I woke up on my 35th birthday unemployed, single, and looking ahead to spending most of the day alone.
Editor’s Note
In this ongoing series from Stanford Business magazine, we ask Stanford GSB alumni to reflect on one of their biggest challenges and what they learned from it.
Brian C. Johnson, MBA/JD ’04, is the CEO of Equality Illinois and the author of The Work Is the Work: Letters to a Future Activist, from which this is excerpted.
Three weeks earlier, I had conceded defeat in my 2012 campaign to serve in the California State Assembly. The transition from the cacophony of one of the most contentious elections in the state to utter silence was swift and stark. For months, I woke up each day at 4:00 a.m. to email, knocked on hundreds of doors, made dozens of phone calls, worked with scores of volunteers, and crashed into bed at 10:00 p.m. I had poured everything into the campaign. Now it was over, and I had little to show for it.
Over the next few months, I bounced back. Slowly. Two months after that birthday, I started a new job I loved. A few months after that, I met the man who would become my husband and the father of my daughter. But this story is not about the rebound. It is about what I learned in that lonely, quiet place nursing a public failure and staring into an uncertain future.
For nearly two years, I had been telling everyone around me a story — a journey story. It was a story about who I was and what I was going do over the next decade in elected office. I told donors this story and volunteers this story. I told voters this story. I even told myself this story.
Only in its absence did I realize how strong the journey story was, and how it had served as a central scaffolding to my sense of purpose. The story gave me direction and meaning. It enabled me to rally others to my side. And when it was gone with no replacement, I felt lost and unnerved and confused.
It was in this period that I realized that I had become addicted to my journey story. I had let it define me. It is not that I was confident I would win. It’s just that I didn’t build out the mental space to consider a plan B.
We are all held together by story. You, too, are undoubtedly in the middle of your own journey story right now. The story of what job you are working toward. The story of how high your career will take you and how broad and deep your life’s impact will be. This story is undoubtedly useful but might not be robust enough to hold a full and evolving life.
Maybe we shouldn’t cling so tightly to these stories of where we are headed. Obsess over them. Worry about losing them. No matter what we tell ourselves, the path ahead is always uncertain and unknown.
In the end, we should use our journey stories but not let them drive us. When things change — and they will change — loosen your hold on your former story a little bit or open up the journey of the story to hold something wider, changing, growing. Honor your journey stories and acknowledge their importance. But know they exist to serve us; we do not live to serve them.
Excerpt from The Work is the Work: Letters to a Future Activist, © 2024 Brian C. Johnson, Broadleaf Books. Used by permission.
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