…continued 

It should be clear by now that your success in creating value and achieving personal satisfaction does not really depend upon what career you choose. These things are possible in practically any career. What’s vital is the state of mind in which you proceed.

You will have to use your imagination. You’ll have to think, and think for yourself, as creatively as you can. Simply “doing what you’re told” will only achieve other people’s goals. As a result, you will find yourself having to do things differently from some of the people around you— occasionally, it will be different from most of the people around you. That won’t be as easy as it sounds: working your way against the conventional wisdom never is. It may be easier if you think of it as a kind of dare, and accept it.

You will often find yourself in competitive positions, and there is really only one way to handle those situations: being completely honest. I’m not just talking about adhering to the dictates of the law or professional ethics, which must be done as a matter of course. I mean honestly facing and dealing with the facts that any competitive situation presents, no matter how painful those facts may be. No amount of blinking or embroidery or shortcuts or rationalizations will substitute.

You will have to work hard, of course, which means not only long hours but tough decisions. But at the same time, you must remember that hard work doesn’t qualify you to think you’re the only person around you working hard. In other words, if you lose your sense of humor and take yourself too seriously—if you squeeze all the fun right out of whatever you’re doing—you only defeat your larger purpose. Have confidence that what you’re doing is worthwhile and important. But don’t let it escalate into an arrogance which presumes it’s the only worthwhile thing to do.

I’m sure that every collegiate generation has two or three books which capture and help shape its imagination. In my own generation, during the late 1950s, one such book was The Lonely Crowd, by the sociologist David Reisman. Everything I’ve been saying about “state of mind” can be found in Reisman’s analysis.

Reisman was fascinated by the phenomenon of “conformity” in the 1950s, a concern that preoccupied many social commentators of that decade. For Reisman, “conformity” sprang from a mentality which took its lead from other people, a mentality which looked to one’s social environment for cues to appropriate behavior and values. In this view, people who are motivated primarily by a desire to conform to their surroundings lacked strong inner resources. They are basically hollow, unable or unwilling to set their own goals or establish their own standards. Instead, they seek to mimic the goals and standards of people around them in order to win those peoples approval. The approval of others, rather than any personal aim, becomes the highest satisfaction. Reisman called such people “other–directed”—that is, they direct their lives towards the values of other people.

The opposite sort of person, whom Reisman found to be as rare as the other–directed person was distressingly common, he called “inner–directed.” By that, he meant someone with a strong sense of self, an identity built from within, someone who established a personal agenda and direction. The inner–directed person was not so much an angry maverick, motivated by negative attitudes toward the world, as an individualist determined to find his or her own way for personal reasons and in search of personal satisfactions.

Today, I still believe the inner–directed persons have the best–and perhaps the only– opportunity for true personal fulfillment. For in my experience, at least, inner–directed persons–the ones who establish their own agenda and pursue their own happiness–find themselves dedicated to creating value, to working for the betterment of people other than themselves and passing much of that value on to those people.

My own definition of inner–directedness brings us to the third paradox: you gain personally by giving yourself up. I believe that if you search within yourself, you’ll find things far more important than yourself. I believe you’ll discover a vast expanse of spiritual values which dwarf the significance of the individual—values which I personally sum up in the word “God.” But whatever you may call these values, and however you may see them, I believe they prompt the individual to dedicate himself to something much larger than himself. That dedication, I am certain, is a roundly stabilizing force in life. And, believe me, when times get tough, when you really have made a mistake, that stabilizing influence is a welcome and necessary one.

You will note that in all this talk of “state of mind” I have not mentioned “quality of mind” or intelligence. That is simply because I don’t believe that unusual intelligence, an off–the–graph I.Q., is necessary to create value and achieve personal satisfaction. There are a few people who are mentally gifted far beyond the norm, just as there are a few who are physically gifted in the same way. But that particular quality doesn’t mean that they will achieve any greater amount or level of personal fulfillment.

continued…

From An Address by Charles S. Sanford, Jr. - June 17, 1989 - Delivered at the Commencement Exercises of the University of Georgia - Sanford Stadium, Athens, Georgia