The lessons we learn at work help formulate who we become and what we value as individuals and a species. It is in work that we become persons. Work is that which forms us, gives us a focus, offers us a vehicle for personal expression and provides us with a means for personal definition. Elia Kazan has said that the one absolute lesson he has learned in life is that our careers and our identities are inextricably bound. Indeed, they are equivalent.
People are what they do, and what people do affects every aspect of who they are.
For good or ill, we are known and we know ourselves by our work. The meter and measure of work serves as our mapping devise to explain and order the geography of life. Our work circumscribes what we know, and how we select and categorize the things we come to know and experience. The lessons we learn in our work and at work become the metaphors we apply to life and others, and the means by which we digest the world. Perhaps the easiest way to prove the point that we are affected, labeled and formed by the work we do is to consider its converse.