CHAPTER 12

You Need at Least Two Points to Create a Trajectory

You have the power to say, “This is not how the story is going to end.”

—Cindy Eckert

It’s not just who you are as an individual that others will be judging. People will also be judging your path—the trajectory of where you have been, and where they think you are going.

The trajectory of an academic is often expected to follow an apprenticeship model. Advisors take students under their wing, teach them their craft, and then release them into a world of academia and boundless economic opportunity.

I was fortunate in landing my first academic placement after that propitious dinner with Raffi and Mac, if you’ll recall. But the part of the story that I left out is what led up to the invitation to visit with them in the first place.

Before you’re even at the stage of being invited to visit the school, there is a four-to-six-month lead-up—a period when you must substantiate that you are a well-trained apprentice. In my field, organizational and behavioral science, when you’re in the last year of your doctoral program, you go “on the market” and start looking for either a postdoc position or an academic position at a college or university.

There is a ton of strategizing and advance preparation that goes into this process. Months before, students are advised to start putting together their packet of materials, which are eventually sent to all the colleges and universities to which you’ll be applying. This packet includes a résumé, multiple writing samples, a research statement that outlines the importance of your scholarship, a teaching statement that outlines your pedagogical philosophy, and multiple letters of recommendation.

Prior to sending out formal applications and packets, students also attend our field-wide academic conference, the Academy of Management conference, attended by more than ten thousand people each year. At this conference, students attend networking events, start to set up some initial interviews with some of the schools that they are interested in, and try to talk to as many people as they can. Those who are on the market are easy to identify—they are the ones in full business suits, while everyone else is dressed much more casually.

In the year that I was on the market, my dear advisor (the master to this humble apprentice) made it a point to give me one particular piece of advice: “Be the prom queen.”

I remember looking at her and thinking, “Wait, that’s the only advice you’re going to give me?” In the four years I had spent working with her, I had never left a meeting without hordes of advice about my research, what improvements I should be making, what I should be working on, things that I should think about, how to think about my data. Every manuscript I had sent to my advisor would be returned with pages and pages of comments, things crossed out in red, notes and feedback in the margins of each page, scribbles of revisions, and suggestions and items to think about. But for the process I was about to embark on, which would be the culmination of my PhD career, the only thing she had to offer was “Be the prom queen”?

And so I sputtered out, incredulously, “Be the prom queen? What does that mean?” I needed clarification. Her reply: “Everyone wants to date the prom queen.” And then she sent me on my way.

Truth be told, I was far from the actual prom queen in real life. And I certainly was far from the social science equivalent of the prom queen. You see, the main currency that academics have in the field is their publications. Of which I had none. Publish or perish, baby. By the time doctoral students go on the market, they often have multiple publications, or at the very least, one—preferably in a top-tier journal. These are the students who command the most attention from universities; these are the students who land the plum academic jobs.

In lieu of top-tier publications, search committees will sometimes significantly weight the quality of the institution from which you’re receiving your PhD, as a signal that you have the academic chops to publish in top-tier publications, even if you haven’t yet done so. And there is a clear hierarchy of these research institutions—typically schools like MIT, Stanford, and Yale are considered top-of-the-line, but well-known public research universities like University of Michigan, UT Austin, and University of North Carolina also carry immense influence.

I had neither going for me—neither any publications to my name nor a high-caliber school to back me. My doctorate would be from UC Irvine, which often does not even make the list of the top fifty research institutions.*

And so I pondered why my advisor felt that I had it in me to be the prom queen. Perhaps it was just that she was like a mother; every mother thinks that their kid is the prettiest in the class and should be the prom queen, right?

My advisor’s advice kept plaguing me, even as I started networking and meeting with people at the Academy of Management conference. It was there that I met the prom royalty, so to speak—a handful of men and women in my cohort who had multiple top-tier publications, were being wined and dined by professors at top schools, and had plenty of charisma that captivated everyone around them.

In that instant, in addition to realizing that I, in fact, was not the prom queen, I also understood that a number of schools were doing intimate, invitation-only chats with people they knew to be on the market. My attempts at networking with folks at these schools would be, at best, feeble.

When I saw my advisor later that evening, she asked me, “Well, were you the prom queen?” To which I replied, “No, but I did meet the prom queen.” She was only slightly amused, and then she went on to explain that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t coming from the top institution, because I was well trained. My advisor didn’t think any of that should stand in the way of a belief that I could fare just as well as, if not better than, others. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have the most publications (or any at all), because that wasn’t the journey I’d had, nor the trajectory that she believed I would have.

