A Life Lesson From Working a Corporate Job
If you place your value on what you know, you risk attacking your self-worth
There’s a question that stayed with me after I finished University
What have you learned?
It often came from colleagues who liked to poke fun at our education system, implying that much of what we learned was useless and would go to waste, but I wasn’t entirely comfortable agreeing that those 4 years were useless. So, instead of giving a direct answer, I let it incubate in my mind as I got ready to go into the working world, and one day it just clicked.
I couldn’t disagree with my colleagues, much of what we learned wasn’t put to use. But on a deeper level, I learned how to learn, I learned how to figure things out for myself.
I remember a moment when a lecturer struggled to explain some concepts to us — instead of going to lectures, I sat at my desk with the textbook and a dictionary, and dissected each sentence. It took a long time, but eventually, everything made sense. And it wasn’t just a vague understanding, I could explain it on different levels to my colleagues who were losing interest in lectures.
So, I have to say that my greatest lesson throughout my schooling career was that I learned how to figure things out.
But I kind of lost track of that when I started working at a corporate job
I don’t know if you have ever worked one before, but the environment can be demanding. I noticed that a large portion of it deals with using what I know to put out fires, to answer questions and point people in the right direction.
There’s pressure, there are expectations and there’s always some fire to put out. And to be honest, it gets mundane. I understand that this is different for each of us, but this is what I have experienced so far. After some time, the deep work decreases and if you do want that, it will happen in your own free time.
I also noticed, after some time of course, that I built a sense of nervousness around not knowing something, especially with things that I should know. It randomly made me feel uncomfortable before a meeting or during one.
This was happening because I slowly started to place my own value and worth on how much I knew — so much that I expected myself to know things that I didn’t know. And to feel valuable, I would try to know more and more, but that wasn’t smart because there will always be something that I don’t know, you know.
So to grow within my personal capacity, I needed to change where I placed my value
I understand that we have expectations that we need to meet in our work, and if we want to grow, we have to learn, but to place our value and self-worth on how much we know is limiting, it holds us back from growing because there will always be something we don’t know, which will come along and attack our self-worth.
So, instead of relying more on what I know and judging my worth by it, I relied on my ability to figure things out, my ability to break things down to their core and rebuild it if I have to. When I reminded myself of this, that subtle nervousness went away, I didn’t feel like I had to live up to people’s expectations. In fact, this brought me back to myself and I no longer felt like an imposter.
And this goes beyond the corporate world too
Working a job is a goal, it’s a means to some end that we need to achieve for ourselves. It isn’t our entire lives because we have other goals outside work(I imagine life would be quite boring if we didn’t).
- We have relationship goals
- We have fitness goals
- We have financial goals
But when we feel we don’t know enough about these goals, achieving them seems far from possible because we have neither the knowledge nor experience to see them through.
And if we base our self-worth on what we know, we don’t do ourselves any favors because we may avoid pursuing our goals just so that we don’t have to feel like we don’t know something(that will directly attack our self-worth).
But if we do this to ourselves, will we ever achieve these goals for ourselves? Or will we be stuck in that ego-driven battle with ourselves?
So, it only makes sense to judge our value and worth, not on what we know, but on our ability to figure things out, to take man-made constructs and decipher them to a point where we can restructure and rebuild them in a better way, a way that can bring value to ourselves and others.
I must say though, this is quite difficult if we don’t trust ourselves
I know that feeling, that feeling making it difficult to trust ourselves because there’s so much that we don’t know. It’s a very discouraging feeling that can keep you from speaking or acting because it’s difficult for you to confidently grasp an opinion or a way forward if you don’t know the things that you don’t know.
But it was the words of Steve Jobs that helped change my perspective, especially when he said that everything around you that you call life was created by people that are no smarter than you.
And we have to admit that much of what we call life works well, but is everything perfect? No, there are gaps that we often find that don’t seem to make sense.
This is quite reassuring(for me at least) because it means that no one has it all figured out, and we can be wrong. But instead of sitting idle with all that we don’t know, we have to accept it and do our best to consider as much as we can today, to do our best today so that we can move forward in some way.
This will help us achieve our goals and find something special in ourselves
Once we learn to trust ourselves to figure out things, our lives aren’t the same because the path that we choose is filled with things that serve us well in the long term.
- We find good relationships
- We find meaningful work
- We build good habits
And when we trust ourselves with the decisions we make, this will help us respect ourselves and if we can respect ourselves, it won’t be long before we can truly love ourselves.
And that’s a special feeling because even though there’s an infinite reservoir of knowledge in this universe, even though we do not know what may come our way, we can rely on ourselves and our ability to dissect things and figure them out — we become reliant on ourselves instead of the outside world.
So, rely more on your ability to figure things out and regardless of where life finds you, you will no longer be the one standing in your way, you will be able to navigate through and find a way forward for yourself and those who will come after you.
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Invest in your existence,
René
