It was Thursday, September 15th at 11:00 am – just under a year since I had joined Sub Rosa and the hour of my annual evaluation. We’d been given a series of questions to answer. One being, “where do you see yourself in 3 years?” I knew if I were honest with myself and the ones reading the answers, I would have to take that dreaded, but oh so exhilarating leap into something new, and move on.
On paper, it had been my dream job, but what I’d come to realize (and apparently what my friends have always known) working for someone else wasn’t cutting it. I wanted a community of collaboration, what I got was complete autonomy. Don’t get me wrong the experience was great, but a lot of times knowing what you don’t want is just as important as finding what you do. And so starts a new journey…
I remember being in the office at somewhere close to 2am and realizing there was still a lot of oil to burn. At one point, my boss sent me a message and said, “Mihae, it’s only marketing.” At that moment I found comfort, it had eased the pressure and lifted the burden of performance. It didn’t change the fact that I still spent the night at the office but somehow it felt better. He would repeat the statement during a recap of the project, but the second time around it felt deflating. It made me question the worth of the work. Keep in mind, I’m not anti-advertising nor hate the corporation, I just wanted the work I did to be meaningful beyond someone’s bottom line. And when you work for the end result of profit over losses, you realize a certain degree of futility. You can walk away from it because at the end of our days, it’s really not worth that much.
I’d written a job posting once and it concluded with a line from Confucius, “Find a job that you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” In the days since writing it, I had oscillated between believing it to questioning it to downright denying it, in fact I may still just be on a pendulum swing in one direction, moments away from heading just as powerfully back. But for now, I can say I believe it.
During Steve Job’s commencement speech at Standford (2005) he said, “for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” The speech ends with a statement, or maybe even a call to action, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
It has stayed with me and I found myself rereading it just moments before my evaluation. I’d written the quote on a sheet of paper and read it word for word to my boss. He gave a hesitant but warm smile and asked, “what are your plans?” The beauty of that moment was that I didn’t have any.
I’d gone into my evaluation with a quote and I’d come out, perhaps for the first time, knowing that my whole life was ahead of me, that the biggest hurdle was getting over the self-doubt and the nagging “shoulds” that seem to come from everywhere except yourself and I’d jumped over to the other side to find I was feeling delightfully foolish with an appetite to match.
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