Food for Thought: Expanding definitions of success
I gave the following talk on March 9th, 2021 at the Asian American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Food For Thought event.
If you only take one thing away from today’s conversation, I hope it is my email address: samarth.bhaskar@gmail.com. I would love to meet you, find out more about your interests and passions, and see if there’s anything I can do to help you in any endeavor. During talks like this, especially in the remote era, it can be difficult to have a meaningful connection. But they can be a good way to get to know a little about me, my interests, background and experience. And, from there, if you feel compelled, we can have a more in depth conversation where I can learn about you. So I hope at least some of you take me up on the offer to correspond over email, set up a phone call, or find some other way to continue this interaction past the hour or so that we have set aside today.
Today I’d like to talk a little about definitions of success. Especially the kinds of definitions we in the Asian American community may have grown up with. I’ll try to demonstrate my thoughts on this through two narratives. In one, I’ll describe some basics about my background, academic and professional experience. In another, I’ll do the same, but focus on some things I’m proud of that may not meet definitions of success we usually discuss.
Here’s the first version of my life so far:
- I was born in New Delhi, India. When I was 10 years old, my family moved to Bloomington-Normal, IL, not far from Champaign-Urbana. In high school, I was a swimmer, singer and did well academically. After 9/11, my interests in foreign policy and international relations bloomed.
- I came to UIUC in 2006, to major in International Studies, study Arabic and learn about the Middle East. While here, I participated in a number of student organizations including Chai-Town, AAA, ISA, Student Alumni Ambassadors, and probably others I’m forgetting now. I also worked a couple of jobs in Urbana-Champaign, coaching a swim team and working at a real estate office. I went to Dubai to study abroad and travel around the Middle East. I went to DC to intern at a political polling firm. I met some of my best friends here at UIUC, many of whom I talk to every day even though we’re spread around the country.
- In 2010, after graduation, I joined the University of Chicago to study more about the Middle East and get more academic training in the social sciences (most of my interests, at the time, were in political science and sociology, especially around the Internet and the Arab Spring, which was starting to take shape at the time).
- After a short 9 months of intense classwork and research, I finished my MA, decided I didn’t want to pursue a PhD like I once thought, so I went into the job market instead.
- A few months later, I got a job working for the Obama presidential re-election campaign. For 15 months, I worked in a dynamic organization, with great coworkers and mentors, on a discrete, meaningful problem. I learned new skills, built a professional network that I still rely on today, and got to live in Chicago, a city I love.
- In January 2013, after a successful first job, I moved to New York City, to work for a growing technology startup company called Etsy. For 2 years, I, again, learned new skills, worked with people I liked, on problems that I found meaningful and important.
- In 2015, a colleague from Etsy who had gone to work for the NYTimes reached out and asked if I might be interested in working in the NYT newsroom on a new team that was coming together called Audience Development. They needed people with data skills like I had. I had always been a news junkie, I thought journalism was one of America’s most important industries, and the NYTimes was a premier institution facing some tough challenges in the digital age.
- For the next 2 years, I learned about the readers of the NYTimes, supported editors and journalists as they tried to understand how their work was being consumed in the world and worked on urgent problems in a storied 160 year old company.
- In 2016, after contributing to some big strategy projects, I made a bid to become a strategic leader in the newsroom. With support from mentors and based on the knowledge and relationships I had developed, I became a Senior Editor for Digital Transition Strategy. For the next 3 years, I got to work on a number of projects from helping create and roll out new tools and workflows for journalists, training them in new skills like data analysis, supporting leadership in strategic projects like hiring, operations and redefining what we cover and how we cover it. I felt like I was blessed to be in the middle of the world’s most dynamic newsroom, working on interesting, impactful projects.
- In 2020, as the COVID pandemic struck, many of our 2-3 year plans became 2-week plans as we had to take the entire newsroom remote. I also started to realize that I wanted to find a way to work on some of the immediate problems we were facing as a country at this time.
- I reconnected with some of my friends from the Obama-world, and we founded a small nonprofit called Fellow Americans, to create information that would help people during COVID, help them vote, teach them about Black Lives Matter protests, talk about Climate Change and address a number of topics. By the end of the year, we ended up working directly with the Biden campaign to help elect a new president for America.
So far I’ve told you a narrative about my life that seems pretty great. If you saw my resume or found me on LinkedIn, you’d probably think I’m a pretty successful person. In fact, my guess is that the kind of people you regularly hear from in forums like these, or on podcasts, or the news, or on social media are people like this. And they are often trying to understand and recreate the conditions or causes of their success, so you too might be successful like them.
