When You Aim Too Low, Everything Gets Harder

The basic idea: You really need this job. You were desperate four weeks ago, but now you're way beyond that stage. So you try to morph yourself into a shape that will produce an offer, all the while aware that you are underselling yourself.

Or perhaps you are trying to salvage a relationship with a client, so you start making promises. "I'll be more flexible," you claim, knowing this really means acting more enthusiastically about a series of lame ideas and unreasonable requests.

Or it's possible you are a gifted artist afraid to fully put yourself out there, so instead of selling true works of art for $3,000 each, you default to selling kitschy mountain scenes that tourists scoop up for $300 each.

But with each compromise, a little piece of you dies.

A bit more background: Underselling yourself is a race to the bottom. You continually undercut your own value and waste your own talent. It's an understandable human instinct when under great pressure—go for the fast, safe bet—but over the long run such a strategy will cause you immense pain.

To cite one fun example, Amy Webb has an amusing and enlightening TED Talk about how she hacked online dating. "I like the idea of online dating," she opened, "Because it's predicated on an algorithm, and that's really just a simple way of saying I've got a problem, I'm going to use some data, run it through a system and get to a solution."

How romantic, right? At first, she created an online profile by cutting and pasting from her resume. The result? "Truly awful dates."

Next she tried coming up with a list of questions that would help her identify what she wanted in a mate. 72 "data points" in all. The only problem was that the men these data points produced did not like Amy back.

Finally she combined lessons from the most popular women online, along with what she wanted. She retained her scoring system, but also realized she needed to use more optimistic language in her profile, and a lot less of it. Think: 97 very well-written words instead of 4,000 or 5,000.

"Once I had all of this information," says Amy, "I was able to create a super profile, so it was still me, but it was me optimized now for this ecosystem."

That's when she met Thevenin, "who said that his job was an arctic baby seal hunter, which I thought was very clever. He talked in detail about travel. He made a lot of really interesting cultural references. He looked and talked exactly like what I wanted."

They are now married, with a daughter.

Looking back, Amy says the problem wasn't that she was too picky. It was that she wasn't picky enough.

Do yourself a favor. Make life easier and more rewarding. Don't sell yourself short. Aim higher.

Want to go deeper? Would you like to find more growth, meaning and impact in your life? Join my Being Growing Doing community, a tiny membership-based organization intended to number in the hundreds. It's organized around my new Being Growing Doing monthly newsletter and my weekly Zoom session for members only.