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I’ve been a Star Wars fan a long time, but the peak of my obsession was probably between 1996 and 1999. (It was hard to sustain after I met Jar Jar Binks.) It’s difficult to describe, or even to remember in retrospect, exactly how immersed I was in that galaxy far, far away. I quoted the films often and seemingly at random. I engaged in Star Wars trivia contests with my friends at lunch. I read Star Wars novels voraciously — fiercely careful, of course, to read them in the canonical sequence — and even got into arguments on the Internet (the kind where you find yourself citing your IQ as proof of your argument’s superiority) about the relative quality of these novels.

Perhaps nothing captures the depth of my fascination more than the fact that I played the Star Wars Customizable Card Game. In my defense, I was never a serious player — for example, I never attended a tournament, and I played far more often with my brother than with anyone else. I also never sank the kind of money into it that was required to build a genuinely competitive deck. (If you don’t know how customizable card games such as SWCCG, or its vastly more popular cousin, Magic: The Gathering, are played, you’re probably better off. The fact that I played any CCG other than Magic suggests that I wasn’t satisfied with just any nerdy pursuit; I had to assiduously avoid the one that was most popular among my fellow geeks.) I basically had the starter set (or, to be more precise, the Introductory Two-Player Game) and a fairly small collection of additional cards from booster packs I’d bought. I also traded with a couple of friends.

Trading in a customizable card game is similar to trading any other type of collectible card; many of us grew up trading baseball or basketball cards and remember that what you wanted was essentially the following:
1) a card you like or think is “cool”
2) a card that is unusually rare
3) a card that is unusually valuable (usually correlated to #2)

If you collect any of these types of cards, what you basically do is convince your parents to buy you packs upon packs of them, searching persistently for the one that will satisfy the above criteria, at which point you declare that it was “totally worth it.” Your other (and perhaps preferred) option is to find some idiot kid who will trade you their awesome card for a modest number of cards that you convince him are equally awesome but are actually worthless. (This is how I parted ways in fifth grade with my Nolan Ryan, the only decent card I ever acquired in the short time I dabbled in Major League Baseball.) We might, in adult parlance, refer to the aforementioned idiot kid as an “arbitrage opportunity.”

It’s basically the same with CCGs, except that there is an additional dimension: value in gameplay (usually correlated to #2 and #3 above). This value can be measured in many ways, some of which include (abstractly) offensive power, defensive power, and the ability to radically disrupt the flow of a game (for example, by redistributing resources or changing what your opponent is permitted to do). As I mentioned, I never played Magic, but even I knew that the Black Lotus was one of the best (in all the senses I’ve outlined) cards you could get, even if I didn’t understand why.

Being a financially sensible preteen, I never took the quest for the rarest SWCCG cards as far as some people, but I did buy the occasional booster pack to see if I could strike it rich (which in practice meant finding a card of a character whose name you actually know: Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and so on).

I remember when the Dagobah expansion set, christened after the remote, swampy planet that a little green man named Yoda called home, was released in the spring of 1997. I was in seventh grade and, like all seventh-graders, couldn’t wait. After much cajoling, I convinced my mom to take me to Sci-Fi City, the go-to comics and collectibles shop in Orlando, to play the Sunday afternoon booster pack lottery. Since the place was in another part of town, I offered to pick up a couple of packs for my friend Drew and deliver them to him at school on Monday. And so it was that I returned home with four Dagobah booster packs in a small plastic shopping bag.

I opened my two packs immediately. I did the usual thing; like a battered victim of domestic violence covering for his abuser, I told myself that some of these cards were actually pretty good, that it would probably work out better next time, that Princess Leia really did love me after all. I called Drew — in those days, I actually used the telephone to talk to people other than my parents — and let him know what I’d gotten. I then asked him:

“Want me to open your packs, to see what you got?”

“No, thanks, I’ll just take a look at them tomorrow.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, man, don’t worry about it.”

“Alright.”

