Should One Expect a Reward When Doing a Good Deed?

Seven Steps to a More Fulfilling Job

    Many people today find themselves in unfulfilling work situations. In fact, one in four workers is dissatisfied with their current job, according to the recent “Plans for 2004” survey. Their career path may be financially rewarding, but it doesn’t meet their emotional, social or creative needs. They’re stuck, unhappy, and have no idea what to do about it, except move to another job.
    Mary Lyn Miller, veteran career consultant and founder of the Life and Career Clinic, says that when most people are unhappy about their work, their first thought is to get a different job. Instead, Miller suggests looking at the possibility of a different life. Through her book, 8 Myths of Making a Living, as well as workshops, seminars and personal coaching and consulting, she has helped thousands of dissatisfied workers reassess life and work.
    Like the way of Zen, which includes understanding of oneself as one really is, Miller encourages job seekers  and those dissatisfied with work or life to examine their beliefs about work and recognize that “in many cases your beliefs are what brought you to where you are today.” You may have been raised to think that women were best at nurturing and caring and, therefore, should be teachers and nurses. So that’s what you did. Or, perhaps you were brought up to believe that you should do what your father did, so you have taken over the family business, or become a dentist “just like dad.” If this sounds familiar, it’s probably time to look at the new possibilities for your future.
    Miller developed a 7-step process to help potential job seekers assess their current situation and beliefs, identify their real passion, and start on a journey that allows them to pursue their passion through work.
Step 1: Willingness to do something different.
    Breaking the cycle of doing what you have always done is one of the most difficult tasks for job seekers. Many find it difficult to steer away from a career path or make a change, even if it doesn’t feel right. Miller urges job seekers to open their minds to other possibilities beyond what they are currently doing.
Step 2: Commitment to being who you are, not who or what someone wants you to be.
    Look at the \gifts and talents you have and make a commitment to pursue those things that you love most. If you love the social aspects of your job, but are stuck inside an office or “chained to your desk” most of the time, vow to follow your instinct and investigate alternative careers and work that allow you more time to interact with others. Dawn worked as a manager for a large retail clothing store for several years. Though she had advanced within the company, she felt frustrated and longed to be involved with nature and the outdoors. She decided to go to school nights and weekends to pursue her true passion by earning her master’s degree in forestry. She now works in the biotech forestry division of a major paper company.
Step 3: Self-definition
    Miller suggests that once job seekers know who they are, they need to know how to sell themselves. “In the job market, you are a product. And just like a product, you most know the features and benefits that you have to offer a potential client, or employer.” Examine the skills and knowledge that you have identify how they can apply to your desired occupation. Your qualities will exhibit to employers why they should hire you over other candidates.
Step 4: Attain a level of self-honoring.
    Self-honoring or self-love may seem like an odd step for job hunters, but being able to accept yourself, without judgment, helps eliminate insecurities and will make you more self-assured. By accepting who you are – all your emotions, hopes and dreams, your personality, and your unique way of being – you’ll project more confidence when networking and talking with potential employers. The power of self-honoring can help to break all the falsehoods you were programmed to believe – those that made you feel that you were not good enough, or strong enough, or intelligent enough to do what you truly desire.
Step 5: Vision.
    Miller suggests that job seekers develop a vision that embraces the answer to “What do I really want to do?” one should create a solid statement in a dozen or so sentences that describe in detail how they see their life related to work. For instance, the secretary who longs to be an actress describes a life that allows her to express her love of Shakespeare on stage. A real estate agent, attracted to his current job because her loves fixing up old homes, describes buying properties that need a little tender loving care to make them more saleable.
Step 6: Appropriate risk.
    Some philosophers believe that the way to enlightenment comes through facing obstacles and difficulties. Once people discover their passion, many are too scared to do anything about it. Instead, they do nothing. With this step, job seekers should assess what they are willing to give up, or risk, in pursuit of their dream. For one working mom, that meant taking night classes to learn new computer-aided design skills, while still earning a salary and keeping her day job. For someone else, it may mean quitting his or her job, taking out loan and going back to school full time. You’ll move one step closer to your ideal work life if you identify how much risk you are willing to take and the sacrifices you are willing to make.
Step 7: Action.
    Some teachers of philosophy describe action in this way, “If one wants to get to the top of a mountain, just sitting at the foot thinking about it will not bring one there. It is by making the effort of climbing up the mountain, step by step, that eventually the summit is reached.” All too often, it is the lack of action that ultimately holds people back from attaining their ideals. Creating a plan and taking it one step at a time can lead to new and different job opportunities. Job-hunting tasks gain added meaning as you sense their importance in your quest for a more meaningful work life. The plan can include researching industries and occupations, talking to people who are in your desired area of work, taking classes, or accepting volunteer work in your targeted field.
    Each of these steps will lead you on a journey to a happier and more rewarding work life. After all, it is the journey, not the destination, that is most important.

