Finding Your Place In The World: The Importance Of Gaining Perspective & Discovering Your "Why"

By Messan Bokor

A little while back, I was asked to contribute to an article that discussed early career advice for students transitioning into their professional journey. In my contribution, I talked about the importance of gaining a large scale understanding of the world we live within in order to find the place you wish to inhabit in it as well as the importance of developing an infinite mindset based around a “why”: a clear end-goal that keeps you grounded and motivated. In this blog post, I want to expand on what I meant as well as discuss my experience finding the perspective I have today and---not only how it has helped me in my professional journey---but how it has helped me define the kind of life I want to live.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned throughout my life journey so far is the importance of taking a step back and dedicating the time to place yourself within the long game of a fulfilling and meaningful life rather than getting stuck in a battle for success or a career. As students, we are taught to constantly ask ourselves, “how do I win in this career?”---what degrees, skill sets, or involvement experiences do I need in order to beat my fellow classmates and get ahead in this career path? As I especially saw throughout my experience in business school, we are constantly thrust into hyper-competitive environments that pit us against one another and make us think that our career path is one long battle that we have to fight to win. In other words, it makes us think that if we aren’t getting ahead, we’re falling behind. Operating with this mindset traps you within a linear perspective and narrow focus that limits your adaptability and capacity to navigate through challenges and hurdles. It also places you in a game of competition rather than collaboration with the classmates and colleagues around you. In order to avoid this and open up your view of opportunity/growth, you need to step out of that “race” to get ahead in your career and step into taking the necessary steps to “build” the life you want to live. When you operate based on the “Build” view rather than the “Race” view, time, challenges, failure, and hurdles hold no meaning outside of how they can be used to help you in building the life you want to live. It is only through being in a race or competition with others that the burden of time and comparisons with others start to weigh on you---taking up mental energy and adding to the stress of your journey. No two journeys---even if they use the same path---are the same. Nor is there any destination that only has a singular path leading to it. The world is full of countless paths and possibilities, and these grow exponentially day by day. The "Build" view allows you to more easily take advantage of these possibilities through expanding the scope of your journey while the "Race" view takes you down the beaten path where your view is blocked by the crowd of people walking around you. This view is also where challenges and failure become setbacks. When you’re simply walking towards the life that you want---challenges and failure just become stones that you tripped over because you weren’t paying attention. You get back up, make a mental note to watch out for stones in the future, and you keep going. Sometimes, you have someone there, walking towards the same destination as you, who helps you up when you fall---turning what seemed like failure into an opportunity to connect and walk alongside someone, supporting and looking out for each other, as you continue your journey towards a meaningful and fulfilling life. On the other hand, if you're racing with someone towards an end-goal, falling down becomes much more detrimental and, rather than helping you up when you do, the others around you have incentives to keep on you on the ground or even trip you themselves in order to get ahead. This essentially turns what was intended to be a journey into a battle where you are pitted against others---effectively destroying any meaning or joy one can derive from the journey. This is also a self-limiting and reactionary perspective where you are constantly modeling your own behavior off of what is defined by the "referees" of the race---or, as is more often the case, the players who have made it farther in the race than you have----as the "proper way to win" or the "rules of the game". This not only limits the scope of your journey, but it also traps you within a mental box that clouds your thinking and blinds you from the greater world around you and all the other possibilities/paths that exist which can lead you to that same destination. In short, the key to not just career---but life success---is to take the time to thoroughly define what you want to get out of it, live your life on your own terms, and expand your perspective of the world and the possibilities within it. This approach to your career and life is best encapsulated by the concept of finite vs infinite thinking detailed within The Infinite Game written by Simon Sinek, David Mead, and Peter Docker. As they explain:

“…for all its benefits, acting with an infinite, long-term view is not easy. It takes real effort. As human beings, we are naturally inclined to seek out immediate solutions to uncomfortable problems and prioritize quick wins to advance our ambitions. We tend to see the world in terms of successes and failures, winners and losers. This default win-lose mode can sometimes work for the short term; however…it can have grave consequences over the longer term…[in] infinite games…the players can operate however they want…the manner in which each player chooses to play is entirely up to them. And they can change how they play the game at any time, for any reason. Infinite games have infinite time horizons. And because there is no finish line, no practical end to the game, there is no such thing as "winning" an infinite game…”

You need to build an Infinite Mindset. Instead of asking yourself ‘what are my career goals’ or ‘what can I do to get ahead of everyone else in this chosen career-path’---ask yourself: what kind of life do I want to live? What would be the things that would be most important to me when I am on my deathbed and reflecting on my life? Making this shift switches your focus from ‘how can I win within the game of my career’ to ‘how can I advance within the game of life towards the specific kind of life I want to live’. This takes you out of the bubble of your career and allows you to operate on a larger scale that takes into account more pathways and avenues that you may have otherwise missed. For some, this means augmenting the traditional definition of their current career and combining it with other skill sets taken from separate sectors in order to develop unique talents that enable you to do bigger things within your industry. For others, this may mean seeing your initial career as just a bridge that allows you to amass the resources and build the foundation necessary to transition on to something much bigger in the future like an entrepreneurial venture or pursuing a creative passion. For others this may mean finding a family of like-minded people rather than a “successful” career. Whatever this may be for you, you need to fully define what a “fulfilling life” is for you and outline the foundations you need for that kind of life. This approach is predicated on three things: moving slowly, taking the time to truly understand yourself, and gaining a greater perspective of the world you live in. One of the symptoms of the fast-paced nature of the world we live in today is that we often overlook the importance of slowing down and taking the time to think deeply about the directions we are heading in. We operate mostly based on assumptions and expectations rather than real understanding. This often leads to us going down a path where, ten years down the line, we end up with feelings of discontent/unhappiness and wonder if we made the right decision. This is so common that we coined a term to describe it: the “mid-life crisis”. A way to avoid this is to slow down and take the time necessary to fully walk through the path you have chosen to its end and ask yourself, ‘will I be happy at this end destination’? A large part of this lies in truly understanding yourself and the things that are important to you. A deep understanding of yourself allows you the self-awareness to more accurately evaluate which end destinations would bring you the most fulfillment and will allow you to break free of the trap of operating based on someone else’s definition of happiness or success rather than your own. The final piece to this lies in gaining a greater understanding of the world you live in order to conduct an informed evaluation of the paths within it and find the one that most resonates with you. There are so many pathways in this world that we simply never get a chance to learn about. We instead focus on the pathways readily available or accessible to us---limiting our own potential while doing so. If you truly want to give yourself the best shot of living a life that leaves you with peace and contentment on your deathbed, you owe it to yourself to expand your view of the opportunities and life pathways you can take through learning more about the world around you.

