Many secondary and even university educational systems are sadly not only breeding grounds for mediocrity but also teach few to no meaningful life skills.
Just as bad, if not worse, is the one-track, conventional thinking that buries multi-dimensional talent in “vertical” thinking, mainly “one major, one marketable skill, one job, one industry, one rat race, only one way to win.”
The result is a perennial slew of brilliant young graduates from top schools who end up in banking or consulting, or business or law school, right after undergrad. They come out over-educated, over-indebted and often under-employed.
The vast majority slog through for as long as they can before moving on to startups or their own businesses, the most persistent among them ending up as partners in large law, consulting or financial services firms. Many go through third- or mid-life crises, suddenly realizing that they hate their work and hate their life but have few choices, given their family and financial obligations.
I was nimble enough to change careers six times before the age of 35, pressured by $250,000 in debt, a wife, kids and New York City rent. I endured a series of crises of career, finances, marriage and confidence before “figuring it out” and building meaningful life skills. “Millennial syndrome” is real and inglorious.
I checked many boxes on the way to figuring myself out, including working at Fortune 500 and Inc. 5000 companies, finance and health care and consulting and tech startups, and moving through a variety of consulting and full-time roles across verticals.
On paper, I had worked at great companies and achieved six figures by the age of 30. But in reality, I was miserable, got let go several times and was still deeply in debt, with uneven monthly revenue, two kids and a marriage on the rocks. After leaving the last startup where we’d invested our own capital, we got the nasty surprise of a cancer diagnosis for our two-month-old.
I’d crashed out of the corporate, then the startup rat race, but I learned something very important about myself. Mainly, while I had followed the prescribed paths of “vertical” thinking and vertical integration, I’d always felt like a fish out of water. The simple reason was that I had always been a “horizontal integrator” across disciplines, networks of people and knowledge, historical eras, worldviews, languages and cultures.
The critical insight that came from my coaching work was that with all the cultural, linguistic, psychological, traumatic and other baggage seemingly inherent to being highly intelligent and highly functional, far too many brilliant people end up with mediocre careers and impostor syndrome, out of sorts with their potential and well short of their own and others’ expectations.
I encountered hundreds of clients from similar educational backgrounds who kept coming to me with the same basic problem. These brilliant people were sulking, procrastinating and becoming anxious and unproductive. They were comparing themselves with others in their cohort, leading to chronic unhappiness from moving and/or irrelevant goalposts. They were self-sabotaging through negative scripts based on misplaced expectations from themselves and their families. Lastly, they had come to base their core identity on their profession and station in life, rather than any inherent qualities.
In short, they had forgotten who they really were and the challenges they’d overcome to get where they were today. They were missing confidence in their own voice, their inherent value and their ability to leave the safe harbor of “good” for something truly great.
So, what did these brilliant “losers” (according to their negative scripts) do to turn things around and “unlock” themselves?
First, they identified their four pillars, mainly “life mission” (specific personal and professional successes they wanted to manifest within 10 years, leveraging their zone of genius), values (personality traits of people who would help them grow and develop quickly as humans and professionals), outcomes (their energetic profile at work) and role (their energetic profile at home), along with negative scripts (self-sabotaging narratives) and founding stories (formative experiences).
They detailed the energetic highlights of their personal story to identify their “superpowers,” choosing among evangelist, operator, caretaker, niche expert and strategist.
They practiced theater, improv comedy or other means of breaking through their limiting beliefs, realizing that if life itself is theater, they had better learn to be great players.
They identified companies or business ideas in alignment with their four pillars and pursued them, full-steam. Rather than compete in a beauty contest for jobs, they proactively filtered each opportunity against their own criteria and needs.
They created a long-term personal and professional development plan. This way, armed with a map and road map, they knew where they were going and how to get there.
Using the four pillars as a filter, they reexamined and realigned their relationships, affiliations and time commitments, streamlining for fit, growth and impact.
With a coach or partner providing accountability and momentum, this transformative, methodical approach can yield increased confidence, focus and, most importantly, great results.
To most brilliant people feeling stuck, reinvention seems more art than science. But in fact, there’s a rhyme and reason to it. Beyond optimism and mantras, it takes remembering and leveraging your story.
