Woman
Never thought so much about being a female until this egg freezing thing. Maybe it’s the extra hormones or maybe for the first time, my body was preparing herself up for a new life. It gave me new perspectives to life. Or maybe I’m just older now and you just grow into new wise insights. “Young people these days…” as I like to start my sentences.
I noticed lots of females having to make trade offs — for babies, family etc. The key which keeps coming back is balance. And that’s the thing isn’t it — you go from being an individual (an I) that’s balanced to being an entity or little world (a we) being balanced. Can’t have 2 crazy ambitious people if you want a family. That’s not balanced. But 1 ambitious 1 more laid back and chilled works. That’s what a healthy supportive relationship is. And successful one too — not one that divorces and remarries every few years.
The easy thing about being me
All in all, I am so fucking lucky that I always lived life in my own terms. I’m trying to figure out what that is, so I can share it with my team and build a healthy culture of embracing oneself, instead of conforming to a certain culture — be it masculine, western, Gen X. I’m the exact opposite. I manage it pretty well. It’s that balance. Still figuring it out.
The hard thing about being me
Having choices are so hard. I subtly think that’s why I got into economics. And why I never play poker. Economics is about making choices and all my life is about making choices. And how to make the right ones. Poker is about making decisions with clear trade offs and when I take the main thing I do in life & structure them with clear payoffs, it stresses me out unnecessarily. I don’t like making wrong decisions. I feel utter disappointed and almost disgusted with myself. I never liked the casino.
The hard thing is not about choices but the methodologies. It’s about trade offs and opportunity costs. I measure them, calculate the implicit and explicit risks and future potential payoffs. It gets hard when you can’t quantify the trade offs well enough or don’t have enough comparison for opportunity costs. All opportunities presented to you are so good, there is marginal difference between. The trade offs and payoffs can differ in terms of risks and that’s hard to compare.
You can’t do 100% home, 100% work. You can’t do 100% work A, 100% work B. No one gets 200%. It’s about allocating that 100% to the highest payoff with the most reasonable trade off. And then it’s about placing these decisions in the priority list.
(Idk why I’m so analytical. I’m trying to be less analytical in my personal life. I’m still learning.)
So I’ve been practicing to follow my gut and to curate better methodologies. I also see this as an important skill and help anyone through it — both to show them the method, allow them to fail and help them to learn from it. I want to say I’m getting better with all these compounded years of decision making.
The current trade off
I’m still figuring out if I want to be the ambitious one — second nature for me where I literally need to stop myself from being too ambitious, or the chilled one — definitely not super-me but I do fucking love a good challenge. I know it’s also possible for me to be both but I really don’t want to be a single mother having to fulfil the role of a father, mother, CEO of a holding group and board of directors for all the other subsidiaries. That I own, created and started on my own. That’s too many responsibilities. I have my first foundational principles in place. To scale and succeed, I want to bring more people onboard. Either creating a family or that 15 more years of ambitious goals.
Honestly if you’re not striving to be the best, why bother. And maybe that type of mindset is the reason my doctors keep telling me to be less stressed.
I do love my life. Goddamn I do fucking love it. I wouldn’t change a single thing. I’m just coming to a realisation that I can’t be everything on my own. I’m not the superhero I thought I was. Just a regular normal woman walking on earth. And to walk far, you need to walk together.
I’ve come to this conclusion in the last 3 months. And I’m excited for what’s to come. It’s a new challenge and it excites the hell out of me! I’m also grateful to be alive now because you get so many documentaries and stories about women in power and the trade offs they have to make. It feels a lot more real when I have to choose a path and say no to another. I’m starting to prefer second mover advantage to first mover.
Good female movies to watch:
The Post. About Washington post and female being a CEO & making hard decisions
Dragon women. Documentary about female in finance and their lives, trade offs and challenges.
LFG. Here’s to a new chapter.
Love,
L