Essay: On Experience and Career

Early in my life I had all the chances to not believe in experience neither in career as I grew up in a country being led by anti-capitalists where the idea of success was never intended to be achieved by meritocracy, by doing business or by understanding and attending the demand of the community through the markets, instead it was encouraged by doing extra classes to prepare myself for exams to join public service and work for the government. The idea of working for the private sector was seem as irrelevant and with caution by the fears of those who are closer and care for your future struggles and the consequences of an uncertain future by their own experiences. If as a teenager we may have a phase of rebellion, then in my case, luckily, I would note, I did not put focus on the plan to work for the State and ended up challenging myself to build my career through the markets by pursuing excellence and success against all odds going through failures and achievements.

Before we think through professional experiences, career and how it relate to each other,?we are going to think about the society we grow in and how the narratives around us can influence us, but not necessarily drive us towards it. It is also important to reflect and understand ourselves, our limitations and our aspirations. We are composed by a bundle of values and prejudices acquired by time based on our initial personal experiences from when we start interacting actively with our thoughts, actions, perceptions, social interactions, and all events which aggregates all things in the way we are now. When we learn something by concept or by action we have to challenge our own self and our own knowledge to compile its results and judge it, into what is truth or not, to then assume our ignorance and absorb this new knowledge to become part of ourselves. This process can be smooth if we do not have existing concepts that explains for ourselves this new concept or if we simple assume it as a whole truth. I would risk an assumption that assuming as whole truth would be the most common behaviour to a modern individual due to the abundance of information, to how fast the information is spread and to how easy we have it at our disposition.

If I exercise about the society I was living in back to when I was young, a public job in my home country provides financial security and certainty of future to live your life with a fair payment to practice whatever you decide to choose as a profession with the main goal to retire yourself as soon as possible and then to be free to do whatever you wish, like traveling, staying with your family or perhaps on the beach ad aeternum. I believe a lot of people in there have this simple idea of life in their minds as it is a straight forward definition of what a career and work would be or mean as we have the wrong idea that our actions do not necessarily have an impact to contribute with our local communities considering that we are not used to quantify its impact from a small scale summing up to a big scale. Today narratives against private sector and against work are inflamed by the same old rhetoric that remembers me Duchamp "lazy action" or the narrative of "greed capitalists" usually characterized by banks or big corporations which are described as "the bourgeois oppressors of the oppressed workers" where the workers were always "saved" by labour unions. In my home country for example, the labour unions were maintained by mandatory contributions per year done by the working class as required by the law that could be challenged in one specific day of the year and ended up in having around 17.000 labour unions including a labour union for the labour union workers. Of course this law was described as what we all would describe as what "seems good" or that it would be of our "benefit" by upscaling the problems and giving solutions in high level using affirmative actions to promote it like "to protect workers" or "worker rights" or any other term that describes it in common sense as "intentionally good" or "to balance" the agreements done between "the greed" companies against employees, always criticizing Capitalism and promoting Socialism. The result was the misrepresentation of what it would be, where it was used more to promote politic parties against Capitalism than to defend workers agreements and even considering this law has been removed, the damage and the mindset remained in the society as it affects each individual capacity to assume their own responsibility to deal with their own risks over their agreements done for their careers where they transferred their responsibilities to the State who have the means to punish companies by the misuse of the law which creates a major risk for those who wants to start their own business from the scratch. In a poor country one family composed by a couple have a low earning per month in the private sector causing most people to push for public jobs to have a better life. We all have to understand that in a poor country not everyone will have a chance to have a normal life with less struggles, and entrepreneurship does not have an incentive as it requires a higher investment to comply with regulations and supposed "rights" added to a scenario where you have to compete with companies that already have some kind of privilege with the local governments or organized criminal groups who dominates the neighbourhood or region. All this short analysis is an example of what we need to understand to be able to identify the mindset of a society we are part of, how it can affect our interpretations of the markets when we think in offer and demand and how it can impact in our actions to improve ourselves in our professional lives, mature as a person and move forward in our careers.?

Extending this analysis to reflect over myself, maybe my rebellion happened because I did work early in my life when I was a teenager looking in whatever kind of job, I could find like guarding cars in front of a courthouse, cleaning cars or when I painted a street food car to be able to do my own stuff on a city in the countryside of Sao Paulo. This simple attitude to look for some work to be able to pay for whatever I wanted probably built and prepared myself to the challenges ahead in the market and added traits that were required later to dedicate myself to work and to build a career. Understanding ourselves is of such importance to seek for a professional path that will constitute part of the meaning in our lives looking forward to contribute to our communities by the rule of offer and demand, which nowadays are being distorted and attacked by those who have a nihilist way to see the world, who want to base their professions choices based on self-centred ideas built by the narrative of 'oppressed and oppressors' which make them feel like victims for not having demand for whatever they choose. These ideas poison the mind to make you think that you can impose whatever is your choice into your community regardless if they need or not. And the community must accept, create the demand and aggregate value into your choice, even if it requires to be imposed by the State itself in a sense of "fairness" and disguised as good intention. Intention that always ends in a sort of anti-capitalist narrative and distortion of the use of law. Because of this, not everyone has a clear idea of what a career is and how the practical experiences of what we learn in theory helps us to develop ourselves and are of such importance to build our path through a meaningful profession to contribute with everyone around us.

