Who Is Designing Your Life
Updated: Oct 6
“What holds many people back from attaining the success they want isn’t a lack of effort or talent. It’s the fear of other people’s opinions.”
Michael Gervais
How much of the life we are living did we actually choose?
I've been thinking about this question a lot lately. We are influenced constantly, by our parents, our friends, our careers, the people we admire, the organizations we work for and increasingly, by the algorithms deciding what we see every day.
I've been thinking about it through a few different lenses recently. Michael Gervais has written extensively about the fear of other people's opinions and how it can shape our behaviour. Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon seemed to be driven by an unusual level of curiosity rather than conventional definitions of success. Rick Rubin talks about creating without constantly trying to anticipate what an audience will want.
I also see a version of it in my own career, particularly in the decision not to keep specializing in a conventional career.
And the more I've thought about it, the more I think there is an interesting connection to leadership and culture. If our environment can shape the direction of our lives, what responsibility do leaders have for the environment they create for other people?
The Plinko Ball
Sometimes I think we are all a little like a Plinko ball.
You drop the ball at the top and it starts making its way down through a series of pegs. Every time it hits something, it gets nudged in a slightly different direction. You don't control every movement, and by the time it reaches the bottom, you can end up somewhere very different from where you might have expected.
I think life works in a similar way.
Our parents give us an idea of what a good life looks like. Teachers tell us what we are good at. Friends influence what we care about. Our first job shapes our understanding of what work is supposed to be. A promotion changes what we think success means. The people around us influence what we consider normal.
None of these things necessarily determines our lives, but they all have an influence on the direction we take.
Social media has made this even more interesting. We can now spend hours every week looking at other people's careers, businesses, homes, bodies, vacations, relationships and lifestyles. We don't necessarily decide that we want any of those things, but repeated exposure changes what we notice and what we compare ourselves against.
A person who spends enough time looking at entrepreneurs building companies, athletes optimizing their bodies and people travelling the world can start to feel like those things are simply what successful people do.
The algorithm doesn't need to tell you what to want. It just needs to keep showing you what other people seem to want.
Over time, some of those nudges become part of our own definition of a good life.
The Fear of Other People's Opinions
This is where Michael Gervais' work has really caught my attention.
Gervais uses the term FOPO, the fear of people's opinions, to describe the preoccupation we can develop with how other people perceive us. It can show up in very ordinary situations. We change what we say, the risks we take and even the way we behave at work because we are anticipating how someone else might judge us.
I don't think the answer is to stop caring what anyone thinks.
There are people whose opinions I care about a great deal. My family, close friends, people I respect and people who have earned the right to give me feedback all matter.
The problem is when we stop making our own decisions because we are trying to manage everyone's perception of us.
That can happen without us really noticing.
We take the promotion because it is what successful people are supposed to do. We stay in the career because it would be difficult to explain why we are leaving. We don't pursue an interest because it doesn't fit with the identity we've built. We choose the option that will make our parents proud, our colleagues impressed or our friends envious.
None of those decisions are necessarily wrong.
But if enough of them accumulate, we can end up living a life that makes perfect sense to everyone around us without ever asking whether it makes sense to us.
Follow The Interesting Thing
I've also been thinking about this through Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon.
I recently listened to Thorp's A Man for All Markets, and one of the things that comes through very clearly is his curiosity. His career moved from mathematics to blackjack to investing and technology, and he repeatedly followed interesting problems rather than staying neatly inside one professional category.
Claude Shannon had a similar quality.
He is famous for his work in information theory, but he was interested in an enormous range of things outside his formal work. He built machines, experimented with games and explored ideas because he found them interesting. Thorp and Shannon even collaborated on a wearable computer designed to help beat roulette.
There is something I find appealing about people who allow themselves to follow an interesting question without immediately asking where it is going to lead.
Rick Rubin talked about something similar in a recent conversation on The Diary of a CEO. He described the creative process as something that needs to develop before there is necessarily a clear understanding of what you are making. His approach seems to be much more internally driven than trying to anticipate what an audience will want.
That idea extends well beyond making music.
What happens when we allow ourselves to be interested in something simply because we are interested in it?
Maybe it becomes a hobby. Maybe it changes our career. Maybe it leads to a completely unexpected opportunity. Maybe it doesn't lead anywhere at all.
I think we lose something when every interest has to justify itself immediately.
