This little light

little light

Dear friend,

When I was young, I sought out advice from every corner of the universe, and in every corner, I found it. As a teenager, I asked strangers on the train whether I should believe in God; in college, I asked an internship supervisor whether good won out over evil. Even after I moved to San Francisco, I was still a sucker for advice, including advice that was in hindsight, clearly baloney. A VC told me that the secret to his success was investing in founders who were tall, white, and had gone to Andover because they could always con other investors into giving them more money. An MD at a hedge fund once told me that the only way to court LPs was to master at least one topic in the holy trinity: wine, art, or golf. I wanted to be anyone but myself back then, so of course, I listened. 

I believed back then that there was a handbook for operating in the world, and I believed that I could learn it if I asked “everyone else.” After all, “everyone else” seemed to be doing so well: growing faster, doing more, having more fun. N introduced me to a personality test called the Enneagram, which is meant to diagnose your greatest desire. Of the nine Ennegram personalities, I fell squarely into Type 3, “the Achiever,” characterized by the blind desire to…well, achieve. Achievers are willing to mold themselves into anything, no matter how alien to their true self, in order to achieve their ends. My friend R, an Achiever himself, once complained that he wanted to switch his Enneagram to a better, less goal-oriented one, which ironically, a less goal-oriented Enneagram category would never even think to want. To an Achiever, everything is a scoreboard, and I was looking for a guide to get to the top. 

I mean scoreboard quite literally, like the lit up signs in a high school gymnasium with names and scores listed out for everyone to see. At 24, when my mother tried to tell me I didn’t need to be in such a hurry, I compared myself to Augustus, who was only 17 when Caesar made him his heir. By that standard, I was already late. The idea of being an heir still appealed to me back then — my friend W once had a Forbes author call him a billionaire private equity manager’s protege, and I wanted to be someone’s protege, too. To be a protege was to be anointed by someone who knew better, to be proclaimed worthy by someone who was worthy themselves. Even after I had the baby, I spent months fretting that I was now falling behind, that everyone else was out there in the world networking with important people, and I was stuck at home, nursing a little lump that had no points attached. By now you see what type of person I was: both the prisoner and the guard. 

What happened? My friend A recently described a breakthrough revelation she had as spurred by the fact that she “just got sick of herself.” And I think that’s what happened to me. The night before J’s birthday, I had insomnia about something at work, and J turned to me and sighed, “Could you let it go just this once? For me?” In that moment, I just got sick of myself: sick of the scoreboarding, sick of empty achievement, sick of the jealousy, sick of the gnawing hunger. Sick of the prison guard always yelling at me in the back of my head, harsh as a slave driver. The people I hurt were the people who were the closest to me, and the person I hurt the most was myself. I have a little wooden jewelry box that I keep on my bedside table, and that night after I fell asleep, I dreamed that the little wooden box was my soul. In the dream, when I opened it, someone told me that God himself packs our bags before he sends us out into the world, and had already filled it with everything I would need for my journey. 

I could not walk someone else’s path even if I tried — so I might as well just walk my own. It’s not that you cannot learn from others; it’s that you cannot be the person you are learning from. Every time I’ve listened blindly to the advice of someone else, even a well-meaning billionaire, that decision has come back to bite me. Other people can tell me about their experience with God or with truth or raising money or hiring employees but they cannot tell me about those things in relation to me. Everything they have experienced is through the filter of who they are. That’s why billionaires often give banal advice like “hire well” and people who have been married for fifty years will say the secret to marriage is to “marry Gracie.” There is no way for them to disaggregate the variables: what they did and who they are. Obama didn’t become president by copying George W. Bush; Donald Trump didn’t become president by copying Obama. Each of them followed a path all his own until the day that path led them to the stage. 

Inauthenticity is the easiest thing in the world to sniff out, and the only people you’ll fool are people who have lost their way and are faking it themselves, a cadre of pretenders. We’ve all met that kid in class who read How to Win Friends and Influence People and now uses your name excessively in conversation: is it convincing? A copycat company has no soul, and everyone can tell. In college creative writing classes, I would always get dinged for lifting whole phrases from authors I liked that inevitably never sounded as good when frankensteined into a different story. I thought I had to: I worried that if I wrote it myself, I would have no way of knowing whether it was good. Now, I think the answer is that you’ll know. A calls the sensation,“feeling it in her body.” You’ll know whether you’re on the path. You’ll know whether you’re making something true to you — whether it’s a piece of art or a company. For that matter, I don’t think it’s possible to make anything good that isn’t original, that doesn’t come straight from your soul. In fairy tales, it’s always the heroine’s little finger that unlocks the final door. 

On Saturday nights, the baby sleeps in my bed with me, and as he guzzles milk from his bottle, I sing him a song where the lyrics go: “This little light of mine / I’m gonna let it shine.” Isn’t it strange? The first thing children learn from their nursery rhymes is to be yourself, and yet that’s the first thing we forget when we grow up. If he’s anything like me, he’ll want to circumnavigate the globe looking for an Operating Manual, and it’ll be my job to convince him that he doesn’t need to. The way I don’t need to take golf lessons or travel back in time to become a tall, white boy who went to Andover. When I look at the baby, it seems so clear that there’s a little light inside of him, like the Deluminator in Harry Potter, that if he just follows, will take him where he needs to go. I would dare say that the same grace extends to the rest of us, too. After all, if God himself has packed your bags, what do you have to still look for? 

Your friend,
Eva