This may sound like heresy, or even ‘dumb’, if you are in Southeast Asia and in leadership and trying to drum up some new ideas and landing on Design Kompany’s pages of DESK. We are the people who help people find breakthroughs. Design is a way to express the essence of one’s identity, at their job, or company, or in their personal life. But how do you arrive there? Maybe you found this page searching for innovaton tips and tools. Sure. We have those.
But: it starts with one thing. Clearing this hurdle. We do not want to get overinvested on ‘outcome.’ That will trip us up from the get-go.
An outcome must be valued, you may believe, if you grew up in Asia, as many, many friends and relatives of mine have. Firmly, and fastly. They want things to have ‘a point’. A ‘value.’ A ‘goal.’
Yes, those things matter. Outcome… it must be valued… to a point.
Overvaluing the outcome, the result part, is the first ditch you will fall into.
On let’s say a cocentric circle series of rings of things that lead to breakthroughs, true innovations, and the sorts of moments of ‘a-ha’ that define the center of the creative process.
You want to get there.
The setup is… waitforit… letting go of the end goal
Easy to say. Hard to do. Especially if this is the programming, culturally, at school, at work, over a lifetime.
Don’t knock yoruself down by believing that ‘there’ is something you can see, from this far, from this early on. The first step is to trust the process. That is what matters.
Play is next. Making it up. Improvising. Like jazz, but also: with the information from each ring’s traveling, the learning of life, experience, and fails. Fails are very important. Okay, ‘kay. I know. Asian leaders do not want to hear yet another paragraph about fails. No, no, no, no, no.
So I will skip it, and talk about the ‘overvaluing’ bit of this post, now. What do I mean by that? I mean not seeing that a thing isn’t just the thing but your projetion of what it means to you thrown upon it. So you get wrapped up in it. It becomes more than it is. You can’t get perspective because you’re engulfed in work, work-related this and that, and you can’t get out of the pot.
The pot stirs and you are folded into the thing that is there and that’s it, then. The whole time you didn’t realize you could control this, you could step up, get some air, get a break, go away, find your next opportunity, even. But, no. It consumed you.
Life is going too fast. You wake up and you are… 40. Is this you?
Don’t lose yourself in your job title, man. It’s not worth it.
You can change this before it gets too far along in the ‘can’t help it now’ golden handcuffs land if that is you. You can always change course.
The choice is yours.
I read that over-identifying with a career title as if you’re enmeshed with your work can wreck you in ways you can’t imagine beause you are not your job, but if you lost it, guess what you will experience? A profound loss of self.
That is a lot to trade away for the job title, and it’s not a guarantee it won’t happen. Many friends, relatives, acquaintances… stars and rising stars, have gone through this and it looks tough.
Also, relying on your job for all kinds of validation may be tricky in other ways. For example, I talked abou the golden handcuffs earlier. That was a friend telling me about it. There was no way to go ‘back’ once the payments had to be made on this or that. Yeah. There was a level to maintain.
How about this: does work become cult-ish, ever? Do you get called ‘part of the family?’ Does it feel like a kind of religion? Without clear boundaries between what you do and who you are, you might start to fee like the only people who can validate you are the people at your job. It’s… not good to see that when it happens to someone you care about, right, so why do this to yourself.I mentioned opportunity costs. There are so many other things you can do with your life. While you’re young, especially. Maybe you think you’re only good at what your job tells you that you are, so you don’t et to try new things or spread your wings. It’s kinda limiting, isn’t it?
What gets you in trouble? A steadfast fixation on landing somewhere before knowing what would be the right conditions describing where a ‘good’ somewhere is.
Mm-hm.
People stick with things because there is some kind of promise, that there is a trophy or somethign at the end. This leads to missed opportunities. Taking risks. Trying stuff. Changing courses, of course. That is a choice like we said earlier, already. It really is though.
Then there is the obvious one. If your career is your primary identity, other aspects of your life tend to suffer. People lose their dimensionality. They don’t have other interests. Or hobbies. Or sometimes families or friends. Your life revolves around deadlines and deliverables, but not your own life’s, someone else’s company’s. A multi-dimensional identity, in contrast, like, for ex, as a parent, community leader, or something like a chess player), you’ll have less emotional flexibility when it comes to understading others. That matters no matter wha tyour job is. It defines how you show up in the world to a large degree: that, is who you are.
- 80% of them were unhappy, a video on how to find your life purpose in one minute
Has your work identity overwhelmed your own? Are you under the surface of the soup? You can get out. How to reclaim identity… Some ideas I found that may help.
Recognize that your career belongs to you, rather than you belonging to a company. Have interests outside of work. Actively develop your identity as a parent, partner, friend, or hobbyist to create a robust, resilient sense of self. Shift the way you introduce yourself, by not stating your title (“I am a manager”) but instead stating your impact (“I help people solve problems”). That’s in the video link above, actually. It’s a guy’s TED talk about it. I listen every so often to see if my own purpose has changed. It hasn’t.
Some things don’t change. And that’s because: they’re figured out. This is what happens when you get to the ‘a-ha’. You just know. What you do, what you don’t. Who you are, and who you aren’t.