I feel really lucky that my 11th grade American literature teacher devised a curriculum that relentlessly attacked the American success myth.
We read Christopher Lasch, Ben Franklin's autobiography, The Great Gatsby, "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather, a bunch of other stuff ....
And at the same time, I was volunteering with the local hippies, and my mentor was a guy who'd burned out on working as a philosophy professor, and now did carpentry to support his peace activism.
My parents, and the conveyor belt of the school system as a whole, were pretty invested in me being a Success by traditional criteria. And so I am so so so grateful to have gotten a deep critique and practical counterexample. Something that helped me with the confidence to say no, to be skeptical.
Years later, during my master's in tech management, a financial services executive came to speak to our class.
He gave a good presentation about becoming more than just a tech person, becoming a strategist and a leader. He may have mentioned ambition, how much you have to want that brass ring to do the work that it takes to get it.
I thought hard to find a question for the Q&A. I raised my hand and he called on me.
That's where it took a turn. He didn't talk about money he's made, or jobs he's created, or people he's mentored.
He said that he wasn't sure about calling himself a success.
He found great fulfillment in the challenges of his work. But, once, years back, when his family was settled in a house and in their lives on the East Coast, he'd gotten a job in another state, and he'd uprooted his family (including his college-age child) to move them. His wife left him.
So, he said, he didn't know whether he'd succeeded or not, how to measure that.
I said: the measure is, would you do it all over again?
The executive thought, and the room went silent, and he said he didn't know.
Three years later, a classmate told me that hearing that answer lodged in and changed his mind. Before coming into the master's program, he'd aimed to become a Chief Information Officer of a big corporation. Afterwards, he decided, "I want time for family."
I remember that executive talking about the pyramid shape of an organization. How the higher you want to get, the fewer slots there are at that level, and the fiercer the competition.
And right now, in my profession, yeah, some things are scarce. But the more I grow people who can perform at my level, the more we all thrive.
The open source industry would benefit massively if there were 10 times as many people who could do what I can do, and so would I. Because a ton of our potential clients and employers don't even know that what we can do is possible, so each of us is, among other things, an ad for all of us.
Zero-sum competition makes sense when we assume the size and shape of the competitive field is fixed. But sometimes it's not. And you have the chance to expand the envelope of the possible.
Would I do it all over again? Too early to tell. And I'd fix some of the ways I did what I did. But right now I'm grateful for what my past self avoided, for the mirage I didn't chase.
@brainwane this is such an insightful thread, thanks for sharing. As someone in leadership I feel the same complex emotions about success. I enjoy leadership as a challenge, and I want to make work better for everyone I work with, but it can really be hard and sometimes not worth it.
@kleaders I appreciate your response and am glad I could share something interesting.
And, to add on to what you have said, working in leadership is itself difficult whether or not it's yoked to zero-sum competition and traditionally hierarchical organizational forms and Big Corporation-style executive culture!
@brainwane This whole thread rings true with me. I worked in a big corp.
Ive never been motivated by power and traditional ambition, just the challenge and being good at what I do.
They progressed me upwards, which took me away from.what I liked. Without realising, I was self sabotaging my work, because the stuff I liked and enjoyed had been taken away from me, and replaced by "managing".
I spent many hours there, and had a marriage breakdown.
I've subsequently left the organisation, and the whole life cycle of this process still eats at me, tired me, and makes me loathe work.
I'd prefer to not work and spend time with my myself, my family and friends. That's where the rewarding stuff is, not the $$$ and hollowness of a corporate existence.
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