Have you ever gone through that career exercise where you write out success stories from your life, and then look back through them for clues about the kind of work you would enjoy and/or be good at? I did that when I decided to leave teaching, my first career. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, but while I prepped for the LSATs I worked through all the exercises in “The New Quick Job-Hunting Map,” by Richard Nelson Bolles. It’s a companion workbook to his famous What Color Is Your Parachute? book. 
I recently ran across those stories, written when I was about 30, as I was searching through old files for something else. (Yes, I keep *everything* I have written.) The earliest success story was from pre-kindergarten, my first year of fourteen years at Moorestown Friends School (that’s Pre-K + Kindergarten + 12 grades, in case you thought I took too long to graduate).
In pre-kindergarten, I was not big enough or strong enough to get on top of the monkey bars, and I was envious of the kids who could. They got to sit on their perch above the rest of us, on top of what was essentially a horizontal ladder high above the ground (it seemed high at the time, anyway). Read the rest of this entry »
OK, this one was just too funny to pass up! Reuters’ headline sums it up: “
David Brooks’ column in the NYT, “
