Talk About Hating Your Job…

From the Seattle PI:

Woman accused of faking cancer to avoid work

ARLINGTON, Wash. — A former Washington state social worker has been accused of faking brain cancer to avoid work. Theft charges were filed Tuesday against Sandra Dee Martinez, 40, formerly of Mountlake Terrace, who was employed by the Department of Social and Health Services in Arlington.

According to investigators, Martinez presented fake letters that appeared to be from doctors saying she had malignant brain tumors. Prosecutors wrote that she received $21,000 worth of paid leave and took advantage of sick days donated by co-workers last year.

Success Is Relative (Especially When Relatives Determine Your Success)

In the past few years, there have been several high profile cases of cheating and plagiarism among young academics. In 2006, Kaavya Viswanathan, then a sophomore at Harvard University, was accused of including whole passages practically verbatim from another author in her first novel. Her book was eventually recalled by its publisher and her reputation as an author perhaps forever tarnished. This past April, Yale student Aliza Shvarts, admitted to faking the circumstances of her senior performance art project, a controversial first-hand account of her (faked) abortion.

What made these well-educated, high-achieving women desperate enough to risk their reputations for 15-minutes of fame?

Could it be a constant pressure to succeed from parents, professors, bosses and popular media?

A query into the Merriam-Webster dictionary shows the definition of success to be:

The attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.

What troubles me about this definition is that it defines success through a third-party point of view. Gaining favor? Having superiority? These are all things subject to other people’s perceptions rather than a personal measure of fulfillment and meaning. This drive to succeed, to achieve based on someone else’s definition of success is wreaking havoc on our generation, a generation raised to believe that achievement is everything.

From a young age, most Millennials have been told they need to be “well-rounded.” College admission boards wants students who can “do-it-all,” so children are being pushed at younger and younger ages into soccer teams, ballet lessons, foreign-language classes and more with rarely a thought as to whether a child really enjoys the activity or not.

Could this pressure-cooker environment with its non-stop schedule of activities and constant competition be to blame for the rise in student cheating? Or the reason so many young people flunk out of college, go on wild drinking binges, and rack up mountains of debt before the age of 25?

Where did we all go so horribly wrong?

Brazen Careerist, Penelope Trunk, encourages readers to cut through the B.S. and think back to their happiest childhood memories to find their true passions:

Do you want to know what you should do right now? Do you want to know what your best bet is for your next career? Look at what you were doing when you were a kid. Nothing changes when you grow up except that you get clouded vision from thinking about what you SHOULD do — to be rich, or successful, or to please your parents or peers… the possibilities for should are endless.

By measuring your own personal success against the standards of others (not all of us can be Pulitzer-prize winning novelists or MVP athletes) you cloud your own path to true fulfillment and happiness. I recommend everyone read through Penelope’s post and take a few minutes to recall a favorite childhood memory and identify positive traits about your true self that you could be doing more to cultivate. You never know what you might be missing out on just because you never thought it important enough.

The Path to Success Isn’t Always the Obvious One

While seemingly a normal Thursday, May 1^st is a day that will be embedded in the minds of high school seniors and future grad students alike as the day that forever changed the course of their lives. For those of you who haven’t been near a campus in a while, May 1 is the traditional admissions deadline for most U.S. colleges and universities. It is the day that students have to make their final decisions about which school to attend and is also when the fate of wait-listed students is decided.

The Seattle Times ran an article highlighting the cutthroat college admissions process and the bitter taste of not being accepted to a first choice school:

“The college-admissions process is an initiation rite into adulthood,” says Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, an adolescent medicine specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an author of books on teenage stress. “But if success is defined very narrowly, such as a fat envelope from a specific college, then many kids end up going through it and feeling like a failure.”

Students complain about a lack of sleep, stomach pain and headaches, but doctors and educators also worry that stress tied to academic achievement can lead to depression, eating disorders and other mental-health problems.

The college admissions game is many young people’s introduction to the self-exploration and interviewing process. They are forced to determine their interests, strengths and decide what type of environment would make them happiest. They must compile information about available institutions, majors and benefits. They have to fill out forms, write personal essays and jump through endless hoops just to impress a panel of six people they’ve never met. This is very similar to the job-search process.

What worries me about these students, and their job-hunting counterparts, is that they pin their entire life’s hope on receiving an offer letter from the college or company of their choice. Anytime stress causes physical reactions such as stomach pain or eating disorders, there must be a problem. And the problem is that we as a society are much to focuses on status—the status of getting into an Ivy League school, the status of getting a top job at a large firm so we can race around in BMWs and show everyone how successful we are.

Living your life according to someone else’s model of success does not make you one.

Most young people are taught the following model, which I’ve written about before, and assume that it will lead them to personal fulfillment and happiness:

Good Grades + Good College = Corporate Career + Happiness & Success

What is unfortunate is that people don’t realize this isn’t the only model for success. I know lots of people who went away to “good” college only to come home after freshman year or not even make it past the first semester because of homesickness, poor grades or just plain unhappiness with the situation they had chosen. They may have felt like failures at the time, but all managed to pick themselves up, create a new situation, and were happier in the long run.

A guidance counselor interviewed for the story in the Seattle Times had some great advice for high school seniors and workers alike:

“Bloom where you are planted.”