The Foreign Service Journal, May 2011

I think of achieving work-life balance as personal en- gineering — with the same trade-offs that all engineers face in getting things done. Taking yet another hardship assignment and dragging your family along (or doing it alone) may advance your career, but at the expense of your loved ones. At the same time, under our personnel system there is no guarantee that sacrificing family needs will lead to pro- motions. Family hardships are not sacrifices on the For- eign Service promotion altar. Keep in mind that the area of the world you love and the hard language you have mastered are your choices — not those of your families. It is not by accident (or due to the daunting testing regime) that few Foreign Service children follow their parents’ footsteps for their own careers. Weigh Your Trade-Offs Diplomats are supposed to be defined by their foreign- language ability, but the reality is that virtually all of your overseas contacts will speak English better than you will ever speak their language. For many of us, learning a for- eign language is akin to chipping stone with your tongue; consequently, knowing a “hard” one can be a trap. De- voting years to mastering the “in” language of the moment at a 3/3 level can ultimately prove useless to your career — and it may get you sent (minus family) to an unpleas- ant assignment. Remember the legions of Vietnamese-language speakers who were going to win hearts and minds through the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Devel- opment Support program more than 40 years ago? And how many speakers of Dari, Pashto, Urdu or Iraqi Ara- bic will we need in 2022? So become proficient in a world (French, Spanish, etc.) language, which you may be able to employ in retirement far more than you would Korean or Mongolian. Unless you genuinely enjoy plug- ging away at acquiring new languages, or have “Richard Burton”-level linguistic skills, leave more exotic tongues to those who yearn to be modern-day 19th-century ex- plorers. M A Y 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 39 F O C U S