    Nursing, as a typically female profession, must deal constantly with the false impression that nurses are there to wait on the physician. As nurses, we are (1) ________ to provide nursing care only. We do not have any legal or moral (2) ________ to any physician. We provide health teaching, (3) ________ physical as well as emotional problems, (4) ________ patient-related services, and make all of our nursing decisions based upon what is best or suitable for the patient. If, in any (5) ________, we feel that a physician’s order is (6) ________ or unsafe, we have a legal (7) ________ to question that order or refuse to carry it out.
    Nursing is not a nine-to-five job with every weekend off. All nurses are aware of that before they enter the profession. The emotional and physical stress. However, that occurs due to odd working hours is a (8) ________ reason for a lot of the career dissatisfaction. (9) ____________________________. That disturbs our personal lives, disrupts our sleeping and eating habits, and isolates us from everything except job-related friends and activities.
    The quality of nursing care is being affected dramatically by these situations. (10) __________________________. Consumers of medically related services have evidently not been affected enough yet to demand changes in our medical system. But if trends continue as predicted, (11) ______________________.

    Google is a world-famous company, with its headquarters in Mountain View, California. It was set up in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998, and  inflated (膨胀) with the Internet bubble. Even when everything around it collapsed the company kept on inflating. Google’s search engine is so widespread across the world that search became Google, and google became a verb. The world fell in love with the effective, fascinatingly fast technology.
    Google owes much of its success to the brilliance of S. Brin and L. Page, but also to a series of fortunate events. It was Page who, at Stanford in 1996, initiated  the academic project that eventually became Google’s search engine. Brin, who had met Page at a student orientation a year earlier, joined the project early on. They were both Ph.D. candidates when they devised the search engine which was better than the rest and, without any marketing, spread by word of mouth from early adopters to, eventually, your grandmother.
    Their breakthrough, simply put, was that when their search engine crawled the Web, it did more than just look for word matches, it also tallied (统计) and ranked a host of other critical factors like how websites link to one another. That delivered far better results than anything else. Brin and  Page meant to name their creation Googol (the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes), but someone misspelled the word so it stuck as Google. They raised money from prescient (有先见之明的) professors and venture capitalists, and moved off campus to turn Google into business. Perhaps their biggest stroke of luck came early on when they tried to sell their technology to other search engines, but no one met their price, and they built it up on their own.
    The next breakthrough came in 2000, when Google figured out how to make money with its invention. It had lots of users, but almost no one was paying. The solution turned out to be advertising, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that Google is now essentially an advertising company, given that that’s the source of nearly all its revenue. Today it is a giant advertising company, worth $100 billion.

    You hear the refrain all the time: the U.S. economy looks good statistically, but it doesn’t feel good. Why doesn’t ever-greater wealth promote ever-greater happiness? It is a question that dates at least to the appearance in 1958 of The Affluent (富裕的) Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, who died recently at 97.
    The Affluent Society is a modern classic because it helped define a new moment in the human condition. For most of history, “hunger, sickness, and cold” threatened nearly everyone, Galbraith wrote. “Poverty was found everywhere in that world. Obviously it is not of ours.” After World War II, the dread of another Great Depression gave way to an economic boom. In the 1930s unemployment had averaged 18.2 percent; in the 1950s it was 4.5 percent.
    To Galbraith, materialism had gone mad and would breed discontent. Through advertising, companies conditioned consumers to buy things they didn’t really want or need. Because so much spending was artificial, it would  be unfulfilling. Meanwhile, government spending that would make everyone better off was being cut down because people instinctively—and wrongly—labeled government only as “a necessary evil.”
    It’s often said that only the rich are getting ahead; everyone else is  standing still or falling behind. Well, there are many undeserving rich—overpaid chief executives, for instance. But over any meaningful period, most people’s incomes are increasing. From 1995 to 2004, inflation-adjusted average family income rose 14.3 percent, to $43,200. people feel “squeezed” because their rising incomes often don’t satisfy their rising wants—for bigger homes, more health care, more education, faster Internet connections.
    The other great frustration is that it has not eliminated insecurity. People regard job stability as part of their standard of living. As corporate layoffs increased, that part has eroded. More workers fear they’ve become “the disposable American,” as Louis Uchitelle puts it in his book by the same name.
    Because so much previous suffering and social conflict stemmed from poverty, the arrival of widespread affluence suggested utopian (乌托邦式的) possibilities. Up to a point, affluence succeeds. There is much les physical misery than before. People are better off. Unfortunately, affluence also creates new complaints and contradictions.
    Advanced societies need economic growth to satisfy the multiplying wants of their citizens. But the quest for growth lets loose new anxieties and economic conflicts that disturb the social order. Affluence liberates the individual, promising that everyone can choose a unique way to self-fulfillment. But the promise is so extravagant that it predestines many disappointments and sometimes inspires choices that have anti-social consequences, including family breakdown and obesity (肥胖症). Statistical indicators of happiness have not risen with incomes.
    Should we be surprised? Not really. We’ve simply reaffirmed an old truth: the pursuit of affluence does not always end with happiness.

