A punk
“Complacency leads to mediocrity.”
A cruel sequence of four words.
My older brother said it to my younger, in lieu of some argument the family was having about the latter’s grades. He wasn’t struggling in school; on the contrary, he had a 4.0, was taking advanced classes two years above his age, and already had a near-perfect SAT and ACT score as a sophomore in high school.
But that wasn’t enough for our family. Getting As at some “public school” was a given. They wanted more. Math camps, AP exams, honors courses, Olympiads. Any thing that you could study for and test for - you did. It wasn’t a matter of learning, it was a matter of status. Success was determined by your scores, and as a child, your self-worth was too.
That crescendo culminates in the final test of youth: college admissions. The only ivies worth their salt are Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The other good ones are MIT, Carnegie, and Stanford. The rest are fake: no-names that only serve as a reminder of your inadequacy years down the road. And God forbid if you went to a state school.
Well, I failed.
I went to the University of Texas at Austin. I submitted 20 college applications and was only accepted there. I did not get into the honors program. I did not get a scholarship. I did not get a 4.0. I did not get any internships.
I was expelled from Carnegie Mellon for truancy. I was accepted into their Master’s program for Computer Science, chose to study computational complexity out of pride, quickly realized I was out of my depths, and fell into a depressive hole. I lied to my advisor, my professors, my parents and spent my days skating around Pittsburgh smoking cigarettes and making regrettable life decisions.
I was a punk. And still am.
For all my quirks of personality, the one that’s strongest is the need to oppose authority. If I’m told to do something, even if it’s something rationally sound, my first instinct is to disagree. Not because I have any good reason to (though I’d hope I at least have some), but on ethic alone.
So school didn’t suit me. Neither did my parents. They applied the same principles that they had with pedagogy to the practice of. They read “Tiger Mom” and thought to do better. It was barbaric - I won’t lie. Yelling, shouting, even physical abuse was mundane in our household. Perhaps that would’ve all ended sooner if I had simply complied, but all that did was elicit a stronger response in return.
I’m fortunate to have grown and healed in ways I didn’t think possible. My parents and my brothers did too, despite their old habits re-surfacing now. Truly, at times, the normal relationship we have now seems miraculous. Yet, the past still stands and to the extent that I can, I won’t misrepresent it. And in some odd way, I’m grateful for it.
More and more, does writing this blog seem ill-advised for my career. I’ve grown aware of my (very small) readership and imagined a few scenarios in my head. But screw it, I suppose that means I’m writing something worthwhile.
The bar is the topic on my mind.
It’s a very Amazonian concept, one that I haven’t explicitly thought about in a while, but learned to live with. The bar is the standard to which you hold yourself and others. When we hire individuals, we evaluate whether they “raise the bar,” whether they are better than the average individual at that role. The idea being that if you continue to hire individuals that only raise the bar, you’ll continuously shift the average upwards.
I have a high bar. Some of it is individual: I hold myself to high expectations and I expect others to do the same. It’s a natural, if not honest, thing to do. I’ve learned that I’m certainly more popular when I don’t, but there’s an irony in that. Lowering expectations disrespects the other. I can afford people leniences and say “oh that’s good for you,” but how bigoted is that? How vain is it for me to categorize people as to what they can and cannot do, rather than treat them as equals?
So I don’t believe in a selective bar. There’s only one - my own.
And now’s the hard part. Raising the bar is hard. Very hard. You’re breaking the status quo. You’re walking in, saying “this is not the way we should be doing things” and waging war on precedent.
There’s a few ways people typically go about it. For one, fear. Fear is an incredibly effective way to spur action, as regrettable as it is. Simply being in the presence of a superior will quickly force most to get their act together. Couple that with draconian punishment doled out at any hint of incompetency and you have a recipe for the military. And it does work - just look at how hedge funds and big law firms are run.
That’s all very familiar to me. It’s how I was raised. So when I joined Amazon and encountered more of the same, I wasn’t fazed. The challenges I confronted paled to my past. But despite that, I refuse to do the same.
Fear is effective. And if I were the type of person to optimize on outcome, it’s the logical choice. But I’m not. I’m a punk and my vanity makes me think I can do without.
And now’s where I’m stumped.
I tried a lot of things. I asked questions, I talked about goals, I gave lectures, I wrote letters, I learned that team events are incredibly high return on investment (so are snacks) and tried to get into the mind of my mid 20-somethings (I downloaded TikTok) before realizing that my attempts to do so would only further estrange me.
I’m trying to inspire them. To work, yes, but to also take pride in what they do and find purpose in it.
I’m up against tough competition and I know. There are way too many fun things in life to list out here and it’s a far sell to think that a corporate job at a big tech company could compare. But still, I’ll try.
The only thing to beat fear is hope. Well at least, that’s mine.