Is Your Car Keeping You from Success?

Expressing yourself is a wonderful thing. Teenagers can tell you this. They love setting themselves apart with body piercings and tattoos, not to mention wild hair colors and styles. Everyone wants to be seen as an original. Besides, it's fun to experiment will different looks - even for your car. It's fun to shop for something new and to install it, and then to show it off to your friends. In doing so, you reaffirm your idea of who you are.

But are you wrecking any hope of getting a promotion at work or getting a better job? It sounds silly, but what you put on your car can have the same effect as what you put on your body. You're already aware that some employers don't want to hire people with body art or certain types of hairstyles. It's not really that they think you are a bad person; it's that they think you may not be able to fit in. If you are so willing to set yourself apart from the crowd, how can he hope that you will learn to be a part of that same crowd? How will your colleagues know that you are one of them?

Unfortunately, the thing that you have to do when you're hoping for a promotion or trying for a better job is to blend in. That means conservative dress and a conservative car. If you are trying to get a promotion from a black Crown Vic kind of guy, and you advertise to the world that you're a red Trans Am kind of guy, with Dead Head stickers and fuzzy dice and that sort of thing, you're actually saying, "I don't want to be one of the black Crown Vic guys." How, then, can you expect them to take you in as one of their own?

You may say, "I don't want to be one of them. I just want a better job."

In order to move up in rank you have to go be with the higher-ranking people. In order to be with them, you have to be one of them. It's all very primal when you think about it, really.

People judge people by the way they look all the time - that includes the way they dress, haircuts, body art, jewelry, whether they dye their hair, what color they dye it, and what kind of car they drive. You do it too, even if you don't actually think you do. That's why you don't want to be one of the Crown Vic-driving suits - because you think they're not cool, or not free, or not something you want to be. You've judged them, and they're judging you.

The thing is, you can be a flaming Trans Am kind of guy on the inside, as long as you can walk the walk on the outside. If you want to enjoy a car that expresses your true inner self, invest in a weekend joyriding machine, and go to work in something that looks more like your boss's car.