A guest post by Stephanie Denning, who writes about leadership issues from a Millennial perspective.
I recently turned 28 and there’s nothing like a birthday to evaluate if you’re winning at the game of life. Throughout my 20s, it always felt like my 30th birthday loomed like judgment day. And I now had two years to figure out how to get a W. A win would be qualified by finally having found a deeper purpose in life—a calling.
Finding a purpose is life’s version of a multivariate equation. What’s your functional purpose? Is it to code, write or build businesses? And in what industry do you plan to pursue it? In which city? And when? The journey to answering these questions is hard because you don’t know if you’ll succeed. The difficulty is putting in the time, day in and day out, to find answers without really ever knowing if it will all work out in the end.
On looking into other people’s experience, I’m beginning to see that you don’t “find” your purpose. You stumble upon it and it finds you. This journey can feel like walking through the rain forest with a blindfold on. So I created this list as a guide to the structure of the journey.
1. You Have To Outwork Everyone
This is an obvious one. What interested me: was how do you quantify “outwork”? Here is what I found:
- Tom Scott, founder of Nantucket Nectars: “I worked seven days a week, usually until 11 p.m., for the first eight years.”
- Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School, Worked from 5 a.m. onwards, 14 hours a day. In grad school, he worked until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. in the morning. Only slept five hours.
- Michael Bloomberg: Started at 6 a.m. and never took a day off.
- Hans Zimmer, composer of the Lion King score: “The majority of skilled musicians I know have been practicing about eight hours a day from the time they were 6 or 7 years old.”
- Daniel Boulud, Michelin-starred chef: “I worked 12 to 16 hour days.”
But is it really just about putting in the time? Everyone I know who has a purpose has worked around the clock to get there. When they aren’t clocking in time at work, they’re at home working on a side business or reading to figure out what they want to do.
The big test is: will you put in this kind of time when you aren’t seeing results? When all you see is failed attempts? Can you face failure and confront it? Outworking everyone else isn’t a number, but a mental state. It’s about grit.
Angela Duckworth, associate professor in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the issue of grit, quotes Will Smith as an example:
I will not be outworked. Period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me; you might be all of those things – you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m gonna die.
2. It’s Not You Against The World
People often view life as a competitor. It’s you against the world and the only way to make any headway is to continuously crash against it like a wave. This is especially true for those of us in our 20s. We spend an inordinate amount of energy crashing against the world. We constantly feel defeated when things don’t work out as we had hoped. I’m no different. I’ve had multiple failures big and small. And every time, this image epitomizes how I feel.
The thing is that wallowing in self-pity gets you nowhere. Perseverance and discipline are so vital to success that taking a combative approach to life will only wear you down. There is only so much fight our bodies are wired to sustain.
Finding continuous harmony isn’t so difficult. The idea of being in harmony with the world is the essence of meditation and martial arts. In The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure and the Search for Mastery (2015), Sara Lewis explains how Aikido, a form of martial arts, “embodies the idea that when we stop resisting something, we stop giving it power.”
3. Don’t Ignore Your Signal Points
One of the reasons it’s so important to be in tune with yourself and the world is to enable you to pick up on subtle signals. Here are some examples:
Daniel Boulud says: “When I was 11, my parents took me to Brittany…We ordered a plateau de fruits de mer. I had never seen anything like it…It was majestic. In that moment, I realized that travelling to experience new kinds of food is one of the most beautiful things you can do.”
Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, recalls one moment during a presentation (before her idea for TFA was born): “That CEO’s words never left me. I knew from then on that I wanted to find a way to address the most important needs.”
We all experience these signals in our lives. Signal points elicit a paradigm shift.
Yet these signal points are not always clear in the moment. As Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter states, “Memory is set up to use the past to imagine the future.” Don’t worry if you feel like you’ve never experienced this. It’s often only looking back that we realize its importance.
In my case, I only recently realized how much I loved to write. But I can look back now and see some trigger points. One time, a good friend told me she was considering a career switch, and asked what I thought. I instantly declared she should be a writer! When I told her, she was offended. First, because nothing she had ever done suggested she was interested in writing. And second, at the time in our world of engineering, math was everything and writing was a second-class activity. It’s only now that I realize I was projecting my own interests onto her.