When we bring what constitute us in this world and spend time practicing our skills, we are applying what we do know to achieve a goal and to challenge our skills through different and unexpected scenarios that will show us the truth in the concepts, values, or prejudices that we own. We can think about the importance of practical experienced by reading what Aristotle describes as the three types of knowledge in Nicomachean Ethics defined as Episteme which means scientific knowledge, Phronesis which means ethical knowledge and Techne which means knowledge of craft; in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith exercises the logic of what a skill is made of and how a person who practice and aggregate knowledge by time in long-term ends up achieving a specialization on that activity; or the logic exercised by Socrates and recorded by Plato in the books that constitutes The Republic where he says "one man should practice one thing only, the thing to which his nature was best adapted". If we compile all three thinkers, we are going to conclude that the practice is an essential part of the whole knowledge we carry within us where professional experience plays an important role as it is to practice and to find the truth of a concept, value, or prejudice within us stressed under different conditions and scenarios which can lead us towards success or failure, or the truth. Failure is an important part of our maturity and helps us to build responsibility as it remembers us that our limitations will always be present within ourselves and the mistakes we have done will become itself an opportunity to learn as we try and desire to find the truth in the matters. Those who cannot accept failure and do not have maturity to deal with it usually externalize it by blaming others as a defensive mechanism to not change or to not have their own beliefs challenged.

Practice must not be confused with the endless repetition of the action to learn something only by theory and the idea that the theory itself will aggregate more value to ourselves than the years of experience we could have by practicing and mastering our skills. Those who learn by theory and by theory remains are not going to be able to see and to find the truth in what they have learned misguiding them and others to a repetitive affirmation of what has been described by others without never getting a chance to test and to find the truth by themselves. It is true that theory in most of the times could be the description of practical experiences done by others, but it does not mean that we would be able to master its practice with the same type of outcome or that we would face the same scenarios and challenges that was once faced by someone else. The dynamism linked to the demands in our time and in the evolution of what we can offer or evolve to make it more productive or to achieve better results may make us consider that when we practice, we not only master the matter, we also may have different outcomes which could lead us to new experiences that later would be used as a model. We could use as an example project management where the practice of Waterfall methodology later gave space to the Agile methodology based on the concept of Minimum Viable Product. Another example of the importance of practice would be why I see Maestro and Politics as two of the most important professions late in our lives as both professions requires extensive practical experiences and maturity that can only be achieved by time and practice to then be able to sacrifice ourselves and our careers for the common good, by lecture or representation, looking forward to share their practical experiences, to show the truths in the concepts and by knowing all the struggles in both personal and professional life experiences. To lecture about a matter to someone we need to carry, not only theory as our base of knowledge, but our experiences when we applied, shared and challenged our skills through an amount of unexpected scenarios that surges and the social and economic demands of a dynamic society. To represent ideas as a Politician we need to have a period of experiences not only in the profession we master, but in the way we live our lives within the society to be able to understand its challenges and represent the needs of all those who have chosen us, otherwise we will always be pretending to understand a group or their challenges and difficulties. This explains the strongest signal of the misleading representation in politics today promoted by the wrong belief that there is such thing as a public career based only in acting to pretend to represent, as a profession, resulting in demagogy. It is when someone promotes what appeals to the common people, but acts in a way of their own interest; substitutes the representation in politics by a persona created to reflect an image which looks and feels like the ordinary people, but do not share the same reality and values as them. Like a reflection in a mirror where we see ourselves when we face and disappears when we leave, but I may stop here as it would be an extensive analysis for another text. De facto when we insist exclusively in theory and ignore practice, we are not able to help other individuals to master a knowledge and apply a specific skill, or we cannot honestly represent part of a society because we do not know the real challenges they face or had to face, we assume.

