true colors essay

I am a lucky person. I was raised by a very caring pair of parents with three very good siblings in an extremely affluent town. I attended the best grammar and high schools in the state, continued on to graduate from one of the best universities in the world, and had no idea what to do next. My drive to excel was both internal and external—I really do love success, but I was equally pressured by outside sources to succeed. The advantages I was given served both to help me start ahead of others and stay ahead in life, and to cripple me once I had traveled through those first two decade’s worth of rites of passage.
I have long known that having so many opportunities had simply paralyzed my ability to pick one of them. While I know that my grade school friends were raised in the same environment as I, I have always wondered why they dove quickly and headfirst into their careers while I spent a decade trying to make up my mind. This introductory psychology course is the final prerequisite course I take before I begin medical school in less than one month. While I would have liked to have made this career decision ten years ago, I am glad to have experienced and learned all that I have in my life, for those experiences serve to solidify my resolve in having chosen my future career. Fortunately (and unexpectedly), Carolyn Kalil’s book has helped me to understand myself and my decisions.
I am GREEN. Very green. Actually, my girlfriend stated that I am “anti-blue”. She is probably right. I am rational, logical, love to find, diagnose and solve problems, and I love debate. My original plan in life was to become a lawyer. I took the LSAT in my senior year of college, was accepted almost everywhere I wanted to go, but at the last minute “freaked” that I was making the wrong decision. My fear was two-fold: was I making a rash decision, and would a career as an attorney allow adequate mental stimulation? I chose not to attend, instead embarking on a very different path for the next ten years.
My gold traits are very strong, though not as much as my green traits. My gold tendencies are loyalty, need for efficiency and responsibility. The description of the gold traits seemed to fit me quite well, but the green traits are very overwhelmingly Me. I suppose were I somehow to acquire ...

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... knowing how I feel in a given scenario. Furthermore, she has helped me to be considerably less frustrated by “stupid” people. She has taught me to accept that other people have different motivations, opinions and abilities and that mine should be mine and their’s should be their’s.
It will be very interesting over the following days and weeks and months as I try to identify the colors for those around me. This will be in part to satisfy my green needs (diagnose and problem solve) and partly to help me interact with the other people of different “colors” in my life. That is probably the most useful aspect of this book—understanding our interactions with those closest to us. I will try to no longer become frustrated with blues, instead embrace their differing abilities and how they might complement my own. I will try to compete with the oranges, not against them. And I will try not to force the golds in my life to quickly adopt and adapt to my world views. I guess all that remains now is forcing all of those colors around me to read this book so none will be offended when I call them a color.

Kalil, Carolyn, Find Your True Colors to the Work You Love, Riverside, California, 1998.