This may not be the only time I write about my fears, and that seems normal. What I’m doing is exciting, but it’s also scary. Some might be thinking about the physical danger here. And indeed, covering so many miles on the road does expose me to greater risk of car accident. Or one may worry about me being attacked by someone for some reason. Or perhaps one would be worried about my COVID risk (I am too). But the physical dangers aren’t really occupying my mind.
What if I don’t find it?
What I’m afraid of is: What if I don’t find it? What if I’m as lost and insignificant afterwards as I am now?
The fears in my head at the moment have been stoked by a leisurely stroll through LinkedIn, the social media network where people present their carefully-curated “professional” images and try to convince everyone that their unique ploys for accumulating wealth are actually saving the world. (Forgive me my jadedness; the tone is mostly for comedic value.) I gaze at the posts, the announcements, the promotions, and I can’t help but think: “Gosh, I really don’t miss this.” It’s all an inauthentic game with a set of rules based in showmanship and competitiveness, which everyone seems to resign themselves to playing just because some players have highly Puritanical sensibilities that are upset by authentic interactions and conversations about our honest wants and needs as humans just trying to live as best we can.
Of course, my bitterness is tinged with a not-insignificant amount of envy, because I fear that I simply cannot thrive in that game anymore. I guess “cannot” vs. “don’t want to” is an open and moot question. Particularly when I’m in digital spaces like LinkedIn or physical spaces with people who tend to measure accomplishment by a narrow set of metrics, I fear my inability to succeed by any metric when the halls of power and large-scale success are owned and operated by the financially-oriented. In these spaces, I can’t help but think: “This is what success looks like; and I can never achieve this.”
“What on earth am I doing here?”
And so in these moments, I can’t help but look at my journey and ask myself, my inner voice dripping with judgment, “What on earth am I doing here?”
What if my ambitions of carving out a professional niche for myself do not come to fruition? What if my niche ends up being somewhere that doesn’t earn me enough money to live comfortably? What if my niche doesn’t end up having the impact on the world that I’d hoped it could? What if I can’t find a self-employed niche, and no one else wants to employ me? What if what if what if…
When I left my corporate job last year, I made a trade-off between certainty/security and my values. If I’d wanted certainty and security, I could have stayed in corporate America (although not in that job), sacrificing my values (and my liberty to live in accordance with them) so that I could have some certainty about my future. So of course, I know I can’t have it both ways – with certainty and with values-alignment, at least not at this stage.
What I can have right now is confidence and faith. Confidence in my path, my choices, and in the belief that I know myself and what’s good for me better than my social milieu knows me and what’s good for me (or, more accurately, my perception of the social milieu that comes across through social media). And faith that my journey will deliver me clarity and opportunity as I follow it faithfully.
I hate that I’m about to write this, but something the CEO of my previous company used to say in all-company meetings is pertinent: “Do the right things, and results with follow.” Stripping away the fact that the “results” in this quote essentially referred to making more money, the point is that it’s important to focus on doing the right things in the here and now. For me, that means continuing to make day-to-day choices that are aligned with my values, while also creating opportunities for myself to head in the direction of larger goals, hopes, dreams, ambitions.
Head down, do the right things, trust yourself.
So I guess in summary: Head down, do the right things, trust yourself. Oh, and stay away from LinkedIn.