I am not old — but working at BuzzFeed sometimes makes me feel old.
Our staff is filled with so many awesome and truly talented young people. There are a lot of staffers in their early 20s. At 28 — almost 29 — I’m probably well above the median age at the company.
And the thing about working with so many young people is that every once in a while, you see someone truly kicking ass and realize: Oh, they’re five years younger than me.
Sometimes, a little bit of jealousy sets in. I’ll wonder: Why wasn’t I doing that when I was their age?
Whenever that happens, I have to remind myself of something I wrote four years ago about that exact phenomenon:
“I get jealous, sometimes, when I see 25 year olds who are way ahead of where I am. I get competitive. How’d that person pull off a book deal at 25? How’d they get a movie done? How’d they make their first million already?
But then I remember that this isn’t a 400-meter race. We’re not all shooting for the same end goal.
We’re all on different paths. We’re all running our own races at our own speeds.
It’s tough to tell where each of us is going now. It’s only with time — a decade, maybe more — that we’ll start to understand where we’ve been going.”
That last sentence really echoes with me now, this idea that it’s only with time that you understand where you’ve been going. If you’d asked me in September 2012 where I was headed, I wouldn’t have mentioned anything about BuzzFeed or newsletters. I thought I was on one path. Four years later, it’s clear I was headed somewhere different — and had no idea how fast I was getting there.
As for BuzzFeed in 2016: I get to work with so many awesome young people. I get to help them make great work, and they get to push me to make better things. We’re all on different paths, but at this very moment, we get to work with each other — and for that, I’m thankful.
And most importantly: I am doing my own thing, and I love it. I have to stop worrying about what everyone else is doing, and keep owning my own thing.
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That absolutely awesome photo of someone running comes via photographer Linh Nguyen and Unsplash.