The Ambitious Woman in Business (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II CHOOSING AN OCCUPATION; HOW BUSINESS ANALYZES EMPLOYEES A Satisfying occupation is very much like a successful marriage, in this respect: like the permanently happy marriage, it must be built. You can not expect another to make decisions for you in either of these momentous matters. If you elude some of your responsibilities, or depend on some happy accident to bring you good fortune, you are likely to be sorely disappointed in either career. "We seem to have some fatalistic idea about both marriage and about occupations. There is an ancient superstition about there being one particular mate somewhere in the world for every individual, and that in due season these two will be drawn together from the mass of humanity in some supernatural fashion! At least, that is what the two believe when they do come together. A similar idea persists in the minds of very many women?and men too?on thethreshold of industrial life. "What is my vocation?" they ask. "Eight vocation" has become a fetish, together with a common acceptance of the bromidiom that the majority of people in industry are "square pegs in round holes," and are doomed to remain so by a law of nature. Many intelligent women consider dozens of occupations, in honest doubt as to which particular one is their "vocation," just as if they were born to do some one thing only, and adoption of any other work meant foreordained failure. We hear very often that a man is a "born artist," or musician, or literary genius; that he has inherited talent, or has shown definite aptitude toward certain work since early youth. But in many cases we find that even these specially "gifted" individuals are able to do more than one thing well. Sarah Bernhardt, in addition to being a great actress, paints well, and has done creditable work in ...