Tortoises, Hares, Chickens and Pigs: How you should live and work in your 20s (Part I)

By Wenyi Cai

At 21, I said yes to the McKinsey Dubai office without ever having been to Dubai, or any part of the Middle East for that matter. What convinced me was a simple letter on the office website from the then office manager, Kito de Boer.[1] He told the fable of the chicken and the pig — that the chicken contributed to breakfast, but the pig made the ultimate sacrifice. He also wrote something that struck me straight in the heart: If you come…I don’t know exactly how…but I promise that you will change.

And so I went.

Change is probably too trite of a word to describe what happened. The alien-ness of everything meant that I needed to strip down to the core — to leave many things that I thought were essential and others I didn’t even know were there — and rebuild who I was from scratch. It was the first time in my life that I actually understood gender, and subsequently learned how to get myself taken seriously by a lot of older men. I started to understand that my ivory tower arrogance of meaning trumping materialism was the result of enormous privilege rather than enlightenment. I tested the boundaries of physical danger by crossing dubious borders and working in cities controlled by terrorist groups. I muddled and then glided my way through loneliness. I fell in love, and also learned heartbreak and repair.

And through it all, I became a lot more of who I really was.

This is what happens when you choose to be a pig. It is only through complete engagement with a life experience — taking bold decisions and making a real commitment for some time — that the most unexpectedly wonderful and important things happen. And it only gets better when you choose to be a pig over and over again.

At 22, or 24 or even 27, you don’t actually know much about anything. It is not time to plan your career because you don’t understand who you are yet. You don’t really know what different jobs actually entail. And you don’t understand what is meaningful work because you are still mostly influenced by what other people think are important and good (even if you loathe to admit it). The smartest thing you could do is to understand your own ignorance and confusion. In fact, embrace it, and be truly open to what the world and others can show you.

Being genuinely open is not easy. The vast majority of people are too delusional or cowardly to expose themselves. Being open means you are uncovering yourself to the elements: to lashes, to regrets, to strong headwinds, but also to paths that you never could have intended but are truly yours, revelations that deeply change your assumptions about the world and yourself, and connections and love from unexpected places.

Over the last five years, I have encountered countless young talent who make the simple mistake of thinking that they know. They think they understand the exact function or industry they want to work in without experiencing more than 1 or 2 (there are at least dozens of each out there). They take a job because they are flattered that someone they know from their past looked for them, or someone else is willing to pay them more. They strive for positions because of social status rather than genuine passion. These are all false handrails that make one feel less lost, but true understanding and self-discovery just does not happen this way. This type of thinking is like a frog that jumps from one lily pad to another, comforted by the movement, but never stopping to think whether he should be in this pond at all, or whether he could actually be a prince!

In your 20s, there should only be 2 criteria for how you make decisions about what’s worth your time:

1. Choose things (especially jobs, but also maybe lovers and friends) that challenge you so much, they make you quite uncomfortable and you don’t know where they will lead you; and,
2. Always choose to be with the best people (measured by capability and values) you can possibly have access to. Everything else, like what industry, what function, even what geography, are all secondary.

There were consultants who came to the Dubai office to do a 3-month study. They had an adventure and then they left; there were no grand transformations nor re-imaginations of self that took place. They dipped their toes in water, but because they never jumped into the deep end, they never learned to swim.

Be a pig. Who would ever choose eggs over bacon anyway?

[1] Interestingly, Kito is now the Head of Mission of the Office of the Quartet, in East Jerusalem. The Quartet comprises the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia, and mediates between Israelis and Palestinians.

Originally published at Polymath Ventures.