Especially in Asian American circles, success is usually defined by things like your grades when you’re in school, your salary when you get a job, the status of the company you work for, or the valuation of a company you’ve founded. Whatever the measures, the focus is on success. And success is pretty narrowly defined.
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to retell my life story again. But this time, I’ll reframe the story slightly. Everything I’ve mentioned is still true. But there were a lot of other things that happened in that time. I went through obstacles. I had to ask people for help. I had to build patience and resilience. I had to take a deep look at my life and ask difficult questions of myself. And over time, I learned to see these things as successes, too, in their own way. So here’s some of that same story, but with a different emphasis.
By the time I came to UIUC, I held my academic skills as one of the core parts of my identity. When I regularly got Cs and Ds in my Arabic classes, my confidence was rattled. During my junior year, in an International Law class, I was accused of cheating on an exam. This was a devastating experience for me. I remember coming in and asking Dr. Chih at the AACC for advice on how to handle the accusation. I remember breaking down in tears in his office, worried I might suffer consequences for something I didn’t do. Thankfully the charges never went anywhere and my poor performance in Arabic classes didn’t turn out to be the albatross I feared it may become.
In my non-academic life, one of my lasting memories was trying to introduce more culture-based programming in the SAA and facing rebuttals every step of the way. It was clear that the organization was not thinking about its non-white constituents and had no interest in doing so. I remember one meeting in particular where I tried to mount a case for culturally-specific programs to incorporate more POC alumni in our strategy and how much push back I got on that idea. But I also remember a couple of my peers who helped me make my case and how we bonded.
I learned important lessons through these experiences: to differentiate between good grades and a good education. To rely on people who believed in me, especially in trying times. And to build alliances to create change from within an organization.
When I entered grad school, one of the reasons I decided not to pursue a PhD was because I realized right away how much more trained my peers were. If we were supposed to be starting at the same starting line toward a PhD, it felt like they were already two laps ahead of me. And the market for PhD grads was looking abysmal then and has only gotten worse since. So shifting my focus and going in the direction of more statistics and computer science training ended up putting me in a better position after graduation. Letting go of one of my dreams—to obtain a PhD and pursue a career in academia—ended up being one of the best things I did for myself. Here, too, was an important lesson in being open to change.
After grad school, as I went about looking for jobs, I ran into many “no”s. In fact, most of my applications didn’t even result in “no”s, just silence. One of the jobs I wanted most, at a social science research lab at UChicago went to a classmate. I felt a deep sense of rejection. The few months that I was babysitting, tutoring and trying to find a job in Chicago coincided with a deep depression. I hit rock bottom. I tried to commit suicide. A hospital stay, investing seriously in therapy and taking medication for depression and anxiety started me on a years-long path toward addressing and learning how to care for my own mental health needs. I would say, of the things I’m most proud of in the last 15 years of my life, my experience with anxiety and depression, and my resilience in developing new mental habits is at the top of the list.
In my jobs in politics, tech and journalism I’ve constantly faced anxiety related to imposter syndrome. I’m a young professional, these are high profile industries, each has its own contexts, practices, culture and jargon, and there are plenty of challenges when you’re trying to contribute to or lead a team in any organization. I’ve had to learn to be patient, to use good judgement about how to create change from within, to accept my own limitations, to build relationships with peers and managers to accomplish our goals together.
I’ve also had to learn that people older or more senior people don’t always know more than me. Just because they have a “higher position” doesn’t always mean they got there through merit. But it does mean they often have more resources, connections or experience. Reframing my relationship to leaders in this way has helped with my imposter syndrome.
Over time, some of my most cherished professional memories have been working through challenges together with a team. The experience of identifying a challenge, working on it collaboratively, and realizing that I now have the skills to take on the next set of challenges feels much more rewarding than any specific success by itself. This sort of resiliency and skill-building became the success, not any job title or salary or award.
I hope you get a sense for what I mean when I say definitions of success, especially from the kind of people you see as “successful” most often, and especially in the Asian American community, are too narrowly defined. I hope as you continue in your time at UIUC and as you enter the next phases of your life—academic, professional, personal—you’ll broaden your definitions of success to include things like
- Asking for help
- Changing your mind
- Walking toward challenging things
- Developing resilience and belief in yourself
I’ll end where I began. If anything I said today resonated with you or made you consider having more of a conversation about these topics, please reach out at samarth.bhaskar@gmail.com. We can email back and forth or find some time to talk over the phone and I’d be happy to help in whatever way I can.
Thank you. I look forward to our discussion today. And to getting to know some of you more in the coming weeks.
