Why Each Chapter of Your Life Story Should Be A Hypothesis
A few years ago during a networking binge, I was asked an odd icebreaker question:
If your life story was written in a book, what would the title be?
Amongst the questions I've been asked in my years of casual networking, this one stuck with me. It forced me to think on several planes — what am I proud of in my past? What am I currently working on? Why am I working on it?
This is what I wrote:
To help founders achieve their goals.
Several years later, I saw the same question — this time the title of a Medium article from the Forge publication: What’s the Title of Your Book?
I scrambled through my past notebooks to find my chicken scratch notes, written alongside daily standup notes, project details, and other written memories from the past.
It put a smile on my face for 2 reasons:
I'm so happy that my note-taking and journaling habit has awarded me with gems like this.
I'm so happy that I've progressed as a person.
The emphasis of the book title is great, but the underlying message is not lost to me — the title of my book, my memoir … was about work.
Reading the Medium article, I found the same thing in the subheader:
An exercise for figuring out your value at work or anywhere else
It's a revealing question and one that requires careful consideration for many reasons — how do I perceive my “self,” my value, my purpose? What are the important things in my life? What kind of mark do I want to leave on my family, my friends, people, nature, the planet?
So as a fun exercise, I thought about this question, and here's what I came up with.
Evaluating the Impact of One on Many and Many On One
Over the past few years, I've learned that reinvention, iteration, and growth are fundamental building blocks to our lives. We should learn to take cues from our environment and from people around us to lead a fulfilling life and not be preoccupied with the vanity of leaving behind a legacy.
The first thing behind this title is that it doesn't call out any specific portion or segment of my life. It can be read both about work and about life, but you wouldn't know it was about both until you opened the book and read the chapters.
The second thing about this title is that it's written in the style of a scientific paper. During my transition from Propeller Labs to Bay Modular, I underwent a lot of self-reflection and doubt when I was transitioning out of a position in technology and into construction. During the process, I learned a lot about what I didn't like and where I wanted to go, creating narratives for myself that were spoken through ego or self-deceptive to placate myself into a decision.
Over time, I learned more about my misplaced disdain for “technology,” my push into the analog world of construction, and why my frustration was misinformed. The scientific style works to convey a message that there is no concrete answer, only a series of questions or hypotheses that are posed, tested, analyzed, and sometimes concluded.
The thing is, although I'm drawn to the title of the book, I'm more interested in the contents within. I'm not interested in judging the book by its cover, I'm interested in the experiments that were conducted and what, if any, conclusions were drawn. Can I learn from them? Can they teach me? Can I share them easily with others?
So each chapter in my book would start with a hypothesis and each would learn from the last, resulting in more sophisticated hypotheses that learn from work, collective understanding, and our rapidly changing environments.
Although I can't speak for the first few unintelligible years of baby babble and teenage angst, I could say the last 2 decades years looked like this:
Everything up to college
Chapter 2: Hyper-competition in university leads to increase in post-grad self-employment
Chapter 3: Association between growth in software startups and shift in professional services
Chapter 4: Evidence that fast, unstructured rise may cause prolonged burnout and insecurity
Chapter 5: Reinvention, a common occurrence in individuals with holistic outlook
Chapter 6: Housing affordability: a study on housing stock, prefabricated construction, and urban planning policy
Chapter 7: The impacts of growing cities on climate change
Nothing in our life is constant, so the title of your book shouldn't be either. I'm encouraged by the fact that each chapter not only represents a critical moment in my life, but instead transition smoothly into the next, signaling growth, changes in values, and an embrace of broader perspectives.
In my next chapter, I plan to bring the lessons I've learned in starting a construction company to my personal commitments to climate change, discovering sustainable solutions, and helping our planet achieve drawdown.