Career Development, a bird's view 鳥瞰事業發展

I started thinking about career-related issues very early. I wanted to be a musician shortly after I got into grade school. I think it was because the music was easy and fun for me. I generally learned music quicker than my peers. It was a good feeling being ahead of others. I was naturally fascinated by the shape and the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments. I wanted to be an orchestra conductor after I saw a movie about Tanglewood, in my third grade. I literally started learning to conduct privately without telling anybody. After I had a chance to visit a print shop owned by one of my aunts and managed by her brothers I started to think about picking up some experiences working in that shop during summer vacation. I did not dare to bring it up simply because it was too much to commute from my home to the shop even though we were in the same city. When I was in junior high of Chang-jung Christian School I had frequent encounters with one of my cousin, who became Rev. Eng-cho To later, while he was one year before graduating from the senior high of that same school. I saw him producing and selling many envelops and pads for letter-writing with the name of the school printed. Obviously, he had an easy market on the campus because there was no duplicating service accessible to ordinary people. I guess my aunts and uncles would give him very special prices to encourage him. Actually, very few businesses had the luxury of having letterhead printed. That gave me the idea and some understanding of the concept of the upstream providers and public relations. In my high school days, my church had a chance to participate in a special project for producing a long-play record, sung by a selected group of church choirs. My church choir had to have a song recorded in the recording studio of a local radio station. My church also needs to provide a person to handle the local orders, payments, and distribution of the LP record. Seeing nobody standing up to pick up the job, I volunteered. I remember that, at that time, I was in my 11th grade for the first time, struggling with my school work preparing to major in sciences in college. I actually repeated that 11th grade once and switched to prepare for the entrance examination of literal and social studies, leaving the natural and technological sciences behind. That particular experiences of handling some business operations gave me some concepts of book-keeping, accounting, and delivery. During that period of time, I also became one of the administrators of the Sunday School of my church. When the children gathered in the sanctuary at the end for a children worship service the sanctuary was more than half full every Sunday. We had a large number of children in Sunday School, like more than a hundred every Sunday. My job, working with a partner who became Rev. Sin-san Wu later, was to display a box full of envelopes with names of children on them at the entrance of the church building, outside the sanctuary,under a tree. As the children got to the church they would pick up their envelope from my stand and put their money for donation into the envelope; and deposit the envelopes into the collection box at the entrance of the sanctuary. While the children had their lessons in separate classes my partner and I would gather the envelopes from that collecting box, pull out the money, document the amount on each envelope and sum up the total in preparion for the ritual of worship.