Dear Paul,
Congratulations, you are graduating from high school and the next chapter of your life awaits you. This is you from the future, we are 40 now. You’ll never believe what we do for a living. I’ll leave some clues later.
We’ve got this unique opportunity to alter our economic future so pay attention! This company called Google will happen in a year. Go ahead and invest in that, along with this thing called an iPod that you can bring your music around with. Your thousands of mp3s will not go to waste. Apple makes a comeback, so yeah… Invest in them.
Here are some things to do right away: Your idea of trying the long-distance thing with your high school sweetheart is a waste of time. I know you are planning to declare Psychology as a major; don’t do that either. You haven’t realized this yet, but you are unreal at learning languages. Choose linguistics and learn as many languages as you possibly can.
As you grow up, you’ll encounter two mentors who give you hugely helpful advice. The first piece of advice is from this guy named Charlie who helped you when you were interviewing for jobs. He told us that we never seemed grounded; for example, if we were asked why we made a decision, we’d say that it just seemed like the right thing to do, or that we just acted on feelings.
He told us to always convey the idea that everything we do in life is done for a reason. We didn’t live in Africa because we felt ‘yada yada yada’, No! We went there to master French, or we went there to start our teaching career (Yes, you end up living in Senegal for a couple of years).
Now get this. As it turns out, the place where we work now is… interesting. Almost every week, we get to hear someone really interesting talk about life. Just this past week, it was a four-star General! He’s an Admiral who said he’d spent a collective total of 11 years or something unreal like that on a sub.
He shared this beautiful analogy about how we go about our lives. He described the ocean as having three depths; a very deep depth, a shallow depth, and then an area in between. The deep one he described as being calm and with predictable currents allowing the crew to park the boat and chill out. The shallow depth he described as being turbulent and requiring constant attention. Part of the job required navigating the boat to both depths, and his analogy was that we do something similar in life.
When we are up near the surface, we are focusing on our actions and connections. In other words, we are focused on who we are with and what we’re doing. When we are down deep, we are focused on our relationships and our character. In other words, we are focused on our close friends, family, and ourselves!
The part of this that you will find useful is as follows: You already know that people who only stay at that shallow depth tend to only focus on who their friends are and who they are going to hang out with this weekend. You know that those people need to dive their boats to shallow depths sometimes, too.
But what you don’t realize is that there is a flip side. The mistake you are making is that you’re staying down at 800 feet all the time. I know… We are the epitome of an introvert. If more than four people are talking at the same time, we can’t focus on the one who is talking to us.
It’s hard, so here is the other piece of advice that another mentor has given us. There is this faculty Christmas party every year, and we hate going to it. When I mention to my mentor that I’m not going, she pulls me aside and gives me this talk. To summarize, the point was that everybody has things that make them uncomfortable. We could either do nothing and be uncomfortable, or “turn the uncomfortable into the comfortable”.
Sure enough, you ended up connecting with a colleague who was just like you! If something is uncomfortable, embrace the discomfort and try to wrestle with it for a bit.
To summarize, convey a sense of purpose in everything you do, and always try to turn the uncomfortable into the comfortable. Anyway, now we are guilty of insider trading. Burn this letter.
Paul
Written by Paul Murray