Which Career Body Are You - MAC152

A while back I walked an entire arc, start to finish. Rock to star. How influence accumulates inside an organization, how far it reaches, and exactly where it stops reaching. And I never once told anyone where they were standing on it.

That is the unfinished business here. But I want to close it in a way that survives contact with the one thing that wrecks every self-assessment ever written — the person doing the assessing.

So this is two things stacked on each other. The first is an instrument: five positions, the honest tells for each, the trap that catches people there, and one move that adds mass. The second is the part most self-assessments skip — what to do about the fact that you are a poor judge of your own position, and that the direction of your error is worth more than the reading itself.

The arc, in about sixty seconds

In From Gear to Field (MAC-143) I borrowed a piece of physics to describe how influence actually behaves. Your pull inside an organization comes from two things and only two things.

The first is mass — everything you have accumulated. Problems solved. Commitments kept. People developed. Trust earned, and trust kept after it was earned. The second is proximity — the fact that your pull is strongest on the people closest to you and falls off hard with distance. Not gently. Hard.

Put them together and you get an arc with five positions on it.

Early on you are a loose cluster of rock. Nothing orbits you and you are not trying to make it. You are getting denser, which is the entire job at that stage.

Compact that cluster enough and you become an asteroid — a single body, heavy enough that the things nearest you start to feel your pull whether you intended it or not.

Keep going and the asteroid becomes a moon, settling into orbit around something larger, carrying enough mass to raise tides across a body far bigger than itself.

Keep going and you become a planet, and now things orbit you.

And at the far end, a star. Mass so great it bends light.