“One day in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”. — Sigmund Freud
Connect the dots of any value, belief or situation in your life and it will trace back to your past. Even the smallest incidents can have lasting impacts whether we know it or not.
Cascading Kaleidoscopes
Growing up with working-class migrant parents who fled war torn Vietnam in hope of a better future, the importance of education and frugality was instilled from an early age. As a young adult, I enjoyed simple luxuries and saw generosity as abundance. Having many things other kids my age had meant I didn’t live without, yet some how I always felt lacking. I’d never seen my parents fully enjoy themselves or truly live.
Why did I have work hard and put off current reward for something in the future that may never realise?
Why couldn’t I work hard and enjoy at the same time? Isn’t that the point of life?
I wasn’t horrible with money but I wasn’t great either. My behaviour was compensation for conflicting beliefs within me. I’d always had discomfort with money. Financing and budgeting Reintention still makes me uncomfortable.
Through this period I met Katie* and connected through like-mindedness. Katie’s a successful entrepreneur, having left the corporate world years before, finding purpose and fulfilment.
Professionally Katie is a superstar. But superstars are also human. Katie could pitch anything to a VC and get funding or stand on a stage and captivate an audience.
Yet Katie couldn’t hold a relationship. Many great people came and left her life. Some with their own frustrations, others through self-sabotage. Katie had many friends, but struggled to find true ones. A natural introvert, Katie sought salvation through solitude. Her need to excel was fuelled by a sense of drive, but also by egotism and insecurity.
Katie told me that she was afraid that she’d missed the biggest fulfilment in life — having meaningful relationships. She brought up a memory of being bullied as a child. Katie didn’t elaborate, and it may have been easy for me to disregard this as a part of growing up — dealing with a few mean kids.
The bullies didn’t just tease her, they fired her up and drove her to be successful. She sought validation through professional success and the people that flashed through her life. Always wanting more she’d chase that next challenge. Success gave meaning as it made her feel wanted and less lonely. It eased the discomfort.
Listening, I recognised a familiarity of Katie’s discomfort that mirrored my own.
If everything can be traced back to our past, how can we use it to stencil a present of happiness and success?
Connecting the Dots…
Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech said “[…] you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future”.
To fully connect the dots requires self-awareness. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck categorises self awareness in three levels:
- What emotions am I feeling?
- Why am I feeling this way?
- What is the underpinning value that makes me feel this?
Most of us get stuck at 1 or 2, however we need to understand the value and metrics used to evaluate our lives.
Values and Measurements
Values dictate the way we feel about a situation; what we focus on is expressed through our emotions. Think of values as a lens. Metrics are a measurement to the value. For example, my value of abundance had the metric of connection and sharing (generosity). Katie’s value of fulfilment isn’t only achieved through professional success.
Metrics are problematic if they are not a true measure of value. Good metrics go down to the root. In my case, abundance isn’t only shown through one’s generosity.
Manson further explains that good values have three characteristics:
- Realistic
- Socially beneficial (Don’t harm to anyone else)
- Immediate and controllable (Not influenced by external factors).
Post leaving my job I started to feel the squeeze. As quoted in Getting Real, I had to work smarter:
“Instead of freaking out about constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus”.
With a small runway and goal to build Reintention, I know I need to get comfortable with money. Delving into my habits, values and psychology, I came across a The Marshmallow Experiment.
The Marshmallow experiment was run by Stanford in the 1970s with young children. Children that delayed eating a marshmallow immediately were rewarded with two. The experiment explored benefits of delayed gratification — children who were disciplined and waited performed better in many aspects of life.
The research further suggests that to succeed you need to find the ability to be disciplined and take action instead of doing what’s easy.
Enjoyment and delayed gratification is art of balancing.
Stencilling the Future
What did I do? I simply started getting all of my invoices, ran a spreadsheet of weekly and monthly costs and a honest look at my bank account. I looked at what costs were generating value which guided me through where to spend and where to cut back.
Similarly Katie re-evaluated her relationships and choose what to consciously focus on. She chose gratitude over expectation. Presence over speculation. Not what she was lacking or believing what 10 year old kids told her in the playground all those years ago. She had to recognise the need for change before she could decide to change.
Understand change doesn’t happen over night. But when we do have those light bulb ‘aha’ moments, it is a movement in the right direction. Awareness is power and enables us to choose how to act next.
Katie and my story paints a picture of how the past influences our lens of the world, shaping our perspective and action (or inaction) regardless of who we are or where we are in life.
It is our ability to deconstruct the events, influences and stimuli to determine what we value and the metrics we chose to evaluate these by.
If you’re struggling to connect the dots as to why things are the way they are or if you should or shouldn’t do something ask:
“Do I enjoy the hardship that this entails?”
Anything worth doing has an element of pain to it. Seeing the glory of something is only looking from one side. Asking this question will get to the root of what you value and allow you to formulate strong metrics that underpin its success.
