Be out there
One of the perils of going to fancy college is that you are told, your whole life, that you are great, that you are destined to do great things, and then you go off and actually do them. Good job, the system worked. Now what?
The answer, of course, is that there is no correlation between success & happiness. In fact, they may even be negatively correlated. The Grant Study, flawed & of-its-time as it may be, said a few core things: get raised by good parents if you’re lucky, fall in love, have good relationships, don’t drink alcohol. And the data set was literally Harvard, including one president.
I think about this often now. My friends did the thing, blew up as you’d expect, and now they are sometimes flying in, having dinners with me, and I am lovingly exhorting them, as I am exhorting absolutely everyone, to link & build on the ground, to build connections, to batten down for what’s coming. These people have it right. And then I watch a well-trained brain slowly snap as they realize, wait: this is the mission?
Yes, this is absolutely the mission. You should be a cool, successful person and live a life where absolutely nobody around you knows or cares about any of that. You should go to bar trivia & pottery classes, chat up people in the line at your farmers market. You should know your neighbors, and you should never feel so important that you become unable to vibe with the people in your neighborhood. You should casually mention what you do at a dinner party several months into your new friendships, and they should go “wow” and then you should change the subject to something dumb that your alderman did. You should know the dumb things your alderman does.
You should live a grounded, simple day-to-day existence because it will be the thing that both saves and defines you if things go really pear-shaped, as they sometimes do. And when things are going relatively okay, it will be the thing that keeps you out of your head, keeps you from succumbing to ego. If you care about making your work better, great: your work will be better, too. But it’s not about the work, it never will be, and you probably never learned that at college.