Is your future unclear? Here’s why you may be on the right track…

Disclaimer: The use of the Masters of Scale color scheme and image of Reid Hoffman in conjunction with my own trademarked image of the abacus was not intended to cause any infringement on the branding of the Masters of Scale podcast. I am simply using my creativity to set myself apart from the other applicants and show my ability to connect the dots.

Previously I worked as an Accountant for Ernst and Young LLP. I received my Bachelors degree in Accounting, and went on to complete all four parts of the CPA examination. You may be wondering why someone who received their undergraduate degree in Accounting, would be interested in storytelling. To that question, I would quote episode one from the Masters of Scale podcast: “I’m going to Mars, but first I have to solve this problem right in front of me.”

The problem I faced in my early years as a college student was bringing the vision I had in my head, for my creative projects, out into the real world. I call this, reconciling an idea to reality. In Accounting, this process is similar to reconciling an account. When creating your vision out in the real world it requires being thoughtful and understanding what it is that you don’t know which would help you to shape that vision into reality. In reconciling an account you have to understand what changes need to be made in order to ensure a balance is correct. This requires that you understand the nature of the accounts that you are reconciling.

Most people, do not see the connection between storytelling and accounting; between graphic design and financial statements. But after my Senior year in High School I had a feeling that I needed to dive head first into Accounting in order to hone my talents and strengths. As a High School Senior I believed that my ability to become an effective story teller lied deep within the debits and credits that others who were not in Accounting disregarded.

“Make no mistake — while a career that twists and turns and nearly flies over a cliff is certainly fun to watch — it’s not necessarily the path you should follow. In fact, if you’re a thoughtful, reflective, mission driven entrepreneur, like Ev, you may find yourself chasing the same big idea. Again and again, you return to it, sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly. And just when you think you’re out, it pulls you back in — to quote Michael Corleone from the Godfather part III.”

• Masters of Scale podcast Episode 20: “Never Underestimate Your First Idea”

To understand the point made in the first three paragraphs the quote above is important. Often career pivots seem like twists and turns to bystanders watching the cars go by from the outside looking in, and I can assure you this is true for the drivers of the car also (those creating their careers). I would argue that what seems to be twists and turns from the outside looking in is actually a straight path toward the overarching goal that a person has for their career. The lack of clarity actually stems from the fact that overarching goals are abstract. Along the way the individual gathers language for articulating that vision. The paragraphs that follow give much more clarity to the idea of a “vision” that you may not quite have words for.

“EV WILLIAMS: ​I have been focused on essentially the same problem throughout most of my career. The Internet was very exciting because of this idea that all these minds were connected. And that there is great stuff in these minds out there in the world somewhere. And the Internet is this big machine that takes certain bits from these minds and puts them in other minds. And so to me that’s like this fascinating possibility, and then these tools that we build are like different approaches to make that machine work.

HOFFMAN: ​Now this idea of connecting minds into one great, big thinking machine may sound a bit abstract. But over-arching visions often are. It’s exactly what makes THIS kind of vision one that can stretch over an entire career.”

• Masters of Scale podcast Episode 20: “Never Underestimate Your First Idea”

In the above paragraphs Ev Williams articulates that vision, and in the below interview between Reid Hoffman and Barry Diller they expand on this idea of only being able to give words to an experience after it has occurred. They also clarify that giving advice to one’s younger self wouldn’t make any difference because the process itself involves course-correcting.

“REID:​ ​Is there anything that you would call and tell your younger self, do X differently, or do more of Y, less of Z?

DILLER:​ Endless. Because, as I say, the process is learning and course-correcting — other than academically — when it’s process towards commerce or whatever. And so it wouldn’t matter, because yes — I would tell myself 27 million different things, it wouldn’t do me or it any good, because for me, I had to unlearn to learn. Learn to unlearn, and the whole circle of that.

REID:​ ​That’s an awesome expression have you said that before?

DILLER:​ ​No.

REID:​ ​I haven’t heard that, that’s great.

DILLER:​ ​I’ve never thought it before.

REID:​ ​I HAD thought it before. But I never quite found the words for it, until I interviewed Barry. You learn something new every day. And then, of course, you unlearn it.”

