You're not behind; you're in Act One
Or, escaping my whirly squirrelly little brain
One.
I always feel five steps behind. I have always felt this way. As if I not only need to have every move mapped out, Queens Gambit-style, but also to have already finished the game. If I can see the next summit in the distance, I am furious at myself for not having already planted my flag atop it.
For a while, this tendency served me well, or well enough. Fear of falling behind masqueraded as drive, giving me the thrust I needed to reach escape velocity from my mediocre Southern public school. Fear powered my admission to the Ivy League and to a fancy fellowship at the University of Cambridge and to big-city jobs that threw me into orbit with Hillary Clinton, Tina Brown, and no fewer than five eccentric billionaires.
It wasn’t just that nothing was ever enough; it was that I was never enough. I always felt behind, a feeling that only sharpened as my peers’ careers all began to unfurl in different directions. I suddenly wanted things that weren’t just six steps ahead but were on totally different tracks — tracks I didn’t even want to be on at all! A Supreme Court clerkship, or a musical comedy career, or a PhD.
Every step forward in my own career felt like a step back in some other ghost of a career I hadn’t chosen. At the same time, it didn’t feel worth moving forward with my current career because I was already behind. I knew people my age with massive titles and teams and multimillion dollar budgets, with multiple homes, with book deals, with Netflix specials! How could I ever hope to catch up?!
I wanted to be all things to all people. To be everything, everywhere, all at once.
If this sounds exhausting: It is. It’s like my imposter syndrome had restless leg syndrome.
But as any career coach will tell you, what got you here won’t get you there. It’s about the journey, not the destination. And how you spend your days (in my case, prickling with anxiety, running the same mental ruts around my brain), is, of course, how you spend your life.
Two.
In my last post, I wrote about how your career is a story, a narrative.
In a story, you can’t start at the end or you miss the entire point. Protagonists need to undergo some kind of transformation; the whole point is that they start out somewhere totally different from where they end up. Then they learn and fumble and double back along the way until finally it all adds up to something, some end-state metamorphosis, like saving the wizarding world from evil or learning to let your son grow up or renting your own apartment.
For that transformation to mean anything, you can’t have started at the end. You need to change in order to learn.
Three.
Cece Xie of debrief recently wrote about the difference between ameliorative, telic values and existential, atelic ones. In short, ameliorative, telic goals have an end state; like becoming partner at your law firm or making over $1 million a year, these goals are check-the-box achievable.
Existential, atelic goals, on the other hand, do not have a determinate end point. They are Sisyphean, like watering your plants or brushing your teeth. Or achieving something we might call “success.”
If you’re like me or Cece, you’ve probably spent most of your life running after ameliorative, telic goals and assuming you would end up with existential, atelic results like “success” or “happiness.” One way to combat this mentality is to accept that most of life’s most meaningful goals are more like watering plants than wizzing a puck into a net as the buzzer blares. Happiness and love and success must be tended, not won.
Intellectually, I know this—and yet that doesn’t stop me from wanting to achieve those ameliorative, telic goals (promotion! book deal! first six-figure client!), or from being really very annoyed when those goals are a ways off.
So if you’re like me and haven’t quite reached the yogic grace that is making peace with the atelic nature of life, just remember: You’re not behind; you’re just still in Act One. And Act Three won’t mean anything if you don’t start here.