The other day, I was reading a blog post written by a 30-something about how being 30 means that you can no longer allow yourself to fail heroically. The author was not any 30-something 9-5 worker or woman spending her days sending out resumes while getting by on unemployment. The blog post was actually written by the beautiful, extremely successful Erin Foster, a television actress and writer on the site Hello Giggles.
Foster’s blog title sums up the feeling:
TotallyConfidentAndCompletelyInsecure.Com.
She writes in her post “Dirty 30: I’m Freaking Out” how she worries about getting her next written opportunity, about her next failure, even though she’s very successful for her age. “There is a period of time when we are allowed a free pass,” she writes. “We fail a math test because we’re in eighth grade and who cares. We sleep in until noon because we’re sixteen and just leave us alone. We get lazy at work because we’re twenty-three and it’s a job we aren’t passionate about. But at a certain point, we’ve run out of free passes and we have to be accountable for every single decision we make. There is no room for error. No one is asking you what you want to be, they are asking you what you are doing. Right now. What are you doing? Are you great at it? Are you making a difference? A lot of people are doing something important. Are you? Are you productive every day? Are you always working towards something bigger?”
Even Anne Hathaway, Oscar winner, who happens to also be 30, is quoted as saying she’s not impressed with herself, only what was created around her, and she constantly worries about where she’ll work next. “I’m still the underdog,” she said of her Oscar win. There’s something deeply romantic, falsely humble, and egregiously motivational about putting oneself in the bucket of never good enough which kicks our insecure yet confident asses into doing really great stuff. But it’s also kind of painful to the soul. It’s not a good way to live. Continue reading Romanticizing the Underdog No More: A New Approach to Turning 30
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Yesterday evening I met up with a friend of mine from jobs past for an insightful chat over tea. He’s one of my few friends who is also a professional in the technology industry, so it’s always good to share stories and dual-crowdsource our own advice. One of the themes of the conversation this evening was defining success, and the reason behind what makes those definitions so different for each of us.