You can guess what happened next. After an appropriately brief bout of conscience, I picked up one of the remaining packs and began, carefully, to open it. I pulled the nine cards from the plastic wrapper and looked through them slowly.

Nothing remarkable, as far as I could tell. I slipped the cards back into the wrapper. I picked up the second pack and opened it, just as delicately as I had the first.

I looked at the top card. Nothing interesting. I moved it to the back of the pile.

I looked at the second card. Again, forgettable. Behind it went.

And holy shit. There he was. Yoda. Power 2, Ability 7. The greatest Jedi Master in the goddamn galaxy.

I had a very bad feeling about this.

My mind raced, trying vainly to catch up to my pulse. What the hell was I supposed to do now? He told me not to open his packs, and this was probably exactly why. Now I had this once-in-a-lifetime card, a Yoda, for Christ’s sake, and I was supposed to give it to someone else! How could I have come so close, yet so far?

I honestly don’t remember it, but somehow, I must have come to a decision. I picked up the phone and called Drew again.

“Hey.”

“Hey. So guess what?”

“What?”

“So, uh, I opened the other packs…”

“Wait, why? I told you not to do that.”

“I was curious.”

“But I told you not to.”

“Well…one of them had a Yoda.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, and well, I was thinking, technically, since I bought these packs, they’re kinda mine.”

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, or any of the multiple conversations we had on this topic over the next couple of days. The final outcome was that I gave Drew the Yoda and some of the other cards that had come in his packs, in exchange for the rest of those cards, as well as some cards from his personal collection. I remember negotiating on exactly what cards he would need to give me to fairly compensate me for the Yoda.

In other words, I traded him his own card.

I can say with conviction that this is, by far, the most unethical thing I have ever done in my life, and hopefully the most unethical thing I will ever do. Astonishingly, it did not ruin my friendship with Drew. But what shocks me most in retrospect is how easy it was to convince myself that this course of action was reasonable. Of course the cards were technically mine! Trading him the Yoda was doing him a favor! I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

These kinds of rationalizations dominated my thoughts in the following days, but, looking back, they were probably only on the surface. What lay underneath, I imagine, was a classic sense of pre-teen victimhood. Why was it that other kids always got the great cards? Shouldn’t I get a great card every now and then, too? On some level, I must have decided that actually keeping the Yoda for myself would simply be too much; but extracting payment for it was like levying my own karmic tax against the universe for giving me such rotten luck. After all, if that pack had just been one of the first two I’d opened, it would have been as though I’d gotten a Yoda, not him.

I’m not sure, but I don’t think this victim mentality is the most common motivation for these types of unethical acts — more commonly, such acts are perpetrated by people who feel that they are somehow special, that they deserve more than the common man, that the fact that they are clever enough to get away with something entitles them to the rewards, however sordid, of the thing they got away with. I’ve seen all these explanations cited for the wildly immoral behavior of men like Enron‘s Jeffrey Skilling and Adelphia‘s John Rigas.

I certainly don’t think that I am anything like them, nor was I at age 11. What this story does show, however, is that it is very easy for good people to do bad things if they aren’t careful. It only takes one brief, irrevocable moment of weakness or confusion. Life offers us plenty of temptations to abandon or temporarily forget our principles, and it’s up to us to try not to.

No. Do. Or do not. There is no try.

It was June of 2002. I had just graduated from high school, and I was at an essay contest winners’ week sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace, a small policy think tank of sorts, established by Congress twenty-five years ago to explore questions around peacebuilding and conflict resolution. I had submitted an essay the previous winter entitled, “American Peacekeeping: Duty or Folly?” (My essay, to be clear, argued the former.) Having been selected as the winner for the state of Florida, I’d come to Washington, along with my fellow state winners, to participate in a week filled with educational activities, including a three-day simulation exercise (in which I was to play then-CIA director George Tenet).

