New Scripts
Even the most self-directed of us could be following someone else’s intuition.
It was a period of uncertainty, one of several that would follow before it, though I wouldn’t know that yet.
This whole Dot Com thing (the first one), as exciting of a ride as it had been, had thrown me for a loop, out onto an open career terrain with no clear pathways. And I desperately wanted a path to follow.
In an attempt at creating pathways I started applying to grad schools and wrote a book about my career and life exploits, or lack thereof, that I inexplicably titled “LATE” despite not yet being 30. It addressed a nagging feeling that I should have planned better, listened to advice the world was giving me, even without asking for it.
I’d been accepted into a socio-organizational psychology graduate program at Columbia University in New York City, where I used to live, in an attempt, I suppose, at returning to the familiar. Still, I wasn’t sure the option that had presented itself was the right one. I’d built a life in San Francisco–something I hadn’t thought too hard about while searching for new pathways. And playing this grad school option out, I wasn’t sure it led me to a better career outcome–a truth that had only become clearer with an acceptance letter.
I decided to take an adjacent path, one that wouldn’t disrupt my life entirely but would give me exposure to this world of org psych. I deferred enrollment at Columbia and took a marketing role at a boutique peer-networking firm designed for senior HR leaders and guided by an advisory of senior ex-operators, master executive coaches and senior advisors to the Global 2000.
Even though the firm advised chief talent, L&D, and organizational strategy executives of highly matrixed companies, its own structure was, shall we say, a bit more chaotic. My role was amoeba-like, taking on, along with the administrative staff, anything that needed doing. As the marketing lead, I also took on some member sales and, due to my background in publishing, edited the manuscripts of the firm’s founder, a legendary HR leader-turned-advisor to the Fortune 1000, who wrote multiple books and bylined in prestigious business publications.
It hardly mattered that I was often asked to perform tasks that were not in my job description (until it did; I departed in a year); the point was I got exposure to and even networking opportunities with senior leaders who’d built successful careers in an industry I was exploring.
The activity I most enjoyed while at the executive networking firm: The advisor dinners. These were events at top restaurants, where we feted associates of the firm, men mostly, who had developed illustrious careers as CHROs, master coaches, top business school professors, managing directors in consulting firms. I got to sit down with them, not as a peer, but as a harmless administrative bystander in a conversational environment. I listened more than I spoke.
One conversation stuck with me, with an executive who was now advising HR leaders in organizations. I had taken advantage of the moment and told him about deferring grad school, asking him if it even made sense to pursue a Masters versus my tried and true alternative of gaining direct learned experience.
He responded, “Do you really want to be stuck making $150k for the rest of your life? You have to go back to school.”
I had several immediate, unspoken reactions to this well-meaning advice.
First was, what gives this guy the impression that I’m being paid anything remotely close to that as a glorified marketing assistant to the founder?
Next, I took offense: He was making a classist assertion, from the vantage point of someone who’d never experienced differently. I knew people with years of experience and advanced degrees who had fulfilling lives and careers making less than the salary he dismissed as an indicator of stagnation.
I left that company deciding not to go to grad school and accidentally embarking on what would become my most career-defining chapter as an entrepreneur, where the rules, hierarchies, and sense of agency were almost entirely different from this highly credentialed, highly stratified environment.
I thought I’d taken away nothing useful from that role, but that’s not true. I met one of my closest friends to this day while there. And several years ago my advisory focus looped back around to not only address the growth strategies of companies, but the structures of organizations deep in transition. The frameworks and systematic thinking that I learned in the abstract, reading reams of manuscripts drafted by people with a proliferation of post-nominals, stuck with me.
I’ve found myself, in this chapter of my career, once again suspended in between the applied and the conceptual, tapping the door of the enterprise, where there’s muted, mistrustful chaos ignited by AI. They will only open the door to people who can fix things, who get the trains back on track so that they can go faster than before, not theorize. While I carry many theories in my bag, I promise to only pull out the tools needed to fix the tracks.
Still, I know where these tools come from. I may not have chosen to stay working as a janitor in the Ivory Tower – I roll my eyes at its elitist, often ineffectual, tendency to ruminate for a living, And yet I’m drawn to it.
I’ve thought for a long time that I had found my intuitive boundaries long ago. But the deeper I explore into my personal operating system the more detritus I uncover that was never mine but that became folded into my future. Others’ presumptions, based on their own privilege and insecurities; awkwardly landed advice; these have largely vaporized, but some droplets still hang in the air.
Even though I had been able to contextualize the advice I was given that night of the executive advisory dinner, it didn’t dissipate. It left a residue of expectation for myself. A line of legitimacy that, once crossed, I could not ever cross back, for fear of de-forming back into an unfinished, uncertain piece of work. I could shape-shift, decline a graduate education, masquerade as a risk-taker, jump fields, so long as that line of legitimacy held.
In fact, the thought of blowing up the sidewalk upon which that line was drawn never entered my realm of possibility until recently.
And now, post-explosion, as I rewrite the scripts of my working life, I’m seeing many crossed lines in my wake. I didn’t know I had crossed them because I hadn’t acknowledged their existence. They started as scripts that had been whispered in my ear by systems I’d rejected. Nonetheless these scripts just sat in my brain refusing to go away:
Your instincts are insufficient;
Money = Proof of Competence;
You can overcome if you just work harder;
You will receive your due by sticking it out;
Numbers, credentials, achievements matter most;
Fulfillment comes after–not alongside, not instead of–proving oneself.
These scripts are starting to dissipate, and I can now see them for what they are, incidental stains spilled on my developing psyche. I’ve had the power of lifting them all along.
And I see my hand is not broken; I can write new scripts.
Breathe more today.
You can’t build on airy regrets, just from the real material of what you’ve done and what you are doing.
Start by picking up this thread from this part of your life, and then this one, and then this one; make something with it.
You don’t need to justify these threads; you just need to strengthen them.
You are right on time.