4. Don’t Wait For The Perfect Time: It Doesn’t Exist!
Since we all grow up in a structured educational system, our brains are taught to think that there’s a time and place for everything. Our life is regimented until we leave college and then it turns into the Wild Wild West.
After college, I had a full time job but knew I wanted to pursue writing on the side. I spent most of my time outside of work reading. That’s an important part of learning to write but it’s also not writing. I kept waiting for the right moment to write. The right inspiration. The perfect idea. The ideal setting. The result was that I never wrote a single thing for three whole years. I only thought about it.
Six years later I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that there’s no perfect time. This doesn’t make it any easier. My current job could easily take over my life if I let it. So I have to force myself to write every day. Even if its just one sentence, I feel victorious.
5. Incubate Your Ideas
It turns out that just thinking about an idea for a long period of time isn’t so bad after all. Successful ideas don’t happen overnight. Every idea needs an incubation period:
Brian Grazer, producer of A Beautiful Mind, writes: “The certainty that something is a worthwhile idea is fragile. It requires energy and determination and optimism to keep going. I don’t want other people’s negativity to get inside my head, to undermine my confidence.”
Jeff Kinney, author of Diary of Wimpy Kid: “When you announce your intentions, you become trapped by them. Adding social pressure to your situation gives you less flexibility. I knew I was working on something special and protected myself by telling very few people about it.”
Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx: “For the first full year I kept my idea a secret from anyone who could not directly help to move it forward.”
Evan Spiegel, the founder of SnapChat, recently gave the commencement speech at Stanford where he concluded: “Find something that you don’t want to sell.” But you have to develop the idea to get it to that point. When an idea is born, you have no idea if it’s any good or even if you like it. How many friends do you know who had this so-called brilliant idea for a start-up only to drop it 6 months later? Incubate your ideas. If after a year you no longer love it, discard it. If you’re still smitten, maybe you’re onto something.
6. Your 20s Is You Time
You’ve heard it before, but just to remind you: “There are a lot of things that if you don’t do them in your 20s you’ll never do,” said Jim Koch, founder of Sam Adams Brewery. Or Daniel Boulud: “Until the age of 28 or 30, people should try to learn and experience as much as they can.”
The problem is that most people in their 20s develop a checklist of things to do, instead of pursuing true exploration. The most common example is travel. There’s a myth that travelling is the cure-all to the malaise you feel in your 20s. Of course, I too fell prey to this. Because I had watched Eat, Pray, Love I also felt like this was clearly the secret to unlocking my purpose in the universe. But reality quickly reminded me that deep down this was not my jam.
I also realized that most people who did travel, didn’t come back with a new perspective or a different view on life. Instead, the travel served as bragging rights. I think there’s a huge benefit to travel, but only if you’re there to soak it in, not tick it off the bucket list.
Too often, we squander the gift of time in our 20s by chasing things that don’t bring value to our lives. I know because I learned the hard way. Figure out what you want to do and forget about what everyone else thinks you should do. Now I would choose to take a writing class over traveling to some exotic locale. A writing class is less sexy, but it’s much more me.
7. Craft A Point Of View
From what I’ve gleaned, your 20s are a fact-finding mission. The mission culminates in developing a mental model of the world. Every successful person has one: Clayton Christensen, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett. The way it seems to work is that you study and study and study the pieces, and seemingly out of the blue, you wake up one day and you see how the pieces fit together.
I once asked my dad how he writes so quickly. He said: “When you have to have a coherent point of view of how the world works, writing about anything is easy.”
From where I stand, developing a mental model, a point of view on the world, seems almost impossible. Hans Zimmer, the composer of the Lion King score, said it best, “I’ve got 12 notes to work with – and every other composer is using those same twelve notes. I wonder, What’s going to make what I do so different from what everybody else does?”
The closest thing to an answer comes from Einstein: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Success starts to follow when you can clearly define what you’re good at. Warren Buffett, also a proponent of this theory, says, “The most important thing in terms of your circle of competence is not how large it is, but how well you define the perimeter.”
And read also:
Four Leadership Lessons Millennials Need
Five Reasons To Un-Friend Facebook
Why Millennials Love Listicles
On Keeping Your New Year's Resolutions
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Follow Stephanie Denning on Twitter at @stephdenning
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