It looks good on paper…

I have a friend who is heading a tiny little tech start-up. He and some friends have been dreaming and coding and testing and talking it up, all in the spare hours around dayjobs and with whatever money they can scrounge from their budgets and their credit cards.

A few weeks ago, he was offered some venture capital funding.

It’s what every start-up wants, right? You might think so, but my friend is really conflicted about it for all kinds of reasons.

Basically, it looks good on paper, but it doesn’t feel like the right choice.

Paper lies

We’ve all had the experience of having something or someone look perfect on paper and not work out in reality. Or look like a disaster on paper and be absolutely fabulous in reality.

The guy who has all the right degrees and interests, but is really annoying in person. The job that looks really odd, but is really fun when you’re actually doing it.

When we say something looks good on paper, what we’re really pointing to is that is makes sense within the cultural narratives that apply. Good benefits, good alignment with our degree, a good job, a good family.

A lot of our lives get left out of the cultural narrative. Our quirky personalities. Our specific histories. Our actual likes.

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, has as one of her Secrets of Adulthood this gem: “You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you LIKE to do.”

Trying to force ourselves to like what we don’t like – however much it makes “sense” in some way – is a sure-fire way to making ourselves quietly miserable.

Academia loves paper

There are a lot of things that “make sense” in academia that run counter to many people’s actual experience.

The flexibility is to die for – unless you want to work reasonable hours and have things in your life other than work.

Professoring is the best job in the world – unless it doesn’t work for your particular personality and skills and needs.

Etc. I’m sure you can think of lots of others.

The problem is not you

The problem is a cultural narrative that insists that certain things are universally good – for everyone, or at least all good people.

But you know what? People vary. Even within communities like academia, which bring people together around some shared values or goals, people vary.

You are allowed to vary. You are allowed to be your own particular, fabulous self.

And you don’t need to apologize for that.

Academia tends to spin our emotional compasses until we don’t know which way is north. If you’re feeling lost, I offer one-on-one coaching to help you figure it all out.