How Meritorious Are You?
10 questions to help you decide
We all want to be people of merit but it’s tough to assess that. It may help to rate yourself on these components of merit. Then review your answers to decide what if anything you want to do to improve.
Rate yourself excellent, good, fair, or poor on these:
Ethics: When you would suffer as a result, you still do the ethical thing. _____
Work ethic: Even when you could get away with shirking, you work at least reasonably long and diligently. ____
Commitment to the work: When it’s not fun but it should be done, you tend to work hard at it, staying with it despite at least moderate setbacks. ____
Reliability: You usually keep your promises: work when you’re supposed to, answer emails promptly, and in your personal life, can be counted on to do what you say. ____
Intelligence: You tend to learn quickly, solve problems well, reason rigorously, and communicate cogently. ____
Improving intelligence is difficult but your best shots may be to take a class in critical thinking, join a debate club, have substantive interactions with intelligent people, and/or subscribe to an intelligent publication such as the New Yorker on the Left or National Review on the Right.
Emotional intelligence: With reasonable accuracy, you anticipate how your actions and statements will affect other people. ____
To improve, note how people react to your statements and actions. If you’re surprised by a reaction, ask for feedback, for example, “You seem offended. Honestly, did I say something wrong?”
Skills: You have the technical and other concrete skills that enable you to do a good job in your professional as well as personal life. ____
A potent way to acquire or improve a skill is on a just-in-time basis. Whatever skill you need now, try to acquire it through self-study, maybe with a tutor to get you over the rough spots. Courses, let alone certificate or degree programs too often yield diffuse, insufficiently relevant, and easily forgotten learning.
Temperament: You are of reasonably even disposition, rarely displaying anger or despair. ____
That’s another characteristic that’s tough to improve. Best may be to remind yourself that extremes of emotion rarely serve you and that it’s usually wiser to breathe, see if something rational should be done, and take a baby step forward, distract yourself, or walk out of the room.
Flexibility: Do you respond well to unexpected changes? Life throws us curveballs: We’re asked to change our assignment or schedule. Someone screws up and we have to adjust. You reasonably roll with the punches. ____
Resilience: After setbacks, you rebound with reasonable speed. ____
The takeaway
As you review your self-ratings, is there anything you’d like to do to improve?
I read this aloud on YouTube.
You can reach career and personal coach Marty Nemko at mnemko@comcast.net
