Hi Mini-Me,
I’m your future self. I know that sounds weird, but I’m you years from now. In the future, you’ll have a happy life. You won’t be content until your mid-40s because you have a need for financial security. You’ll always be thinking of your next big thing that will allow you to retire. Even if you achieve that “big thing,” you probably wouldn’t retire because you like building things.
The Lost, yet Spiritual Years
Years from now, you’ll have an inefficient career path. In your early 20s, you won’t know what your career should be. By your mid-20s, you’ll figure it out, but you’ll have to start college all over again since you wasted your first year at college after high school graduation, squandering money and time. You’ll figure out that you want to go into Indian healthcare, which is dependent on federal funding, so you’ll get a B.S. in Political Science and a master’s dress in Healthcare Administration.
Getting your master’s degree will expose you to an urban environment, causing you to stay in Seattle rather than return to your hometown. This decision affects your ability to get a job right out of graduate school since most of your work experience is in Indian healthcare. You’re not marketable because of your background. Fortunately, one of your professors will take pity of you, so your first job will be in marketing at one of the largest delivery systems in the area. The skills you acquire in marketing will finally put you on the path of healthcare technology products.
I Want to Be a Manager When I Grow Up?
As a kid, no one thinks, “I want to be a product marketing manager when I grow up,” but that’s what happened to you. You became a product marketing manager that led to becoming a product manager, leading you to discover your love of defining and building products. At this time, you discover your natural love of management and leadership. You eventually become a department head and then vice president. Again, you never thought as a kid that you’d want to be a manager. But who does as a child since we’re busying playing with Legos or being a team captain on a high school basketball team?
An Entrepreneur? No way!
But what will really shock you is that you’ll become an entrepreneur. As a child, you have an aversion to risk, so this outcome is inconsistent with your basic personality. However, along the way, you’ll develop the love of building things, but not maintaining things. This trait shows up in your early 20s in your first real job in healthcare when you’re hired to build a third-party reimbursement system for health insurance, then again when you become a department head and you take disparate direct reports and form them into a cohesive marketing department. Your favorite job as a Vice President in a healthcare technology department is creating your own marketing department from scratch, based on your own tools, templates, and work experience. Through a strange series of events, you’ll be a partner in a LLC that will sell its properties to MTV Networks. Remember being a couch potato, watching Duran Duran, Missing Persons, and Madonna on MTV in the early 80s? As in, “I want my MTV!” This life event places you on the path of being a co-founder that successfully sold its business, a coveted goal of all internet/technology entrepreneurs. Who knew? Not you, when you were little.
Your Favorite Things
Right now, you’re in Kindergarten. You don’t know what the internet is or what an entrepreneur is. It hasn’t been invented yet. For now, in the near future, you’ll love music, tennis, and basketball. You’ll go through a KISS phase. I’m not sure why your Mom didn’t freak out about that. Apparently, she saw it as harmless. But if I was her, I wouldn’t have let you go to that KISS concert at Key Arena in the summer of 1977. What was she thinking? If CSI was on TV back then, she wouldn’t have let you go. And you would have been too cautious to want to go.
In junior high and high school, basketball will be the focus of your life. And you’ll be good, really good. Your natural talent will enable you to be the youngest player to be co-captain on your team in middle and high school. Go figure, but how will you use these leadership lessons in the future?
Team Sports Socializes You for Business
From team sports, you’ll learn how to be a leader. More importantly, you’ll learn that your high standards for yourself help your career in the future. By participating in sports, you’ll learn time management, grace under pressure, and passion. As a team captain, you’ll learn how to lead by example. You’ll understand that you can’t do what you always want, but what’s always right. You learn discipline from hours spent going to practice and doing homework on the road.
Unfortunately, since basketball will be your focus in middle and high school, you fail to take an interest in academics. In the future, you’ll be fascinated with math and science. But in school, you’ll hate these subjects. In fact, there isn’t a subject that you have the same passion for like basketball. Your parents will indulge your passion for tennis and basketball, but not instill the importance of academics as much as they should. They don’t realize that they should be emphasizing college and getting a master’s degree. Since they don’t have this background, they’re unable to mentor you through this significant career stage. Your mother wants what’s best for you, but she’s busy working, raising you, and paying the bills. She doesn’t realize you have the potential to be a business professional.
Master and Apprentice
You’ll find your way and get back into college, but it will take years to achieve bachelor’s degree. However, at 19 years old, you will meet someone who will know your potential and set you on the right track to get to your future. Her name is Inalee. She’ll be the mentor you never had. She’ll be your best friend, your big sister, your grandmother, and your “master.” She’s everything to you, coming in a close second to your mother.
As her apprentice, you’ll learn the guiding principles that will make you successful in business and in life in the future. She’ll “grow you up” where your mother left off. She’ll be so important to you that you two will talk to each other every day for 24 years. Unfortunately, Inalee will pass on in May 2006 just two weeks before getting acquired, as if she knows that you’re ready to live without her. But be prepared, this is one death you’ll never get over. As days go by, you constantly think, “Am I living the life that InaLee saw me living?”
Letters to You
So many things happen to you in your future that you wished you could go back and make changes so you can learn certain skills or specific subjects in school. There are little things along the way that you don’t see as an important, but are when it comes to how your life will unfold. You’ll wish you had letters from your future self to know when you should or shouldn’t do something. You’ll not want to change outcomes because you believe everything happens for a reason. You will want to have better outcomes or more opportunities rather than be constrained with the skills you left your childhood, teens, 20s, or even 30s. You should have learned to enjoy math and science, but you were too busy playing sports.
So in the spirit of mentoring a younger version me, I’m writing letters to you so you can course correct and manage your career and life better. I wouldn’t want to change my life events because “everything happens for a reason.” I’m coaching you so you can have greater knowledge in areas that will add breadth and depth to your experiences.
Good luck! And keep an open mind as you read your letters.
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