in your job? If you can identify specific areas in which to focus, and then work on developing your knowledge of those areas so that you know as much or more about them as anyone else you work with, then you will cultivate reasonable authority as the decisions you make and try to bring into effect prove to be sound and reliable. (Of course, where rightful authority and reasonable authority clash, rightful authority often wins. In the short term, at least.)

Finally, there is what I’ll call “personal authority” — the kind of forceful authority that people develop through their manner, attitude, and charisma. Rightful authority and reasonable authority both depend on a sense of legitimacy — legitimacy of position or legitimacy of conclusion — but the holder of personal authority does not need to actually possess any legitimacy. She only needs to convince others that she does. In one sense, this is the flimsiest sort of authority, because self-confidence and charm will only persuade others to follow you for so long, if the path you are asking them to follow leads nowhere useful. On the other hand, though, many people have taken advantage of the opportunities opened to them on account of their personal authority, and used those opportunities to improve their understanding of an issue or their connections to people able to grant them rightful authority. And, like reasonable authority, personal authority is something you can start cultivating right now.

If you have career goals — which you should — then you will need to be able to exercise authority at some point to bring them to fruition. Why not start cultivating that authority today?

Part of my reaction is a reflexive outrage over discourtesy, for which I can thank my parents. It is just rude not to acknowledge people who are doing you a service, and I consider getting me to work on time without smashing into a bridge abutment a considerable service. But I am actually more astonished by the poor cost/benefit analysis. What does it cost to be pleasant? A moment of mindfulness and a few syllables of air. What’s the benefit? In the short term, there’s a little mood elevation for me and the driver, a slightly better way to begin a day. In the long term, good will accumulates. Drivers have held up at the stop a minute longer when they recognized me hurrying over from a distance, or have waved me onto the bus gratis when I unexpectedly found that my fare card is low. Seems to me the benefits far outweigh the costs, and yet every morning, and every evening, I watch a parade of commuters pack into their shiny metal box with the apparent goal of making the ride as unprofitable as possible.

Career fulfillment does sometimes hinge on the dramatic — the unexpected epiphany or the daring career change, for example — but we should not overlook the incremental. There are many things you can work on every day that require just a little effort, just a little extra attentiveness, that in the long run can have just as significant an impact on your success. One of these is congeniality. In absolute terms, it costs virtually nothing to be pleasant and open to the people you encounter during your work day — some smiles and waves, a few greetings or “Pleases” and “Thank yous”, maybe a little time to hold a door open for someone carrying a bundle or to listen to someone’s tale or complaint. For that investment, you develop relationships — perhaps not always very deep relationships, but still, ones that might mean something someday, like the day you need to ask the guy at the copy room to move your job to the head of the line in order to beat a deadline. Or, if that seems a little too quid pro quo to you, remember that relationships are meant to be two-way. You might discover, in a conversation with a colleague you don’t normally work with, that there are projects on which you could join forces to your mutual benefit. You’re more likely to have that conversation with someone who feels at ease with you than someone who doesn’t even get a nod as you pass by in the hallway.

This is not to say that such extroverted friendliness comes as easily to one person as to another. Some people are shy; some people are stressed out; some people aren’t good matching names and faces. I have trouble with that last one sometimes, and in retrospect I can see there were times when I held back on the congeniality out of a sense that it was better to look busy and rush past without saying anything than to accidentally initiate one of those awkward encounters in which it quickly becomes clear that the other person remembers me better than I remember him. I know what it’s like to think that it’s just easier to move along with your head down. Often, it is. But it’s also less rewarding. And, really, what’s the worst that could happen? You have to ask someone for her name again? Take it from me: if you’re sincere, people are generally forgiving.

So make the small effort. Say “Hi” when you’re not sure who that is, or just smile at someone even if the needed eye contact does not come naturally to you. Remind yourself that whatever demanding client or looming deadline is stressing you out, you can probably afford the few seconds it takes to thank someone for their help or to ask them if they’re over that cold. These are increments that contribute to success. If you want to be more, be more congenial.

He looked like a modern-day Cary Grant and he had an excellent job with a well-known bank. It was easy to conjure up stereotypes of the beautiful, manicured wife he’d met in college at a Tri Delta party who now spent her time shopping and getting hot stone massages. An image that no doubt played well at the company Christmas party, but did not successfully translate into a fulfilling life. She was not of the world; working full-time had broadened his landscape and he could no longer relate to the confined dimensions of her world.

What was he to do? What was she to do? They were both playing their defined roles, the ones that society offered up as approved options, the ones they had accepted without question until life had become more complicated. And now here he was, relating his frustration to strangers who sat silently, uncomfortable, with nothing to say in return.

He transitioned into his approved topic, and when he was done, a handler escorted him off the stage to ensure he made his flight. He would go back to his life and his wife and possibly wonder how following a societally approved option could have gone so wrong.

Fulfillment is shaped by our questions, not just the answers.