In ten years on the default path, I experienced the magic of good hard work for two years at McKinsey, twelve months working on the conference in business school, and three months while at BCG. But if you stumble into the magic Brie had at Stripe or I found at McKinsey? Then go all-in - you likely won’t regret it. These great environments are so hard to find and they get lost in the stupid debate over “hard work.” I think it’s pretty stupid to work long hours when you aren’t being supported and the people around you don’t care. And for five years after business school, I more or less failed to find that magic again, stumbling from job to job working for various insecure grown men. The feeling of marching toward a finite goal with a collection of amazing people all doing it because they gave a damn was delightful. Sloan Sports Conference Was Awesome, This Pic Was a Bonus! I wasn’t getting paid and I didn’t even have a goal of working in sports but it was one of the things I spent the most time doing during my second year of business school. They cultivated a culture of support but also excellence. They set a high bar, supported people, and gave us room to make decisions.
#The pathless a new path awaits professional#
I got to work with Daryl Morey and Jessica Gelman who were both volunteering their time outside of demanding jobs working in professional sports.
If you know sports you know this conference. In business school, I volunteered as part of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. And to expect that from your colleagues in a way that makes you feel that “we’re all really, really, really in this together” kind of way. She puts it better than I can: It’s more about missing that universal agreement that it’s really, really cool to devote yourself fully to your work. When you are around people that give a damn it is infectious. But I also completely understand what Brie is talking about. Would I have tried to work less than fifteen hours a day while still doing good work? Also 100% yes. Would I have taken the vacation? Almost definitely. You might think this is counter to what I write about here on Boundless. And, to be around people who I know cared that much too. Call me masochistic, but I have to admit that it felt good to care about anything that much. “If you go, who will cover your work?” I looked around at my colleagues who were also regularly working 15-hour days and decided to stay put. Brie talks about skipping a vacation and not regretting it because of how much people cared at Stripe: Once, my manager asked me to reconsider the vacation I had been planning because my team needed me. People get critiqued all the time in the workplace but rarely do they get to experience it in a culture of people that actually give a damn about their work. But at McKinsey, I received similar kinds of criticism and by the end of my time there, craved it. If I never experienced a similar thing at McKinsey, I might write Brie off as delusional. My work was meticulously but warmly critiqued by my peers and leaders alike, and my work got better and better because of it. Once, the CFO called me after sending out notes from a “postmortem” I ran to remind me that we should use the word “retrospective” instead (it’s more reflective of what we were doing and a lot less morbid). For example: My colleagues chimed in on my work-because I asked them to, and because it made the work better, not because they didn’t trust me. We are only capable of what our environment allows.īrie Wolfson shared a fantastic reflection on working at Stripe, a place that pushed her incredibly hard but was also immensely rewarding.
We like to think that we as individuals can conjure up great work through great effort. This experience was the greatest thing for my own skill development but also the worst because every work experience after that was disappointing. I’ve experienced three stretches of working in such environments, one of which was my entire two years at McKinsey when I was 23. Intense hard work within a great culture can be one of the greatest things in the world.
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