When I was in high school, I had a friend who barely graduated. We stayed friends for about a year afterward, and then life took us in different directions. As the years passed, I didn’t give him much thought. When I did, he was still the kid I knew in high school. That was the last version of him I had, so that was the version I kept.
Many years later, we reconnected. I did what I usually do and asked a lot of questions. I learned that he was married with kids and had built a successful career managing large teams on projects worth millions of dollars.
I remember being surprised and, looking back, a little embarrassed. I’d have told you I had no opinion about how his life turned out, but my surprise said otherwise. Somewhere along the way, without ever deciding to, I had written the rest of his story based on who he was at 18.
He had been writing a different one. The kid who struggled to get through high school found an environment where his talents mattered, people who valued what he brought to the table, and work that allowed him to thrive. While he was living all of those years, making mistakes, learning, building a career, and raising a family, my version of him stayed exactly where we parted ways, at 18.
We experience our own evolution one day at a time, so we know what has shaped us. Our changes happen gradually, and we don’t always notice how different we’ve become until something forces us to look backward. We don’t always have that same window into anyone else’s life, so we take a snapshot of someone at a particular moment and, without meaning to, mistake it for their biography.
It doesn’t take years apart for that to happen. As leaders, we can see someone every day and miss who they’re becoming. We remember the employee who wasn’t ready for more responsibility, the one who stumbled on an early assignment, or the one who needed more direction than we expected. They may have outgrown all of it, but if our picture of them hasn’t caught up, they keep running into a ceiling they can’t see, one that exists only in our memory.
Of course, somewhere out there, people are doing the same thing to us. There are people who remember versions of us we might barely recognize today. They aren’t necessarily wrong; we may very well have been that person when they knew us, but they either weren’t there to see our evolution or didn’t notice.
My picture of my friend only changed because I asked. If I hadn’t, I’d still be holding onto the high school version of him, never realizing how outdated it had become.
“The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.” – John Tanner, Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw
I sometimes wonder who’s still carrying around a version of me I wouldn’t recognize. But maybe the better question is which versions of other people I’m still holding onto, long after they stopped existing.
Have a great weekend.
-Vijay