Be A Dragon
Knowing When “Enough is Enough” and Saying So
The Universe had to bitch slap me a few times for me to get the lesson. Not to make excuses, but to insert a level of realism, I will tell you that I was raised in a family that most certainly had expectations of me.
Those expectations did not include me being bisexual, artistic, Jewish, at times atheistic, Buddhist, moderately inked, a podiatrist instead of a brain surgeon, and an INTJ that doesn’t accept authority based on titles.
My very nature didn’t sit well with much of the DNA I was born to, and into.
But that’s okay. If you’re interested in the story of my journey from surgeon to wildlife photographer, you can find it here:
I tried on some of my family’s, and society’s, expectations from time to time, but the frames just never fit. You know how it is when your underwear is riding up, your bra won’t stay down, or the seam in your jeans is bound and determined to give you a camel toe. It sucks, and you have to ditch the apparel in order to free yourself and be comfortable.
While I was meandering around in the halls of expectation, I did wind up with a good education and some tools to provide for myself. I’m not sorry for any of it, or for the people I met and have loved, for the journey, and for where it led me.
If you spend enough time on Medium, or any other platform of the kind, you’ll find a ton of advice regarding how to be successful. There are varied opinions, and many that are strikingly antithetical to each other.
I’m not going to come out in support of any particular algorithm for success. I’m just here this morning to tell a little story that has been brewing and how I decided to say “enough is fucking enough” to the conventional this week.
My day job is in a molecular diagnostics laboratory for oncology. I love the work. The fabric of life and the mutations of it excite and challenge me. That hits me in the left-brain and in the heart.
My right brain and heart are dedicated to wildlife photography, art, and conservation.
Moments ago, I was sitting in a lecture hall filled with doctors. We were listening to new “quality reporting” complexities — how to navigate the bahzillion new codes and how to “make oneself look good” in the ever evolving game to be reimbursed for healthcare services in the United States. I’ll tell you now that it’s a mind-fuck. Private practice is that way, but more and more often, so is being employed by a healthcare entity.
The challenges are ever present — incessantly jumping in the path of the dedicated who simply want to delivery quality results for a patient.
Anyone who has searched for a job in the past few years has probably noted that there seems to always be a push for education, education, and more education. It has become so commonplace that even the MBA now seems to be “assumed.” The debt burden on those emerging from colleges and professional schools is oftentimes debilitating. I’ve struggled with it for years.
And yet we just keep doing it. Because we need jobs. And we think to get those jobs and keep them, we need to keep climbing the ladder of more.
But this past week, I didn’t need a job. I already had one. Actually more than one. I like to remain diversified in how I obtain income, not relying heavily on one employer or industry.
As is often the case with someone of my personality type, learning is super fun, and I very much consider myself a perpetual student of the Multiverse. Very often that has been formal. But it doesn’t have to be.
I’d been involved in another master’s program that pertained to one of my current lines of work. It was even being paid for by my employer. But conditions in the work environment changed dramatically. Massive personnel losses, quality failures, and generalized chaos made navigating the waters moderately stressful. I began to rely heavily on my right-brained activities not only for their own sake, but for my sanity.
I interact with a lot of people in administration and managerial positions, and in the past several months I have heard the following statement several times:
Everyone is replaceable.
Really? Is that the new conventional thinking? The current corporate mentality?
I’m not one to wallow in the sentimentality of things, but I just don’t think human capital can be generalized accurately in that manner. Generalization, by definition, implies a lack of accuracy. In fact, managerial acceptance of this notion might be part of the recipe that leads to massive personnel losses…just something to ponder.
I believe human skill sets are unique. Some folks bring to the table an incredible amount of knowledge and yet couple it with deplorable people skills, or vice versa.
Liz Ryan agrees with me regarding what she calls this “business lie” and says that if managers do really feel this way, they are doing an incredible disservice to their customers.
It is an intriguing assumption, this very limiting belief of replaceability. When I hear the mantra touted by managers, they really aren’t telling me anything about the employees they are referring to. They are telling me about themselves and how incredibly shallow their knowledge and skills are in the realm of emotional intelligence and anthropology. They are admitting to their own ineptness. And oftentimes their laziness.
They may be revealing to me that they don’t have the time or the skill to determine how to manage conditions for optimal productivity — something that relies on employee well-being. Creating great conditions and professional relationships requires too much thought and effort, so just piss the employees off, challenge their ethical compasses, drain them completely of their transferable assets, and then tell them if they don’t like it they can go elsewhere because “corporate” can find other bodies for the cubicles.
Why the incessant cycle of turnover is not more taxing than building better environments and employee relationships — a true quality investment — escapes me. Not to mention the cost! I suppose I don’t think like many corporations though. I take the long view to profits, not the short cuts.
I’ve just never witnessed successful short cuts in the long haul.
I’ve also noticed that the concept of time, as measured in corporate terms, is very different than the moments of an individual’s life. Often, employees are asked to give more and more personal time — “Just for a few more months…” — to a day job to compensate for tighter budgets and very slim profit margins. First place to cut when things are tight? People. I couldn’t disagree more.
And the “months” touted by corporations are measured in the seconds and minutes of an employee’s life. Moments we can never get back. Moments with a child? Our families? In nature? Developing a new skill? However we choose to spend our personal time, these are the moments of our lives, and we never know how many we will have. And if we work in an environment where we are seen as expendable and “replaceable”, well, sheesh, that ought to begin to color the choices we as individuals make about just how much blood, sweat, and soul to pour into a day job. Food for thought for those that find it difficult to detach because they care about quality. I’m one of those, so I’m preaching to myself here too.
Tess Penning discusses “the system” and how to begin to detach in a blog article entitled Going Rogue: 15 Ways To Detach From The System, located here:
This week I said no again to the conventional. I’m not going to take the route of more education because it looks good in the industry, for the department I work in, or for anyone else who might “respect” higher and higher levels of education.
I’m dropping the formal masters program and going to do something for my right brain. Something many folks wouldn’t understand because it doesn’t contribute to driving profits into my bank account. It doesn’t increase my professional appeal in the healthcare industry, and it doesn’t push me up the corporate ladder.
I’ll begin to trek through the swamps and wetlands and coastlines of Florida, learning about the flora and fauna, how to educate people regarding it, and how to celebrate and conserve it. It’s a learning program not as “esteemed” as the one I’m dropping — by conventional wisdom anyway. But I reject that.
I’m unshackling myself from any additional formalities and stressors related to the day job and marrying myself to what feeds my soul — and to creating a legacy that I believe will outlive me and benefit the generations to come — helping to stabilize the planetary environment.
While I’m not going to be someone who preaches the “drop everything and live off other people and go backpack” mentality, I am going to suggest that we don’t have to accept what has been shoved down our collective throats for decades now. The system became the way it is by our own making. It is therefore, us, one at a time, rejecting the conventional, who will make a change.
“A dragon is not a slave.” — Daenerys Targaryen
Be a dragon. Think long and hard before accepting the conventional. Because conventionality — like all other things — is impermanent.
FB: @artofeliewolf
