By Jim Hagarty
2015
When you are young and just starting off in life, it is easy to lose your way. There are so many career choices today it is mind-boggling. How does anyone ever choose successfully?
I think the trick is to not find your career but to let your career find you. Strangely enough, that works more often than not. And at the other end of the scale, when you’re retired and reflecting on things, it’s tempting to look back and wonder if you took the right path.
In my case, I became a journalist, a newspaperman to be exact, or, as others have described a person in my line of work, an “ink-stained wretch.” I didn’t think my life was wasted but lately I have realized I threw away my best years.
I wish, when I was starting out, I had gone to my parents and said, “I want to become a collaboration specialist.” I am sure my Dad would have said, “That’s great, you can start by collaborating the cattle from the back 40 to the barn.” But whether there would have been joy or disappointment in the house following the announcement of my decision, I cannot say.
I know everyone is aware of what a collaboration specialist does, but I will go over it again in case you have forgotten. A collaboration specialist helps companies run better meetings. In 1969, if I had known this was a career option, I would have grabbed onto it. What a fantastic path to take. To help companies bore and annoy their poor employees even just a little bit less with every meeting they are forced to attend would have been so fantastic.
And some day, in the old folk’s home, as I sit around with the guys comparing our careers, the old novelist, TV producer, grocery store owner, law professor and microbiologist, will all look at me and wonder when I tell them that I spent my life as a collaboration specialist. I hope they are not filled with envy as that is an emotion that can shorten your life. However, company meetings can bring a certain interminability to life that can be achieved in no other way that I know of.
This column is adjourned.
Minutes will be distributed at a later date.
