Table of Contents Introduction A Brief History of Civilization Four Dimensions and Four Portals of Perception Contracting, Consulting, and the Personality Traits that Support Success The Mixture of our Dimensional Perceptions Summary: Contracting and Consulting as influenced by our Dimensional Perceptions Who are you? Thinking Through Your Dimensional Perceptions How Personality Relates to Stress in our Careers Should I or shouldn't I … the Final Analysis

Introduction

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Face it—deciding what you were going to do for a living used to be a lot easier. Up in the morning, shake off the cold (and the flies), throw on your freshest animal skin, pick up your spear, a quick “ugh” to everyone else in the cave, and you were off to survive one more day of hunting and gathering.

Then, with a few minor steps in between, along came the computer, and things got really complicated. Computing went through lots of changes, driving all sorts of corporate upheaval. Up-sizing, down-sizing, right-sizing, capsizing—it was hard to tell if you'd been fired up, laid off, lopped off, knocked down, drug out, or steamrolled.

The 1990s arrived. Driven by stockholder scrutiny, employers stopped “taking care” of employees, favoring the immediate bottom line over long term workforce stability. Knowing that they could show lower employee head-count to their stockholders, employers fired thousands, only to hire contractors and consultants as replacements (companies can easily hide the expense of contractors and consultants from their investors). As a result, the market for consultants and contractors boomed, and will continue to do so as long as public corporations and foolish investors exist (forever?).

My first three paragraphs may provide a distorted and convoluted picture but they contain all you really need to know about the job market. You can now make a case that every job is temporary, all employers are acting in their own best interest, and every person is responsible for themself. Your decision: take control of your own future, financial success and career track, or believe that a corporation will take care of all those things when you accept a “permanent” position.

Now, keep in mind that many of us function better believing our job is “permanent.” In this chapter we’ll figure out if you have the kind of personality that easily takes on full responsibility for your own success, or you prefer to veil the unstable nature of our times by working full-time for someone else.