She had expected me to guide the understanding that while I hadn’t had the normal trajectory that we expect to see in a doctoral student—one in which you work hard, make steady progress, and then have a paper or two to show for yourself—I hadn’t had the traditional apprenticeship trajectory either. Mine wasn’t the model of a steady, upward trajectory of someone who is taken on as the student of someone famous, groomed to produce a certain type of work, and then able to show the fruits of that labor.

“But that’s what makes you uncommon,” she said. “That’s what makes you special. That’s what makes you the prom queen—someone who generates the interest, demand, and attention of everyone, based on the aura of something special. That you’re on an uncommon, special trajectory. Guide people to that, you dummy.” (She didn’t actually say that last part.)

Don’t let them make assumptions. Give them the data points so that they can draw the trend line that you want them to see. Tell them, rather than allowing them to guess, about your future potential.

My journey, my trajectory, was one in which I was not told what to do, but was instead given support and encouragement to explore my own research passions. Where others had been given a passion project, I had discovered mine by having to go out there myself to struggle and figure out a phenomenon. In turn, I had answered an unanswered, previously unsolvable question: the role of gut feel in entrepreneurial investment decisions—something that very much ran counter to traditional economic theory and entrepreneurial finance, which no one else had dared study. And as a result, I had produced one of the most novel and interesting dissertation topics out there.

This trajectory wasn’t the shiniest or prettiest—but it did offer something special and unique. No one else had had the trajectory that I’d had, nor the story and the resulting research that I had to offer.

You already know how this story ends—how I found myself at a steak dinner in Philadelphia, and ultimately landed my first academic position. What I haven’t said yet is that I ended up sitting down the hall from one of those famous professors, who I remember was wining and dining and wooing others. Years later, he told me in passing that I was hired because I was seen as an “unfinished work”—someone with a fresh, new, and distinctive way of looking at the literature, with an amazing trajectory and tons of upside potential. It was basically the same thing that my advisor had said.

Being the prom queen, I discovered, truly is about the aura of something special. It’s about mapping and explaining where you have come from and where you are going, in a way that guides others to understand your value. Too often, we try to follow the trajectory that others have taken, using it as a road map for success and trying to contort our own experiences into the standard trajectory. But had I attempted to sell myself with the tried-and-true academic trajectory—the type that others embodied—it would have gone horribly wrong.

What is it about trajectories? Why are they important? First, being able to clearly communicate your trajectory allows you to guide people in such a way that they can comprehend who you are in a coherent and meaningful way. Some may call it a personal narrative, but it’s more than that. A narrative provides an anecdote, a moral, a quick lesson, like what you’d get from one of Aesop’s fables. A trajectory, on the other hand, paints a richer picture of where you are and where you have come from—who you are as a person and what others can expect of you. This trajectory, importantly, lets you dictate what is meaningful for them to know. You get to package factual information about both your tangibles and your intangibles—you get to be the one to construct it. They don’t. That is important. There will always be people trying to project a description onto you, trying to tell you who they think you are based on signals that they pick up on, cues that they notice—and biases that they draw from. When you take control of the trajectory that you’ve experienced, it’s the equivalent of taking over the steering wheel and constructing the sequence for them before they have a chance to do so. You anchor them at a point that you dictate, rather than letting them construct a view of you that you might then need to spend all your energy getting them to think differently about and trying to prove yourself otherwise.

This is what I eventually did with job search committees. Rather than letting them write me off because I didn’t have any publications, I took the steering wheel and communicated how my trajectory had led me to a novel, never-before-seen research contribution. And so senior faculty members went beyond their initial signals and cues. They overcame their uncertainty and risk avoidance that otherwise would have disqualified a candidate from a lower-tier university, to understand how I could be that diamond in the rough.

In this way, a clear and fitting trajectory also allows you to help others understand your value and how you will enrich. What do you want people to know about your trajectory—where you have been and where you are going? What is it about your trajectory that helps people understand your potential and your ability to enrich?

You can immediately help them do their sense-making around understanding how who you are and where you’ve been will bring potential value. You won’t have to explicitly elaborate complex reasoning behind how you’re going to get from point X to point Y, because your story allows them to make that leap on their own. Your trajectory provides the handholds and the logic that allow them to do it on their own, which is not only more powerful but also more memorable.