Masters​ ​of​ ​Scale​ ​-​ ​Episode​ ​15​ ​-​ ​Learn​ ​to​ ​Unlearn​ ​-​ ​Formatted

“But here’s the thing, you shouldn’t feel fatigued by the repetition. Instead, you should celebrate your single-mindedness, your focus. I believe you can never know the full reach of your first idea. It could span your entire career”

• Masters of Scale podcast Episode 20: “Never Underestimate Your First Idea”

I would argue that to most, career paths do not feel like repetition at all, because most times we don’t have the words to articulate the problem that we are chasing and want to solve. What seems like a change to a completely different industry can be very closely woven into the problem that the individual feels they must solve, even though they may not consciously be aware that they are drawn to this single problem. This is because of the abstract nature of the vision.

Sometimes we get a glimpse of the vision of our career through early childhood experiences, for me it was cooking. (See the below picture for a cookbook I made when I was younger. . . more on that later)

I made this cookbook when I was younger. Please excuse the coloring outside of the lines and the marker smudges.

“HOFFMAN: ​Programming was just the spark for Ev. What really set his imagination on fire was an article in Wired magazine. Ev still remembers the piece to this day.

WILLIAMS:​ I picked up the second ever issue of Wired on a newsstand. I remember talking about connecting all the brains on the planet, and about the instantaneous publishing of text and ideas, and all these utopian ideals.

HOFFMAN: ​Utopian as it may have been, Ev took it deadly seriously.

WILLIAMS: ​That got me very excited. And I got it because of playing with bulletin boards. And I had a PC at the time that I would dial into things with, and that just immediately, I found very exciting.

HOFFMAN: ​Now this is the wave that Ev will start riding. From the outside, it might seem like his passion is to empower self-expression. But there’s a deeper force that will carry him from Blogger to Twitter to Medium.”

• Masters of Scale podcast Episode 20: “Never Underestimate Your First Idea”

It is important to note that the discussion being had is with the older Ev Williams (above) that has made the connection and has the vocabulary to articulate this vision, and not his younger self who first got inspired to chase the idea in the first place.

Some people do not have all of the words to put it all together, and some people do. Some people believe that you can only make this connection only by looking back in your career.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect the dots looking backwards”

I believe saying that is the like saying we all grow to be the same height or that we all have the same facial features. I believe that our minds work in a similar way but at the same time everyone is different. Some people have the talent to be able to see that trend and help others to articulate the vision they may not have words for, but all can feel the pull. I believe this is what the phrase “follow your passion” tries to articulate. Because that “passion”, that excitement towards a problem that you are trying to solve, will be the question that dictates the story arc of your career. I believe everyone essentially chases the same problem or “passion” — for lack of a better word — for their entire career.

This is where talent comes in because finding someone who has honed the ability to connect the dots is very rare. Most are only able to do it for themselves. But one thing is true, that top level goal (as Angela Duckworth calls it), helps everything else to fall into perspective.

“ANGELA DUCKWORTH:​ Human beings have goals. You want to have lunch today. You want to call this person back. The reason why I’m trying to do these things is trying to reach these other goals that are actually of more enduring importance to me. “Oh, well, the reason I have to call that person back is actually that relationship matters to me.” Why does that relationship matter to you? You keep asking this question of why until you get to the top level goal, that gives meaning and purpose to everything else that you do.

HOFFMAN: ​Whatever’s at the top of that hierarchy makes everything else fall into perspective. And that’s what keeps someone like Ev — or me — in pursuit of that one idea. You keep going because every single thing you do is in service of your vision.

WILLIAMS: ​So, I was at Google a little over a year-and-a-half working on Blogger the whole time — we started to build things that were attempts to make it an aggregation. But our frustration was really, we’re building this software. It’s the easiest way to start blogging. And then people would move off Blogger, because there was no network effect. There was no reason for them to stay there. That’s when we started on it more, and we built profiles, and we built links between the profiles.

HOFFMAN: ​He was in a race to build features that were precursors to a social network. But there was just one problem — Ev never really aspired to build a social network. Remember, his vision is to connect brains — not to connect friends or foster a sense of community. ​The lifeblood of social media is not just self-expression — it’s communal interaction: The friend invites, likes, pokes, comments and other notifications that deliver a dopamine hit and keep you engaged. The fact is, those features never really engaged Ev.

WILLIAMS​: We didn’t build comments into Blogger for a long time. And that actually hurt us as because for some people like it was all about the comments, all about hearing from people. I was like, “Eh, I don’t really want to hear from people. I just want to puts some thought out there and read other thoughts.

HOFFMAN: ​So what features did he want to build? Any feature that enabled a deeper exchange of ideas.”

