The Misfits

A couple of movies I saw recently, "Rocket Singh" and "Revolutionary Road", albeit tangentially, make a point about the "Organization Man".

In both movies, the lead characters get disillusioned by the companies they work for, either because of the corruption or the banality of their jobs and seek something better.

When you look back on the last 10 years, you think how much 'life' has been wasted doing trivial things, things that you are not really proud off or didn't really enjoy doing, but was necessary nevertheless for your own livelihood and to the society to a lesser extent. Living the rat race so that maybe a couple of decades later you could be a 'VP' or something in the company.

“So maybe we are running… We’re running from the hopeless emptiness of the whole life here.” -from Revolutionary Road when the lead character decides to move to Paris to seek a better life.

At my office, I find my project mate and myself often lamenting about the deteriorating 'quality' of work. But what we find interesting is that the majority of the people at work are happy with what they do. They come in promptly at 8:00 AM and leave at 5:00 PM with a misplaced feeling of having accomplished something, while all they did was something that was really boring and mundane.

Are they delusional? Or do they think that the 9hrs they spend at work doesn't need to be fun. Or that they would do anything as long as they get the money? Or are they so terrible that they find whatever they are doing challenging?

Either case, if they are they majority, then we must be the misfits.

Thats why, this post on the Wall Street Journal, on why people become entrepreneurs resonated with me:

What made it happen? What makes one give up the cushy life and pick the spiky-pointed one? I don’t think it’s any romantic love for risk. Entrepreneurs aren’t wild risk-lovers. I think we’re calculated risk-takers. In a perverse sort of a way, it might be in the genes.

I do believe all humans are different, DNA-wise at least, at the core. (If not, then forensic sciences are in bit of a jam.) And I believe that for every individual mental make-up, there’s a particular job that’s particularly perfectly suited. Some people are just born to be Bank Officer, Grade 4. Some others to be one-down right-handed batsman. And if these people are lucky, they get the jobs that are right for them. They don’t ever have to go through the trouble of being an entrepreneur.

But there are perhaps a few million types of jobs out there. And there are seven billion of us. So there’s obviously a lot of us who are not in jobs tailor-made for us. Look around you – know anyone who isn’t deliriously happy in their current job? Know anyone who is?

The rest of us just can’t find a job that suits us. And we really don’t like ‘adjusting’. So we make a job for ourselves. Where we like our bosses - ourselves, the business - our own, the working hours – whenever we feel like, and the location – wherever we are. We don’t do it to take a risk – we do it to be safe.

And the world calls us entrepreneurs, heroes of some sort. But really, we’re just folks who didn’t find a job that suited us well enough.