Rithesh Menon

Two years ago this week, I decided to make the leap from the private sector into the nonprofit sector. Or better yet, I decided to go find my passion. Two years later, I am pleased to report that while I haven’t found my passion, I am as happy as can be. 

Sounds contradictory? Yep. Read on. 

At StartingBloc (where I work), we do something very interesting. We incubate people. Not ideas, not start-ups but people. What this means is that not only do we help you discover your passion but we try and make sure that your passion endures.  

Yes, contrary to popular notion, passion isn’t something that will shine through against the odds and act as your north star. If you subdue it, oppress it, ignore it, it will stay hidden. It won’t shine through and it certainly won’t show you the way. 

Often, we hide our passion subconsciously or as a force of habit. Other times, societal norms will do the trick. As so many books and TED talks will tell you, the power to conform is the greatest enemy of creativity and by correlation, passion. 

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When I was young, I liked to draw. I was quite good at it. By the time I was fourteen, I had moved on from water colors to oil paints. I toyed with the idea of being creative in some way when I grew up. But I didn’t. Instead, I quit art altogether when I was fifteen. 

Mostly, life got in the way. Everyone around me was studying science, math and computers. I had to do the same. I was told that learning wasn’t necessary – but studying was. So, like many teenagers at my age, I was indoctrinated into the rat race of life. 

The same happened with music, another hobby of mine. Till the age of about thirteen, I took regular training. It went the way of my artistic expression. It died a slow and lonely death, crushed under the weight of math, chemistry, class rankings and the SATs. 

When I reached college, I chose to study architecture. As much as I tried, I couldn’t be passionate about it. It was almost as if I lacked the necessary genetic build up. Whatever passion I had a few years before was gone. It couldn’t endure the banality of my life.

***

When I went through StartingBloc as a Fellow some three years ago, it as a bit like time travel. I felt that I was taken back to when I was twelve or thirteen. I felt the surge of creativity pouring me. I joked that I finally understood what the Force was all about.

When you spend sixteen hours a day for five days straight with a hundred or so people just like you, something extraordinary happens. You start to think anything is possible. Something you last felt when you were a child. Before you joined the rat race. 

So you learn like you were meant to, and you start to build bonds with these people around you. You know you have only five days but you act as if you have a lifetime to chat, learn and share. It’s because you do. The bonds are true and they last – past the Institute. 

It isn’t just that you are passionate again, it’s that you have a tribe to share it with. It also means more than just a support group. It means that no matter, where you go and what you do, you can always return and pick up where you left off.

***

This is how passion endures. It needs a support system. Extraordinary people we admire often have this. Some times it’s obvious but some times it’s hidden. Unless you nurture your passion, it will fade. Like all things in life, we often learn this lesson a little too late. 

So two years ago, I rediscovered creativity and I am very close to discovering my passion. I am less concerned of how it will play out. I don’t think that being passionate always means being unreasonable. It means understanding when to be unreasonable. 

For me, that point was two years ago. For some of us, it is yet to come. I think the challenge is to read the signs and follow the trail. Still, it is good to know that there is hope and all you have to do is look for it. 

It takes various shapes and forms – the StartingBloc community is just an example. It also has a spot for every one. It doesn’t matter if you are a creative or want to learn to be one. If you have passion and want to make it endure, you will always be welcome. 

A few months ago, I read a talk given by William Deresiewicz at West Point last year. I urge you to read it, it is a great speech and one that forced me to revisit my own definition and understanding of leadership.

The topic of original thought interests me so much is because I believe it to be one of the most important and underrated qualities for leadership. In his talk, Deresiewicz mentions how a lack of original thought is leading to a crisis in leadership in America:

What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

Later on, Deresiewicz makes the connection between solitude of thought and leadership. In his own words, this can seem “like a contradiction”. As he later writes, solitude doesn’t mean just being alone, it can: 

…can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better.

What I took away from his talk was that it often isn’t the actual original thought that matters, but the process itself. It is the ability, the discipline, the training that we all need to to have an original thought and to not be afraid of it. 

I say afraid, because we are always under pressure to conform – not because of fear of being singled out, but fear of falling behind.

In the rat race to be the first to know, it is important that we see, read and hear everything everyone else does; because we need to be in the know. We are always connected because we believe we can’t afford to not be. 

This begs the question that what can we do, in this age of hyper-connectivity to train ourselves to have an original thought? In other words, how can we ensure the individuality of our thoughts and the strength of our convictions in what we do. 

