"I was so insecure as a teenager. I was the type of guy that never fit in because he never dared to choose. I was convinced I had absolutely no talent at all. For nothing. And that thought took away all my ambition too…" Those words come from Johnny Depp.
So what changed in this insecure teen to allow him to evolve into one of our most versatile and celebrated actors? I have no idea, because I don’t know him. But I relate a bit to his words.
I was given the word ambition today by a friend at work, and over the course of the evening, a variety of thoughts have surged through my mind about what direction I wanted to go with this. I've just decided to go deeply personal and focus on where I think my own ambition started.
I relate to Depp's words not because I was an insecure teen, but because I didn't have anything notable about me at that point in time. I was smart but not brilliant. I was involved in a variety of activities but didn't have a "thing" that made me outstanding. I was friends with just about everyone but felt close to only a few. At the end of the day, I left high school with an incredible desire to leave the beautiful town where I was raised and reinvent myself. I had no idea who I would become, but "Chrissy" was dead. There was no f'ing way I was going to go through life known for being "that cute girl."
So I went off to college, eager to change my name and my approach. It took me while to find my groove. And finally, in my junior year summer when I interned at what was to be my first stop of many in my Kendall Square career, I found out how ambitious I really was.
Post graduation, after moving back to Boston, I went into overdrive. All I cared about was learning as much as I could, and taking on as much work as the people around me would give me. I had no business being responsible for half the stuff I was doing, and yet I proved with each project I could handle more. It was during that first year of work that I looked around and said, "These people are very smart. And so I am." So I enrolled in a masters program at night, and I cranked through my degree in two and a half years so that I could join their consulting ranks. In doing so, I became the youngest consultant the company had had to date. I gave up a social life and a lot of fun to do that, but my ambition to grow, and to learn, and to build a career reinventing my field fueled that. And it was worth it.
And it never stopped. I have never had the ambition that craves the spotlight or praise for anything I have accomplished. Instead, I just keep raising the bar on myself, wondering what I can do next to push myself to continue to grow or learn. And while my role hasn't fundamentally changed in the last 15+ years, the way I have been playing it has. Playing it as a new executive in a public company came with one set of challenges. Playing the role as a new mother came with another set. Stepping away for a while to run my own company was new set of things to go after, and now I find myself pushing the limits trying to pull this off doing it as a single mom. And each time, I try to do it significantly better than the time before from the lessons learned. Or just rewriting the lessons altogether.
I have no idea what flipped that switch for Johnny Depp, but clearly now he's got the confidence to take on just about any role and play it by his own rules. That really resonates with me. For me, and perhaps him, that ability to find that one "thing" that you click with, that gives you the confidence in yourself to move forward, THAT was the thing that created some pretty unrelenting ambition that has turned into a career I could never have imagined.
That, and an insane amount of hard work and sacrifice. And I would do it all again in a minute. That is how I know I love what I do for a living.
No comments:
Post a Comment