In pursuit of a lived-life
By: Jiali Yu
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Morality, Kind, Mba, Life

Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to witness my best friend, Clara, marry the love of her life. In many ways, Clara made me the person I am today. She taught me that our true life purpose transcends our own happiness — it’s about making the world around you a better place, and lifting up the people who need your help.

One week ago, I finishing reading the book “How will you measure your life” by Clay Christensen. The book explores how we measure a life well lived, the difference between hygiene factors vs motivators, as well as why some high achievers end up unfulfilled.

As I approach my next life adventure, combined with the above two events, I was inspired to write about my view of a meaningful life and how I can make an impact as a late-20s-confused-business-school-student.

For many years now, I have pondered on what happiness and success mean to me, and more importantly, thought about the values that drive me and the kind of person that I want to be. It’s no secret that it took a lot for me to be here today and that I struggled with depression for many years into my adulthood. Through that ordeal, I experimented with many versions of success and happiness, and their corresponding efficacy to “save me” from those emotional blackholes.

I experimented with superficial metrics of success, such as securing a competitive finance job, completing my CFA or getting into business school. But ‘meaning’ that stemmed from those achievements was short-lived for me, at best. Ultimately, working with people in finance did not resonate with me, because many of them overvalued their own achievements and had little empathy towards those different to themselves. Being accepted into Booth was initially bittersweet for me as I never felt I fit in. There were very few people at school who shared my experience and in turn, my perspective which made me feel lonely at the time. But I later learned this difference of perspective was a blessing in disguise.

I experimented with confidence-related metrics of success, such as exercising and dieting, learning how to speak to the opposite sex, as well as dressing in clothes that make me feel pretty. The confidence I felt from my physical appearance quietly manifested itself into greater self-confidence. I feel embarrassed to admit this, but feeling prettier enabled me to be more my authentic self. It gave me the confidence to stand up for what I believed in, and publically challenge people when I felt they were wrong.

Then I unlocked what I thought was my true life-motivator, which is being a good person and living a life guided by morality. To me, being a “good person” is most obviously achieved by being kind. This can span from celebrating your friends’ victories in the most genuine way possible to sacrificing your own leisure to be there for people who need you. However, it is more powerful if you project kindness to those that you do not gain any benefit from, such as assuming good intent with whoever you work with, to humanizing homeless people in San Francisco, and to participating in the correction of broader societal inequalities.

But I constantly question and evaluate what being kind, and more broadly being a good person, actually means, and being a business school grad, how much of that is hypocrisy. Am I really making a tangible difference to society through my role at a tech company post-MBA? Am I willing to accept a more impactful job at a personal sacrifice of lower pay? I have done a lot of things I am not proud of, my expectations aren’t always fair and I get disappointed too easily.

However, we are all human and are allowed to make mistakes, and being a life-long student has taught me that maybe being a good person isn’t about being perfectly moral, but more the continued hunger for learning and re-calibrating for what it means to be a better person. We are so lucky to have the intellectual horsepower that will allow us to question the status quo and the empathy to stand up for what we believe is right, so let’s not waste it.

Our responsibility is to accept opinions different to ourselves, interact more, read more and make a decision between what’s right and wrong, but also possess the open-mindedness and humility to be corrected when we are wrong. We also need to guide those we care about and help develop their values or have the confidence to walk away when our values don’t align because you are a product of who you surround yourself with.

At the end of the day, I feel satisfied with my life, not because I think I am a good person (far from it), but more than I’ve tried with all my available resources to learn to how to be a better person, a better friend. And in the absence of faith, this is the truth that guides me and provides meaning to my life.

Sorry, this Medium post has been a lot about nothing, but let me leave you with an excerpt from ‘How will you measure your life’.

“Somehow, after all of this, I came to understand that while many of us might default to measuring our lives by summary statistics, such as a number of people presided over, number of awards, or dollars accumulated in a bank, and so on, the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people…whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage…These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life.”