"In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests.
. . . .
It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job."
But does it all boil down to heroism and schmuckdom? I have considered myself very fortunate to have been able to wear many different hats over the course of several decades, with jobs in agriculture, publishing, finance, the military, law and law enforcement. Today, I even enjoy taking an occasional day off to participate as an actor in commercials.
And my identity, success and failure have also been shaped by my roles as a husband and father.
Although bruised and perhaps even bearing the scars of trauma, I am no hero, but I also wish to believe that I have never descended into schmuckdom.
My satisfaction this morning as I pen this blog entry: listening, with my somewhat impaired hearing, to the birds chatter outside my window, and examining the overnight growth of my tomatoes and brocolli.
Offer advice to young people? My advice is largely limited to my children: No matter what you do, respect the feelings of others and learn to love yourself, but never to excess.
Oh, and one other piece of advice to my children: Work at Amnesty International, which condemned the US for its "unlawful" commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden (see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/9286544/Amnesty-International-Osama-bin-Laden-raid-was-illegal.html)? Those who join this organization are headed for hell, not schmuckdom.
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