Telling Ourselves

At the height of the dot-com craze, at an “Internet boot camp” near Silicon Valley, a thousand people gathered in a ballroom to learn how to become Internet entrepreneurs. PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation told the audience how to do it. But the real action was between presentations. During the coffee breaks, participants could go to booths, lined up as if going to confession, to tell their stories to and receive feedback from specialists on the “elevator pitch,” the two-minute compact story used to talk your way in the door of a new career. The waiting lines were long.

In one of those lines was Roy Holstrom, a fifty-three-year-old mechanical engineer. A victim of his manufacturing firm’s last wave of downsizing, Roy had quickly come to the conclusion, in the spirit of Groucho Marx, that he did not want to join any corporation that would have him. He had spent his severance time in the library, searching for patents without a home. After months of research, he had found the needle in a haystack—a solar energy device—and had tracked down the inventor, proposing that they join forces. Now he was at boot camp, hoping to find capital or advisory board members. And to get those, he knew he needed to get the story just right. He was in line for a second round of coaching on his pitch.

People devote considerable energy to developing their stories—what key experiences marked their path; what meanings they attribute to those experiences; and, more importantly, what common thread links old and new.^[23] Precisely for that reason, some academics argue that interviewing people about why and how they are changing is a flawed approach. Interviews, the argument goes, just yield a self-presentation: the cleaned-up identity a person puts on for the outside world. They can never unearth the “truth” because, as any good social psychologist will tell us, people can’t resist embellishing their stories, making themselves look braver and smarter than they really are and coming up with logical explanations for events that are really random. So our stories never reflect objective reality.

That is why revising our stories is a fundamental tool for reinventing ourselves. One of the central identity problems that has to be worked out during a career transition is deciding on the story that links the old and new self. Until that is solved, the external audience to whom we are selling our reinvention remains dubious, and we too feel unsettled and uncertain of our own identity. To be compelling, the story must explain why we must reinvent ourselves, who we are becoming, and how we will get there. Early versions are always rough drafts. They get floated to friends, families, and new contacts, whose reactions prompt revisions. Since often we don’t know exactly where we are going or what the critical events along the way will be, the story will necessarily go through many iterations before it is finalized.

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career