Who sits at your table?

I have been reading of late a book from the library titled “What should I do with my life?” As graduation is pending closer and closer daily I find it a fairly relevant question. The book consists of short chapters where the author went out and interviewed various people and got their life story. He looked for people that seemed to have “found their passion” or some otherwise unusual change. I’ve noticed that most of his subjects have advanced degrees from some prestigious school that should have allowed them to take positions of power and influence throughout the world. Yet, because of some moment of crisis they diverged from that path to some quieter vocation.

While many of the stories fall short of helpful there was one analogy that caught my eye. The subject was a lawyer in Silicon Valley who had just lost his position and needed to decide what else to do. He desperately wanted to jump back into the ring and prove what he could accomplish even though he hated Silicon Valley and the atmosphere there (this was during the .com bang). The author asked him who he was trying to impress, what was he trying to prove? Along those lines he said that we each have an inner table filled with people who are important to us. The world has many definitions of success but the one we care about is being successful to the eyes of the people sitting at that table. If they weren’t impressed with us then we weren’t satisfied with ourselves. We just need to decide who gets to sit at our inner table. The man caught hold of that idea and decided to stop impressing people he hated. He moved back to his home in the south and started teaching school there, much happier than he was in California.

So who sits at my inner table? As I search for a job, or a future school, one path or another, who am I trying to impress? I’m I trying to sit with the sabios of Harvard and Berkley? Do I need to compete with them to feel successful? Or do I sit at a table with Leopold, Pinchot, and Muir? Is the table I’m trying to join higher than my long legs can reach?  When it comes down to it eternally I don’t suppose it matters much which table you sit at career-wise. As long as you make the best of what you are and live honorably the most important parts of your life can be done at any table. There are some tables that would look at my pending college degree and be extremely impressed while others would scoff at a single BS in an obscure field. But it may well be that feelings of success and accomplishment are directly tied to impressing your own imaginary table of peers. Who am I trying to impress anyway?