Design The Environment
The other side of this idea has been on my mind from a leadership perspective.
If our environments can influence the direction of our own lives, then leaders have an enormous amount of influence over the people around them.
When you watch people who have accomplished things at an extraordinary level, one thing that often strikes me is how much their work seems to resemble play. They are obviously working incredibly hard, but they also seem to spend a lot of time doing things they are naturally good at, deeply interested in and genuinely enjoy.
That has made me think differently about the role of a leader.
The goal isn't to make every day at work feel like play. That's unrealistic. There are difficult conversations, tedious tasks, deadlines and plenty of things that nobody particularly enjoys doing.
But I do think a leader should be trying to create an environment where people regularly get to operate in the areas where they are at their best.
Can you position people on your team into their own zone of genius? Can you understand what they are unusually good at, what gives them energy and where those strengths are most valuable to the organization?
I was thinking about this recently while listening to the How I Built This episode on Seventh Generation. They were thinking intentionally about culture very early, when their 1989 office included things like a nap room, a ping pong table and spaces designed to encourage people to speak openly. But the example that really stayed with me was something else.
They had a weekly award for the employee who made the biggest mistake.
It sounds strange until you understand why they did it.
The company was growing quickly, and people had to make decisions every day without constantly going back to a boss for permission. If people were afraid to make a mistake, they would stop taking ownership. Worse, they might make a bad decision and then hide it, leaving everyone else vulnerable to making the same mistake again.
The failure award changed the incentive. It made it safer to bring mistakes into the open, which meant people could move faster, learn from one another and take more ownership.
That, to me, is much more interesting than a nap room.
The culture wasn't about creating a workplace that looked unconventional. It was about creating an environment that supported the way they needed people to operate.
In the early days of a company, this is relatively easy. A founder has a strong point of view and can hire a small group of people who genuinely believe in what they are trying to build. You end up with a group of evangelists who don't need a handbook explaining the culture because they are the culture.
The really difficult part is maintaining that alignment as the organization grows.
The founder can't personally shape every interaction anymore, so the culture has to start showing up in who gets hired, how people are developed, how teams are structured, what gets rewarded and, ultimately, what the organization chooses to do.
The best leaders I know are constantly trying to understand this. How do I put the right person in the right place? How do I create the conditions for them to do their best work? How do I give them enough ownership that they can actually use their judgment?
That is culture as an operating system, not culture as a list of values on a wall.
When Culture Becomes Identity
When that works, something interesting happens.
People want to work there. They hear about the organization through other people, they are attracted to the culture and, once they're there, they don't want to leave.
But the influence of culture doesn't necessarily stop with the people inside the organization.
It can start to show up in the product, the customer experience and the brand. The people inside the organization are aligned with what they are trying to create, and that alignment becomes visible to the people who interact with it.
Apple is an extreme example.
I've experienced the little pang of judgment when someone texts me from an Android phone and the message turns green. That's not a rational assessment of messaging technology. It's a tiny example of how deeply a company can embed itself in someone's identity and expectations.
At its best, that kind of alignment creates customers who don't just like a product. They identify with it. They recommend it, defend it and want other people to experience it.
The culture has moved beyond the organization itself and become part of the experience people have with the brand.
That is when culture becomes much more powerful than a set of internal values. It starts reinforcing itself.
The right people want to work there. Those people create better experiences. Those experiences attract the right customers. Those customers become advocates. Their enthusiasm attracts more of the right people.
The culture starts becoming a flywheel.
The Question
I don't think there is a simple answer to any of this.
Most of us are going to continue moving through life, hitting one peg and then another, adjusting our direction as we go. We will be influenced by other people, and we will influence other people in ways we don't even realize.
But occasionally it is worth looking up from the path we are on and asking whether we actually chose it.
And if you're a leader, there is another question worth asking.
What kind of environment are you creating for the people around you?
Are you giving people the opportunity to do work that uses their strengths? Are they connected to what the organization is trying to accomplish? Does the culture you describe actually show up in the way people experience the company?
Ultimately, does that experience make its way all the way to the customer?
We might spend our lives chasing a pot of gold, only to realize that what we are ultimately left with is a pot of memories.
I'd like mine to be memories from a life I was actually interested in living.
As a leader, I'd like to create organizations where other people can say the same thing about the time they spent working there.
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