Opinion
Why ‘mad’ passions are worth following
By Jim Bright
The psychotherapist and England cricket captain Mike Brearley found himself at the non-strikers end watching opening batsman Geoffrey Boycott facing the bowling of the Australians at the WACA in Perth in December 1978. He wondered: what compelled his batting partner to prove himself again and again?
Compulsion is a frequent ingredient in careers.
Circumstances compel people to take jobs to survive.Credit: Justin McManus
The writer George Orwell reflected in an essay in 1946 that although he had known from the age of “five or six” that he would be a writer when he grew up, he described trying to abandon the idea in his late teens and early 20s, but realised he was “outraging his true nature” and “sooner or later I would have to settle down and write books”.
For Orwell, it appears he felt there was no choice. Shades of 1984 perhaps.
Michael Parkinson, the journalist and broadcaster, also says he knew what he wanted to be when he was about eight years old. The contemporary writer David Baldacci is more explicit: “If writing were illegal I’d be in prison, I can’t not write. It’s a compulsion” (in Why we Write, Meredith Maran, 2013).
Compulsion seems to start early, or at least it is recalled that way. Actor David Wenham in his TEDx Sydney talk in 2019 recalled trying to entertain from an early age with comic devices such as pulling his trousers up high. He concludes that he is an actor because he wants to tell stories. By Wenham’s telling, acting was not a conscious choice, but a pursuit of a natural tendency.
George Orwell had known from the age of “five or six” that he wanted to be a writer.
Of course there is the other, more negative sense of compulsion. Circumstances contrive to compel people to take jobs to survive. For those individuals, they do not feel as though they have a choice. The choice is removed by necessities of life to make ends meet, or perhaps to satisfy a cultural, community or familial norm.
Choice for people in these circumstances is determined by context, and if we believe individual choice is important we must first change the context in which individuals find themselves. The compelled have no voice and have no choice.
The American Psychiatric Association defines compulsions as “repetitive behaviours or mental acts that a person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession”.
“The behaviours typically prevent or reduce a person’s distress related to an obsession temporarily, and they are then more likely to do the same in the future,” it says.
Discovering early on that behaving in a certain way brings pleasure may be the spark that lights the career bonfire. Getting feedback or insight that one possesses a talent for whatever one is doing, provides the fuel for the fire.
That early combination of curiosity and trying something and then the delight at seeing the roar of the ensuing fire acts like a rocket engine launching the young person toward the stars.
The spark that starts the fire depends on the match being in the right place at the right time. It is essentially a chance event and we know from research including my own, that most people point to a chance event as being influential in their career.
We can make these positive chance events happen at any age, of course – but as we get older, we become more guarded, more cynical, more patterned and routinised, less curious, less experimenting and less open to feedback.
Maybe the way to choose a career is to let it choose us, by being more open to opportunity and more aware and confident of our talents. Luckily for everyone concerned, I received the brutal feedback as a child that I was never going to open the batting for England.
Dr Jim Bright, FAPS owns Bright and Associates, a Career Management Consultancy and is Director of Evidence & Impact at BECOME Education an Ed Tech start up www.become.education. Email to opinion@jimbright.com. Follow him on Twitter @DrJimBright
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