Youthful and Purposeful, not Young and Dumb

In 2001, I made the decision to move from Chicago to San Francisco. There wasn’t anything spectacular about it - I hadn’t gotten into a dream school, I wasn’t going to see about a girl, and I didn’t have a blockbuster job. If anything, the objective mundanity of the move was its defining characteristic. My friend Tate and I hopped into my already well-worn 1993 Saturn SL1, took a long-ish westerly route through the Black Hills and Rockies, overnighted at some motels and in friends’ basements, and crossed the Bay Bridge on July 26 backgrounded by the soundtrack of Zombie Nation doing Kernkraft 400.

I remember the entire trip as if it happened twenty days rather than twenty years ago. And even though it would be easy to characterize the decision to move as my specific instantiation of Wanderlust, the truth is that it was more deeply and purposefully motivated.

I grew up in the same town in Northwest Ohio for 18 years. I remember thought experiments with my high-school girlfriend in which we’d ask each other which neighborhood in Toledo we’d settle in. I remember my brother’s incredulity when I estimated the length of the street we grew up on at over a mile (it’s less than half a mile). I remember that it never occurred to me to go to college outside Ohio until I got invited by my friend Jeff to visit Northwestern one spring during high school. Though I’d flown to Europe and India a handful of times when my parents were still married and before I was eight years old, I’d never been west of the Ohio state line.

But even when I visited Northwestern as a “prospie,” I knew the allure was enough to attract me there. Once I made good on my end of the deal by being accepted, I was off to the Mecca of the Midwest. The juxtaposition of city and town that existed at the nexus of Chicago and Evanston, coupled with the alchemy of a vibrant global community and a familiar midwestern sensibility that I experienced on campus, opened my eyes to a new way to think, to live, to be. All of a sudden I had neighbors from every corner of the world, and all of a sudden it hit me how little about that world - their worlds - I knew.

Meanwhile, my best friends at Northwestern were from places like Dallas, Los Angeles, and Berkeley. They’d broken down barriers or made big jumps to come to the Midwest when they were teenagers, and I began to admire their courage and sense of wonder. At some point, the thought occurred to me that the time immediately after college might be the best time to try a new adventure of my own. And I distinctly remember that my calling had a very particular, even if abstract, motivation - I wanted to learn how to create and get comfortable with change when I could engineer it on my own terms so that, when change was thrust upon me later in life, I’d have a muscle memory built to handle it and a heuristic developed for managing it.

There are probably deep-seated reasons for this that, even now, I haven’t fully excavated. When my parents divorced, I was woefully unprepared for the emotional toil and logistical burdens the new arrangements placed on me. When my mom lost her nursing job while I was in high school, I wasn’t as helpful as I could have been in managing the new priorities and realities in our family’s life. When several of my high school classmates died our senior year, I wondered whether I could have done more or better as a friend.

But, more basically, by my mid-20s, I had a sense that the only constant was change, and that I was going to have to either embrace and thrive on it or be encumbered and weakened by it. So I gave notice at my consulting job, said yes to an offer from an education startup, and headed west. While I felt like I was saying goodbye to the life I knew, I felt I was learning to live, because life is change and change is life.

In time, I found my way back to a career in consulting. And after a few years, the west coast began to feel like home (which I recognized with a strange certainty on one flight in 2009 when going ORD-SFO rather than SFO-ORD felt distinctly like it was the Homeward journey). But, with respect to the 2001 decision, I found what I was looking for. Embracing and thriving on change had indeed become a skill set. When I fell in love and did choose to go see about a girl, it was not a big chore to move East for a bit while she finished school; we were engaged in 2005 and married in 2006. When the economy dried up in 2008, I had no problem adjusting the mix of industries and clients I served. When my wife found out she was pregnant with twins in 2014, we set up a house, a home, and a mix of careers that would enable us all to thrive amidst the bustle of the city and in the prime of our working lives. And when I wanted to step into an executive role at Qualtrics that I felt would be a huge growth opportunity for me as a professional and as a person, after 12+ years at Prophet, I worried zero about whether I would be prepared for it. I truly believe that “practicing” change on my own terms in my early 20s in the early 2000s gave me the readiness and aptitude to take on some of these challenges with clarity, conviction, and (depending on whom you ask) grace.

So it has been with a sense of joy and a feeling of camaraderie that I’ve experienced the stories a few guests on Breakthrough Builders have shared over the past few months. Andrea Robb of Airbnb talked about embracing the Bhuddist notion of “leap, and the net will appear,” balancing personal confidence and an assessment of risk in any important decision. Steve Schwartz, Founder and CEO of Art of Tea, spoke about the decision he and his wife made when they were “young enough and dumb enough to go down a path courageously” to impact people’s lives with tea, inspired by what had been done to broadly humanize connections with coffee, wine, and beer. Nicole Dawes, Founder and CEO of Late July Snacks and Nixie Sparkling Water, shared that her bet-the-company move to get Late July into tortilla chips was something the market needed, but more important, was a change she needed to make in order to move the company and her career out of the shadow of her successful father. And Gurdeep Pall, inveterate builder of technology for 30+ years at Microsoft, spoke about the importance of not being hidebound by the way things had always been done, and of truly challenging himself and people around him to question the limits of what’s possible - rather than make incremental moves forward.

The only editorializing I’d do is with respect to the phrase “young and dumb.” Incredible creators from Leonardo to Mozart to Jobs composed most of their magnificent work during the first half of their lives, so there is ample precedent for “young” not being a reason to make mistakes. And “dumb,” even though it’s used in a self-depricating by accomplished people so as not to brag about their successes, doesn’t give credit to the degree of contemplation and courage required to make a big change in one’s career, geography, or lifestyle. I prefer the slightly more cumbersome “Youthful and Purposeful” to the slightly more trodden “young and dumb.”

The young are not dumb - they are bold, courageous, thoughtful, active, engaged, riveting, and forward-looking. Most important, as Gurdeep implied, they are unencumbered by an overabundance of experience and knowledge that, too often, morphs into unwillingness or inability to change.

Would that we all take a page from the youthfulness and sense of purpose that lies within each of us, so that we continue to discover how to contend with, create, and learn from, and ultimately be the change that’s best for us - and right for our world.