On our first full day in town, we had an introductory lecture from one Jeffrey Helsing, who I see is currently the deputy director of the Institute’s education program (and was back then, too, most likely). After a few initial remarks, Dr. Helsing asked us to pair up with the person sitting next to us for an old-fashioned thumb war (please, Wikipedia, do not delete this article). The rules were the usual; in addition, we had a time limit (something like a minute or two) in which we could play as many rounds as we could get in. The goal for each person, as you might expect, was to rack up as many points as possible.

I remember being paired with a guy named Will. We didn’t really know each other, so there was that uncomfortable tentativeness of a couple of boys who didn’t know exactly how hard we were supposed to be trying and didn’t want to be the one who tried too hard. Will was bigger than me, though, so I think he scored three or four points, while I managed only one.

After our time had expired, Dr. Helsing did the usual thing a moderator does to quickly get a sense of how an exercise went: he asked for a show of hands.

“Raise your hand if you got at least one point.”

Most hands went up.

“Okay, now keep your hands up if you had at least two points.”

Some hands dropped. Dr. Helsing continued.

“Three points? Four? Five? Six?”

Only a few hands remained, though I didn’t pay much attention to whose.

Dr. Helsing pointed at a particularly big fellow in the front and asked him, “how many points did you have?”

“Uh, eight.”

“Eight? Wow, you really went for it.” We all laughed.

“Okay, who else? What about you, young lady?”

A soft voice came from toward the back of the room.

“Seventeen.”

I turned in my chair.

“Seventeen?” Dr. Helsing repeated. “Seventeen??”

The girl, brown-haired and slight, certainly didn’t look like a thumb wrestling champion. She now had everyone’s full attention.

She looked sheepishly at her partner, looked back, and said simply:

“We both had seventeen.”

The room was silent. Dr. Helsing reiterated unnecessarily: “they both had seventeen.”

To be honest, I don’t remember any of the rest of the discussion. But, as trite as this sounds, I’ll never forget this moment. The truth is that the demonstration was, perhaps inadvertently, rigged; I later learned that this girl, Angela, was the daughter of a well-known (at least in this crowd) scholar in the field of international conflict resolution. So she had almost certainly seen this exercise many times before, and she knew exactly what to do and what the exercise was supposed to teach (though I never did ask her about it). And I imagine Dr. Helsing knew in advance that his little icebreaker would be even more illustrative than usual.

Despite these little cheats in the situation, I still find it a tremendously compelling lesson, even in retrospect. It shows how trapped we all are in our traditional modes of thought. Someone tells us to fight, and we fight, because that’s what we expect to do. If we just sat for a minute and thought about it, we’d realize there has to be a better way.

This is true for far more than thumb wrestling, and for far more than the international conflicts that the thumb wrestling was supposed to represent. We are perennial prisoners of our own assumptions. Every time we approach a task thinking we’ve done this same thing a thousand times, or meet a new person and think they’re just like people we already know, or have to make a decision and think we should just be consistent with a previous decision, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to do something new, to experience something exciting and different, to achieve something unexpected.

I learned something very important from Angela that day (and from her partner, too, who I presume readily accepted Angela’s recommendation rather than worry about what we were “supposed” to do). I learned that we humans are, despite our habitual slavishness to established norms, capable of remarkable ingenuity and strength of spirit. All we have to do is stop listening to ourselves long enough to actually listen to ourselves.

“So, what do you do?”

People respond to this classic conversation starter in a variety of ways:
“I’m a teacher.”
“I work at Initech.”
“I tend bar, and I listen.” (sorry, I couldn’t resist)
“I’m a full-time dad.”

You can tell a lot about a person from the way they answer this seemingly throwaway question. How? Let’s take a look.

Some people respond in the most literal way possible. What do I do? Well, I wait tables. I run a small crafts store. I design microprocessors. In short, I do something. I’ll call these responders activity-oriented, because they describe their professions based on the actual activities that occupy their time

Others recast this question as an inquiry not into their activities but into the circumstances of their employment.
“I work for Texas Instruments.”
“I work at Booz Allen Hamilton.”
“I work in Speaker Pelosi’s office.”
Let’s call these individuals association-oriented. What’s important in their answers is not what exactly what they do, so much as where they do it or who they do it for.