In regard to myself---the infinite game I choose to play revolves around creating a positive and uplifting impact on the world that extends well beyond my lifetime. It is an extremely rare opportunity to be able to make it out of an under-resourced community like many within my home country and be placed within a place like the US which has an abundance of resources and tools, specifically in education. There are many who spend their entire lives searching for that kind of opportunity and never see it. I am one of the lucky few that did. I want this to mean something. Rather than finding a nice career and being able to live well off, I want to live a life that leaves countless threads of opportunity behind that others can seize to better their own lives---to turn something that was just simply luck for me into an open bridge/gateway that others can use to transition towards better situations. This is the basis behind every life/career decision that I make and is what allows me the strength of mind/character, resilience, and adaptability to navigate through any challenges or hurdles that I come across in my journey.

The Infinite Game Of Human Development & The Collective Prosperity Of Our Civilization

In relating to my chosen field of interest, which is technology, this means playing the infinite game of how we can use technology to improve the human experience and the overall well-being of our civilization. Contrary to how the current technological age is often portrayed by prominent technologists and the media built around them, we live in a world where technology is not really being utilized to improve the overall well-being of our entire civilization but rather to uplift the lives of the limited few closest to the technology while largely ignoring---or in the worst cases, siphoning from---everyone else. This has led to a world where there is a growing chasm between the realities of those at different places within our civilization’s socioeconomic structure.

Instead of using technology to work towards a utopia that uplifts everyone, we are instead moving towards a dystopia where we are split into a leisure class that enjoys the fruits of technology, an underclass that fuels it, and those on the margins—essentially left out of the future. While the higher end of this spectrum enjoy an abundance of resources—to the point where consumerism and triviality have become a stable of our cultural zeitgeist—the rest of our civilization are living under broken straw roofs and are watching their homes and crops burn, wilt, or disappear under tidal currents as rising sea levels and worsening climate environments are increasing the severity and prevalence of droughts, floods, and wildfires—making life on the edges of society even more precarious than it has been in the past. On the technological side, while one end is on the cusp of a massive jump in civilizational progress through the development of ai technology paired with automation, the people on the other end of the Digital Divide are struggling to build the infrastructure necessary just to access the internet.

Source: https://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Visualizations/InternetMap

Source: John Matherly on X: "Pinged all devices on the Internet, here's a map of where they're located :) http://t.co/G3fiNcKCul" / X (twitter.com)

Depicted above are visualization maps that show the density of internet connections across the world. What these graphics reveal, with striking clarity, is the disparity of access seen between different parts of our global community. If you have only lived your life within areas dense with connections, it would be hard for you to understand what it is like to live without such a transformative tool. Yet while we take these resources for granted and—in many cases—misuse them, there are countless people and communities living within the areas on the map blanketed in darkness that are completely cut off from the vast resources the internet houses and continues to enable the birth of. This is just one example of the disparity in resource prevalence and technological progress seen among different parts of our global community and how it is leading to a stark division of our societies, one half that sees abundance---struggling with hyper-stimulation and over-consumption---and the other half that lives in precarity---struggling with scarcity and trying to survive day by day.

My life goals and the focus of the infinite game I choose to play is predicated on adapting technology to address this disparity. It is a mission predicated on the hope that, collectively, we can build the systems and resources necessary to enrich not just our own lives but the lives of our entire global community. The heart of this is building technology centered around developing communal resources and facilitating the process and prevalence of open collaboration within local to international communal groups, organizations, and individuals in order to build coalitions that allow us to create the support systems necessary to uplift those that are losing their footing within our society. This is captured, in essence, by one of the founding pillars of Crescere Nexum: The Tide. This pillar is predicated on the goal of linking and harnessing all the separate waves of positive change created by people and organizations around the world working to make it a better place and coalescing these waves into one giant tide that sweeps across the globe---collectively raising all our boats in the process. It is centered on the principle that divided we are weak, but together we are unstoppable. To put it another way, divided, our efforts could sometime seem like drops in the bucket---especially in places facing extreme challenges---but together our efforts can cause that bucket to overflow---enabling us to overcome any challenge we may face.

The key to doing this is digital technology. Digital technology allows us the capacity and reach to spread resources across the world. Through it, one can gain access to almost resource from anywhere in the world. Not only do we need to realign our digital technology towards this purpose, but we also need to expand accessibility to digital tools while adapting their use to the communities that actually need it. By doing so, we can help organize the allies and resources necessary to address both the collective and individual problems we face. Through these coalitions empowered by digital technology, we can build the systems necessary to realize the original vision that birthed the technological revolution: a prosperous and interconnected world. A world where everyone, regardless of where they were born, has the foundation and reach to access any resource, collaborate with anyone, and solve any problem they may come across.