“The parts of you like everyone else are less important. The parts that make you weird are what you contribute to the world” – Alex Akagi
As I go through much of my life, a predominant thought has been “what would be normal in this situation”. The feeling of wanting to fit in is still in the back of mind where I subconsciously copy mannerisms of people I look up to. In topics of career development and building relationships, I find myself gravitating towards actions that if I honestly introspect, are driven by the fact that “this is how others have done it in the past” or “this is how other people say you should do it”.
When deciding to quit my job, a common mindset for my friends in finance was to optimize hitting a threshold net worth (e.g. $5m, $10m, $50m) where despite sacrificing your 20s, by your mid-30s you will be able to retire and start living the life you want. And though this makes logical sense, as I learned during my time off, having financial stability and all the time in the world isn’t sufficient for overall life satisfaction for most people. That despite this being perhaps the perceived “normal” path in finance, the audience in which this is the correct advice for is ironically small as evidenced by massive employee churn rates.
I’m a compulsive individual when it comes to decision making which I’ve realized is one of my strongest assets. In college, I decided to start a computer science degree mid-way through my junior year, and only after realizing my senior year I didn’t have enough credits to graduate, I decided to commit to my decision and take an extra year in school. At the time, I experienced FOMO as my friends were enjoying their senior years on endless Napa and Vegas trips, and during my extra year, I felt the stigma of still being in school while my peers moved on with their adult working lives. But looking back, this decision is one I am thankful to have made.
Arguably, I could have planned out my college years better, but what I appreciate is my blind confidence in myself that things will generally work out. This decision based on my own values, being able to study computer science to satisfy my own personal intellectual itch, and given there were tradeoffs, someone else could look at the same exact context and think I made the wrong choice. The question here isn’t one of objective right or wrong, but rather highlighting falling into the trap of “normalcy” for the sake of comfort. Because if we know ourselves the best, and if we’re not the ones to bet on ourselves for who we truly are, who will be?
Life building is a big topic on my mind these days. While being an adult is a more nebulous decision matrix than deciding to pursue an additional degree and I do still catch myself falling into the normalcy trap, I think the principles remain the same. As my paid garden leave expires into normal unemployment, I honestly still haven’t made much concrete progress in figuring out what I want to do with my life. But what I have learned with all this time off is how to embrace my own weirdness which I’ve found invaluable. For me, embracing my weirdness means accepting my overactive internal thought process (thank you ADHD), being down for anything from the interesting (almost dying skydiving) to the boring (lying in bed for a week playing video games), and being vulnerable enough to share my honest thoughts over the internet.
Not everything weird is necessarily good. The next step for me is to learn to utilize these differences. Lean into them to make as big of an impact as possible both in my day-to-day and broader life journey. 2021 was a good year. Time to make 2022 even more epic.
Random Musings 