"… But now note that things relate in one way to practical understanding [that directs behaviour] and in another to theoretical understanding [that pursues truth]. Practical understanding causes things and is the measure of what it makes; but theoretical understanding acquires knowledge from things, being changed by them in a certain sense, so that things are the measure of it." [1]

It is also important to understand that practice can only be constructive if we and our skill set are always being challenged by a dynamic, diverse and multicultural environment. Dynamism will constantly force us to go beyond our understanding to stress all the knowledge we have and to force us to challenge ourselves and our set of skills to achieve new results for unexpected problems or scenarios. Diversity allows us to experiment, not necessarily to master, the challenges of various professions in all kinds of its scenarios which helps us to merge our own knowledge within other business areas and complement ourselves with new base skills. Multicultural not only in the sense to have persons from multiple cultures, but individuals from multiple socio economic backgrounds, to increase our skills in how we communicate and how we deal with conflicts, deceptions, expectations and trust to help us to understand how different or inequal individuals are and how different results each one of them can achieve by their own set of skills, values and prejudices in a way that we can learn to improve ourselves, ignore known mistakes or to prepare ourselves through the evaluation of scenarios with known results. Most people have a negative idea of inequality which is wrong, inequality is the consequence of the human expression that shows to us the fact that we all are different and that we all will have advantages and disadvantages that we need to understand in ourselves to be able to drive our careers towards what would aggregate more for ourselves and for others, just like the practice of a sport. There is no better proof than the materialization of results proportioned by the practice of a sport which shows to us the truth in ourselves, in our behaviour and in our bodies stressing it by the pursuit of excellence through comparison, or competition, with others or with our own version in the past.

"A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man without trials." [2]

?As I described to fail is to learn and we should not treat it as a shame or treat ourselves as a victim but recognize it as an opportunity to reflect over ourselves, our actions, our goals and compile it in our understanding to apply in a different way in the future. Failure is an unavoidable part of our experiences, and we must be prepared to identify it going against our own values and prejudices in order to polish our skills as reasonable as we can with the ambition to always be a better version of ourselves. In the begin of our careers it is common to fail and individuals who have more practical experience and more maturity than us expects it where we should be always open to listen carefully. Feedbacks must not be seen as negative, where you should create the most welcoming scenario to give people freedom and trust to talk with you honestly, so you receive the good and bad reviews in the same way that you would expect from a friend who tells you what they think that are good and bad in you. In the end, you will be the one who will process the information you have received to be able to think and to filter what are the conclusions as you also may consider to avoid the mistake of absorbing someone opinions that values only theory, have less experience or uses entitlement as a way to dictate knowledge, someone who usually push and judge more than contribute and add. To identify, understand and absorb other person extensive professional practical experiences is to have the privilege and to grant the advantage of being able to correct ourselves and exercise our behaviour at the same time we are mastering our knowledge, and by consequence, our profession.

Career is a path led by our capacity to focus on our chosen profession constituted by the accumulation of professional experiences that are related to it and to aim to short- and long-term goals that we define for ourselves which has to contribute to our society, represented by our customers and their demands. The accumulation of professional experiences without a goal and order does not help us to understand, find a meaning in what we do or a reason in why we practice it and how society will aggregate monetary and social value to it. When we start to add experiences to our professional life, we gather knowledge in diverse fields which we use to practice our skills challenging and forcing us to interact with all the concepts we have learned, values we have acquired and prejudices that we have. Specific skills within a profession are only important in a later stage when we already have achieved a mature knowledge over the base concepts of our professions, to then start mastering an extension or a complex new concept formed by these base concepts. This can only happen if we have a clear understanding where we want to drive our careers and where we want to be in the long-term, otherwise we will not be able to understand how to correlate different set of skills to improve not only ourselves, but the profession we are trying to master or specialize.

We need to realize that our careers are based in what we decide to master ourselves and in who are in need of our skills, an exchange of our products or services with the value attributed by someone, or the simplest way to define Capitalism. We must never think that we have the right to impose whatever we want into society without analysing its needs, its demands, how relevant a profession is and how abundant the market are of it. All these factors will have influence in your career plan by giving you an idea of return of investment, investment not only in monetary manner as money, but in a more expensive exchange, time. We never impose our set of skills over others to make them accept whatever is our base concepts or ideas, we serve our communities through the markets by attending their demands, discovering their struggles, and trying to aggregate value in our set of skills to support and help someone who gave value to it. A free society based on democracy is going to express its needs through the free markets, they will value the specializations as needed and it is up to us to update and transform ourselves as the scenarios changes and transforms itself because our societies are dynamic and it will always evolve with the consequence of requiring from us the constant update of our practices, methodologies and by consequence our careers. Our career path can be always threaten by those who define the rules in a society through the law and mess with the complexity of the markets and its trade relations done by individuals with the consequence of increasing our costs to operate or making it more bureaucratic, but if our set of skills are in high demand, it is required in other free societies and there is a low number of individuals who master the same profession or specialization as ours, then we will always be able to relocate ourselves to keep going through our careers avoiding these intentional obstacles.

We must remember that when we agree to exchange our skills with the demand of other individual, we assume the responsibility over our professional capabilities and over the offering of ourselves and merge it with the ideas, processes and struggles of those who are in need of help. It is up to us the responsibility of our actions to serve our communities - represented by businesses, individuals, or institutions - in a way to contribute with their demands and to get the opportunity to improve ourselves and everyone who we will affect. Its natural by the accumulation of time and professional experiences that we will become responsible by other individuals and their set of skills which we may have to manage, apply, or direct by transferring knowledge, learning or helping them to improve their own skills.

