I love Mr. Mafioso on AskMen. “Look, college boy,” he writes, “there are certain lessons that all the books in the world couldn’t teach you.”
Strikes a chord with me. I came out of college quite the college girl. It was a college in rural Minnesota, very academic, very intellectual. How academic? How intellectual? More students pass the MedCAT from this school than any in the nation, or did at last count. It produces doctors and lawyers, but not necessarily rich ones; more typically labor lawyers and inner-city clinic doctors, or med and law-school professors.
I think it attracts more than its share of NFs – Idealists (only 8-10% of the population). Whatever job the Idealist has, it’s a means to an end: saving the world. This is the college boy Mr. M. is talking about, and the college girl who has to learn to put on her Big Girl Panties, because one can never save the world, but one can lose one’s job.
When I left that ivory tower and landed my first job, they saw me coming. Determined to be honest, brave and true (and believing that others were), I got all the extra work, my “job description” expanding to match the infinite boundaries of my naivete; I got the worst equipment; I interviewed students in a closet (I was a career counselor); and of course I was ostracized just for good measure. Eating lunch alone, I read a copy of “How to Survive in the Real World.” j.k.
What I did was get street smart. You know how someone in the office is doing better than they ought to considering their education and skills, and you can’t figure out why? Then you notice – she’s got street smarts. She always lands on her feet, she knows the score, she reads between the lines, she gets out when the getting’s good, she can add two and two, she can smell a rat, she knows a good thing when she sees it, she knows it takes two to tango …
It’s Emotional Intelligence — what Mr. Mafioso talks about in “Street Lessons.”
He begins with the litany that idealistic intellectuals can’t accept: “The world isn’t fair. It isn’t nice. Nobody cares if you get stiffed, if your feelings get bruised or how hungry you are.” We’re all in the same boat, he alerts us, and it can be a rough ride. “Everybody’s trying to get a piece of the action, trying to survive. And the street is equally cruel to everyone.”
I’ve seen clients have to experience this many times before they were willing to let go of how they thought the world should be, or wished it were and started dealing with it the way it is (reality-testing). Eventually, with coaching, they quit telling their co-workers nicely (for instance) that they really don’t know what they’re doing after getting shot enough times with a gun they had loaded and handed to someone.
Mr. Mafioso then tells us the thing we least want to hear – that it’s out-of-control. You can be on top one day, wondering what the big deal is, then get bagged. “By any of a number of things: family, work, health, divorce, tainted spinach