In the fall of 2008, I found a seat in the sea of other graduate students for an international affairs class. It was one of my electives in an applied statistics program, and I was eager to get started. I opened up my syllabus, and found my eye wandering down a required and suggested reading list longer than a Cheesecake Factory menu. In fact, there was reading that had been assigned for the first day of class. Reading, of course, I hadn’t completed.
Our professor stood in front of us, and in his short introductory talk prior to the launching into the lecture stated his academic and life philosophy.
“As you have probably noted, there was reading assigned for today, which you haven’t completed, unless you were fortunate to get a tip-off from someone who already took this class. What this means, is you are behind. That is OK. In this class, in your academic career, and in life, you are behind. You will always be behind. We are all behind. We are all playing catch up.”
I spent the entire semester playing catch up, and I’m not certain I ever caught up.
While it was a bit of a cruel trick to start a course in that manner, I took his words and teaching approach to heart. We are all behind in some way, which is a comfort when you feel you are struggling in isolation. Big personal, professional, and financial growth is not for the faint of heart, and there is no user’s manual toward meaningful success.
Most of us start academics, career, money management, relationships, and every great undertaking woefully unprepared. We take out student debt we are unprepared to pay off, largely because we were never given good guidance on what constitutes a reasonable debt load. We struggle to manage our finances, often because we were never taught basic principles. We find ourselves in relationships that are less-than supportive, often because we lack good examples.
There do seem to be a handful of people who got a “tip-off” on these areas, but they are the few. If you are behind in investing, saving, career growth, academic credentialing, interview skills, resume writing, using LinkedIn, building a network, you are part of the mass of humanity playing catch-up. We are all playing catch-up, but you don’t need to struggle in isolation.
I was woefully unprepared for the majority of my graduate classes. I had somehow gained admittance to a graduate program in statistics, the lone subject to grace my undergraduate transcript with a “C”. (I retook statistics several years later, to secure an “A”, to prove I could hack it.) Fortunately, I made small talk with a few students after the lectures, and a Chinese student finally told me about one book that had really helped him with the theory that was so befuddling me. He was also behind, in the same way that I was, and his helpful suggestion enabled me to complete the rest of that class with my self-respect intact.
Being behind caused me to reach out. Being behind led me to build relationships that were helpful, at least for the task at hand. Which is, of course, the hidden gift in being behind.
You are not the only one behind. The key to meaningful success is to find others who are in your phase of “behind” or a little advanced, and develop practical support for moving ahead. In fact, particularly for women, the community and cohort model has proven extremely helpful time and again across multiple settings. Self-education can be as simple as signing up for Investopedia.com to receive their daily article. Joining online communities is also helpful. I’m a part of several Facebook groups, such as Women’s Personal Finance and Executive Level Women On Fire.
Meaningful success is always ahead of us, and we are all working toward that next goal. Being “behind” is a gift, when you let it push you toward more education, and more community. Playing catch-up is not an individual sport; it’s a great race we run together.
Photo by frank mckenna