It is intrinsic the social concern through the exchange done by the markets under Capitalism because those who offers the products and services has to be conscious of what they are offering and its quality in order to have a continuity and to serve well, and those who demand the products and services are also conscious of what they need, in whatever rational they decide they need, by using two powers to decide: one is defined by the aggregation of value and the other by reputation of the offered products and services. The monetary value aggregated by each individual who consumes a product or service is a conscious expression of ourselves who lives under a democratic society and who are used to practice our individual freedom to use our own money earned by our own efforts and achievements to choose what it is good and what it is not. The reputation became a strong power yielded by consumers in modern societies and democracies that demonstrates other control to evaluate products and services. And in the information era we can quantify its reputation by mechanisms like ratings instead of only by the reputations that were passed from people to people, which can cause direct impacts to the aggregation of value of a product or service exposing its quality or wrongdoings to others.

Anyone who decides to plan their professional lives and careers aiming for a long-term goal need to understand how to serve society needs through the market by offering the best of whatever they decide to offer. We have to understand that if the product or service - constituted by the set of skills or by the consequence of it - is abundant in the market the value aggregated to it tends to fall where this rational over abundance helps us understand that if we offer a demanded specialized service that has less offering then it is going to be more valuable by consequence and necessity. Specialized service or specialization is our capacity to focus into a matter within a profession that offers enough complexity to require from us dedication and experience to be capable to deal with it considering all the common base knowledge in that field. A simple rational to explain it would be the capacity of a blacksmith to do any metal work, but if we were in need of a blacksmith who knew to work specifically with axes then we were going to look for blacksmiths with most practical experience in dealing with axes, or per say constitutes the specialization in the art of dealing with axes by practical experience. And as once were blacksmiths, now we can extend to all other areas such as Information Technology where the specialization could be related to a specific product of a company such as IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, or Google, or, why not, your own product.

There can be and will be multiple mechanisms to drive us out of our paths and damage our careers, especially if we find ourselves in a field with high demand that cannot be attended by the current number of resources that are offered in the market. As I explained, when we are specialized, we are focused in accumulating more specific experiences within our profession becoming an extension of it, but if the profession itself lacks professionals, the high demand will always try to drive us out of our specialization and focus to attend whatever that area is in need of. If this need requires and applies only common base knowledge, and by consequence less value, then it could be supplied by those who have less or no practical experience, and not by someone who already have extensive knowledge summed by a good amount of practical experiences. A good example of this mechanism to trick our careers in Information Technology would be someone who tries to offer a professional who is specialized and carries a good amount of practical experience on Cyber Security to supply a demand of Technical Support that usually is related to general problems in Information Technology that are not focused in Cyber Security. Other mechanism is to try to generalize and reduce all knowledge in a field in a flat structure where it carries the presumption to define a professional in that area as the individual who dominates all of its specializations without the need of experience and here, I may personally argue: those who know everything know nothing. This is usually applied when the field is under pressure by the lack of resources and the high value attributed to a specific professional, where those who demand tries to generalize creating a new sort of nomenclature and attribute a new value to it, for example, in Information Technology it is clearly exemplified under the nomenclature "full stack" that tries to simplify all sort of different demands in Information Technology into a profile defined as the "all-knowing", and at the same time, ironically, less-valued.

In the end our careers belong to ourselves and we are responsible to put together our professional experiences, our career path and knowledges to merge with other professionals and, most important, customers who demand and evaluate through the democratic aggregation of value and reputation proportioned by Capitalism to our services and products. We must never depend on anything to define our own path to avoid being vulnerable to others mistakes that could push us to failure and to become vulnerable to others weaknesses independently of how much effort you apply. Professional experiences are contained in our careers and both concepts help us to mature through time accumulating responsibilities over ourselves and others. We must remember that advancing in our careers without or with a lack of practical experience is to be subjected to failure with high consequences as to be exposed and to be judged by our actions and by the responsibilities we had. To build a career is to be patient and to understand that we may never know everything, instead we will always be able to learn new things and accumulate these knowledges within ourselves. The theory gives us base concepts and descriptions from other experiences, practice makes us master it by evaluating how it applies in real life and how we can identify opportunities to improve it, and the meaning of all is to achieve the goal to help our customers and community by attending their demands through the markets understanding that our small actions will always sum up with other professionals around us and have a major impact.?

References

[1] Selected Philosophical Writings. St. Thomas Aquinas. Oxford University Press, 2008. Page 57. ISBN13: 9780199540273.?

[2] Letters from a Stoic. Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Penguin Classics, 2004. ISBN13: 978-0140442106.