Year
2021
- Published
- Peter chadri
You are your story. Too often, people identify themselves by their work, and measure their life’s worth by their professional achievements.
Smith. Carpenter. Wood. Clearly, this phenomenon is not a new one. But as I create a site dedicated to my professional and amateur work, it is important to me that I express this point of view: You are not what you do. (Sorry to disagree with The Dark Knight).
When I found out that I got into Stanford, I thought that it would be smooth sailing henceforth towards changing the world. Yet when I graduated in 2010, all I wanted was a job that offered health insurance, and I had neither. After 3 months of applications, and mounting bills, I chose to be a waiter. I did all I could to keep a stiff upper lip as I waited upon friends, former teaching assistants and professors while hiding my shame.
The cycle repeated itself again when I graduated from Kellogg’s full time MBA program among the 5% who didn’t have an offer within 3 months of graduation…actually for two years up until the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and one person’s adversity turned into an offer for me. During those two years, as as I applied for jobs and got turned down, I withdrew once again in shame, which only compounded when I decided to start driving as an uber driver and picked up former classmates during our one year reunion.
I ask: What is your story, not, what do you do?
From my post-Stanford experience, I took that not everyone gets the job he wants, but (mostly) everyone has bills to pay, and at some point, one has to take the work that one can get. I also stopped trying to define myself by my title. I am not an entrepreneur, even though I do attempt to turn problems into opportunities; I am not a program manager, even though I do coordinate different teams and actors to accomplish a goal on time. These are things I do, some for income, others out of love, but they are not who I am; and I want to be more interested in knowing who people are. I also realize that there are a lot of people who still continue to define themselves by their work and/or title. So, instead of “What do you do?”, I try to ask “What is your story?”, and let the other person chose to tell me what matters to them. Because to some, the most important thing in their life is their work. To others, it is not. To others, they are in a predicament similar to the one I was in, and are glad for the face-saving opportunity.
And from my post MBA experience, I take that although I can intellectually see the point of not defining oneself by one’s work, I still strongly feel the need to measure my worth by this metric. And I have a lot more work to do to appreciate myself in all other aspects.
Another thing I do: I play(ed) rugby