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    Crossroads: A Success Guide for New Graduates
    Crossroads: A Success Guide for New Graduates
    Crossroads: A Success Guide for New Graduates
    Ebook133 pages1 hour

    Crossroads: A Success Guide for New Graduates

    By Michael M Dent

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    About this ebook

    In Crossroads: A Success Guide for New Graduates, the lines between academic and professional choices are blurred. From the author’s extensive experience over the years, this book reveals the lessons, moments of revelations, and even the myths when one steps into that meshed landscape of academia and career exploration. Befitting any reader, every page offers captivating yet philosophical angles, or even questions, on a spectrum of topics—from education and life, to career.

    As you reach this book’s end, the choice to decide will be in your own hands.

    “Philosophy tells us that the true objective of humans is the pursuit of happiness. We were born to suffer and life is a continual struggle against the slings and arrows of unpredictable luck.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSunway University Press
    Release dateJul 23, 2024
    ISBN9786297646121
    Crossroads: A Success Guide for New Graduates

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      Book preview

      Crossroads - Michael M Dent

      CHAPTER 1 Introduction

      What is Success?

      Most of us can formulate a long list of things we want. The initial things tend to be material objects: a house, a car, or a lot of money. Other criteria will then appear: health, friends, a good love life, contributing to society, or even a sense of achievement. Some may even throw in Abraham Maslow’s concept of self-actualisation in the list¹. However, when asked to arrange this list of wants according to priority, the sequence may start to reverse. Health may move up to number one, friends to number two—perhaps a happy love life may beat them both to the top position!

      Most of the material objects mentioned are related to the amount of money available for spending. Interestingly enough, having a lot of money may not equate with happiness—which did not appear in my initial list at all. Happiness can be regarded as a meta-level numeraire for many of the other items on my list. At the same time, money is only useful for the things it can buy, and the number or quality of things that provide happiness is subject to the iron rule of the theory of diminishing returns. For example, your first BMW is a source of great pride and ego but thereafter, a Porsche or Ferrari does not quite bring the same level of satisfaction, and buying subsequent super cars little more.

      There is an excellent exercise (Senge, 1997) which you can conduct to find out what you actually value. Look at the following list of words provided and circle the 10 values you think are most important to you. Do not spend too much time on this—pick those that intuitively appeal to you. Do not worry about writing on the book—it is your book and for your own use; you are very unlikely to bequeath it to your grandchildren.

      Table 1 What I value most

      Source: Adapted from Senge (1997)

      Now take those 10 chosen words and write down the 5 most important to you. You can do this by scoring out the least significant ones from the table. Now reduce that list to your top 3. You can guess what comes next … reduce your list of 3 to your top attribute. Perhaps you might want to think or reflect about why such value is important to you.

      This exercise can be a great eye-opener as to what is really important to you. This list may change at different life stages, and it is probably a good idea to regularly rethink your preferences.

      From the Beginning

      I do not wish to overload you with the philosophers of the past so early in the book, but they have spent the last 3,000 years or more agonising over this question of how do we judge ourselves, or our successes. So, it is probably worth a brief diversion into their territory to see what they make of it.

      In more recent philosophy, I would like to start with Adam Smith and the theory of moral sentiments. Simplistically, Smith likens a cut on one’s finger to a massive problem that figures higher in hierarchy than the elimination of an entire civilisation! In other words, things that matter to us on a personal level take more of our attention than nationwide or global-scale issues.

      This is worrying, because if we cannot achieve some level of proportionality (as Smith did by observing his small chamber and the overlooking mountains from an imaginary distance—for proportional comparison), then we have little chance of discerning the correct path when addressing more complex issues, especially if that issue is regarding your career choices.

      The suggestion of proportionality by Smith is one of my favourite philosophical positions, but I would also like to share another term called the Man on the Clapham Omnibus. Introduced by Lord Justice Greer into the English law in 1932, this concept entails looking at one’s actions through the eyes of a disinterested and impartial observer. Additionally, in John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness, he questions whether a reset in socio-economical, and political, statuses will enable the ‘new’ public to produce impartial and logical judgements.

      While there will not be too many men on Clapham buses nowadays, and Smith did not assume that there would be, it is worth thinking about how that influences our perception towards ourselves and/or the success we obtain.

      All in all, the solution is to see yourself as others see you.

      A colleague of mine uses this approach in his Mind Mechanics programme to envision how others envision you in a given situation, then making you step into the moccasins of another to observe your interactions with others. This is a powerful experiment and best conducted with friends and a well-trained facilitator. Nowadays, we would call this the Johari Window. Created by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955, this notion was a technique to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. Then again, as both Smith and his great friend David Hume exhorted, the truth is best derived by the means of dialogues among

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