Inadequate
While I am sitting here in a small room in Nihonbashi, spending pointless hours surfing community sites and blogs on the net and moe’ing like a newborn fan over anime girls, an INSEADmate of mine – 3 years younger, equivalently less work experience, absolutely frivolous but also a significantly more intelligent than yours truly – is cleaning up shop as a marketing manager in a major corp’s Shanghai branch. She’s doing it alone, and with little more than a shakey grasp of Mandarin. Kinda puts your current aspirations into perspective, eh.
I have never been a competitive person, perhaps because I feel only the need to excel to my own, self-defined, standards. However, when I go over the jobs and the companies I have spoken to over the last several weeks, I can’t help but feel that I’m just not that good.
I have an MBA. I am reasonably smart. I do have pretty decent EQ. My experience could be better, but my qualifications overall don’t look half bad. This begs the question… so what is my potential? Somehow, I think it’s more than what I could find at web project venture shops that pay minimal foreigner’s wage.
Then again, if you were to suggest something like, say, “Brand Management for a Major Computer Company Obssessed with Making the Numbers”, I’d have to say it’s not for me, either. I might be able to do the work, or I might not… but I’d definitely be unhappy. And so I aim for smaller companies, which do not pay as well, do not have grand-slam projects worth billions of potential future earnings, do not require you to Show the Results in Stark, Unmistakeable, Undeniable, Bottomline Figures.
I think I am psychologically allergic to the requirement to deliver defined measureable output based upon manipulating indirectly effective inputs against a huge amount of uncontrollable variables. Ie get out into the real world, fight other massive corps with other really smart managers, and make the target. This could be because I am afraid of failure, that a stark failure here is a reflection of my own inadequacy.
I like to be able to feel the result of everything I do, more or less directly, more or less immediately. This is easier with a small company. The results are no doubt much smaller in scale too, but that means it’s easier to wrap my head around the whole thing.
Safety. Security. Responsibility. Power. Risk. Reward.
I am torn… Big fish in a small pond? Small fish in a big pond? Ah, but never small fish in a small pond, no matter how interesting and warm that pond is. I think my pride won’t let me do that.
No, not when you have friends making waves over in the big pool. Perhaps I am competitive, just a little bit. After all, gotta feel good about yourself too, in five years time.
