Out of the Box

Who are you?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

On my year-end review, she wrote attention to detail. Not that I was good at attention to detail, though. She wrote that I was bad at it, that I had an attention to detail problem. That I had to be more careful and check and re-check my numbers over and over again. Like, an infinite number of times. Every document that leaves your desk should be accurate, mistakes are not acceptable, she said. It sounded like an ultimatum. 

She was right, my work had some avoidable mistakes. When it’s four o’clock in the morning -- she continued -- and you feel a little tired, go to the bathroom, splash your face with cold water, take a few deep breaths, and go back to your desk to check your numbers one more time. Was she serious? I was terrified, and at the same time holding back the urge to burst into laughter. But I had to listen carefully and take that seriously, if I wanted to fix my flaws and be one of them. She was 100% serious. She had the seriousness of someone who devoted their entire life to that job, someone who sacrificed everything else in their life to succeed at it -- family, friends, passions, interests. Someone who identified with that job. Who was she? She was an investment banker. 

And I wanted to be one. I’d work a hundred hours a week (not really a spontaneous choice), to be one. A week has one hundred and sixty-eight hours in total, including those we spend sleeping. So, assuming that I wanted to sleep eight hours per night (fifty-six hours per week), I’d only have twelve hours left in the week for my non-job life. That is, one hour and forty-three minutes each day that I’d probably spend, one way or another, in the bathroom. And the real luxury of it all was that those hundred hours would not be evenly distributed; maybe there would be two or three all-nighters back-to-back. Nobody knew.

But this was what I wanted to be, and I was ready to overcome any obstacle. I wanted to be that job, identify with it, and if our identity is like a box where we allow things and beliefs and behaviors and ideas to occupy some space and define us, I was ready to let this job occupy most of it. And I did. Once I let this job into my identity box, I started to approach it as if I was that job. So whatever were to go wrong with it, it’d be as if it went wrong with myself, with my life. I was scared to death of making mistakes, I felt miserable every time I made a mistake. High tension and nervousness and emotional distress were normal everyday states. And of course I screwed up a lot, and the fear of screwing up would create more mistakes, and I’d get scared even more, and so on in an unstoppable, infernal loop. I didn’t have the tranquility, the serenity, the confidence to be in control. I desperately wanted to succeed, but the harder I tried, the worse I did.

So despite all the hours, despite my as-if-my-life-depended-on-it approach, despite the sacrifices and everything I gave up, that year I didn’t get paid. Now, on Wall Street, “not getting paid” doesn’t mean that you don’t get any money. It just means that you’ve been ranked at or near the bottom of your class, and that, consequently, your year-end bonus, the one thing everybody works their behinds off for, the mirage at the end of a year-long walk in the desert, is just a low, symbolic amount. (A Wall Street’s “symbolic amount” would be in any case higher than any amount received as a bonus, at a comparable level of seniority, in any other “normal” industry.) And Not getting paid is code language for “We’re not firing you but we invite you to look for a job somewhere else”. 

And I looked. And got another banking job, somewhere else. But then, before starting at my new firm, before getting myself into the meat grinder with no hope of ever getting out, I did some thinking (something I hadn’t done for a while). What if I got that job out of my identity box, and treated it solely as a means to pay for my life? What if I detached from it, so that I am me, and the job is the job? What if I didn’t identify with it? And inspired by that Seinfeld episode titled “The Opposite”, in which George Costanza, after a life of disappointment and frustration and bad luck, decides to start doing the opposite of whatever he would normally choose to do in every situation, based on the idea that “every decision I’ve ever made in my entire life has been wrong; my life is the complete opposite of everything I wanted to be”, I decided to start the new job doing the opposite of what I did at my prior firm.

So I abandoned myself into opposite land. I forced myself to say no more often, to disagree and take a stand when necessary, to look at situations from a detached vantage point, to work towards deadlines as if nothing would happen if I didn’t meet them, to shun “face time” and go home if I didn’t have anything to do, to replace anxiety with optimism and positive thinking, to smile more. In a nutshell, I pulled myself out. I built a wall between my job and myself. Was I playing with fire? Maybe. But that’s what I resolved to do.

Surprisingly, everything changed. Everything except the long hours. They didn’t change. I still wasn’t the owner of my time. My state of mind became one of just doing my best, of clarity of thought, of fearless realization that if anything went wrong, life would continue, that there’s a remedy for everything, except death. This separation between me and my job made me perform better, and earn the appreciation of those around me. It helped me take risks that I wouldn’t have taken when I was so scared of making mistakes. It’s amazing how much better you can do your job when you think that, if you lose it, you still have yourself. And everything else. 

I’m not saying that, all of the sudden, I cared nothing about my job, or that I turned into a superficial, reckless, childish schmuck. I was immensely grateful and privileged to be where I was. All I did was to change my inner narrative from “I am what I do” to “I am who I am”. From “It’s my life” to “It’s only a job”. As exciting and challenging and critical and absorbing and energy-draining as it was, it was only a job.  

That mental shift changed my life, and made me understand a lot about personal identity. If you let something take a big role in defining who you are, then when that something disappears or morphs into something else or falls short or disappoints you, your identity gets hit pretty bad. And, by reflection, you get hit pretty bad. You’d let that something explain so much of your identity that you feel disoriented and start questioning who you are without it. And now there’s a big void in your identity and you have to get to work on trying to fill that void as soon as possible. It’s distressing.

Jobs are a big one. We tend to identify ourselves with our jobs. The first thing we say about ourselves is what we do for a living. The first thing (or among the first things) we expect to hear about someone is what they do for a living. Our job defines us. Or rather, we let our job define us. Maybe because we cannot live without a job, therefore we cannot even be? Hi I’m Paul, and I’m a banker. That’s who I am. If I’m unemployed, then, it’s as if I don’t have an identity. Who am I now that I don’t have a job? I was a banker up until a month ago, who am I now that I lost my job? I’m extremizing, but this is bad.

So I learned that I shouldn’t let big things into my identity, and that this doesn’t mean that these big things are not important. They are, but they just do not define who I am. They live somewhere else in my universe, somewhere I can test and confront and challenge and fight them, if necessary, without damaging my identity. Somewhere anyone can test and challenge them without having me get into wars of religion. Ideas, beliefs, philosophies, politics, are all strong and important. At the same time, they’re all precarious, they have to continuously work on earning their place in my world. And if any one of them gets less convincing or lets me down or can’t survive a harsh confrontation with yours truly or anyone else, I let it go. 

Without big things in it, I can keep my identity small. And only let small things in. Small things into a small identity. Details. Micro stuff. Post-its with small words scribbled on them. Maybe there’s “likes nightwalking” written on one of them. Or “twirls own hair when concentrating” on another. Or “only wears worn out boxers; most of them have holes” on yet another.  

Small, reliable things. Things that will always be there. Into a small, safe identity. A small box where all these small things will be untouchable and unreachable and securely kept.  

While writing this, I’m listening to Where Do You Think You’re Going, an old Dire Straits tune. Mark Knopfler’s soothing voice and guitar make me forget that I have to end this piece somehow. “Where do you think you're going? Don't you know it's dark outside?”, it goes. 

I do know it’s dark outside.

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