Launching the scholarship bondbreaking advising service
Months ago, I wrote about wanting to set up a simple service to advise anyone considering breaking their scholarship bond. I have thought a lot about it. I thought through many ideas for how to position it. Should I buy a new domain? Should I write a collection of articles first? Should I have testimonials from happy clients?
Basically, I ran into the problem that many of us face with projects: I failed to ship.
Last week, a total stranger emailed me for advice on her bond. This hasn’t happened in awhile. (Been getting a lot more startup related requests lately.) But I was reminded of what I had set out to do in the first place. Pay forward my good fortune at being able to break my own bond years ago. Put myself out there. Help people live more fulfilled lives. Help people as only I can.
She didn’t need me to build a fancy website. She didn’t need me to establish my credentials in some bio. She didn’t even need a form. All she did was find my posts on bondbreaking - hooray for the power of search - and email me. Hopefully she got something useful from my exchange with her. I am immensely grateful for her trust and for the chance to help her. (If you could spend 90 minutes of your time and have a stranger tell you that you are one of the most inspiring people she has come across in her life, you, too, would do the same.)
So I have decided to just ship. Here I am hanging out the shingle.
It’s here! Check it out:
What it’s like to advise scholarship bondbreakers (or a reflection on giving)
[This post is on scholarship bondbreaking. If you are not from Singapore, there are some articles out there for context. However, even without context, this entry really is about gift gifting.]
This year, I’ve gotten an almost steady stream of requests for career advising chats. They are either about wanting to join a startup, about getting a job in social venture capital, or about scholarship bondbreaking. This last category particularly gets to me. It is hard for me to describe the immense empathy I feel when someone comes to me and wants bondbreaking advice. It’s been 5 1/2 years since I broke my bond, and I have gone from being bitter and vindictive towards the scholarship system to being relatively agnostic on what I think scholars should do. But I still know what it’s like. How stifling, isolating, confusing, and self-denying it feels.
A few months ago, I started to get burned out by the chats. It was emotionally draining. I had one conversation where I knew I was going through the motions. I ask a bunch of questions, listen, tell a bunch of stories, toss out a few ways to adjust the person’s perspective. It comes easily to me now. I’ve done it enough to know what buttons to push. But I didn’t feel good about the conversation at the end of it. At the time, I blamed the person, not aloud but in my head. We just didn’t click, I told myself. This is not so fun anymore, maybe I should stop.
In retrospect, I was struggling with feeling used, not by this person in particular, but I felt that it was in some way unfair that I felt obligated to do this. There are lots of other bondbreakers out there. There are a whole bunch that I talked to! Why does no one else do this. Why am I saddled with this obligation, this empathy. I didn’t feel like doing it anymore. There are tons of other things I should make time for. But I felt like I had to keep doing it because I would feel too guilty otherwise.
I stopped for awhile. I was still fielding the requests for the other chats - for social VC at that point - but it’s not the same. Those chats are mostly about delivering information. But those people are not lost. Ok, that’s not true. Fairly often, they are lost. But I don’t know how to help them, I mean really help them.
Earlier this week, I attended a lecture about giving. We have all heard that “it is better to give than to receive.” But what does that mean. And who really buys that anyway. Then the speaker explained the various kinds of giving. The first one was the gift of wealth. Giving up money, personal resources in order that someone else may benefit.
The second one is the one that got to me: the gift of courage. Being able to say the right thing at the right time to someone, so that they may go forth with courage.
Ahh.
I wasn’t thinking about the gifts I had given in the form of the chats. I was thinking about the fact that I had this gift to give. The gift - of the ability to give courage - was mine. And that’s where it all made sense. It is better to give, wholeheartedly and with good intent, than it is to receive.
I can tell you that when I do these chats wholeheartedly, I gain tremendously. It is an enormous privilege to hear someone’s real story, to have them open up and share their fears, their vulnerabilities, to pour out things that they have had to keep secret for fear of being judged unfavorably or dismissed. And then to see them figure it out. To imagine the future with hope. To see them face the hard questions, to reflect and stall and flounder and sometimes panic, to be able to see them do the essential work of figuring out what makes them happy. The search for fulfillment. I know I cannot get them there - that is their work, not mine - but I get to be a part of it. That kind of connection with another human being - there is nothing else quite like it.
The gift is mine to give.
The amazing thing is that the only thing I can do with this gift is give. I cannot keep it for myself. It is of benefit to anyone only when I give it away.
I never asked to be able to do this bondbreaking advising thing. I’m not formally trained in any way to do this. The main way I know that something is working is that I get referrals. A steady stream of referrals from friends and friends of friends. And repeat customers. And emails from strangers who find these posts.
I know that it is an incredible gift that I had the means to break my bond. That was the original gift. I now also know that it is a gift, not a burden, that unhappy scholars come to me and that I can help them. It doesn’t matter if anyone else can do this. I should do this. It is my gift that I can do this.
The most recent chat I had, just 2 days ago, I went into it wholeheartedly. Just give, I told myself. Just give. And I felt better about this work, this bizarre thing I do, than I have in a long time. I felt like I got more out of the conversation than the person did. And I want to give more.
So there are 2 things to come out of this:
1) I’m going to write a series of blog posts about the things that I discuss in these bondbreaking chats. So all of you who search for queries like “break bond scholarship” and “singapore scholars dissatisfied with scholarship” (real queries to this site) will have a resource.
2) I am going to set up a simple bondbreaking advising service, so that any scholar who wants a bondbreaking chat can ping me for one. You don’t have to know me, or know someone who knows me (the current system). You just email me. You may have to wait awhile depending on my schedule, but I will find time. If you are local, we can meet in person. If you live elsewhere, we can Skype.