I have taken a few pointers from Deresiewicz’s talk itself. I have started to read more quality literature versus more quantity. This means fewer feeds in my Google reader and fewer Tweets from the people I follow. It also means less time on social networks.  

Social networks aside, I have also started to spend more time thinking about what I read and then conversing about it with friends. This last part is also a suggestion from Deresiewicz; what he calls the “deep friendship of intimate conversation“. 

Lastly, I think it’s important to test your thoughts by acting upon them. Though to be successful at this, I believe you need one more skill: being a good listener. This is something that Deresiewicz does not mention explicitly but alludes to, in his talk. 

Will any of this work? I don’t know and I doubt I will know. I can only hope that when the time comes and I have a difficult decision to make, I am able to do it without self- doubt and without wavering in my conviction. 

Eight months ago, a reality TV star and a married Premier League footballer (soccer player) began an affair. Frankly, it wasn’t all that interesting to me till about two weeks ago when a Twitter user identified the couple in a tweet. 

Thus began a new chapter in the drama that has come to be known as The 2011 British Super-Injunction Controversy. I personally prefer Twittergate. What is really interesting about this whole affair is something known as the ‘Barbra Streisand Effect‘.

The effect basically states that the more you try to hide or remove information (primarily on the world wide web), it will more often than not result in that information actually becoming more publicized. Yes, the effect is named after Barbra Streisand. 

In the case of the footballer, his undoing was when he decided to sue Twitter after his name got tweeted. This result was tens of thousands of mentions of his name by various Twitter users all in protest of his super-injunction against the press. 

Kashmir Hill at Forbes says it perfectly: 

Filing lawsuits has a nasty effect of bringing even more attention to that thing you are filing the lawsuit over. The Guardian has published a graph making fun of he-who-shall-not-be-named, not including his name, but showing how many times his name has been mentioned on social media channels since filing his lawsuit. 

It didn’t help that he was identified in parliament by an MP either. For now, the footballer has successfully created his own PR disaster – all because he couldn’t understand the lack of extent of privacy laws on the internet. 

On the flip side, this is the most I have ever had to google Barbra Streisand. This and when I was looking for Duck Sauce. 

Over dinner with a friend last night, the topic of ‘favorite characters’ came up. We were all chatting about characters from books, movies and TV shows that we considered favorites and those that we identified with. 

This got me thinking about a well crafted character in a book or on TV and what that really meant to me. Identifying with a character is simple enough – since you are essentially looking for yourself in a mirror that is the page of a book or a scene on TV. 

It is adopting a character as a favorite that is really the interesting process in our minds. We tend to oversimplify the process but in reality, it tells a lot of who we would like to try being (even if it is for a short period of time like a book or a movie).

I like to think of this as reinventing ourselves for a brief period of time. We step out of who we are and try to experience life as someone else. Seems almost autoscopic, but what it really means is that you are privy to the learnings of someone else’s life. 

***

One of my favorite characters from a book is Mr. Stevens from Remains of the Day. My affection for his character stems from from his ability to remain optimistic when all that he has trusted and known in his life has failed him. 

To me, it is terrifying to have to self-doubt your life’s work. Yet, Mr. Stevens does it and moves forward. The force of everything that I (as a reader) learned about him (as a character) from the preceding 244 pages in the book comes to a head and distills itself in one memorable sentence: 

Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. 

When I put myself in his place, I become depressed and deeply discouraged. Then, I remind myself that Mr. Stevens chose to take it in stride and move on. I teach myself that it is the best I can hope to be should such a moment arise in my life. 

***

Oddly enough, while one of my favorite characters is an English butler, the other one is a criminal drug lord. This is Russell ‘Stringer’ Bell, from The Wire, which I consider to be one of the greatest shows ever produced for TV. 

This is a character that I admire deeply because it is a recreation of the something we all admire – the brilliant and ambitious entrepreneur / business person except in a setting we all universally deplore – the world of drug-gangs in inner cities.  

As Bell builds his empire through the series, you begin to sympathize and maybe even admire his work. Yet, in the end he dies a gangster’s violent death – as retribution for his life and his work. There is no memorial, no eulogy and no remembrance. 

To me, his character brings out the inherent hypocrisy in all of us. I like who he is but not what he does. Yet in my own life, I choose so often to overlook such a character flaw. However, being Bell even for a minute exposes this hypocrisy like never before.

***

As I write this post, I am reminded of a brilliant piece by Robert Rowland Smith about reinvention as rediscovery. I like to think that reinventing ourselves briefly as characters in a book or a movie allow us to rediscover our own lives through their short, but memorable ones.