Because I choose my career with full awareness, I am able to play with intensity without getting serious.

I have the will, energy and persistence to investigate the career I have chosen and find out all pertinent information.

I am totally honest and realistic in my appraisal of myself and my abilities.

I remain confident that I can flourish in the career or combination of careers that best support my life's mission.

I trust myself. I know that if a career is right for me, even if I do not now possess the skills and knowledge I need to excel in this career, I will acquire all that I need to know and more.

Nothing can stop me from achieving my purpose in life. Every step that I take gives me new confidence that I will succeed in making manifest my vision for myself and others.

From Laurence Boldt's book, "Zen and the Art of Making a Living."  

In life, sometimes you walk alone.
 You must make your commitment
 to stand up and walk a straight path.
Warrior's Commitment,
by Jerome Bushyhead

The Disease of Specialization

"The disease of modern culture is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough...The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint --that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquerie --indeed, the impossibility-- of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.

The first, and best known hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists --people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing...

Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competencies and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average --one is tempted to say, the ideal-- American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and "agribusinessmen," the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else --or, perhaps nobody else-- will be responsible. And, not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him."

"The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture," by Wendel Berry, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.