Finally, a proper trajectory helps generate interest and commitment. You’ve directed others to your upside potential and you’ve primed them on what your future trajectory might be. Effectively communicating your trajectory allows others to connect what you are saying to a broader context. Make no mistake, your depiction and your trajectory are yours—so it will still appear original and distinctive to others—but just by painting a picture of where you have been and where you are now, you allow people to embed what you are saying within broader contexts that are interesting to them.

So how do you grasp and recognize your trajectory—the trajectory that will give you your edge? It’s about recognizing the path you have taken thus far, and the path you intend to take going forward. Many different trajectories exist—like the steady, upward trajectory that we discussed, or the distance-traveled trajectory or second-chances trajectory, as we’ll soon see, but these are just a few. Yours may be some variation of these or something entirely different. Daniel Bertaux and Martin Kohli, sociologists who examine the use of life stories and autobiographical narratives, find that there is no comprehensive set of archetypes to describe one’s trajectory—but instead, there are two main trends. The first focuses on meaning and patterns, and the other focuses on what shaped these patterns within the social milieu. In other words, the logic and the larger paradigm. Your trajectory has to provide an account of the details that really matter, but if you don’t know how each detail fits into the overall story of what really matters, you don’t really understand it and you can’t effectively communicate it. But communicating your trajectory isn’t just about storytelling and isn’t just about being cute. To pinpoint your trajectory, you must understand and appreciate the underlying disadvantages, challenges, and obstacles that you face and have faced and the ongoing path that you see yourself on.

My friend Beatriz’s path is about how far she has traveled, from bookkeeper to Louis Vuitton—quite effortlessly, it seems. When I met Beatriz on the first day of our MBA program, I was immediately struck by how unbelievably poised she was, dressed in a style that was uniquely hers—professional and practiced, yet effortless and chic. It was only months later that I learned about how she had grown up in an extremely small rural town in Spain, where her childhood was spent helping her family tend farmland. Until the day she left, she had never ventured more than about thirty-five miles outside her town, let alone left the country.

She had achieved quite a lot by the time she left Spain, by her town’s standards, having gotten some basic bookkeeping training and even landing a job as a receptionist at one of the larger offices in the next town. But one day, she decided that she was going to move to Germany, a country she had always dreamed of seeing. To her and her friends, it was a place that could provide something bigger, something greater than what they were destined for at home, even greater than anything Spain could provide.

So she saved up, took a chance, and moved to Munich. She started interviewing for whatever jobs she could—in German. The first few interviews were, predictably, quite disastrous (and as she recounts it, quite humorous), as she spoke no German at all, and even if her interviewers spoke Spanish they didn’t let on. But she owned it, and kept at it, acknowledging her language deficiency. She noticed that when she openly told her interviewers that she was from Spain and that her German was still evolving, they would do most of the talking—they even seemed to enjoy doing so. As Beatriz recounts, “I started noticing that some of the questions were the same. And I would listen to them talk about their companies and almost answer the question themselves.”

She would listen. And then she started memorizing certain phrases, not knowing what those phrases even meant. She found that almost instinctually, at the next interview, she’d repeat some of those phrases she picked up here and there—just to keep up with the conversation. “Lots of times, I didn’t even know what it was that I was saying. I was just stringing together words and sentences—things that I had heard and that sounded good,” she told me.

People found it charming. She was amazed. She would infuse her own interpretation of things that she only barely understood, and then be complimented for taking a risk. She recalls, “They said that I was distinctive. One person even told me that they thought I would go very far in life.”

She started to realize that people took to her. More specifically, they took to the distance-traveled trajectory. When they would ask her to tell them about herself, she would guide them through her trajectory: coming from a small town in Spain, but having the guts and fortitude and gumption to not only operate in a foreign language, but to do so with her own flavor of poise and sophistication.

And then one day, she had an interview at a company that she had never heard of: Goldman Sachs. They were looking for a receptionist in their private wealth management area. The minute she set foot into the company, she knew that what they wanted was a receptionist who was professional and practiced, yet effortless and chic. She guided them through her trajectory, stringing together phrases that sounded good, even while not speaking German fluently. They loved that she could improvise and charm while still not having command of the language—and in fact, they saw that as a huge asset, especially with their client base, many of whom were also not native German speakers. She got the job.

She was a spectacular receptionist. Within a year, they promoted her to analyst—the first time they had ever promoted a receptionist to a frontline role. Her manager had made the case that she had made great progress, and that she continued to show guts and gumption, poise and sophistication time and time again—her trajectory. And then shortly after, she was promoted to sales associate in private wealth management. They gave her the opportunity to take stretch assignments in Frankfurt, New York, Miami, and Switzerland.

