Play, Slay, Sashay: 3 New Principles for Thinking about Work or, How to Find Your Groove in All this Chaos

Free your mind and the rest will follow.

Reinventing yourself? Pivoting? Finding your footing in your career? Maybe these principles will resonate with you, too — or inspire you to craft your own.

I’m reimagining everything that I’ve ever thought about my career and my work. I know a lot of folks in the same frame of mind right now — whether because of the pandemic, life events, or the current wave of layoffs of so many talented people in my industry. I also just had a milestone birthday and am coming off my 2nd sabbatical — and am nowhere near done pivoting or exploring. In fact, I feel like I’m at a new beginning.

It’s all too easy to compare ourselves to others, in the workplace or while scrolling LinkedIn, and to define success solely within the usual parameters: a linear increase over time in status, title, pay — and its external recognition. And when your journey doesn’t map to that narrative, it can make you question the path you’ve taken, your worth, and your path ahead. It can be a Herculean task to reimagine and reframe this for yourself, but I can’t think of anything more important to doing your best work in this life.

Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting. — David Bowie

I’ve struggled a lot with comparing myself to peers — colleagues, coworkers, people my age, people on the internet. People with “better” titles or money or acclaim. I come from an achievement-oriented immigrant family and am naturally competitive, and am of course a citizen of American culture. It’s hard to resist external measures, especially in the age of social media and quantified lives.

But… but… What I am coming to embrace as a feature, a superpower, is my curious and insatiable multipassionate, multidisciplinary mind and the wild journey it takes me on. I’m on, like, my 3rd or 4th career at this point. I have nice neat version of how it all ties together for employers and such — because specialization is usually the order of the day — but I’m done devaluing it or dumbing it down. I’ve been a writer, editor, software developer, marketer, photographer, designer. (And bartender and catering server and receptionist and secretary and a lot of other things that I did when I was broke or laid off or coming back from a debilitating isolated illness — all of which I learned from and contribute to who I am today. I’ve lost everything I had twice as an adult and take nothing for granted.) I was a Managing Editor when I was 25, a Marketing Manager when I was 32, and didn’t even identify as a Designer until my late-30s. The Web didn’t even exist (Internet yes, WWW no) when I graduated college and I’ve reinvented myself many times. Even within design, I’ve taught myself and thrived in a few disciplines. Why did I so often then (and still) come to compare myself with folks who have been on a singular path for decades? That is not me — it has never been, even as a child, and it will never be. And it’s not a bug — it’s a feature. The humans and artists I’ve most admired over time are those that stay curious, inventive, and have an experimental mindset their life through.

You know the classic dance steps… slow, slow, quick quick, slow…? Sometimes things are the same for awhile and then sometimes life or mind turns a corner overnight. Yesterday I blinked and suddenly came to a clarity on something that’d been running in the background of my head for awhile.

Yes, And…

These are my new principles for how I think of my career, my work, my vocation, and what I do with most of the waking hours of my life. As a longtime Amazon employee, I lived and spouted their widely-shared leadership principles around the clock; whatever you think of the company, it’s worth recognizing the power of such a framework as a mental and decision-making tool. You are worth a mission or value statement.

Here is mine:

1. Play.
   Lead with curiosity and a beginner’s mind. Actively seek out opportunities for discovery and growth, where I can build new muscles and find new edges of what I can or can’t do. Surround myself with others like this.
   If I am learning, I am happy. Nothing is more energizing to me than being slightly out of my depth, solving a new puzzle, and having to figure out new ways to do it. I love big ambiguous impossible and novel challenges. Have fun, be messy, don’t get attached to outcomes, and bring kindred spirits along for the ride.
2. Slay.
   Lean into and trust my strengths and superpowers. Feed them to get better, faster, stronger. Choose roles and situations that amplify them — using new situations and problem spaces to hone and polish them. Know what I am good at (and just as importantly… what I’m not), and own this vis-a-is myself and others. Trust myself and my talents — then dive in and take those risks.
   This sounds kind of obvious, n’est-ce pas? It’s really not obvious for everyone. It took most of my adulthood to disabuse myself of the immigrant work ethic that hard is good, hard is better, and to not to trust things that come easily or enjoyably. “Perfect is the enemy of done,” I tell myself frequently… working to unlearn a lifetime of overthinking and perfectionism. I strive to: Bring my best self to the table and then trust the process, trust the experiment. Sometimes the risk won’t pay off, but either way, I learn something and get better.
3. Sashay.
   1) Do things with boldness and finesse. Take up space with grace.
   2) Sashay away if something no longer serves me. Be vigilant about this.
   This one builds on the others and in a decisive moment can be used to answer the age-old question in the immortal words of The Clash: Should I stay or should I go? For me and those of you like me, it can be easy to start or get excited about new things — and not so easy to know when to move on. For all my curiosity, I am one persistent and tenacious mf individual once I’m in the door — my last employer I was at for 10 years (!), making a lot of different things with a lot of different people, but still. Time’s a wastin’. The energy needs to be coming in for me to do my best work, sustainably; I’ve stayed too long in some roles on (psychological) starvation rations and its a fast path to burnout. No more. I will hold opportunities to a high(er) standard to ensure that the energy loop is-a looping — sustainable and continuously improving.

And… scene.

Yesterday’s epiphany.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it.

I’ve written this in one sitting on a Friday the 13th in January and, in the spirit of these principles, I’m going to post this today. I hope that at the very least this provides you a moment’s distraction — and that it helps you reflect what is important to you. So now, right now:

Grab a Post-It or scrap of paper and write your own 3 words.