Chart House Notes
"
Necessity is the mother of taking chances."Mark Twain (1835-1910)
American writer
A
careful paraphrasing regarding career management services, taken from the
thirteenth chapter of LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
by Mark Twain, published in Boston by James R. Osgood and
Company in 1883.
A
PILOT'S NEEDS
BUT I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is, make plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters, some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting. First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory.
A careerpilot, then, must have unique knowledge of his pilotage area. His knowledge can not be bounded by static research or mere knowledge gained from professional experiences in "real life". His uniqueness is the ability to function in a more dynamic, interactive way, in a skilled manner of keeping up with "real life". This is not perfect knowledge, but a body of knowledge in the constant state of change.
He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is
so and so; he must know it; for this is eminently one of the "exact"
sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if he ever
ventured to deal in that feeble phrase "I think," instead of the
vigorous one "I know!" One cannot easily realize what a tremendous
thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river and
know it with absolute exactness.
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Illustration from original publication |
A careerpilot, then, regularly extends the boundaries of past experience by integrating both the dynamic process of career management and the ever changing body of career related resources. In such manner, he provides vigilant navigation assistance to the most seasoned skippers who find themselves in the challenging waters of career decision making in its many forms. |
If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilots knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head.
And then if you will go on until you know every
street crossing, the character, size, and position of the crossing-stones, and
the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some
idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of
trouble.
Next, if you will take half of the signs in that
long street, and change their places once a month, and still manage to know
their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated
changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a
pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi.
A careerpilot, then,
must know the fickleness of a professional's employment marketplace, his
career... realizing that "change is inevitable" but the personal
growth of his candidate/ skipper must be the choice of that skipper, in command
of his career. Achieving career goals is a journey, not a destination at
all. Penultimate success, then, is that dynamic feeling of career
management, being in command of one's next step!.
I think a pilot's memory is about the most
wonderful thing in the
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The effective careerpilot, then, is one who transfers his gift of "perfect memory", the dynamic process called career management, to his candidate/ skipper. And in so doing, widens the boundaries beyond his own reach. The first of three keys to effective career management is to think and act "outside the box".
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Illustration from original publication |
A skipper's vessel is safe in the harbor... but that's not what vessels were made for!
Carry on,
