Thomas Carlyle: "Blessed is the man who has found his work. Let him ask no other
blessedness."
I recently spent an evening with Paul W. Boynton, employment supervisor for the
Socony-Vacuum Oil Company. During the last twenty years he has interviewed more
than seventy-five thousand people looking for jobs, and he has written a book entitled 6
Ways to Get a Job. I asked him: "What is the greatest mistake young people make
today in looking for work?" "They don't know what they want to do," he said. "It is
perfectly appalling to realise that a man will give more thought to buying a suit of clothes
that will wear out in a few years than he will give to choosing the career on which his
whole future depends-on which his whole future happiness and peace of mind are
based!"
And so what? What can you do about it? You can take advantage of a new profession
called vocational guidance. It may help you-or harm you-depending on the ability and
character of the counselor you consult. This new profession isn't even within gunshot of
perfection yet. It hasn't even reached the Model T stage. But it has a great future. How
can you make use of this science? By finding out where, in your community, you can get
vocational tests and vocational advice.
Such advice can only take the form of suggestions. You have to make the decisions.
Remember that these counselors are far from infallible. They don't always agree with
one another. They sometimes make ridiculous mistakes. For example, a vocational-
guidance counselor advised one of my students to become a writer solely because she
had a large vocabulary. How absurd! It isn't as simple as that. Good writing is the kind
that transfers your thoughts and emotions to the reader- and to do that, you don't need a
large vocabulary, but you do need ideas, experience, convictions, examples and
excitement. The vocational counselor who advised this girl with a large vocabulary to
become an author succeeded in doing only one thing: he turned an erstwhile happy
stenographer into a frustrated, would-be novelist.
The point I am trying to make is that vocational-guidance experts, even as you and I, are
not infallible. Perhaps you had better consult several of them-and then interpret their
findings in the sunlight of common sense.
You may think it strange that I am including a chapter like this in a book devoted to
worry. But it isn't strange at all, when you understand how many of our worries, regrets,
and frustrations are spawned by work we despise. Ask your father about it-or your
neighbour or your boss. No less an intellectual giant than John Stuart Mill declared that
industrial misfits are "among the heaviest losses of society". Yes, and among the
unhappiest people on this earth are those same "industrial misfits" who hate their daily
work!
Do you know the kind of man who "cracked up" in the Army? The man who was
misplaced! I'm not talking about battle casualties, but about the men who cracked up in
ordinary service. Dr. William Menninger, one of our greatest living psychiatrists, was in
charge of the Army's neuro-psychiatric division during the war, and he says: "We
learned much in the Army as to the importance of selection and of placement, of putting
the right man in the right job. ... A conviction of the importance of the job at hand was
extremely important. Where a man had no interest, where he felt he was misplaced,
where he thought he was not appreciated, where he believed his talents were being
misused, invariably we found a potential if not an actual psychiatric casualty."
Yes-and for the same reasons, a man may "crack up" in industry. If he despises his
business, he can crack it up, too.