She soon left Goldman Sachs to pursue her MBA, which is when I met her. She wanted to make a switch into luxury goods—which proved to be difficult, though the industry requires the very qualities that she had been building throughout her entire trajectory. Even as we faced our impending graduation date, she still had no job. Yet while others who also had no offers were nervously scrambling, she just reminded herself that what she was experiencing was merely what had been foreshadowed in the past, in the early days of her trajectory. Instead of not speaking German, this time she didn’t “speak” luxury goods.

Three months later, she received an offer from LVMH (Louis Vuitton) as their manager for women’s leather goods in Paris at Maison Champs-Élysées. She started out on the sales floor managing sales associates, but it surprised no one when she became store director for Louis Vuitton in Monaco, responsible for the store’s revenue and profitability targets, local marketing, operations, HR, and team management, and later also taking on responsibility for Louis Vuitton in Milan, managing private client relations and client events.

Beatriz’s trajectory helped her communicate an important account of who she is: gutsy, risk-taking, sophisticated, and poised under any circumstance. Yes, she started off from humble beginnings. Yes, she probably felt at times like she had to work twice as hard as everyone else. But as she noted to me on multiple occasions, all of that was irrelevant. People don’t even notice (or care about) effort. At first, they judged Beatriz the same as everyone else—as if everyone began at the same start line. It was how she communicated and positioned her trajectory that changed that. It was her trajectory that enamored them, allowing them to see that she had actually come very far on very few resources (and in spite of lots of hurdles), and she was able to deliver her brand of sophistication—the very characteristic they valued and appreciated—precisely because of the path she had taken.

For others, it’s not about coming from humble beginnings and showing the distance they have traveled. The world can be cruel at times, and someone like Dave Dahl, whose trajectory is based on what someone can do with a second chance in life, can tell you that it was the story he was able to tell because of this second chance that gave him his edge.

Dave had spent fifteen years in and out of prison for drug abuse, robbery, and assault. He found himself labeled as an ex-con and a failure. But his identity wasn’t always tied so tightly to such labels. Dave conveys the days from his childhood when he found that he had a gift for making bread. And that led to him deciding that he would try to turn this gift into part of his salvation: he would make breads that were nutritious, natural, and filled with seeds, nuts, and grains,* and slowly try to build himself back up. The only problem? He saw the way people reacted to his ponytail, gravelly voice, and overall demeanor, and knew that starting a bread company was going to be a tough road. The distance-traveled trajectory was never going to work for him. But he could do something else—he could own his failures and present his own trajectory. He started his company, calling it Dave’s Killer Bread, with the description of the company mirroring the trajectory of his life:

At Dave’s Killer Bread, we have witnessed the power of Second Chance Employment: hiring those who have a criminal background, and are ready to change their lives for the better. It gives people a second chance not only to make a living, but make a life.

Without employment opportunities, those with criminal backgrounds often resort to the only life they know—a life of crime. We want to change that.

Dave guided not only investors but also retailers and customers to see why his trajectory warranted a second chance. Turn it into your advantage and make it about guts. Remember that 75 percent of superhigh achievers come from troubled families—the types of families who have found success from a second chance.

This can be harnessed to guide. Describe your failure, your trajectory, without bitterness: “It has been an incredible journey.” “I learned a ton.” It presents every failure as temporary—a way station to success.

There are many trajectories and many ways to depict your own trajectory. We’ve discussed a few here, but it is nowhere near a comprehensive list. There isn’t one path that is “better” than another, because your edge comes from recognizing the corresponding impressions that others will have of you based on the path you have taken and the path you intend to take, and how to manage and guide those impressions.

The way you chronicle your personal trajectory helps you explain who you are in a compelling way, a way that others will understand and be impacted by. People are trying to guess about your future potential based on your past trajectory. Ultimately, there is no wrong or right trajectory. The only mistake you can make is having no trajectory in mind at all. If you don’t provide your own chronicle of who you are, one will be given to you. You’ll assume whatever description the other party gives you, dictated by their biases, perceptions, and attributions. Don’t passively let others write your narrative—write your own narrative and guide others’ view of you. Make sure you have a baseline account of your trajectory, craft your own narrative, and don’t shy away from embracing all your past experiences—even the disadvantages, challenges, and obstacles that you’ve faced—in mapping your story. Your past is not something that you should lament; it should be another asset in how you gain your unique advantage. Let your past make you better, not bitter.