Hedge 206: Taking Care of Yourself with Ethan Banks
As we reach the end of what has been a hard two-year stretch for what seems like the entire world, Ethan Banks joins Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about the importance of taking care of yourself. In the midst of radical changes, you can apply self-discipline to make your little part of the world a better place by keeping yourself sane, fit, and well-rested.
It was very reassuring of my own thoughts when I heard Russ comment about the interview question “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”. This is a really poor interview question and I have come to strongly dislike it. My interpretation of the intent of this question is: the candidate should express all the ways they intend to grow and support the organization they are interviewing with. Ultimately, the candidate should do a bit of convincing that they intend to repay any investment the company is making in them with years of service (tenure?).
I was interviewing for a position and was presented with the ‘where do you hope to see yourself in 5 years?’ question, to which I quickly replied: “retired”. My reply was meant to be snarky and joking, to lighten the mood on this unnecessarily heavy phone interview. Following my reply the cadence of the conversation skipped a beat, like when a drummer unknowingly skips a beat and the other musicians turn-around to look if he realized the mistake yet. I noticed the cadence change and now I’m looking around to see if anyone else noticed the cadence change. This was my first indicator that we weren’t a good match but the interview went on for 40 more minutes.
Days had passed before I found out I did not get the job but I did get summary of the post-interview report that outlined why I wasn’t a good fit and interestingly also included a comment about me answering “retired” to the question. This entire interview goes down as one of the worst professional experiences of my life and was extremely uncomfortable.
I thought further about the ‘where do you see yourself…’ question and felt that “retired” is the only correct answer for such a question. To me “retired” means: I’ve worked so hard to achieve so much and positioned myself so that in 5-years time I will have felt so accomplished I can walk away knowing I’ve made the organization better than it was when I started and that I’ve shared all the knowledge and vision with all my peers to carry out any work that would out-live my employment. Retiring means you have nothing left to give.
The fact is, I’ll never retire. I’ll always be working on, tinkering with, building or learning something. The difference between employment and retirement is whether or not I’m getting a salary to do those things.
If I recall from this podcast episode, as an example response to the question, Russ replied: “I don’t know!” Which led to a discussion on how are you actually supposed to know where you’ll be in 5-years or where you want to be in 5-years? Things change. People change. How is anyone supposed to accurately answer that question?
I don’t know where I’ll be in 5-years, or what I’ll want to be but I know that where ever or whatever that is, I want to be positioned to make that happen for myself.