Hugo
Victor Hugo. 1802 - 1885.
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, said Victor Hugo, and I listened and believed it to be true.
Many years ago, I was stuck in-between jobs. I am being literal here. I was stuck working three different jobs so I could help at home, pay the bills, buy the food, carry the weight, keep the lights on.
My work was repetitive in nature and there was some peace in that. I was working the front desk of a tiny marketing agency in Seattle and helping two families with cooking and cleaning because of debilitating health concerns. I would go from thing to thing, place to place, task to task, Monday to Friday; all the while looking for an opportunity to break through and deliver to myself the promise of what I knew I could do…
Fast forward 10 years and I am in a different place. Somehow, through hard work, perseverance, and being at the right place at the right time, I was able to build a career path that today I am so grateful for, and kind of amazed about it too. I feel like I will have more time to expand on my work later, but the reason for bringing this up is the fact that this week, at my job, I went through a personality profiling for team building. The Birkman Method.
I went in, as expected, skeptical. I am an enneagram fan and tend to be faithful to the tool. But I had to test in order to do the virtual face-to-face with the rest of the team… so sure, I’ll answer the questions and the algorithm will spit out a report with personality traits that are as accurate as a fortune cookie telling me I will do well in my ventures as long as I am astute. Honestly.
However, the test results were somewhat upsetting to me, pointing to a more intellectual and abstracting person than I give myself space to be. When compared across the multiple members of the team, I presented lonely and deep in the quadrant of “Design, Creativity, Strategy, and Working with Images and Stories” while my teammates were associated with qualifiers like — “Building, Solving, Promoting, Selling”.
‘Fascinating,’ I thought, and when I realized that my deep introspective and introverted persona was going to be shared with the team, ‘terrifying,’ was my reaction. And yet, the whole meeting was pleasant enough with people looking around and buying into some of the results while rejecting others. My direct supervisor, one of the kindest people I have come across in tech, said to me: ‘Julia, you are right where I need you to be. Refining ideas, planning, seeing things and connecting them. Creating the message and telling the stories.’
I needed to hear that, and the moment took me back to the beginning of my career path when I was leaping from the three jobs into one. The one that would retain and sustain my attention, and land me years later into the ‘thinker’ category of a personality test. What I was leaping into was the belief that ideas are powerful when we lean in at the right time to put them into action. The belief that somehow I could act upon my ideas.
So long ago, and yet, just yesterday. Ideas were formed, some worked, others didn’t. Time passes and the building blocks get stacked.
Now I find myself turning my attention to an idea that has been with me for a while. The idea of being a writer. Of becoming someone that expresses through the written word the things that before lived only in the ethereal scope of existence.
Writing and being read is naked stuff. Kinda raw and unprepared and a little painful, especially for the reticent. It feels a bit like a knife prying open the oyster shell, exposing the gooey and shapeless interior, but also bringing light to the tiny pearl. This website is the very tip of that knife, and I think after writing a few posts, I am ready to push it live - sunlight upon the opalescent sphere.
In doing this, I reflect on how very right Hugo was, ideas are powerful things when turned into action at the right time. Let’s see where this idea goes.
-jm