“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
- Steve Jobs
If I had to trace back to one point that absolutely changed the trajectory of my life, reading & internalizing this quote would be that point.
There are only a few internal changes that need to happen for someone to decide to carve out their own journey with work & life.
And a big one is understanding how fundamentally fabricated the world is.
Every word we say, every product we use & every place we visit all exist not because it’s the way it is.
But because someone made it up.
This is not an entrepreneurship encouragement post, one that tells you to dream big & create products that will be in the hands of every person on the planet.
It’s not a pitch to make up the big stuff, it’s rather a pitch to make up the small stuff.
To create a world for yourself where everything is exactly the way you like it.
It’s fundamental to thriving on your own path, to live in a world where there are no rules but your own. Otherwise, the sacrifices stop making sense. What is the point of this life of uncertainty & lack of prestige if you still need to exist in the same limiting world as everyone else?
You know what my only ‘work strategy’ is?
To make up roles for myself.
People spend a good few years of their life following work rules. Deciding what career they want to end up in, asking around to chart the path to get there & following it to the tee. Going to the right college, getting the right grades, applying for the right job, saying the right interview answers, adapting to the company culture, paying your dues, giving it time, taking on the right projects & networking with the right people.
All of this, all the time to finally have a chance to be in the positions they want to be, make the money they want to make, and do the work they want to do.
Maybe I’m lazy but I just didn’t want to do any of that.
You might be thinking, “Oh that’s easy to do when you’re self-employed,
But you can’t do that in college”
But I did.
The only way to get a job was to take one from the companies that hired from campus & unfortunately, I only wanted to work at Goldman Sachs & they didn’t hire from my college.
So I made up my own way of getting hired. I emailed recruiters.
“But what else can you do that for?”
I loved the work that Jubilee’s YT channel was doing & thought it’d be really cool to work there & produce content. But it would have honestly taken me years to move to LA just for this.
So I pitched them an idea a little closer to home.
I have created & pitched internships, full-time roles at startups, full-time roles to work with influencers when they had no teams, freelance projects, co-founder positions, podcast concepts & even the concept of the service that I now offer as a freelancer.
A lot of it materializes & a lot of it doesn’t.
And this doesn’t only apply to work.
You can program your brain to think this way about everything that’s a part of your life.
I got engaged with a sapphire ring when everyone said I HAD to get a diamond cause sapphires are so much cheaper & way more beautiful.
The entire concept of leaving the default path is to do what makes sense for only you.
A rule probably only made sense for the person who made it up in the first place. So you should feel nothing about not following it.
What you should be following instead is exploring the idea that maybe your life can be designed by you from scratch. You can take all the things that are already there by default that you’re okay with & change all the things that you aren’t.
But nothing is off the table.
A lot of general unhappiness comes from the fact that we spend so much time doing things we don’t want to do because we think we don’t have a choice.
Realizing that you do have a choice harms no one & only benefits you.
People will tell you ‘You can’t just make things up’, ‘Life isn’t that easy’ ‘You have to pay your dues’ ‘You can’t cut the line’ ‘If it was that easy, everyone would do it’
And they will say it with such conviction that you may think they must know something you don’t.
Trust me, no one knows anything. Might as well do whatever you want to do.
Where do you start?
What was the last thing you found yourself saying “I wish I could do ‘this’, not ‘that’” or
“Wouldn’t it be so cool if I could do that” about something?
Follow that feeling. Do the thing it would be so cool to do.
And from my experience, doing the thing the way you’re ‘supposed’ to do it has like 2948726 steps involved whereas finding your own way to do it probably is very simple. All it probably requires is an email.
LOVE this one, Sri! "Navigating this fictional world." is the perfect subtitle, and I totally resonated with your parallel of choosing an emerald rather than the prescribed/default/marketing-driven diamond. (Also, emeralds are clearly the way cooler choice. Plus it actually has meaning for YOU.)
Thanks for sharing the wisdom that we can all take the parts of the default world that we like, and change the parts that we don't like. It's not all one or all the other.