Do not try to prove your value
Hard-earned work/life advice
The best way to prove your value is to not prove it at all. The moment you consent to prove your value, you make it normal to fundamentally doubt you as a capable person. That greatly diminishes your perceived value. If people do not like you and do not want to give you a chance first, go somewhere else. It is ok to find out that some places are not the right ones for you.
You might say, “I want to show results!” That is something completely different, and of course there are ways to do this, e.g. empiricism. Your value does not depend on your results. Otherwise, you would bother about honestly showing results when things do not work as expected. How you perform short-term is not your long-term value.
Background: This month it has been 20 years since my first job after university. This is one piece of advice that, looking back, I would give my younger self even if it meant being jobless and considered “lazy” or “incompetent” for a while. Nothing is worth self-humiliation. I had to learn this the hard way. I was also surprised how many years it took me to learn this and how many opportunities I needed until the lesson finally landed.
Julian Casablancas: 11th Dimension
