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One Step Backward, Two Steps Forward
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18321 |
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LIFE
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10 / 1990 |
2,933 Words |
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Steven Kaplan
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Today's bookstore shelves are loaded with tomes advising us how to be rich and successful. What's harder to find, though, is something that tells us what to do if becoming rich and successful fails to make us happy. Increasingly, people are discovering that it takes a lot more than money and success to find happiness. But very few ever suspect that their success itself may be the cause of their unhappiness.
Sound hard to believe? Ask Bill Topka, who gave up being president of a bank to become a handyman. He had found that his job created artificial barriers that kept him from the one thing that truly interested him - a personal connection with the people he dealt with. But unlike many of his kind, Topka had the courage to escape being trapped by his own success.
"There are several reasons a person might want to change a career after becoming established in it," says Herbert J. Freudenberger, a New York City-based psychoanalyst and author of Burnout: The High Cost of Achievement. "It's always possible that he has accomplished what he sought to accomplish, and therefore no longer considers it worth continuing. Sometimes it might be a function of pressures he felt as a child - achievement demands forced on him by a striving mother or father. If that parent is dead, such pressures may finally be released.
"Whatever the reasons, only a small percentage of men and women brave enough to attempt a dramatic career move. It requires risk-taking, courage, and a strong belief in oneself. Many people don't want that kind of risk. But for a certain sort of person, the need for change overwhelms the fears of the unknown.
Totally Stifled
Topka's urgency to get out of his job and the lifestyle that accompanied it subsumed any fears he may have had. Not, he allows, that his job was totally without attractions. He was president of the First National Bank of New Prague, Minnesota, which just about made him king of that town of three thousand. Cementing his "royal" status, his family owned the bank, together with quite a bit of New Prague. Whatever he did became a social event; what he thought became town policy; what he liked became the in thing. Mayors came and went - their power was ephemeral. But the bank president was forever. Topka's grandfather had held the job, and his father had been president for more than sixty years.
However, young Bill had other visions for his life: "After a while, the job totally stifled me. It was guaranteed. I could have sat there another forty years doing exactly the same thing every day.
"The town itself also numbed me. Both ethnically and religiously, New Prague is a homogeneous society. I needed a socially richer environment for my family."
"Everyone noticed the perks, but almost no one seemed aware of the liabilities of being bank president. I'm deeply interested in human nature and in the real connection between human beings. Banking does not lend itself to authentic person-to-person relationships. Although there's a sort of intimacy, because you're let into people's financial lives, there's none of the more human, emotional kind. I couldn't really talk to people in an honest
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