#5. Leaning into authenticity

I am very malleable and often influenced heavily by my peers and the content I consume. As such, I am finding the process of discovering my ‘authentic self’ to be a powerful catalyst in the dual pursuit of competitive edge and deep fulfilment. This post explores what this process has entailed so far.

A genius is the one most like himself.

Thelonius Monk

---

Sewing seeds of authenticity through introspection

In his book Let your life speak, Palmer Parker explains how finding our true vocation, the thing we are supposed to spend our time doing, does not come from wilfulness, no matter how earnest or bold our intentions. It comes from listening: “Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”

Naval Ravikant references similar ideas in his description of one’s ‘specific knowledge’: “Your specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and your identify. Then you can hone it”

Naval describes how specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to study for the hottest job or moving into a field based on noise from investors.

---

Feeling the tension of inauthenticity:

Whilst it wasn’t clear at the time, I’ve often moved in professional directions that were not aligned with my ‘specific knowledge’:

1. I don’t belong in engineering: During my first ~3 years at university, I had convinced myself that I would become a mechanical engineer. That was until one technical design internship where I found myself paired with a guy who built robots in his spare time and oozed a certain engineering DNA that I severely lacked. Despite growing up in a household of mechanics and carpenters, I have never been a hands-on tinkerer, or had any desire to understand how mechanical systems operate.
2. I don’t care about the metaverse: Over the last few years, I’ve found myself surrounded by exceptionally smart people who are gravitating towards Web3, Crypto and the Metaverse. Many times, I’ve convinced myself to follow suit; that perhaps I too should be attaining ‘financial freedom’ by ‘flipping some NFTs’, as a friend of mine recently described. However, whenever I’ve started moving in this direction, there has been no genuine curiosity and it felt much more like work.
3. I lack empathy for coders: I’ve spent the last 1.5 years as a product manager building a tool for data scientists in which the product was a codebase. Despite dabbling in Python, coding is certainly not my forte. As such, I often struggled to cultivate the deep empathy for the user problem that is critical to creating an exceptional product experience. Now that within my own startup I am building a tool for non-technical users (like myself), the step change in feeling the user needs has been immense.

---

Fast-tracking the discovery process:

When trying to understand my own areas of ‘specific knowledge’ and characteristics of an authentic vocation, I have found the following sources to be particularly insightful:

• What do you do in your free time that people find strange? Thinking about the things I have chosen to do during my ‘time-off’ that most people consider to be more like ‘work’ (e.g., reading and rigorous note-taking, learning languages)
• What were you up to as a child? Thinking about the ways I spent my time as a child and teenager and identifying the common themes (mostly creative pursuits: drawing and designing)
• How are you perceived? Understanding my family & friend’s main perceptions of me growing up (helping others, not ‘technical’, introversion with high awareness)

---

Escaping competition through authenticity…

Figuring out answers to these questions brings us closer to experiencing deep fulfilment in our professional lives. As Palmer puts it: “The punishment imposed on us for claiming true self can never be worse than the punishment we impose on ourselves by failing to make that claim. And the converse is true as well: no reward anyone might give us could possibly be greater than the reward that comes from living by our own best lights.”

As well as fulfilment, knowing what feels like play but looks like work to others can have a huge impact on competition, in that:

• Nobody can compete as well at being you than yourself
• If you are not 100% into it, then some one else will be and they will outperform you
• If you are fundamentally building something that is an extension of who you are, then you’re far more likely to be fulfilled, regardless of outcome

As Terry Crews mentioned in an interview with Tim Ferris, instead of fighting to get ahead in one lane, carve out your own.

---

Building a company that is an extension of who I am

The question that this has led to is: What would it look like to embed my most authentic self into my company? Here are some of my emerging thoughts:

1. Being very intentional about personal learning e.g., taking regular time to reflect and write; spending high amounts of time with coaches & mentors
2. Developing my own sales style e.g., displaying confidence in sales through listening, transparency and intimate knowledge of the product; instead of forcing extroversion, animation and persuasion
3. Building a strong value-driven culture e.g., embedding values from day 1 with team rituals focused on learning, communication, personal balance and awareness
4. Focusing on bringing design & creative flare e.g., putting user-centric design, marketing creativity and visual flare high up on the agenda of what we’re creating