• Masters of Scale podcast Episode 20: “Never Underestimate Your First Idea”

The above quotes from the discussion between Angela Duckworth, Reid Hoffman, and Ev Williams illustrate this idea perfectly. While some may have seen Ev Williams departure from the business he helped to co-found (Twitter) as a vicious U Turn away from a successful company it was actually closer aligned to his vision and his intended career path and the problem that actually drew him to help co-found Twitter.

As Ev Williams states. . .

“WILLIAMS​: We didn’t build comments into Blogger for a long time. And that actually hurt us as because for some people like it was all about the comments, all about hearing from people. I was like, “Eh, I don’t really want to hear from people. I just want to puts some thought out there and read other thoughts.”

• Masters of Scale podcast Episode 20: “Never Underestimate Your First Idea”

. . . he was not interested in the features that would have made Blogger massively successful (success as it is defined in the mainstream). However, the pull brought him closer to the major question/problem that defines his career.

Consider the below interview with Gary Vaynerchuk where he speaks to the way in which the world comes to you. The above quotes and the interview with Gary Vaynerchuk explain how mainstream success is attracted to the path you create as opposed to feeling the need to follow a path to obtain the mainstream definition of success which is often fleeting.

“The world came to me”

Like Ev Williams, Gary Vaynerchuk seems to have had tremendous clarity on what it was he wanted to do. You can spend a lifetime breaking down each of the pillars they used to build their careers (which I will do in future posts). I think it is important to understand that because no one knows what the future holds, that it will be created in the same way that you see the other side of a forest while taking steps through it. You see the future through your understanding that eventually, you will get to the other side if you keep walking in the right direction.

https://www.worldwildlife.org/habitats/forest-habitat

Ev Williams and Gary Vaynerchuk’s life paths are not traditional (most new things are not), and creating this path by definition means that they will look different and as a result the decision will be shunned by some. Consider this quote for reassurance:

“ The most visionary founders recognize the limits of their vision. They can picture in vivid detail what their customers want. But they also recognize that that picture was painted by their overly-active imaginations. They have to readily revise this imagined future, based on the reality of customer feedback. You can’t get that feedback by simply describing the future to your customers. If you were to ask them, “Hey, would you want this?” The usual answer is a sort of lukewarm, “Possibly, I don’t know.” You don’t get very good data, because most people are not good at conceptualizing the future. But if you give customers a glimpse of that future — which means building and rebuilding your product — what typically happens is, customer kind of knows it when they see it, right? At some point, they’ll go, “Ooh, that’s good.” And only then does the next step in your strategy become apparent.”

Masters​ ​of​ ​Scale​ ​-​ ​Episode​ ​15​ ​-​ ​Learn​ ​to​ ​Unlearn​ ​-​ ​Formatted

Most people from the outside looking in will not be able to conceptualize the vision that you have, it will be difficult to grasp until they see it. Over time they (friends and family) will get a glimpse of the future that you imagined.

Waiting until you know exactly what to do and the vision is “perfect” before you share it usually means that you waited too long.

“ If you’re hearing a chorus of “No’s” it may actually be a good sign… Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb — they all sounded crazy ... So don’t be discouraged by rejection. Instead, learn to hear the nuance between the different kinds of “no.””

I firmly believe that the fact that no one is watching is the fertile ground from which your dreams will be born.

When I hear interviews of people who have created meaningful careers I think the fact that we as the younger generation have these overarching visions but aren’t willing to look at the nuances of each of those visions are what detracts from them happening.

“There’s a set of entrepreneurs who see a transformative change taking place in the world — a change that is so profound they can spend a lifetime playing out the possibilities in their heads. They say to themselves, “I know the world’s moving in one particular direction and I’ll just keep betting on the world going in that direction.” And suppose you’re right — the world does, in fact, start moving in that direction. You’ll be surprised how many times you’ll want to ride that wave. It doesn’t matter if you end up having the ride of your life or an epic wipeout — you’ll just keep paddling after it.”

• Masters of Scale podcast Episode 20: “Never Underestimate Your First Idea”

I think the above gives clarity to the overuse of the phrases/words

1. Follow your passion
2. Entrepreneurship

These phrases are overused within the younger generations because there is no common language for how to articulate this vision. So some call themselves entrepreneurs because they want to start something from scratch — as most entrepreneurs do. And some say they want to “follow their passion” to chase this overarching vision that they may have no words for.

In short, if your vision of the future is unclear, you may be on the right track.