A personal quest.

In Pursuit of Quality. #2.

Original image generated by DALL-E.

Welcome, friends, to the second issue of In Pursuit of Quality.  Thanks for being here and for your support.  

This week, I want to pull a thread from my first post:

"Tiny, individual changes can result in outsized transformation."  

It's better to show than to tell, so I'm going to share my own journey toward Quality.  Apologies if you've heard my story before.  And brace yourself if you haven't.

Thoughtless Pursuit.

Most of my life has been a thoughtless pursuit of Quantity.  That's embarrassing to admit.  But until recently, I was always about more, more, more.  

My parents did the best they could.  Still, I endured a murky childhood in a divided and uneducated household.  I put myself through college and then somehow got funding to earn a Master's and Ph.D. in cognitive science.  I've never been the smartest nor the hardest working, but I was driven by the glow of achievement.  The prestige of advanced degrees stoked my fire more than the work itself.

Things didn't change when I ditched the academic path for the corporate world.  I made my way working for creative agencies, but that wasn't enough.  I wanted more.  More happened when a friend recruited me into YouTube, where I would learn to love the taste of the corporate Kool-Aid.  It didn't matter what I worked on.  The glory was in the fame of the company, the titles, and the false sense of self-importance.

I kept going.  After about five years at YouTube, I was offered a leadership role at Spotify.  It felt like a rung up on the ladder, so of course I climbed it.  But it was only a handful of months in when my life was thrown into deep and utter chaos.

Tragic Reflections.

It was March, 2016.  I was coming home from a work trip when I got a harrowing phone call.  My dad was in the hospital.  He was found in his suburban backyard suffering from two blows to the head—and there was no chance he'd recover.  Gone.  Murdered?  It looked that way but there were no witnesses, no evidence.  

I will never know for sure what happened to my father. 

My thoughtless pursuit of Quantity could have ended then.  Life's crossroads provide the richest moments to display our humanity.  But I continued on the path of blind achievement—I didn't know how else to cope.  I went onward and upward to Instagram, believing that bigger roles would solve the complex calculus of pain.  I wanted even more.

When I was offered the job of Chief Marketing Officer for Bonobos, then Walmart-owned, I thought making it to the top of the ladder would pull things into perspective.  What more could there be to the pursuit of Quantity? 

Something Clicked.

But I was the wrong CMO for them.  And, sorry, but I hated it.  It didn't add up; nothing did.  There was a galvanizing moment when, during a sullen dinner, my partner told me that "every night feels like a funeral."  Ouch.  I had internalized the trauma of loss without understanding that my priorities had fundamentally shifted as part of the grieving process.   

And that's when it started to click.  In order to take joy in my work—and my life—I would need to stop being an academic or corporate robot.  I would need to understand what it means to be human.

Finally, I could start the journey from my thoughtless pursuit of more to an intentional quest for better, more fulfilling outcomes.  I could make sense of life.  I could make choices about how to live.  I could make small changes that would result in outsized transformation.

The most important change is where I choose to focus my attention.  Our most valuable asset is time.   Within that band of time, we only have so much energy to give.  Attention is a commodity that's in ridiculously high demand; everyone wants a piece of it.  In pursuit of Quantity, I never spent the time nor energy on Quality outcomes.  This resulted in working long hours doing work that ultimately meant nothing to me.

With the zeal of a convert, I now see it all around me.  The collective temptation to pursue Quantity is at a fever pitch.  And it's no surprise why.  Our culture venerates strivers and overachievers, simultaneously reinforcing an illusion that the mindless pursuit of money and notoriety is noble.  Is it?  Or are we ignoring the reality that the cost of mindless accumulation is often despair, loneliness, and division? 

So, we each have a choice to make:  Will you continue to focus on Quantity—attaining more and more?  Or will you choose to spread attention to Quality—attending to outcomes you actually want? 

I continue to make the often scary shift to Quality.  It's a work in progress, but I know I made the right choice.  I have much more freedom and far more meaningful relationships—with no sacrifice in material lifestyle.  

Without hesitation, I can say that shifting more attention to Quality has made my life immeasurably better.  And this journey is just beginning. 

With warmth, gratitude, and respect.