Many Shades of The Placeholder
What is YOUR shade?
When people learn about the idea of the Placeholder, an opportunity to create a uniquely meaningful work to oneself, one of the common reactions from them is this: “Oh I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know what’s meaningful to me and I cannot really leave my current job!”
It’s a totally legitimate reaction. It feels like a lot of work that will consume so much time and effort. It also feels too drastic and grave as if they would have to drop everything they are doing now to go through the Placeholder. I get it.
One Shade: “Going All The Way”
That version of Placeholder certainly exists. Take Roz Savage’s story. Roz Savage had spent 11 years working as a management consultant in London after graduating from a law school. In her mid-thirties, she was living a comfortable and conventional life with a successful career, steady income, a nice house in the suburbs with her husband. Then on a train trip in 2000, she did an exercise to write obituaries for the life she was living and the one she really wanted to live. This exercise changed everything.
The first version of the obituary reflected how things would turn out given her then current life trajectory, and the second version reflected a vision of the life she aspired to live. In the process of doing this exercise, she discovered something: writing the first version drained so much of her energy she couldn’t even finish it. However, while writing the second version, she was so energized she couldn’t stop. This disparity left such a strong impression in her mind and spurred her to leave everything she accumulated up to that point behind to pursue the “meaningful work” she wrote in the second version. It was about becoming the first woman to complete the Atlantic Rowing Race solo. Roz left her husband, prestigious job, steady income and invested all of her assets and time for this purpose.
On March 14th, 2006, she finished the Atlantic Rowing Race solo: one woman, one boat, and 103 days of rowing across three thousand miles of open ocean. Many things went against her original plan. All four of her oars broke and she had to row with patched-up oars for more than half the race. Her cooking stove failed after 20 days, then her navigation equipment and music player. But she made it. In 2010, Roz became the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean, too. Since then, she continued to live following the vision of the obituary version 2 as an environmental advocate, writer, speaker and now a politician as the Member of Parliament of the United Kingdom.
This is the common understanding people have of the changes they think they need to make through the Placeholder. However, the Placeholder comes in many shades. The changes we create in the Placeholder don’t have to be so grandiose that transform our lives upside down and inside out. It can be a tiny change, like what Woojin Kim did.
Another Shade: “Making One Patch of the Quilt at a Time”
After working at an investment firm, tech companies, and a startup founder over the course of 20 years, he wanted to stop jumping from job to another job but create something truly meaningful for himself. So he started asking himself a question—What matters to me?
As he looked back his life and career, he understood what mattered to him was entrepreneurial spirit. In work, he valued entrepreneurship so much that he even started his own company once. He worked at AWS to help startup teams and founders as well. He also started teaching entrepreneurship at a local college.
The entrepreneurship was integrated in his parenting as well. To teach his kids the independence, scrappiness, creativity and resilience of entrepreneurs, he started a small business with his kids as a side hustle. His older son, sixth grader, became a CEO and his younger daughter, fourth grader, a CMO. He did everything from creating a business plan to doing a market research together with his “cofounders”. The product idea they had was so good that they could even secure a Pre-Seed fund from a startup contest, went to market and had good sales. His kids, who are now teenagers, are so natural in presenting themselves and their ideas. They are willing to experiment anytime, unafraid of failing, which is the essence of entrepreneurship Woojin hoped for his kids.
Thanks to these many small steps and experiments he took toward entrepreneurship, he was ready to invest 100% of his time as a catalyst for entrepreneurs of the present and the future. For current startup founders and teams, he wanted to help them out to become better leaders and stronger teams. For those who aspire to become entrepreneurs, he wanted to help them sprout the entrepreneurial seeds planted in them. As he envisioned this, he decided to leave his full-time work at AWS and started his own practice as an entrepreneur himself. On the surface, it doesn’t look that much different from what he was doing before; but it’s a meaningful change for Woojin that now he’s doing it on his own term.
The Placeholder is a spectrum. There are so many shades on this spectrum; some are so subtle and some are dramatic. However it looks, what those Placeholders in different shades have in common is that each Placeholder is a uniquely meaningful innovation to the career and life of the individual who’s taking it. As you cannot criticize one shade of blue is better or worse than the other shades, you can’t evaluate or compare different shades of Placeholder.
If you ever thought it’s all or nothing for you to enter the Placeholder, here are some questions for you to consider:
What would feel more like you — even if it’s just a little bit more?
What's the smallest version of the change you want to make — and would that still feel meaningful to you?
What would you be doing more of if you stopped measuring your choices against someone else's bold leap?