Can Do #19: An unexpected deep dive into my heritage
(Leonid Afremov, Mysterious Rain Princess)
Welcome to the 19th edition of Can Do, a newsletter where I share my journey of building a Career Multiverse™.
You can also read my previous editions and follow me on Twitter.
Newsletter at a Glance
Career Multiverse™: An unexpected deep dive into my heritage
Article: New York City and return to office
Tweet: Open offices
Career Multiverse™
Our heritage and our place of birth have a direct impact on our careers, whether we like it or choose to acknowledge it.
I have spent most of my life making sense of my identity and how my personal history has influenced my professional decisions.
I was born in Minsk - in what used to be the Soviet Union and is now Belarus. I spent a little over a quarter of my life there.
By some estimates, nearly 2 million Jews emigrated from the former Soviet Union in the late 20th century.
There is a wide spectrum of relationships that these people have with their place of birth. People on one side of the spectrum feel a very close connection to it and see it as their true homeland. They choose to speak Russian at home, feel an affinity for Russian culture, and teach their children Russian. In the most extreme cases, they are also closely aligned with the Russian political views, as we have seen since the start of the war in Ukraine.
People on the other side of the spectrum don’t want to have anything to do with their place of birth. Since their decision to leave the former Soviet Union had more to do with survival and avoiding anti-Semitism, they tend to have a very distant connection to the country of their childhood. As Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, famously told his dad, “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.”
I am part of the latter group. In 31 years since I left the Soviet Union, I have never been back and have generally chosen to keep my distance. However, I could never fully explain why I felt that way, and that used to bother me. Then, recently, I read the book, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and everything finally made sense.
In the book, Pressfield compares two kinds of societies: the artist and the fundamentalist.
“The artist is the advanced model. His culture possesses affluence, stability, enough excess of resource to permit the luxury of self-examination. The artist is grounded in freedom. He is not afraid of it…He has a core of self-confidence, of hope for the future. He believes in progress and evolution. His faith is that humankind is advancing, however haltingly and imperfectly, toward a better world.”
“The fundamentalist entertains no such notion. In his view, humanity has fallen from a higher state. The truth is not out there awaiting revelation; it has already been revealed. The word of God has been spoken and recorded by His prophet, be he Jesus, Muhammad, or Karl Marx.”
“The fundamentalist…cannot stand freedom. He cannot find his way into the future, so he retreats to the past. He returns in imagination to the glory days of his race and seeks to reconstitute both them and himself in the purer, more virtuous light…He creates destruction.”
When people talk about a lightbulb moment, this was mine. As someone who looks forward, hoping to create a better world, it is hard for me to feel connected with a society that tends to look backward, seeking to recreate the past that favors only a few at severe cost to the rest.
Sadly, and somewhat ironically, our corporate leaders have become fundamentalists, not unlike what we see in Russia. They, too, are trying to “return to a purer world from which he [we] and all have fallen.”
Similar to how I have a hard time relating to my place of birth, I now have a hard time relating to my professional heritage as well. I understand it, but I cannot support it.
Article
New York City is getting closer to the tipping point in return to office work (CNBC)
I find the return to office debate frustrating. On the one hand, I get it. Companies are spending millions of dollars a year on office rent, and to leave those offices permanently empty makes no sense.
On the other hand, I am frustrated by what the executives of large companies say is the reason for their return to office mandates. They say that they want to preserve their company culture. If that’s the case, then there was a huge problem with the company culture before the pandemic, and bringing people back to the office will not solve that problem.
Company cultures are not built by forcing people into one space, removing their sense of privacy, and monitoring their every move as if they were nameless robots on a manufacturing floor.
Company cultures must be mutually beneficial to organizations and the people who work there. One way to do that is to empower employees to take ownership of their work. When employees think and act like owners, control many aspects of their work, have the leeway to rearrange, modify, and improve their assignments, their mindsets start to change from what cannot be done to what can. They become innovative and push their companies forward.
Tweet
I don’t know anyone who likes the open office layout.
Thank you for reading!
Alina