How to Start Taking Real Ownership in Work and Life
In my own experience, ownership means feeling a sense of responsibility for achieving a set of outcomes. There are a few ways this concept can be applied: agency and freedom at the individual level, and social responsibility at the community level.
Individual Agency
In my own experience, I've always felt the drive to consistently find ways to do the things I wanted to do. In middle school, it would be experimenting with content creation on YouTube. In high school, it would be looking up ways to make quick cash by doing surveys (aka trading away my data). If I truly look back at my educational history, it was consciously chosen to be the safest and most interesting thing to me at the time – something relating to computers and tech. However, I always knew that creativity through music and self-expression was a constant throughout my life, so I would continuously find ways to find time to do non-tech activities. In essence, I would be so highly driven to optimize my time, I felt ownership over the direction my life was going in.
Now, the problem with not really focusing on tech in school was that I felt that I started at a disadvantage when it came to my first venture into a proper industry job out of school. I took what skills I could learn from my projects, and always made sure that I was spending my time wisely– learning skills for myself and not to check off a requirement that was mandated. Some of these things I still had to do, but the value in doing them and immediately forgetting everything didn't seem like the best use of time.
In reflecting on my career, I realized that individual agency comes from having a good match between skills and opportunity. What this means is if you're working on something that is sufficiently challenging but not too difficult, it's engaging and fun. If it's too easy, things are boring. If it's too hard, I'm going to blame my circumstances for setting me up for failure. As I've started to mentor younger analysts at work or other peers, I will try to guide them towards figuring out what really makes them engaged. "What do you want to do?" and "What do you NOT want to do?" are really good questions to ask yourself. It's much easier to cross off something from experience when you're still figuring out what it is that is a good fit for yourself.
When I notice someone who is more of an engineer and needs an opportunity to shine, I give them opportunities to do more of those things and give them the freedom to execute on a solution. When I notice a friend has latent songwriting abilities, I support them in ways to showcase that as well.
Something that I've constantly seen pushed online is this concept of "victim mindset" – a more passive way of navigating through life and perceiving circumstance. I've definitely been in those states myself and have observed this in others. I think the trick to making the pivot is to have a helping hand and mentors while maintaining curiosity and persistence. One can't change someone else, but one can open doors to opportunities and help someone rewrite their internal narrative.
To use gamer analogies– even with a really bad spawn point and character stats, you can still make good progress with the right resources. A lot of this requires increasing the surface area for opportunity which often requires taking risks that are scary.
Social Responsibility to Community
On this broader topic, I'm exploring the individual's relationship to the organization. I've recently realized that there's a sort of "professional sports" analogy I can make to corporate life. While franchised sports teams trade players quite frequently, I imagine that to be somewhat similar to what happens when a company "poaches" talent successfully. Each company is kind of like a sports team, where there's a community to foster and a culture to maintain, and a sense of pride or competitiveness when it comes to winning in their industry.
I've also recently noticed that with this deep "attachment" to the companies we work for, there is a stark lack of social responsibility to the actual communities in which we live. I'm literally talking about local politics, state politics, and national politics. It seems as though unless something is directly impacting our immediate ability to survive, our actual communities and politics do not seem to be of great worry to some folks. A lot will feel out of our control when it comes to all the narratives that exist in media, but it still seems incredibly important that people feel like they have ownership over the outcomes of not just the companies for which they work but also the communities in which they live.
Toying with geopolitics doesn't seem like a sensible thing to do when the fallout of any decision directly impacts the livelihoods of the people who had no say in the matter. There's an interesting thing I've noticed about social media and decision making which is that optimizing for financial outcome means catering towards the silent majority, but optimizing for greater trust means addressing the vocal minority. Social media is where narratives spread and the vocal minority often influences the silent majority, so take ownership over the outcomes of both your communities by influencing how decisions are made and realizing that you do have the power to make your impact.