There will be no charge. In exchange, I ask that you perform an act of kindness to pay it forward. Pay it forward in whatever way you feel is right. Pay for coffee for a stranger, be kind to someone having a bad day, make a donation. Whatever you feel is yours to give. And then write and tell me about it.
**
I wish you very good gifts for 2012. Happy new year.
Is it crazy to want to change the world
I received an email from a reader who is on scholarship in response to my post about scholarship bondbreaking. He writes, “my dream is to create/invent something that will change the world and add enormous value… Am I being delusional, or are my views shared by other scholars?”
It is somewhat heartbreaking to me that when young Singaporeans express this sentiment, this wish to do something huge, they say it with a tinge of guilt. They feel it is too self-indulgent, to impractical to pursue one’s dream or to even do something that would make them genuinely happy. They seem to think it makes more sense to find a job that will win approval from someone else - their parents, their friends, society (whatever that means).
The funny thing is, when asked to describe what they would actually like to do in an ideal world, I have rarely heard any plan that is reckless or even highly risky. A lot of these alternative plans involve finding a different job, one with a decent salary. I don’t hear too many plans to become starving artists. Even for people who want to become entrepreneurs, there is something to be said for entrepreneurship being less risky than many jobs these days. And people with those inclinations strike me as resourceful enough to find a job or something else should their entrepreneurial dreams fail.
As far as I can tell, most of the young Singaporeans I talk to seem to have a fairly good grasp of the risks of making a leap, but terrible awareness of the real costs of being miserable. If you are miserable in your job, chances are you are focused on yourself, your problems, possibly on your escape plan, and not on doing your job effectively or on helping others or on contributing in any meaningful way.
As for wanting to change the world, of course, it is crazy to want that. But as has been much quoted around the internet lately, the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
All this is to say, making yourself happy is a fairly important life skill. Learn to get good at it.
Career coaching
I get career advising requests a lot. They mostly come through as referrals. Friends of friends. 2nd and 3rd degree friends. Half of them are scholarship bondbreaking related, and the rest are about how to land a job at a startup as a non-engineer. I get them enough that I could have done 4 last weekend if I didn’t push out the meetings. This is not a service I advertise (but maybe I should), and I’m not professionally trained in any way to do this. People just find their way to me.
I used to draw mainly from empathy and some kind of intuitive grasp of what people need to feel, not just hear, from an advising conversation. It’s weird to have done this enough that I can now draw from experience. I can tell when people are genuinely, deeply unhappy. Their outlook is colored by a kind of despair. I can tell when people are frustrated and ready to take action. These people are unhappy but empowered. I can tell when people just want to complain about their unhappiness but will never do anything about it. And I can tell when people are just mildly curious and pondering options. The first group, those in despair, I feel an obligation to, because that’s how I felt about the first job I ever had, and the journey out of that job was nothing short of life changing.
But lately it’s become a bit too much. Too many hours in a crowded schedule. I don’t want to end it entirely, because it has occurred to me, especially on the bondbreaking side, that I am doing work that no one else can do. But I’m trying to figure out what else I can do so it’s more effective and even scalable. More blog posts specifically on this topic? Invite people to send in questions? Another fundraising talk? A book? I am rather enamored of the idea of a book, especially when I think about stories I’d like to share, points of view I wish people understood. But I don’t have that kind of time.
Can this even scale? In some sense, we’re talking about a highly personalized service. You can get all the advice in the world from reading stuff, but there is nothing quite like having ONE person sit there and listen to YOUR problem and ask you probing questions and put your particular fears in perspective.
So what to do. I don’t know. But somewhere in there, there must be a project that can help more people. There must be a very exciting project to do.
Why scholars break their bonds
A year ago, I decided to give a talk about bondbreaking. I wrote an email and asked friends to forward it to anyone who might be interested. A handful of brave souls showed up. The really interesting outcome was that the email got far wider circulation than I had expected. In fact, I was recently introduced to someone who knew of me because a friend of his had read that email. Yeah. Small world.
This person asked why I broke my bond.
It has been 5 years since the bondbreaking. This past June would have marked that all important 6-year mark, the theoretical end of the bond had I stayed to serve the whole thing.
When I talk to scholars who find their way to me, I still feel a sense of deep identification with what they are going through, even though it’s been years. When you are in that position, you come to believe that there is no bigger problem in the world. You look around at your scholar friends and they seem unhappy too, but you become convinced that no one really gets it. Your problem is individualized and isolating.
And yet from the other side and with distance, I see the patterns. I now think my reasons for wanting to break my bond are not very different from why any scholar might want to break his or her bond. Boredom, bureaucracy, a nagging sense that my paper pushing wasn’t actually making a difference to serving the public. The most unhappy scholars I knew were often the ones who cared too much.
The best explanation I’ve found for why people want to break their bonds is this concept of cognitive dissonance. There is immense cognitive dissonance that comes from being told you’re supposed to be appreciative of your amazing opportunities as a scholar, while having to face a reality that the job you’re assigned to is one of the most uninspiring things you could do with your life.
(This is not true of everyone’s experience, of course. I know some happy scholars. I was not fortunate enough to be one of them.)
As for what separates unhappy scholars from actual bondbreakers (aside from monetary considerations), I think bondbreakers have a clearer idea of what would make them happy and are willing to stomach the emotional risks to make it happen. You need to be able to imagine what happier looks like. And then be willing to fight for it.
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Note: this is not to encourage or discourage anyone from bondbreaking. These are merely observations from having had having many people open up to me on this topic.
For non-Singaporean readers, it seems there is no good Wikipedia entry on scholarship bondbreaking…
