Today, I'm going to share with you something I had shared with my team at LinkedIn earlier this year. It's a lesson I wish to have practiced consistently much earlier in my career, but once it clicked, my relationship with work changed.
By now, I'm sure we've all experienced something in life or at work that created a setback. It could have been for a variety of reasons from organizational restructures to a family matter. No matter how public or private, institutional or personal, these types of changes often create a disruption in the path you were expecting to take for a period of time. And the thing about disruptive elements is that they will wobble you for a moment, making you feel like you don't have control over the most fundamental pieces of what makes up your day to day. It's completely normal to feel the wobble long after it's gone. But it's important to regain your balance with an intentional approach:
First, recognize the obstacles, name them and face them. Letting the situation surround and settle into your day to day without confronting it will only make you feel worse and that you have no control. The other reason it's important to take stock, process, and make sense of what just happened and what you're dealing with is so that you don't end up creating a story that doesn't actually exist. As you know, any good story with a proper dose of drama and a story arc involves some sort of obstacles for the protagonist. A hero's resolution often involves an enemy of sort and who doesn't love a satisfying journey of finding something to fight against? It's only human to identify someone or something as the obstacle of your story, but don't make the mistake of spending all of your time and energy building them up in your mind. Obstacles aren't the main character of your story. It's simply an arc and possibly a catalyst for something else...
...which means opportunities are often disguised as obstacles. Think about the last time something didn't work out as expected, and where and how you've ended up since then. I once had a new job sealed and signed to go, only to have it rescinded because they chose to relocate the role to another city two days before my start date. I wasn't in a place in my life to uproot my family and life, and having already left my previous role, I was suddenly jobless. I needed to go find a new way to make a living, which turned into a fun and productive stretch of being my own boss. Another time, I didn't get the promotion I was so sure was locked in for me. I spent days trying to analyze and find my "enemy" in this situation, only to realize that I was the one holding myself back, and that the work I was ready to do ahead was one that would take me beyond that particular job or the company. I'm sure this list will go on for me, and for you, too.
The most interesting part of the story, of course, is you. Your story doesn't begin and end with the obstacles or even the opportunities. It is about who you are and what you choose to do in these moments, and how you'll own your decisions and actions forward. That job that fell through was the beginning of a huge growth moment for me as a mom and a professional. I would never have had the courage to strike out on my own and start a business without the push. What I chose to do then was out of necessity, i.e. needing to find a way to make money, and that necessity turned into discovering what I could do on my own. That promotion that I never got turned into a two-year exploration to find out why I wanted to "get ahead" in the first place, and what versions of that could exist outside of the path I'd previously imagined. I may have been perfectly comfortable letting the circumstances become the story, but I am glad I put the work in, surrounded myself with people who helped me capitalize on these breaks in the routines, and chose to make something out of these disruptive moments that became catalysts.
I'd like to add a footnote on ownership, too, which is that sometimes it can also take the form of doing nothing about the obstacles or the opportunities [insert record scratch sound]. Minjae, after ALL that, what do you mean do nothing about it, you might ask. We live in a world where activities have become proxy for productivity so I feel compelled to spell out more explicitly that sometimes, the right decision and action may be to do nothing—but as always, with intention and reason. Only you know what's the right thing to do for you at this time, when it comes to putting energy towards people and things that align with your values and goals. And sometimes, that may be doing nothing about one thing so that you spend that time and energy towards another. Just be clear about the why, and know that what may unexpectedly stop you in your tracks may be a fork in the road.