Over the past few years, I’ve shared a lot of writing about careers and career transitions. Sometimes you know where you want to go and it’s just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. For others, they sense what they are doing is not the right fit.
This doubt is especially unsettling at the start of a career. It’s easier to pivot when you are younger and opportunity costs are low. Oftentimes it’s just a matter of fighting through the initial discomfort.
I wanted to quit my trading career my first day into it.
I was 22 years old, hapless in my attempts to understand the language of bids and offers ricocheting from the smelly mouths I was standing next to on the Amex trading floor. “Everyone has to start somewhere” is true but hardly consolation when you feel useless. Fetching traders’ lunch was the only time I felt useful. Useful but stupid. I’m in Cafe World on the corner of Trinity and Rector staring at a diagram of where on the plate my boss wanted his Singapore mei fun noodles while lamenting the wisdom of taking on college debt for this privilege.
Fortunately, the initial learning curve for trading isn’t too steep if you are immersed on an exchange floor. I didn’t have to waste much time figuring out if this was a mistake, because it only took a little persistence to get to a place where I could be useful. I became proficient in Excel in less than 2 months. I stopped “offering for” and “bidding at” in less time than that. I could see that my development was in line with my cohort. These clues were helpful because I’ve always felt some suspicion about grit.
I thought grit was overrated.
It wasn’t a buzzword back then, but I always had a feeling that Venkat Rao put into words when he said “hard equals wrong” in Calculus of Grit.
There’s a bit I want to highlight:
School’s failure to reveal most people’s strengths sets their lives on a needlessly masochistic journey.
Venkat explains:
Why? Think of it this way. The disciplinary world very coarsely measured your aptitudes and strengths once in your lifetime, pointed you in a roughly right direction and said “Go!” The external environment had been turned into a giant obstacle course designed around a coarse global mapping of everybody’s strengths.
So there was no distinction between the map of the external world you were navigating and the map of your internal strengths. The two had been arranged to synchronize. If you navigated through a map of external achievement, landmarks, and honors, you’d automatically be navigating safely through the landscape of your internal strengths.
But when you cannot trust that you’ve been pointed in the right direction in a landscape designed around your strengths, you cannot afford to navigate based on a one-time coarse mapping of your own strengths at age 18.
If you run into an obstacle, it is far more likely that it represents a weakness rather than a meaningful real-world challenge to be overcome, as a learning experience.
Don’t try to go over or through. It makes far more sense to go around. Hack and work around. Don’t persevere out of a foolhardy superhuman sense of valor.
It can be difficult to tell when you should persevere vs cut your losses. I offer some thought and links in On Grit. To be clear, I think grit is important. But if anything it’s probably more overrated than ever since an airport book was published on it.
In the years since I read that post, I came across an essay that I think is a perfect companion to the grit discussion. The subtext, at least in how I read it, is to orient your heading so it’s downhill. No matter how you read it, it’s a terrific essay. Since it’s commencement season, send it to a recent grad.
✍️How Will You Measure Your Life? (16 min read)
by Clayton M. Christensen
Here are excerpts I like to return to.
On how Clayton responds to advice-seekers…
When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.
On remembering why you do something at all…
Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life.
Not everything that matters is good at giving you prompt feedback. If you fail to appreciate this, you chase what’s easily legible at the cost of things that are hard to measure.
Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.
When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement.
Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.
Give me an example…
The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.
Be careful how you strive…
Once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. [Me: This is a powerful prescription to make yourself more teachable]: Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too.
His final recommendation…
Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.
This echoes the wisdom of another late visionary, Michael Crichton:
“If you want to be happy, forget yourself. Forget all of it—how you look, how you feel, how your career is going. Just drop the whole subject of you. People dedicated to something other than themselves are the happiest people in the world.”
It’s a lot of brilliance in a couple of paragraphs:
✍️Happiness (3 min read)
by Michael Crichton