Pedigree

I’m not a thoroughbred, no matter how badly I sometimes want to be.

I don’t have the pedigree to match my ambitions.

That still bothers me more than I’d like to admit.

I notice it most in rooms where people care about where you went to school, who trained you, where you worked before, who you know, what institutions have already decided you’re worth paying attention to.

Some people have been compounding those signals since they were children.

Good school. Better school. Internship. Fraternity. First job through someone’s father. Graduate program. Prestigious firm. Another introduction. Another person willing to take the meeting because someone they trust already vouched for them.

One thing feeds the next.

By thirty-five, you’re looking at the finished product and calling it pedigree, although a lot of it started twenty years earlier.

I didn’t have that path.

I changed direction. A lot.

I studied religion. I became interested in psychology without ever becoming a psychologist. I found my way into design. Design pulled me toward technology, behavioral economics, organizations, product, business.

Looking backward, I can tell that story beautifully.

Religion taught me to think about belief and meaning. Psychology gave me a vocabulary for human behavior. Design gave me a way to apply it. Technology gave me scale.

It sounds intentional when I tell it now.

It wasn’t.

I learned how to make it sound intentional because people want a coherent answer when they ask how you got here.

That may be one of the skills you develop when your résumé doesn’t explain you very well.

You learn to explain yourself.

You get good at connecting dots. You build a portfolio strong enough to make someone forget they had questions about the degree. You learn how to talk to people. You develop taste. You become resourceful about getting into rooms where nobody thought to invite you.

Eventually, if you’re good enough and persistent enough, something strange happens.

You get into the room.

Then you discover that getting into the room and feeling like you belong in it are separate achievements.

I’ve worked alongside people with educations I once imagined belonged to another species of person. People with formal training in fields I found my way into sideways. People whose résumés would have intimidated me badly when I was younger.

Sometimes I’m their peer.

Sometimes I’m leading them.

That should probably settle the question.

It hasn’t.

I can sit there with plenty of evidence that I belong and still notice the school someone mentions in their introduction.

I still hear pedigree.

I notice when someone says, “She went to Harvard,” as though they’ve explained something important about her.

I notice how people talk about candidates who went somewhere less impressive.

I notice how quickly a famous company on a résumé changes the amount of curiosity someone receives.

You learn the hierarchy partly from the way people talk about other people when they aren’t around.

That’s probably where some of my insecurity comes from.

I know too much about how the sorting works.

When someone has no context for you, they need shortcuts. A school is a shortcut. A company is a shortcut. A title can be one. A mutual friend may be the strongest shortcut of all.

If you don’t have those things, you need enough other evidence to overwhelm the absence.

For me, that has meant work.

It has meant charm.

It has meant learning how to tell a story about myself that makes a strange path feel interesting instead of deficient.

That creates a particular kind of ambition.

There is always another piece of proof you could produce.

A better portfolio.

A bigger role.

A more impressive company.

A credential.

Another person whose respect might finally settle something.

I’m old enough now to recognize the mechanism while it’s happening.

Recognition hasn’t switched it off.

I’ve done therapy. I’ve thought about it from every angle I know how to think about it. I understand intellectually that the evidence of my own life should carry more weight than some institution I didn’t attend twenty years ago.

The feeling survived the argument.

There are useful things that come from this.

People who come through side doors often become unusually good at finding side doors.

You learn to improvise because the official route was never available to you. You become comfortable crossing disciplines. You’re less attached to the idea that someone needs to certify you before you’re allowed to become interested in something.

That may be part of why people with strange backgrounds have often found a home in technology and startups.

Those worlds offered another sorting mechanism.

Can you build?

Can you think?

Can you make something people want?

For someone whose credentials are mediocre and whose work is good, that is an appealing arrangement.

It has been for me.

A degree in religion that might look useless in one environment can become fascinating in another. Someone hears that and wants to talk about belief systems, rituals, persuasion, human behavior.

The weirdness becomes an asset.

You discover that an unconventional background gives you material.

Then even that world develops its own pedigrees.

YC.

Stanford.

A successful exit.

Stripe.

Google.

A famous founder who backed you.

Human beings seem remarkably capable of rebuilding status systems after tearing the previous ones down.

I don’t think that makes pedigree meaningless.

I’ve come to think the opposite.

Credentials are useful because other people have limited time. They need signals. Some signals are earned. Some are inherited. Some are expensive. Some are excellent indicators of ability. Others survive mostly because everyone agrees to keep recognizing them.

You can spend your life resenting that system.

I’m more interested in understanding what it does to the people outside it.

There’s an invisible tax on coming from nowhere in particular.

You spend more energy becoming legible.

You have to convince someone to look long enough to see the work.

You have to turn the unusual parts of your history into something memorable.

You become good at manufacturing the signals other people inherited.

After enough time, you may manufacture a pretty convincing pedigree of your own.

The strange part is that you remember making it.

You remember when nobody knew your name.

You remember needing the portfolio.

You remember needing the charm.

You remember constructing the explanation for how religion somehow became psychology, which became design, which became technology, which became whatever comes next.

People may eventually hear that story and think the path sounds interesting.

Maybe even enviable.