Don’t Let Someone Else Tell You Who to Be

I let someone else tell me how I was supposed to be successful. I let someone else tell me who I should be. I believed them.

I have an odd strategy for working out problems. I stop thinking about them. It took me a long time to come to this strategy. I was taught from an early age that if you thought about a problem hard enough, and for long enough, and you were smart enough, you’d come up with an answer. The problem with this way of thinking is, if you thought hard, and thought long, and you didn’t come up with an answer… there was only one other variable that could be the cause of failure.

That’s kind of a soul crushing realization for a kid. I won’t say that it’s why I was always in the ‘doesn’t live up to potential’ category at school. I have a deep distrust of — and rebellion against — authority, which was a significant contributing factor as well. Still, when you’re bright enough to think that you’re not smart enough, that’s a special kind of hell to be in.

It took me until I was established in my career to I realize that thinking long and hard aren’t a huge part of my problem-solving toolkit. Oh, I can think long, and I can think hard, but that’s not where solutions come from when I’m concerned. For me, solutions come from intuition and my subconscious. It’s not the sort of thing you’re taught in school.

People look at me strange when I ask what a computer is feeling. They look at me strange when I say a problem smells like some other problem I’ve encountered before. It’s not your typical rational response to solving problems in technology. It’s not your typical rational response to solving problems in life. At least that’s what I tell myself.

That’s background for my current conundrum: who do I want to be?

I thought I had this figured out. I discovered Buddhism over a decade ago. While I am a lazy, lazy Buddhist, I have gone from the stage of ‘caucusing with the Buddhists’ to calling myself one. The idea of living in the moment, striving to have an open, compassionate heart, to see my own emotions when they’ve steered me onto a bad path; that’s where I wanted to be. That’s who I wanted to be.

I looked for ways to weaken the attachments I had to things, and how I thought things should be. For a while I was happy living that way. Then I ran into a problem. I listened to something someone else told me.

I went through a leadership training program at work. I took it seriously. Honestly, I got a bit too hung up on what was being taught. Looking back, it’s easy to see why. There is a lot of weight put on this program. Our leaders had been through it. There’s a perception that unless you embrace the ideas that are part of the program, you aren’t going anywhere in the organization.

So, with a focus on the present, a desire to engender compassion, and a drive to reduce attachment to things and ideas, I was presented with SMART goals. Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Reasonable, Timely goals. It is a terribly rational approach to analyzing and codifying your attachment to a desired state. We were encouraged to think about goals for a six month to a year timeframe. Our mentors encouraged us to plan a trip to a certain destination. I was at a point in my life when I was learning that the journey is the reward. Things did not go well.

I think my mistake was believing what an authority figure told me. Just like it was a mistake to believe I needed to think hard, long, and smart to solve a problem. I let someone else tell me how I was supposed to be successful. I let someone else tell me who I should be. Worse, I believed them.

It’s taken me a while to unwind from that experience. It’s taken time to realize that trying to live my life with an attachment to how I want things to be is causing me a great deal of suffering. I’ve had to disconnect quite a bit of my life to come back to the simple truth that Buddha taught. Attachment is suffering.

So I’m at a crossroads. I’ve seen how people (who get paid a lot of money) think a career — and by extension a life — should work. They seem to think that if you think about things really hard, for really long, and if you’re smart enough, you’ll find success; you’ll lead a happier and more fulfilled life.

The thing is though, life isn’t rational. Life is the furthest thing from rational. It’s messy, it’s surprising, it’s swept up in emotion and uncertainty that is resistant to the best laid plans of mice. Trying to impose rationality on the irrational seems like a disorder to me, something obsessive and maybe a little compulsive.

I don’t know who I want to be.

But.

I know who I don’t want to be.

And that’s enough for me.