    The use of deferential (敬重的) language is symbolic of the Confucian ideal of the woman, which dominates conservative gender norms in Japan. This ideal presents a woman who withdraws quietly to the background, subordinating her life and needs to those of her family and its male head. She is a dutiful daughter, wife, and mother, master of the domestic arts. The typical refined Japanese woman excels in modesty and delicacy; she “treads softly (谨言慎行)in the world,” elevating feminine beauty and grace to an art form.
    Nowadays, it is commonly observed that young women are not conforming to the feminine linguistic (语言的) ideal. They are using fewer of the very deferential “women’s” forms, and even using the few strong forms that are know as “men’s.” This, of course, attracts considerable attention and has led to an outcry in the Japanese media against the defeminization of women’s language. Indeed, we didn’t hear about “men’s language” until people began to respond to girls’ appropriation of forms normally reserved for boys and men. There is considerable sentiment about the “corruption” of women’s language—which of course is viewed as part of the loss of feminine ideals and morality—and this sentiment is crystallized by nationwide opinion polls that are regularly carried out by the media.
    Yoshiko Matsumoto has argued that young women probably never used as many of the highly deferential forms as older women. This highly polite style is no doubt something that young women have been expected to “grow into”—after all, it is assign not simply of femininity, but of maturity and refinement, and its use could be taken to indicate a change in the nature of one’s social relations as well. One might well imagine little girls using exceedingly polite forms when playing house or imitating older women—in a fashion analogous to little girls’ use of a high-pitched voice to do “teacher talk” or “mother talk” in role play.
    The fact that young Japanese women are using less deferential language is a sure sign of change—of social change and of linguistic change. But it is most certainly not a sign of the “masculization” of girls. In some instances, it may be a sign that girls are making the same claim to authority as boys and men, but that is very different from saying that they are trying to be “masculine.” Katsue Reynolds has argued that girls nowadays are using more assertive language strategies in order to be able to compete with boys in schools and out. Social change also brings not simply different positions for women and girls, but different relations to life stages, and adolescent girls are participating in new subcultural forms. Thus what may, to an older speaker, seem like “masculine” speech may seem to an adolescent like “liberated” or “hip” speech.

    Historically, humans get serious about avoiding disasters only after one has just struck them.   (1)    that logic, 2006 should have been a breakthrough year for rational behavior. With the memory of 9/11 still    (2)    in their minds, Americans watched hurricane Katrina, the most expensive disaster in U.S. history, on    (3)    TV. Anyone who didn’t know it before should have learned that bad things can happen. And they are made    (4)    worse by our willful blindness to risk as much as our    (5)    to work together before everything goes to hell.
    Granted, some amount of delusion  (错觉)  is probably part of the    (6)    condition. In A.D. 63, Pompeii was seriously damaged by an earthquake, and the locals immediately went to work    (7)   , in the same spot—until they were buried altogether by a volcano eruption 16 years later. But a    (8)    of the past year in disaster history suggests that modern Americans are particularly bad at    (9)    themselves from guaranteed threats. We know more than we    (10)    did about the dangers we face. But it turns    (11)    that in times of crisis, our greatest enemy is    (12)    the storm, the quake or the    (13)    itself. More often, it is ourselves.
    So what has happened in the year that    (14)    the disaster on the Gulf Coast? In New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has worked day and night to rebuild the flood  walls. They have got the walls to    (15)    they were before Katrina, more or less. That’s not    (16)   , we can now say with confidence. But it may be all    (17)    can be expected from one year of hustle  (忙碌).
    Meanwhile, New Orleans officials have crafted a plan to use buses and trains to    (18)    the sick and the disabled. The city estimates that 15,000 people will need a    (19)    out. However, state officials have not yet determined where these people will be taken. The    (20)    with neighboring communities are ongoing and difficult.