A Letter to All the Lonely People in Business

Middle school. Whose idea was it to put 12 and 13-year-olds in a new school with new social structures and new challenges while they're basically getting new bodies all at the same time?

Did anyone like middle school? Okay, I know some people did. My wife for example—she’s been a beacon of happiness throughout her life.

Meanwhile, I had what might be considered more of the stereotypical experience. Middle school is when I first started to figure out I really didn’t fit in. High school Valentine's Days were looming, along with physical education and dodge ball fiascos, but it all started for me in seventh and eighth grade.

The most brutal part was simply eating lunch. I vividly remember that awkward dance of grabbing my tray, walking down the lunch line, getting some paper napkins to blot the grease saturating my gross slice of pizza, all the while scanning the room looking for somewhere to sit.

“Oh yeah," I'd say to myself ruefully, "I’m not friends with anybody.” But sitting alone felt like the worse ignominy to a 12-year-old. So I’d find some empty classroom to dine in.

The situation didn’t change much in high school, but luckily we had an empty computer lab where I could program during lunch.

I truly hope your loneliness struggles weren't nearly as bad as mine, but I’ve found that almost everyone I talk to can personally relate to my feelings of not fitting in.

Human-first

At Gainsight, we’ve always had this belief that going to work isn’t fulfilling if we don’t get to be our true selves. We've all had to compartmentalize our lives at work and school and at home, but that's not what we want at Gainsight. Everyone knows that old adage, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” But we believe, in the eternal worlds of business legend Michael Scott from The Office:

So we adopted our company purpose statement a year ago to canonize that aspiration:

To be living proof that you can win in business while being human-first.

Dear Evan Hansen

Back to my personal story. Last summer, my wife (yes, I eventually made a friend!) and I took our tween (at the time) daughter on a daddy-mommy-daughter date. All three of us adore musicals and I had seen the relatively new Broadway smash hit Dear Evan Hansen earlier and was so excited to share it with my family.

If you haven’t seen Dear Evan Hansen, it’s one of the heaviest and lightest musicals I’ve experienced. The topics—teenage depression, loneliness, and suicide—are not for the faint of heart. The opening lines to the pivotal song “You Will Be Found” sung in Ben Platt’s soaring voice capture that weight:

Have you ever felt like nobody was there?

Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?

Have you ever felt like you could disappear?

Like you could fall, and no one would hear?

But it was also incredibly light in that it’s beautifully rendered with comedy, energizing scores, and optimism. Needless to say, it’s a moving experience that leaves one at the end looking to the right and left to find out who’s cutting onions.

For me, this show hit home, given some of the loneliness I felt as a kid and how I still carry it with me today, despite sometimes being in front of thousands of people. I still can’t say I feel like I fit in most of the time. I still feel weird and broken—like I don’t belong—pretty frequently.

But if you’re lucky enough to be a parent, you know that your child's emotions can amplify your own like a thousand times over for you. Seeing how moved our daughter was by the musical got me thinking about how much loneliness is a part of all of us.

What does this have to do with business?

So why the heck am I talking about this in a tech blog?

In the technology business, we're literally building the digital infrastructure for my daughter's generation and many beyond hers. We're in the first stages of a new economy, a new society—potentially a new civilization. It's exciting and terrifying. The choices we make will resonate for a long time. That's why I'm so proud of the customer success movement, specifically. I think it's a sign that maybe we're improving on some of the mistakes of previous generations of business people.

But when I see that my kids often experience the same isolation I felt in junior high, I wonder if things really are getting better.

As business people and as builders of companies and systems that will potentially outlast us, we need to grapple with these questions. Are our products and processes building a more human-first world? Are they making us less alone?

Read the rest of the post on Gainsight.com.