originally posted January 2009

In my efforts to get published, I feel like I am slowly becoming part of a large corporation. This corporation has its own company culture which you need to become familiar with in order to move ahead. There is a certain manner of speaking, a way of talking about yourself. You need to be able to acquire friends and influence people. You need networking skills, good presentation; you need to be open and confident.

Some get promoted to the upper levels. The talented, that is. Do you too have talent? You won’t know yourself. There are talent spotters in the corporation. You can be lucky and run into one by the water cooler. Or you can try to get the attention of one – be assertive, but not too pushy.

Doing your job excellently can be enough to get promoted; it just takes years and years, or else a lot of luck.

After some time you want to get out. You feel you don’t understand the unwritten rules, you never will. You want to clear your head of the institutionalised thinking. Just why is someone universally lauded for talent when a couple of weeks before their work was universally ignored?

The corporation requires a particular kind of personality to succeed. You have to ask yourself: are you that type? You might instead be an individualist, a non-conformist – a creative type.