#7 King of the Universe

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I was catching up with a good friend recently and he reminded me of something I said to him a few years ago when we were discussing him taking a new job. To preserve his anonymity, let’s call my friend Matt. At the time, Matt was a big shot partner at a major law firm and he was offered up a job by, oddly enough, one of my clients (we were at different law firms so that’s why it was a weird coincidence). He called me up to share the good news and asked for my advice. So here’s the thing when it comes to friends asking me for advice, they already know I won’t pull any punches. My approach when people ask me for advice is to give it absolutely raw and unfiltered. Why? Because I get so frustrated when I ask friends for advice and their response is “Well, that seems like a tough problem” and proceed to not give me any actionable advice (now that I think of it, I feel like some of the lawyers that agitated me the most did the same thing).

Back to the point, so Matt asked me for advice on whether he should make the leap and leave the well sought after “Partner” title at a top law firm for the Head of Business Affairs at this new venture. One of his concerns (that he had heard from other partners) was that he was essentially taking a demotion in title. By being a partner at a law firm, he had no bosses, so why would he trade that in for going and working for a handful of them? Apparently my response was something along the lines of:

“Listen man, you know I hate hearing all this noise about title. I’ll f&*%ing call you the ‘King of the Universe’ if that’s what it’d take to pull you onto my team. Does that make a difference? That’s a title that other people judge you by. It’s something someone else created at some point. Yes, there’s validation in it, but it’s certainly not what defines you.”

This opinion was largely informed by my own mistakes when I was more junior and considering some opportunities years back. The terrible advice I’d received was “Don’t ever let go of the title. If you have two options and one is for a higher sounding position. Take the higher position.” Oh boy was that the worse advice, and I was even dumber for taking it. After having a bad experience I learned that title is what you take to signal to the outside world who you are, and it means very little when you don’t value yourself outside of the title. Titles are mechanisms for external validation (and there’s nothing wrong with that), but you’ll find that taking a job for the internal validation (e.g. taking on a new challenge, alignment with your long-term goals, good fit with a team, etc.) is much more fulfilling which results in longer term happiness.

My friend Matt is much happier at the new gig and now we laugh about how I told him he would find his consideration of job titles mind boggling after a year out.

So the next time you’re considering making a switch, and there’s that nagging voice in the back of your mind saying “Does the title sound right?” Just ask yourself, between that and calling yourself the Queen or King of the Universe, does it actually mean anything or are you just feeding your ego?