Dance like a bee.

The part of your work that you need to focus on the most.

I have been thinking about what it looks like and feels like to have new dreams and goals in your mid-30s. You already have some experience, and some good things have been accomplished but also some hunger for more. On the other side there is a certain type of grief of everything that you wanted to be but you are not, and there is a chance that some goals should stay in the past. You know not the right time, place, or circumstances anymore. That type of thing.

I have been struggling with this topic this past month on who I want to still be, what I want to stand for and what has absolutely no importance anymore. One thing you need to know about me is that I don’t engage easily in what is good or bad or right or wrong online because these conversations are all very boring and binary. I think we need to put so much nuance and context into everything we evaluate, our lives included. I don’t want to take anybody’s templates and try to fit in, it is not going to work, I know.

What I do everyday whether you call it career, work, vocation and so on is very important to me. I figured I still have many many goals and I wanted to share with you my approach to them.

I need to use bees as an example. When you think about what a bee produces, most probably honey is what comes to mind. I learnt that they never need as much honey as they make. Honey is just fuel that keeps her flying. It was us humans that turned her surplus into her whole reputation because it was the part we could put in a jar and sell.

Then I found out something more interesting about the bee. When a bee finds good flowers, she flies home and starts moving in a tight figure-eight on the comb, that movement is called waggle dance. The angle of the dance, when read against the sun, says which way to go. The length of it says how far. She takes something she saw, out there, alone, and turns it into directions the whole hive can follow. Here is how it looks like:

Now let’s think about us, humans. Everything you are asked to produce is honey: the deck, the code, the spreadsheet, the plated dish in the restaurant. It is what you are measured on and paid for and, let’s be honest, you should be good at it. But honey is also the most replaceable thing about you. Plenty of people make “honey” especially with AI now. More and more people do faster and cheaper and sometimes with better quality than you can. And yet people still want to work with you specifically.

What they remember is your dance aka your point of view, the particular way you see a problem that nobody else in the room sees quite the same way. That is the part with your name on it, and the only part of your work that cannot be copied, because it did not come from a template. It came from you, your unique way of experiencing the world, your way of thinking, talking, showing, researching etc. I think you got the point.

Think of anyone whose take you actually trust. Are they ideal or do they produce the best work every time? Maybe. But more likely that’s not it. You’re not drawn to a specialist only for the quality of work you could get from a thousand others with near-identical portfolios. You want to hire and keep certain type of people because you trust their ability to understand the right and the wrong in your context, to use their intuition to correct themselves when needed, to be decent about their limits and their advantages. You hire them for their perspective, their point of view which is built on top of all the things I shared with you.

A point of view is not a pile of opinions, and you will not build one by having more takes or posting them louder. Watch what the bee actually does. She flies out and sees something firsthand, then comes home and dances it. The flying is the raw material. The dance is the point of view, the moment private experience becomes a way of seeing that other people can act on. You cannot dance a field you never flew to. I personally don’t care how you flew somewhere, you may have taken detours, you may have got the direction wrong, the point is now you came back and you have a map, you have a solution.

So the real work of becoming someone worth listening to is mostly the work of going out. Fly further than the job requires. See things in person, sit in rooms you were not invited to. I want to call this a kind of exposure therapy, in the sense that some of it is so uncomfortable. Who am I to even think about doing this, being here, going after this big dream of mine?! Then, you need to learn to carry it home and say it clearly, so a private thing you noticed becomes something other people can use. This takes courage. Sometimes you’re going to get it wrong, and you need to practice it anyway. Be wrong in front of people.

None of this depends on “being big”. A bee weighs almost nothing, and her importance has nothing to do with her size and everything to do with where she goes and what she brings back. Your most valuable asset was never your output. It is your perspective, and no one else is standing exactly where you are.

When I started my career I spent so much time perfecting my “honey”. I got very good at the deliverable and at delivering. What took me longer to see is that the deliverable was never the point. The thing worth building was the way I saw the world, and you only get that by going out and living enough to have something to report.

I always want to be hired for my perspective, my way of thinking because everything else is replicable now. RuPaul said it best, you need charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent.

The honey is the part people can always ask for because it is visible and tangible. But the dance is the part that is yours and that they are really looking to hire.

One of them you can get from almost anyone. The other you have to fly out and earn, a flower at a time.

With love, and see you out there chasing new flowers,
K

P.S. I will share more on how to develop your perspective in upcoming weeks/months.