What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up and Die?
I spent a good chunk of 2020 talking to people in their 20s about their professional lives and how they are thinking about their careers. One pattern emerged very clearly — people aren’t thinking about their careers as thoroughly as they should be. Sure, people are wondering whether to get an MBA or an MS, whether to continue in sales or move to data science, go further as a developer or jump to product management.
But that’s like playing chess with moves that look cool in the moment without really having an end game in mind. Partly, this has to do with how our education system is structured. Our schools incentivize us to optimize for the next exam, the next checkpoint instead of building a holistic blueprint for learning and this inevitably seeps into our decision making as adults.
I’m digressing. Back to the topic. I decided to write this post because far too many young men and women are making narrow life choices with extremely short time horizons without thinking about how it ties back to longer term vision or a bigger purpose. Most of us are caught in a web of tactical moves without a coherent strategy in place. Either we become people in 40s wondering about all the wrong career moves we made, or worse, we become optionality chasers and status seekers. What this leads to, is a series of stints that don’t necessarily add up to a career or a life of meaning.
But Gokul, you ask, do every single one of us need a purpose? Well, that’s a topic and a fight for another day, but IMO (and purely IMO), I think yes. I want to be able to live knowing that I’m delivering more value to the world than I’m extracting from it. A defined purpose in life and a relentless pursuit of that purpose helps do that. Again this is purely IMO. Does this reek of arrogance coming from a privileged male who got a few lucky breaks? Possibly. But again, this is my worldview.
If you don’t think the above holds true for you or that work is just meant to be a part of life that lets you sustain, it’s a perfectly fine opinion to hold — but this post may not be for you. However, if you are one of those people itching for greatness, doing purposeful work, find yourself searching for meaning in life, constantly gazing at the stars with hopes of being seen as one, some day, this might help. More so if you’re like one of those folks in their 20s who don’t know how to best channel their energies!
To you, I have one piece of advice: Write your obituary. An obituary? Yes. The blob of text that people write about you when you’re dead? Yes. But what has that got to do with life’s meaning and a purposeful career? Lots, it turns out.
The Merchant of Death
To illustrate my point, let me introduce you to a Swedish man whose brother had passed away. Thanks to a reporting error, a French newspaper had printed this man’s obituary instead. (The year was 1888 and Twitter still hadn’t built the edit button, so we can’t really blame them for not undoing the mistake) But yes, this man — who went by the name Alfred Nobel, owned many weapons factories and had invented many things including dynamite — ended up reading his own obituary. And it was not pretty.
The title read ‘The Merchant of Death Dies’ and it went on to explain how he had become rich by ‘finding ways to kill people faster than ever before’. Devastated by what he had just read about himself, he decided that this was not how he wanted to be remembered. This obituary changed how he thought about his life’s meaning.
Not one to believe in “too late to change anything”, on November 27th, 1895, he signed his last will that bequeathed most of his sizable estate — worth over $250 million in today’s money — to a series of prizes awarded to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” These prizes are what we call the Nobel Prizes today. And that’s how Dr. Nobel is remembered. Quite a leap from ‘merchant of death’ to the man behind some of the most prestigious awards celebrating human achievement.
Death as a checkpoint
While certainly one of the most dramatic examples, Dr. Nobel is far from the only personality who uses death as a checkpoint to define life’s meaning. Steve Jobs remarked something similar in his famed Stanford commencement address. “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” he said.
His counterpart at Amazon, Jeff Bezos follows something similar. His Regret Minimization Framework talks about big decisions in life. When confronted with them, he reportedly thinks about his death bed and checks if he’d regret doing or not doing something. The next step stems from the answer to that question, he says.
Because, why not? As Jobs added in his speech “… almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
An obituary is a nifty way to imagine your life after … well, you. When your entire life is reduced to 3 paragraphs after you are gone, what people put in those 3 paragraphs is who you are, in essence. What you want people to write there, is what your life’s (overarching) purpose should be.
Death as a starting point
I’ve found that treating your death and this obituary as a starting point and working backwards through the years and decades the best way to draw a line between what you are today and what you want to be, by the time you die.
It’s not very different from a flight path. If you’re flying from Bangalore to London and you need to reach within 8 hours, you know that you need to fly over the Arabian Sea, onto the Middle East, and across continental Europe. You can also be sure that having Singapore in your checkpoints doesn’t make sense — surely not if you want to reach within 8 hours. Even if Singapore might be a sensible waypoint for someone else (who’s going to Seattle, perhaps!).
I have found it helpful to think in time horizons starting with 50 years. Assuming that a human lives for approximately 80 years and you are 25 now, where do you need to be by the time you are 75? By the time you are 50? 35? 30? These 50, 25, 10, and 5 year plans should ideally form a coherent narrative. What you do tomorrow or in the next 1 year should then tie back to where you want to be in the next 5 years.
But Gokul, you ask, wouldn’t your priorities change? Is your purpose set in stone? No. And that’s where the flight path analogy falls apart, actually. Because unlike a passenger on a commercial airliner, you can decide at some point during the journey that you actually want to go elsewhere. Because you, my friend, aren’t on a commercial plane. You’re on a private jet of your own. And unlike an airplane, it’s perfectly fine to open the door midway and get out. What doesn’t change, however, is that without a destination in mind at all, you’re likely to be flying around in circles, run out of fuel, crash, and burn. You don’t want that.
Closing notes
“Write your obituary” is one of the best life advices I’ve ever received. I got it from someone when I was 19 and it has helped me immensely in terms of keeping the big picture in mind while taking any major life calls.
It has also helped me resist calls from many around me to pursue what seemed like good options to them (getting an MBA, doing well in college, buying a house) but don’t really fit in my 50-year plan. Because as Biz Stone writes in Things a Little Bird Told Me…
“Adopting a career because it’s lucrative, or because your parents want you to, or because it falls into your lap, can sometimes work out, but often, after you settle in, it starts to feel wrong. It’s like someone else punched the GPS coordinates into your phone. You’re locked onto your course, but you don’t even know where you’re going. When the route doesn’t feel right, when your autopilot is leading you astray, then you must question your destination. Hey! Who put “law degree” in my phone? Zoom out, take a high-altitude view of what’s going on in your life, and start thinking about where you really want to go. See the whole geography — the roads, the traffic, the destination. Do you like where you are? Do you like the end point? Is changing things a matter of replotting your final destination, or are you on the wrong map altogether? A GPS is an awesome tool, but if you aren’t the one inputting the data, you can’t rely on it to guide you.
In talking to many, many folks in their 20s, I have now come to believe that this could be a critical piece in figuring out how to move forward in life. I hope it helps you too.
So, what do you want to be when you grow up and die?
