What Defines You?

Early last month, before the new academic year began I received the sad news that one of my students, a petite 18 year old girl, had contracted cancer. She had just completed her 2nd Year and was looking forward to start her 6-month internship in the new semester.

I met her distraught father to help initiate the administrative process needed to defer her studies till she gets better. It is always heart-breaking to hear about people, especially people who are near and dear to you, who are stricken with the scourge of cancer. Recent medical and bio-technological advances have made huge strides in the fight against cancer, improving the survival rates significantly, but often this is still scant consolation for those stricken with the disease and to their loved ones.

This latest reminder of the fragility of life, that everyday is a gift which one should treasure and cherish was especially sobering for me. It made me think of my father and how he worked so hard all his life so much so that when he retired, he seemed to have lost his raison d’etre and appeared displaced and confused about post-retirement life.

It reminded me of a question a management trainer asked of me? “What defines you?” And one of the things I said was my work defines me.

But the critical question, especially after this latest news about my student, is, “Does your work define you solely as a person or a human being?”

I hope the answer is a negative and it should be a resounding negative. Men, especially, feel their self-worth and their standing in society is a function of their achievements and success at work. But it is indeed a very sad day when society uses this as the sole gauge of how good a human being someone is.

A person is still someone’s sister or brother, someone’s mother or father, someone’s spouse and someone’s friend and not just someone’s boss or colleague. And that’s how, I feel, we should all be remembered by those around us, as a whole person who has a life outside of work.

I also began to think about the causes of cancer and it is a well-known fact that stress is one of the chief contributing factors. This brings us back to our jobs and our workplace.

Is all the stress at work really worth it?

Let us first be upfront about one thing. I am not proposing that all workplaces should be stress-free zones. That would not be possible. Stress can be a good thing up to a certain point because it encourages us to push beyond the boundaries, to continually do better and improve.

Media professionals often talk about how the media and communications industry is one of the most stressful in the world today. Well, having spent 14 years in the media industry, I can vouch for that sentiment. But I’ll be quick to add that stress is not the sole preserve of media industry.

Just ask former Lehman Brothers CFO, Ms Erin Callan. She wrote a brutally honest opinion piece in The New York Times entitled, Is There Life After Work?

In the article she lamented not LIVING her life to the fullest and making work the centre of her life. This meant putting all else, including her family, friends, husband and marriage second to her work. Not surprisingly her marriage ended at about the time that the 2008 financial crisis struck U.S. markets causing the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Callan resigned just months before the collapse.

She wrote, “…when I left my job, it devastated me. I couldn’t just rally and move on. I did not know how to value who I was versus what I did. What I did was who I was.”

In Callan’s case, she left her job following financial collapse of the markets decimated her company. But how much worse is it if you are forced out due to an incurable disease like cancer? You see what terminal illnesses like cancer do to you is to strip you of all your worldly possessions and of all the things that are not of any importance to you and re-focuses your mind on the people and things that are truly important and which bring you genuine happiness.

Callan’s thoughts were echoed chillingly by the late Linds Redding, an art director at advertising companies BBDO and Saatchi & Saatchi. Redding died of esophageal cancer at the age of 52 in October 2012 after spending years as a successful advertising executive. Cancer was a wake-up call, a dark epiphany that suddenly put his life into proper perspective. It was an especially heart-wrenching moment when  he learnt that the cancer was inoperable from his doctor .

He wrote a visceral blog entitled “A Short Lesson In Perspective” which became viral in the aftermath of his death especially among creative executives in the advertising industry. In the blog, he lambasted his former colleagues for sacrificing precious times and occasions with family and friends for the sake of work by calling them “f*****g mad”, “Deranged” and “So disengaged from reality it’s not even funny.”

He further labelled the advertising industry a scam and a con; the con being that the industry forces you to believe that there is nothing more important than the client brief and the work involved whether it is a TV commercial or more elaborate ad campaign. That this work somehow gives more meaning to one’s life than anything else.

Of course readers of his blog say that his chilling rant is applicable to other industries and the problem of placing work above all else is something many of us are guilty of.

But it is up to us to recognize that life is not all about work and that having a good work-life balance is actually healthy for optimal work performance.

It is about coming to terms with the realities in the work-place concerning taking on additional work responsibilities, bonuses, promotions and weighing these against being a good spouse, a responsible and loving parent and a filial son or daughter.

In Singapore, we have our own Linds Redding in the late Dr Richard Teo, who gave up a promising career in the public sector as an ophthalmologist to become an aesthetic surgeon. He died of lung cancer at the relatively young age of 40. He gave his own account of the meaning of life and what it means to be successful and happy in a powerful and sobering Youtube video. (Note: video is a little grainy and has poor sound quality).