Be happy about your journey

And not sad about how little you have accomplished...

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Every now and then I get upset with myself for how little I have accomplished in life compared to other people.

For instance I was in a summit recently with the leadership of the organization unit I am in. This summit was led by my 4-up (the skip manager of my skip manager). He did a phenomenal job, but as I sit there and look at him I wonder "Why am I not there? Why am I not leading a multi-thousand people organization?"

Or there is this younger gentleman I worked with at Google. He started one week after me and we worked in the same office for a while on the same service. Fast forward 17 years and he is a senior director (or maybe VP by now) and I am still an engineer. True, a somewhat senior engineer, but with not 20% of the influence, responsibility, and probably bank account, that he has.

Or there is this lady who, when we just started dating, explained that her ex-boyfriend hadn’t met any of her friends because he had a really big job and consequently they hung out more in his world. I on the other hand had met several of her friends already, apparently courtesy of not having a big job.

Suffice it to say that I am regularly insecure about what I have achieved. This gets worse as I get older because I deal more and more with younger people that have achieved a lot more than I have or who are on a total roll to surpass me in a few years.

Of course these feelings of insecurity do not withstand five seconds of rational analysis. I have definitely not done badly. But that's the problem with feelings, they do not respond to rational analysis at all! You could tell me for an hour that my feelings are wrong, but that has never changed the way I feel.

Whenever I feel unhappy about the station I am at, I focus on my journey there. Maybe I did not get off at the final station, but I did not board the train in the middle of the line either.

I asked a friend once why he got a PhD. "That's just what you did in my family", he said, "my father had one, my mother had one, everyone had one. It was just assumed that I would get one too." Not so in my family. Not only was I the first of my entire extended family to go to college, I am still the highest educated family member (though I am happy to report that most of us are doing quite well). 

My family life as a child was quite chaotic. My parents were small business people and party animals. They didn't have a lot of time for us. Most of the small dramas that happen in a young person's life went right past them as they were not to be bothered unless it was really important. It was up to my brother and me to chart our own course through life, and really how well are you able to do that in the absence of any role models or people to help you?

I don't hate my parents for that, they had their own demons to deal with. But, having gotten only limited education themselves, they were not great advisors in getting me prepared and ready for college choice. They didn't (and couldn't) help with homework. And the way social systems work, we didn't know anyone else who could. Fortunately I didn’t need a lot of help with homework :-)

So I underachieved for my entire school career and eventually opted to go to a lower placed school instead of a better (more academic) one. That's another problem of social systems, they are "sticky"; I opted to go to a school that was traditionally better suited for my social class, thereby also depriving me of an opportunity to get introduced to a different world.

Expectations for me were not high. In fact, when I moved to a new elementary school my new teacher, Mrs. Klaassen, told my parents in the first parent-teacher meeting that nothing would ever come of me. With the benefit of hindsight that's maybe a bit of a harsh thing to say about an 8 year old boy whose parents had just divorced and who was in his third elementary school in one year.

Low expectations are also "sticky". My grandparents, themselves from a war-torn countryside, were manual laborers. Their goal for my mum was "a job in an office". Didn't matter what job or in what office. Just "a job in an office". They, through my mum, achieved their goal because at 17 she got a job as a secretary in a law firm. Unfortunately for her it was 1963, so when she got engaged two years later, the invitation to the engagement party was automatically considered to be her letter of resignation.

She overcame all of this and did very well for herself, starting multiple businesses and retiring at 45. She once confided in me that when she was lounging at the pool of our house in Spain she regularly thought "For a girl from the Kockstraat", a working class neighborhood in the Hague, "I have done alright."

There are many problems with the “Winner Takes Most” rat race that we are all in. One of them is the permanent comparisons to other people: Am I winning? Am I successful enough? Will I get promoted? Will I get this job? Am I setting up for a great career? But the simple truth is this, if you are reading this article, you are most likely in the top 5% of everyone of all time along pretty much every conceivable dimension: Education, money, career, and, most importantly, overall quality of life. To speak in a bridge (the card game) metaphor: It is not how many points you get, it’s how well you do with the hand you are dealt. Unfortunately we live in a world of absolute outcomes and that invites absolute comparisons.

I think of my mum’s  statement a lot. I might not have reached the top of every mountain, but for a boy from the Loosduinsekade (a street in that same working class neighborhood) I have done good.