One of the most important requirements of a job for me is that, in the execution of the work, I am able to be myself, or at least not stray too far from myself. It is a shame and I suppose not irrelevant that the jobs that pay best tend to be those where you need to leave your personality, with your hat, at the front door of the office. And even within the same job some employees are able to open up a valve between their personality and the duties whilst others never quite find the knack. You see them, prisoners of their cheap suits, trapped in the cage of their functions, unable to turn that valve that would connect themselves with their activity.
Some employees have a plan. They think that they will spend a number of years working in a highly paid job where they accept to forego their personality, even their identity. But what they will do is they will acquire wealth and security and after a sufficient period of time they drop the job and are free to be themselves, to write their novel or assert their personality in whatever way they want without the pressures of the material world crowding in upon them. They make that pact with Mephistophiles. What sometimes happens is that after twenty-four years of leaving their personality at the front door, when they look to pick it up again, they find it has turned to dust.

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