I have two career goals:

1. Liberation.
2. Retirement.

Of course these are not the kind of answers I would give to management when they ask what my career goals are. In that case, I throw out some corporate lingo-bingo interim goals such as "career broadening" or "growth in project management".

Liberation is defined as the point in which one's investment income equals or exceeds one's salary or a stated numerical goal. This is when I have the freedom to change careers regardless of income as long as my health benefits are covered. I expect that I will achieve Liberation from The Man between the age of 40 and 42 year old. That's less than ten years!!

Retirement is defined as the point in which one's investment income can cover living expenses for the remainder of one's life. Retirees choose to work rather than work to make ends meet. I don't have a set goal for this but hope for the mid-fifties.

Working in the corporate world isn't all that bad. But I will tell you what is bad: doing things that are useless or not meaningful. And that is what has happened in the corporate world since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed in 2002. A classic argument between the compliance personnel in my department and the internal/external auditors is that they want us to do something that is completely useless, wastes resources and increases expenses which ultimately trickle down to company shareholders. But the actions they want us to take will fulfill some ridiculous requirement as stated by law. Msot of the time these actions involve printing out large quantities of paper, putting them in a binder, and placing them in a shelving unit. To defend ourselves from doing useless work, we argue our position with the auditors. Sometimes we are successful and other times we aren't.

If someone asks me what it is that I do for a living and I think they can humor me, my answer is "I take a pair of tweezers and pick up a grain of sand in a cup. Then I move the grain of sand over to the second cup. I continue to do this until the sand in the first cup is gone. Then I repeat the process by moving the sand one grain at a time to the empty cup."

So. The general consensus among investment analysts is that large cap company stocks are undervalued. And why would anyone in their right mind want to invest in large caps while they are spending BILLIONS of dollars for employees to move grains of sand from one cup to another? The REAL corruption in corporate environments exists in the upper echelons of management. We pee-ons can't afford to take risks with our jobs by acting unethically. On the other hand, a CEO can do whatever he wants, since he will receive a $20 million exit package if he gets fired.

Perhaps that explains why I call the next phase of my career "Liberation".

My biggest fear regarding my career is the fact that I don't know if I have any career skills since the work I do doesn't appear to be meaningful. Any corporate manager will say that yes, indeed it IS meaningful because my work prevents the company from negative news coverage and a subsequent hurricane sale of company stock. But it's of little reassurance to me when the work that I do isn't fixing the real problem.

I haven't learned much from my incarceration in the compliance area of my organization, other than that if I were the CEO of a small company, I would recommend that the board NEVER take the company public, unless SOX were repealed. That is, if you want to actually have a company that gets anything done without spending billions to do it.