Still others have a different perspective entirely. Work is not merely an activity or an association, but rather a state of being. “I am a writer.” “I am a software engineer.” “I am a pilot.” These people are identity-oriented. Their work isn’t just a thing they do or a place they go; it is who they are.

Now, as with all such deconstructions, the world is not nearly as simple as the three buckets I’ve outlined. Indeed, most real-world responses combine these perspectives in some way, as in, “I write copy at Hill Holliday,” or, “I’m a graphic designer, I sell custom wedding stationery online.” Moreover, sometimes the response you get doesn’t reflect any particular worldview but is rather a grammatical convenience; “I’m a product manager at a software company” just sounds more natural than “I do product management.”

But even with all these caveats, I still think that you can learn something about a person by observing which “orientation” they exhibit when explaining what they do for a living. There’s an especially stark distinction between those who are identity-oriented and those who are not. People who say that they are their profession are telling you that it’s impossible to understand them without understanding their job, and they’re telling you that they’d be different people entirely if they had different careers. Most of all, they’re telling you that their profession isn’t something that fades into the background at 5 PM; it’s a way of life, one that influences everything they do and every decision they make. I think we all, to some degree or another, seek careers that we can be, not merely do.

And it’s clear that some vocations are simply more likely to provide people with this sense of identity. I don’t intend to espouse career elitism by saying this, but we can all name these jobs if we’re honest about it: teacher, doctor, entrepreneur, artist, astronaut…you get the idea. These are the careers we typically associate with making meaning in the world, with doing things that matter in some ultimate sense. There is, of course, nothing wrong with choosing a career that doesn’t lend itself to the identity-oriented perspective, and there are plenty of very good reasons to do so (not the least of which is a preference to find identity outside the workplace instead). But it’s nevertheless hard to imagine someone associating a strong sense of personal identity with their job as, for example, the receptionist at the Scranton branch of a struggling regional paper supply company (sorry, couldn’t resist again). That’s the sort of thing that someone does, not is.

Meanwhile, association-oriented answers can be revealing in their own right. For example, some people say they work “for” their company; others say they work “at” it. Similarly, one person might work “for” his boss, and another might work “with” her. Those who regularly use “for” are, whether they realize it or not, expressing a viewpoint that their work output ultimately belongs to somebody else, not to them. Meanwhile, the “at”/”with” crowd are saying the exact opposite: no matter who signs their checks, they are working to achieve their own goals. I have consistently observed a correlation between heightened ambition and adherence to the “at”/”with” faith (although exceptional loyalty can and does push these people back into the “for” camp). There’s also certainly a generational element at work here; on average, we so-called millennials (if you’ll permit the overgeneralization) are much more likely to harbor a fundamental distaste for the idea doing anything “for” anybody other than, well, ourselves.

Activity-oriented responses, finally, are probably the easiest to understand. People who give them want to make an impression, so they avoid the potentially sycophantic association-oriented answer, but they may not be convicted enough for an identity-oriented one. (Some people fake it and give the “I am” speech anyway; you can always, always tell.) The more insecure members of this group turn the question into a prompt for a resume, filling their long-winded answers with hyperactive verbs like “coordinate,” “strategize,” and “drive.” Paradoxically, though, activity-based characterizations can also be a vehicle for great humility; I’ve met people who might run the entire widgets business and still introduce themselves with a simple, “Hi, I’m John, I help build widgets.”

Why does any of this matter? Well, for one thing, it’s always useful to be able to make quick guesses about someone’s interests, motivations, and self-image when you first meet them, especially in a professional context. (It is, of course, equally important to be willing to abandon these snap judgments given more substantial evidence.) But more importantly, I think this model allows us to ask ourselves what it is we really want from our careers, and whether our answer to this perennial question means that we have it, or that we need to make a change.

So: what do you do?