Category Archives: work/career

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When is it ok to take work home?

This is part 3 in my series on lessons for young professionals from recent movies.

3. Total objectivity is impossible and overrated.

I need to start this post with a disclaimer: Boundaries between teachers and students, therapists and clients, and other parties in professional relationships are important.  In the examples I give in this post, the professionals in question respect the legal and ethical boundaries while allowing themselves to become emotionally invested, to a healthy degree, in the people they are helping.  Philosophers and psychologists tell us that complete objectivity is impossible; we all bring biases and baggage to whatever we approach, including our careers.  That’s not a bad thing, and in the two examples below, I hope to prove that it can even be beneficial under the appropriate circumstances.

First, we return to Anna Kendrick.  In 50/50, she plays a mental health counselor to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, who has cancer.  At first (and I think this has a lot to do with how young she is, and feels) she is overly vigilant about maintaining professionalism, which makes the counseling sessions tense and awkward (and, admittedly, very funny).  A breakthrough occurs when she gives her client a ride home and he gets a chance to see her as a real person with a very messy car.  At this point, she begins to open up about some of her own personal worries, which allows the therapeutic relationship to become natural and unforced.  Ultimately, the counselor learns just as much as the client does, and in the end (AFTER the counseling sessions have ended, I must stress) she gets a really great boyfriend out of the deal.

A similar principle is at work in The Woman in Black, in which Daniel Radcliffe plays a widowed lawyer with a young son.  (If you’re having trouble picturing that, remember that this is a late 19th/early 20th century period piece–people died earlier back then, so they had to get started earlier.)  I believe that his grief for his wife’s death and concern for his son’s safety, far from interfering with his work, endow him with the emotional intelligence and perceptiveness necessarily to solve the spooky case he gets caught up in, which involves the death of a woman and a young boy.

In the next post, we’ll begin to look at some negative examples.

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Working for an audience of one

This is part two in my series on examples of young professionals in recent movies.

2. Please your boss and ignore the naysayers.
If you’ve been following my blog recently, you know that this summer I wrote a paper about Moneyball. During the research process, which consisted mostly of watching the movie over and over, I found another inspiring young professional in Jonah Hill’s character Peter Brand, a mid-twenties economist whose unorthodox ideas and lack of sports experience make him unpopular with the establishment–i.e., the Oakland A’s scouts and coaches, who call him (disparagingly) “the kid” and (irrelevantly) “Google boy.” Peter makes the smart choice to ignore those people and concentrate on continuing to impress the person who’s actually his boss, Billy Beane. He does his job and lets Billy take care of the jerks. This story demonstrates that often all you need is one person to see that you’re doing good work and thus to champion your cause. It is helpful, though not absolutely necessary, if that person is your boss.

Next post: more Anna Kendrick, plus lessons in professionalism from a horror movie.

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Advice for young professionals

Do you ever feel like you’re too young for your job? I do. Actually, let me clarify: I know I’m quite capable of doing my job, but I worry that others think I’m too young, which in turn negatively affects my work. Fortunately, recent movies provide a number of good (and bad) examples of young professionals doing their thing. Today I’m starting a series of posts on lessons I’ve learned from them.
1. Anna Kendrick is a great role model.
I was born the same year as the Up in Air and 50/50 actress, which is one reason I feel an affinity with her. I also take inspiration from her age-appropriate, realistic portrayals of sincere and capable but sometimes fumbling young professionals. (She also played a high school student in Twilight, but I give her props for breaking out of that mold earlier than many actors her age.) In a great example of the circular process by which life imitates art which imitates life, both Anna Kendrick’s characters (one of which I’ll examine more closely later in this series) and Anna Kendrick herself, who was nominated for an Oscar for Up in the Air, have earned the respect of their older colleagues by doing their jobs well.
Next post: Please your boss and ignore the naysayers

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Read these other blogs.

I did not expect to find inspiration for my blog from a tutoring appointment I had to cover today.  The tutee, a native Korean speaker, wanted me to check her blog posts to see whether they sounded like idiomatic English.  I fell in love with her blog, banquet365.blog.com.  Despite its title, My Continual Feast, it’s not exactly a food blog, though she does occasionally include some pretty delectable-looking descriptions and pictures of her culinary creations.  In general, “feast” here should be understood in a metaphorical sense.  It’s a feast consisting of notes from friends, watercolor Christmas cards, Central Virginia foliage, good dreams, and a beloved cat.  It’s a feast, in short, of all God’s blessings.  Looking at her blog made me a bit embarrassed of my long, sometimes pretentious posts.  When I showed her my blog, I wished I had included more pictures, more recipes (told in narrative style), fewer words.  (She did say she would use my blog as “homework” to practice her English reading comprehension…not exactly what I envisioned when I started it, but at least somebody is getting some use out of it.)

This is another blog that inspires me: allisonscoles.wordpress.com.  The author of this one is a native English speaker, a very articulate one, but she manages to keep her posts simple and lovely, and people actually want to read them the whole way through.  I want my blog to be more like these two that I’ve mentioned.  Maybe that will really happen; maybe it won’t–after all, I’m me, not them.  But you can probably expect a few changes over the next few weeks.  Meanwhile, you should start following these other beautiful blogs.