The Rite Of Passage

I think many people, ultimately, have experienced not being recognized, or appreciated enough.

I'll tell you what, and I'm saying this as a matter of fact. So, hopefully it brings some peace of mind. Family and close friends are a common one. Everywhere. It seems almost like a rite of passage to have your dreams torn down by family members before you're successful with those same ideas.

Then, if it couldn't get worse, the one place you have to go where it's obvious that you should be recognized, because that's why you were hired, management tears you down as well at your job.

I've been through a lot of jobs, a lot of companies, known a lot of managers before I ever went off completely on my own, and what I'm about to describe is EVERYWHERE. It may even be you doing it to someone else, and while I can't stop it happening for you, I can tell you how it's working.

People have expectations of who they are in life relative to their own accomplishments, standards, skills, and other human beings. There has been a path that they have taken to get wherever it is they are, and however they believed that was how it worked to get to where they are.

These are very rigid constructs that form in people's minds regardless of how beautifully complex the human mind is. Compared to the data, it's rigid.

One of the biggest challenges I faced in simply keeping jobs, no lie, was not allowing my direct management to find out how capable I was, because once they did, they made my life working there a living hell, and I needed that job to support my family. I needed to eat. I needed to pay rent. These aren't things that you mess around with, but the reality is both of my parents pulled themselves out of poverty to make it into executive positions very rapidly relative to most people's expectations on how that works. I watched them do this. I understood the mechanics. In fact, I thought that's how life worked (before I found out it was more common for people to be in the same position for 10-20 years), but not only that, I was exposed to everything they'd bring home from work during this journey. Then, on top of that, even though when I was about 18-24, I really wasn't sure what I was going to do with my life, I thought I knew, I thought I was going to be a Pastoral Counselor, my first love was Entrepreneurship, and I had been watching, studying, and learning about innovation and business before I even made it to Junior High.

I had a type of natural leadership ability where executive power radiated from me as a sharp, dangerous kind of intelligence before I even made it out of High School, and my primary interest of study since I was younger than 5 was human beings. I could read people on levels where when I opened my mouth as a child, adults thought I was demon possessed, because there was no way that came out of kid. Literally, I scared the daylights out of a lot of people just by existing.

I started programming when I was 12. I drew, and sculpted fine art when I was 10. When I was in kindergarten, the school district came to my parents and said, "We can't tend to his needs here. You need to get him into a private school, or he's going to suffer in the public school system," and suffer I did. Nothing in my life followed this model leading up to these jobs where I could explain to anyone how my path worked, and why I was there.

So, here I am, working in retail going to bible college. "Adam. How would you like to advance in your career?" It was an offer presented to someone who needed a break in life, but people formed their own ideas about who I was. I simply did my job. The reality was, I had no intentions staying there. I was going to college for ministry, but it was an easy yes, because I knew what I was doing, and that's when I started opening my mouth around management, and that's when it started getting bad for me, and it wasn't the last job.

Eventually, I found myself sitting quietly in meetings with middle management executives of very large corporations among a group being reprimanded for poor overall performance, in that group, and by this time, what I was doing with my free time was that I had designed a fully automated eCommerce store, managed relationships with manufacturers, customers, ran customer service, developed automated data cleaning software and took a sole proprietorship from nothing to competing with Amazon, WalMart, Staples, and Best Buy neck to neck with the same product offerings in a year. It looked like a multi-million dollar corporation, and it cost me mostly my time to build. However, I needed millions of dollars of sales in order to be confident to quit my job, because my markup was so low, and I only had thousands of dollars, but growing. So, I was still there. In this meeting. The root of the actual problem that wasn't being discussed, and strategies to redesign the entire operation to increase performance was sitting in me like an inferno trying to be kept in an aluminum drum. I felt like a giant in a toddler's chair, and if I even spoke, really spoke how I do in meetings with C-level executives today, the sheer friction in people's cognitive dissonance on how in the world someone "like me," in "my position" could sound like that would have angered everyone in the room. I already saw it happening on smaller scales, and so I kept my mouth shut.

People don't know who you are. They know who they are. They know how they got to where they are, they have expectations of what the best to have is, and they form ideas about who you are, and a lot of times they're ideas that confirms their social dominance.

They say in themselves, "I'm valuable, because I can do this. I can do this, because of these things. Not many people can do what I can do," and especially not you. You're not their peer. You didn't go to college with them. You're not in middle management. You're not even a thought in their mind that you could jump ahead of them, but it's based on the mechanics of how they determined their value, and when you challenge those mechanics, it upsets people. Their value is degraded by the sheer idea that someone thinks they're capable without following this path that they "know" this is how it works. That this is how you get to those skills.

However, it's not their say. Sure, they're upset. Confused. It's going to take more than a few moments to get past that, and it's probably not going to be you, at least in the near future, that's going to get through to them.

Focus on what you're doing. Make sure you know what you're doing, however you do it, however you learn, and focus on that. Don't worry about them. Don't let their approval be a metric in your happiness. Seek God's approval.