Let's Say It All Together Now: Nothing is Wrong

I mean, sure, everything is wrong right now, but if you are career-questioning maybe you are exactly where you should be. Just promise me you won’t WORK it out.

Student Council, 1-4; Class President, 2,3,4; Spanish Club 2,3; Yearbook 1-4; Volleyball 1; Gymnastics 1,2; Soccer 1,2,3; Cheerleading Squad, 1,2; Dance Team, 2,3,4; Pun Club 1; Student Poet Laureate, 4; Young Ambassadors 3,4; Drama Club 2,3; Band, 1,2,3; Debate Team, 3; Honor Roll 1-4; AP English, History, Math, History, Science; College 18-22; Grad School 25-28, Career 30s-40s; Passed-over, mid 40s; Existential crisis, 50s; “Spending time with Family”, mid-50s; Revisiting early childhood fascination with watercolors and bongo drums…

I get inspired on a daily basis just reading comments in the Optionality Open Threads. In our first one we asked members the question, “What are you letting go of?” prompting one of our Advisory Board members, Minaa B., to respond, 

“I’m finally learning to reset my brain and teach myself a new habit which is I don’t have to work this hard and the things I feel anxious about will get handled.”

Such a simple statement, and yet it hit me like a revolutionary proclamation, the thought that we could simply decide to do less and survive.

I have always been a do-er. I was that kid who signed up for everything, whose poor mother became an unpaid assistant and chauffeur managing my calendar and shuttling me to every lesson, practice, extracurricular, and volunteer activity. 

I did it all of my own volition, not through any urging. Though I do suspect it was genetic. Looking through my mother’s high school yearbook as a child, I noted the paragraph of copy indicating her memberships and activities and thinking, like my mother, I was going to have the longest paragraph next to my picture of anyone in my grade. 

This mindset served me through the early stages of my career; near-constant resume-building.

Career planning was an exercise in optimizing for achievement alone. Assessing which activities I was actually good at or loved was not part of the calculation.

For instance, I knew I loved writing, but realizing how difficult it would be to write for a living, I quit my full-time freelancing role months after embarking on it in favor of an editorial management role with an emerging “prestige” internet company. I would leave that role within three months when I discovered that all the busyness in the world would not help me succeed with a deeply political manager. Ironically, she was the first to give me advice I would hear many times afterward – Work smarter, not harder – but was not yet ready to implement.

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January 10, Premium Optionality members: No “New Year, New You” narrative here, don’t worry! Come ready to start the New Year at our January Office Hours, where we’ll talk #notresolutionsjusthabits and support each other on realistically and sustainably moving toward our goals.

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Becoming an entrepreneur was perhaps the first opportunity to put this advice into practice, providing a carte blanche opportunity to do too much, perhaps even more than I could handle. But by then busyness had become wired into my brain and was now reinforced by having actual shit that needed doing. 

My busy-ness correlated with revenue, and hence, with survival. 

For the first time, however, I needed to streamline an overflow of opportunity and pick which tasks would be most fruitful. I needed to be selectively busy; I needed to choose which forms of busy-ness I was best at.

After 10 years of near-constant stimulation punctuated by airline status awards, burnt laptops, and batch purchases of stupidly high-heeled shoes, I left. Again, this was of my own volition, as I had realized long into this stint that I would one day leave it and seek “depth” vs. “volume” work that matched not only the level of impact I’d generated, but also my passions.

Unfortunately I had no idea what that looked like.

I had done it all in a frenzy of momentum-building and then optimized for activities at which I was most effective; but in so doing, I switched off the part of my brain that indulged in doing what felt good. And those things that once felt good, like writing, didn’t feel good anymore. They felt foreign. They felt wrong.

So I did what I had become accustomed to doing: Working my way through the problem. 

All I knew at the time was that NOT doing anything felt wrong. And like anyone addicted to anything I fought this feeling with the hair of the dog that bit me, packing on roles, at times agreeing to work with and for people who were not worthy of my time and effort, but who held up the potential of stimulating work like a dime bag, offering me a hit. And, like any good drug dealer, they made me feel bad for putting my own needs first. They tried to convince me that, if I wasn’t succeeding I wasn’t working hard enough.

Only after years into this cycle was I able to even recognize this issue and do less as the only antidote to getting to my destination of self-acceptance. Of contentment.

I remember the words of my first toxic–but not wrong–manager: Work smarter not harder. And I’m adding a twist: Work better, not smarter. 

I had proven I was smart, that I could make choices, run teams, hit goals, make money. But I hadn’t proven that I could trust myself enough to know, for myself, the best use of me. 

I can’t say that I have this question completely sorted. But I am willing to accept that I can no longer work it out. Like Minaa, I’m teaching myself a new habit of acceptance, and doing less.