Arrested Development in Me…

I’ve often wondered if the term “Peter Pan Syndrome” applies to me…

Marty Nemko Ph.D., defines Peter Pan Syndrome by these traits:

An unwillingness to get working or stay working when you're not motivated.

If you're only willing to work hard when you feel like it, you won't feel like it often enough. Working hard must be something you do; it's not a decision to make. It's foundational.

Dabbling: being unwilling to stay focused on becoming sufficiently expert at anything. Brilliant people can achieve excellence in many areas but most people can't.

Networking aversion. Not having taken the time to develop the deep connections with the right people that, alas, often are needed to land and succeed at a good job.

Betting on longshot dreams: becoming a self-supporting actor, artist, documentary filmmaker, sports marketer, environmental activist, fashion executive, etc. Yes, obviously, some people have achieved such goals but unless you are unusually talented and driven (ideally with great connections,) your chances are small. Yet some people cling to their longshot dream, sometimes as an excuse for not doing the work required to launch a more realistic career.

Abusing alcohol or drugs.

Blaming your failure on something your parents, spouse, or former employer did to you. Many people who were terribly abused--including, for example, many survivors of the Holocaust or of Japanese internment camps--did just fine. You've probably suffered a lot less. Unless you suffer from a severe physiologically caused mental illness, you too can probably triumph over your past.

Doing an insufficiently thorough job search. Here's what a thorough job search looks like: identifying 50 people not advertising an on-target job but with the power to hire you for your target job or create one for you, and you not only pitch yourself to them but make the effort to build a relationship with them over months. You must also regularly contact your extended personal network to get leads and build the relationship, have a good LinkedIn profile, craft many top-of-the-heap job applications, including collateral material such as a white paper, a portfolio, and substantive follow-ups after job interviews, for example, a mini business plan describing what you'd do if hired.

The takeaway

Might any of those Peter Pan Syndrome behaviors apply to you? If so, is it a wake-up call? Or do you want to accept that you just don't care enough about career success to make the now usually-required effort? Alas, today, more than ever in my 30 years as a career counselor, I'm finding that unless you're lucky or brilliant, landing and keeping a good job really does require you to be a grown-up.

Most of these manifestations have tended to apply to me over the past several years…

…To be continued…

Revisiting D.A.R.Y.L. Part IV

It is the last line of professor Rebecca West’s study that catches my attention: “As in many fairy tales, in Pinocchio too it is the overcoming of obstacles that pushes the tale forward, so that the hero or heroine may be rewarded with the happy ending…In order to understand better the qualities that make of the puppet's tale something much more complex than a simple fairy tale-like story of goodness and obedience rewarded…” Pinocchio achieves his humanity, i.e., his transformation from a marionette to a flesh-and-blood boy through redeeming himself of his selfishness. The preadolescent android “D.A.R.Y.L.”, as the audience bears witness, achieves his humanity by transcending into the normality of childhood emotion and experience. He becomes simply Daryl Richardson, 10-year-old adoptee. This is achieved by the middle of the movie, rather than the end. It is at that middle point of the film that Daryl’s creator the essential “Geppetto” of the story a government scientist named Dr. Jeffrey Stewart enters the picture. He, along with his colleague, Dr. Ellen Lamb arrives as Daryl’s “parents,” come to reclaim their missing amnesiac child from Joyce and Andy Richardson, who have by come to love the boy as though he were their own.

It is at this point, once Daryl is returned to the laboratory from which he was conceived that the truth of Daryl’s origin—he was designed for military purposes by the Pentagon—are finally revealed, in case any in the audience haven’t already suspected this from the get-go. Apparently, the driver from the beginning of the story was Dr. Stewart’s other colleague, Dr. Mulligan. Mulligan had begun to feel sympathy for the robot-child and had absconded with him in an attempt to free him from captivity. Dr. Stewart eventually develops the same sentimental feelings, upon his fascination with Daryl’s newfound emotions. But the android’s transformation from plaid automaton to average All-American boy does not sit well from the typically jaundiced-looking military brass, which immediately schedule Daryl for termination. With Dr. Lamb’s secret collusion, Dr. Stewart and Daryl make a break for it, initiating the action-adventure themed final stage of the movie. This involves the usual car chases, (which Daryl is prepared for via his Atari game expertise), and even a nod to the 1982 Clint Eastwood actioner Firefox, where Daryl commandeers a stealth fighter jet. But all that is nonessential to the story’s significance as a Pinocchio derivative. Dr. Stewart displays his essence as Daryl’s own Geppetto in the film’s most poignant scene, when as he lays dying from a policeman-inflicted gunshot wound he tells Daryl, “Remember, you are a real person…” He then with his last breath, follows with “…I only wish…” and then passes away before completing the statement. Perhaps he meant to say he only wished Daryl were his son. Unlike Geppetto, he doesn’t get that chance.

If there is a Blue Fairy character to the story, it is presented in Dr. Lamb, the last surviving scientist responsible for Daryl’s creation. As Daryl has seemingly drowned, after ejecting from his destroyed fighter jet and landing in a river, Dr. Lamb revives him with an electric charge to the microchip that serves as his brain. This is the final act of Daryl’s transcendence. He then makes a joyous reunion with the Richardson and Fox families.