I changed my mind, it was all worth it

Watch me debate myself

There will be no cynical content in this post after this cartoon, I promise. Art by Stephanie Davidson

I’ve been feeling a little complain-y recently. While I try to maintain a curious, balanced tone here in this newsletter, the topics I write about—chronic illness, the physical and psychological effects of modern work culture, infertility, the vicissitudes of motherhood—all have a naturally negative bent. Or maybe negative isn’t the right word. Critical? Worse, complain-y?

On top of that, writing personal nonfiction is always going to feel a little navel gazey. After all, the subject is myself. Essayists have long been self deprecatingly aware of this; as E.B. White wrote, “only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.”

So this effort is both kind of self absorbed, and kind of negative, in the most ungenerous description of the work. And sometimes, like now, I feel a bit ungenerous towards the work.

In this moment of feeling complain-y I decided to do a little writing exercise and look at the opposite perspective. I thought: I could use a little challenge today! And I’m a girl who loves a good writing exercise. (As a bonus, I have included a few of my favorite writing exercises at the end of this post!)

So here I go—I’m going to tell you why pushing myself to my limit in my early career was a really great decision. This is the opposite of how I usually write about it. Part of what prompted this examination is my recent, fantastic conversation with

Emma Simpson

, coming out on The Lady’s Illness Library podcast next week. Talking to her reminded me that there are really, fantastically positive things about being a highly driven, hardworking person, and I don’t usually write about these.

It is useful to intentionally look from a different perspective like this because it highlights the fact that nothing is simple, and very few things are just good or bad. It also forces us to remember that there are many right ways to live a life, and pushes against the insidious urge to promote our own way of living as the best one (usually, I think, we do this in order to fend off any doubts we have about our choices). Finally, it helps us break mental habits and remain open to new ideas, rather than coming to the same conclusion over and over until that trench is so deep there’s no way out.

Warning: if you are new here, please do not take this post completely at face value. Counter arguments can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and in basically any other Inner Workings content 🙃. I feel the need to make an overarching statement that I don’t believe any of these benefits are worth sacrificing one’s mental or physical health.

As a quick background, I began my career at McKinsey and then I started a company, ran it as CEO for five years and sold it. I usually write about how shitty all those experiences were, and how morally compromised I felt during that time. Now, ladies and gents, here’s why working at McKinsey and being a CEO was awesome and definitely the right decision and not misguided at all…

I became highly efficient and effective at doing tasks

This is something that I began to develop in school—the ability to just sit down and get sh*t done. But the real training came from having far, far too much to do at any one time, always, for years, beginning at the age of 23. For a decade, I had to practice extreme prioritization every day, over and over, and drilled myself in just sitting down and jamming it out.

Furthermore, for a perfectionist like me, a big part of this training was learning to release things into the world that aren’t perfect. When you have too much to do, all on quick deadlines, you just have to let it go. It was a painful thing for me to learn, but I did eventually get the hang of it. McKinsey consultants constantly talk about the 80/20 rule—you can do work at eighty percent quality with twenty percent effort, and that should be the goal. Trying to improve the work product beyond that has diminishing returns, and you’ll end up spending way more effort to make it another five percent better.

It’s a consulting cliche, but I have also found it to be generally true in my work. 80/20 is programmed into me now, so I’m mostly able to let go of the urge to push and push to make something better and better when it’s already good enough. (The one big exception here, in my experience, is art. When I write literary essays like this or this, the 80/20 rule goes out the window—that work is not about efficiency).

For example, this post will take me about two and a half hours from the time I sat down at the blank page to the time it’s done and scheduled, including the time it took to take a break for iced tea refills and to breastfeed my baby one time. I do not have other random tabs open, I am not thinking about other things. I am writing this, and then it will be done. That is a superpower. Thank you McKinsey.

I developed a high bar for difficulty

I remember when I was in the depths of my first breastfeeding journey, and I was lying on the bed with tears streaming down my face after yet another horrifying twenty minute session of vasospasms in my nipple, which feels like knives stabbing into your flesh or strong electric shocks. I was feverish from a breast infection and hadn’t slept more than two hours in weeks, and my mom said something like,

“It makes sense that you’re feeling this way—this is the hardest thing you’ve ever done.”

Immediately, reflexively, I snapped back,

“No, it’s not.”

And that was true. The hardest thing I’ve done is start and run my company, and for many reasons related to my character and gender, that was really, really, especially hard for me. Parenting two kids under three is often hard, but not nearly as hard as the company. Marriage is hard, but not like the company. I will never do any work as hard as that again. While I believe that there were many other ways to develop thick skin that would have been less damaging to my mental and physical health, I recognize that it made certain other parts of life seem easier by comparison, forever, and that is helpful to me now.

It’s worth noting that my therapist firmly believes that the degree to which I am willing to suffer through hard things is definitively a liability, not a strength. I agree. I also wrote about the problem of working really hard on things you don’t believe in here. But right now we are doing this exercise looking at what is gained from an intense early career, so we’ll put aaaalllll of that aside for the moment.

I laid a foundation for future endeavors

I do not worry too much about taking a step back from my career for this period of time with young kids. Actually, that’s not true: when I’m sleep deprived and stressed and my kid is screaming, I worry a lot about my future and whether I’ll ever do anything besides parenting again. BUT, when I’m in a calm, rational state, I feel confident that I can re-enter the work world in any number of different ways.

My one mentor at McKinsey, a female partner who ended up leaving shortly after I did, once told me: don’t quit until you quit. In other words, don’t preemptively take the gas off your career in anticipation of having a family and slowing down. Push and push, all the way up to the time when you decide to step back. That way, the thinking went, you will reach the highest level you can, which will make it easier to reenter the workforce at a high level when you return.

I have long been very cynical about this advice—(what me? Cynical about advice from a McKinsey partner?)—because it feels deaf to all the potential goals in life other than “being as powerful/rich/conventionally successful as possible.” But I can’t deny that there is truth to it. Pushing that hard got me somewhere from which I won’t easily fall. Even if I slide back a little, it provides me with many career options going forward.

I made money

The most obvious and concrete thing I gained from pushing myself really hard in really conventional ways is, well, money. I made enough to live and start a family in a major city without being stressed about money, which in this current environment is extraordinarily rare—so shockingly, depressingly rare. I also gave myself enough buffer to step back from the intensity of my early career and do this mom thing for awhile. All of this is a precious privilege.

There are no caveats to that. I have all kinds of mixed feelings about the money and how I earned it—guilt and pride and self-loathing and self-congratulations—but it is undeniable that what I gained from the money is huge.

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Ok folks! There’s my best effort at presenting some resounding positivity about my high-flying early career. I would love to hear what you think of this devil’s advocate exercise, particularly from those of you who read my usual criticism. Keep me honest, that’s what Inner Workings is all about!

As a bonus, here are some writing exercises that I love. These are good for writers looking to generate interesting content, but they also work for anyone looking to process the events of a life! It’s best to do these in a free-write format: set a timer for fifteen or twenty minutes and write. If you choose to edit, do that after the timer is over.

• Take the opposite perspective of your habit. This is what I tried to do here!

• Imagine and alternate set of events. I love this one in literary essays. Take a past event and imagine what would have happened if you had said or done something differently, and write that scene. Another version is to write an imagined ending to something that hasn’t ended yet. I did this in this essay, imagining an alternate conversation I could have had with a sexist asshole.

• Tell a scene or story in two different ways, both true. In this one, you take one set of events and tell it two ways. Since writing nonfiction involves choosing a set of details from infinite possible real details, you can always choose a different set and tell the same true story completely differently. I did this recently here, and also in this essay about infertility.