Unless you've been living under a rock (and also provided you don't have an internet connection under that rock), you've probably heard of Eric Sink's "Career Calculus" by now. If you haven't, the short explanation is that it's a way of determining how likely you are to progress in your career.
That's fine and dandy, but if you're like me, then you probably think calculus is too hard and best left to brainiacs like the Crocodile Hunter and Cher. Why Eric didn't write "Career Arithmetic" or something like that is beyond me.
Because so many of us were obviously left out of the loop on that one, I came up with my own, simpler answer to Career Calculus. Rather than trying to figure out how far you can progress in your current career, I thought it might be more useful to start at the beginning and come up with a system that would make it simple to choose your career, and then let your high IQ handle the rest. I call my system the "Career Piñata."
It's called "Career Piñata" mainly because it involves your career and a piñata.
Here's how to do it:
1. Sit down with a bag of fortune cookies and start crackin'. You need to break about 100 fortune cookies open. The point of this little exercise is to harvest the fortunes. Once you've gotten your fortunes, you can either eat the cookies or throw them away. I'm not your mamma, so I'm not going to decide for you.
2. Now that you have a pile of fortunes, you need to flip them over to the blank side (if your fortunes have writing on both sides (with lotto numbers, for example), then you bought the wrong kind of fortune cookies - I should have written this in item 1, but I didn't, so suck it up, go buy new ones, and start over). Now, on the blank side of your fortunes, write down the titles of some careers that might interest you. Try to only choose things that you'd actually want to be for the rest of your life.
3. Done with step 2? If not, then what in the hell are you doing at step 3?
4. The time has come to select a piñata. Piñatas are available at most convenience, variety, and hardware stores. You shouldn't have a problem finding one. They come in various shapes and sizes, usually taking on the form of an animal. For demonstrative purposes, I chose the "donkey" shaped piñata because it's the most common (and also because I hate donkeys).
5. Take the piñata home, set it down, and maybe invite the neighbors in for a drink so that you can brag about it. They will almost certainly notice the donkey sitting in the middle of your living room floor, and will want to speak about it at length with you. Once the freeloaders have taken off (after drinking your good liquor, no doubt), stuff the fortunes in the donkey, tie a rope around your piñata, and hoist it up so that it's just over your head.
6. The next step is to get a black tie and wrap it around your head like a mask, paying special attention to covering the ocular cavities in which you most probably have a pair of mostly functional eyeballs. When a tie is worn around the head in the manner described herein, we call it a "blindfold."
7. You're going to need something with which to whack the piñata. If you don't understand why this is, then I suggest that you take a short refresher course in piñata theory. At children's birthday parties, the stick is commonly a broom, but we're playing in the major leagues here, so you really ought to get yourself something more substantial, like a baseball bat or small tree. [Note: If you want to be extra-specially safe, then you're going to want to do this step before the previous step - it's going to be a little tough to find the baseball-bat when you can't see where you're going]
8. With your piñata hoisted, your blindfold on, and piñata slugger in hand, go place yourself directly beneath the piñata. Upon your arrival, spin in a circle three times, stop, and then say something profound about your future.
9. Whack that donkey!
10. Provided you whack sufficiently hard, the donkey should crumble into several chunks of donkey piñata material. This will cause career fortunes to go flying all over the place, and this is the point at which you will want to get on your hands and knees and rifle through the fallen fortunes. Once you feel one, grab it, remove your blindfold, and then read your fortune aloud. Congratulations: You've figured out what to do with the rest of your life:
