Ramit Sethi talks with someone who marketed themselves as a photographer in scholarship applications, submitting essays and slides that won awards. The conversation explores how early identities stick around socially even when your interests change, and how to treat self-presentation as a system rather than an accident.
What are the other systems that you've built? You've won a ton of scholarships. It's not just academic, by the way. Right. You did very well in school. Okay, blah blah, blah. What else? I mean, are there other things in terms of systems that you look at?
Well, what I thought was really interesting is I was getting lunch with a friend last week and he had said something about me being a photographer and I kind of laughed and was like, haha, I'm not a photographer. And he was like, what are you talking about? Of course you are. All of these people who are part of this kind of scholarship board that did decide to give me lots of money. That's all I talk about is that. That you're a photographer. And I was like, oh wow, that's interesting. I guess I did tell them that I was a photographer and I did say it pretty strongly because as a high school student it made me stand out. Right. There were lots of people that did 4.0's in high school, lots of people with good SAT scores. So I had to do something above and beyond. So I, you know, wrote an essay about photography and how it kind of related to my worldview and I sent in slides of this application and apparently it was very successful because they still talk about it despite the fact that I really consider myself a photographer, or at least it's not one of my dominant things. I do love photography, but it isn't like one of the five things I'd put down if I was talking about myself, which I guess is what you would refer to as branding, which is something I kind of did without really realizing there was a greater system involved and something I did kind of intuitively.
Yeah, you branded it. And I think what's also cool is that you don't feel guilty or bad that like, hey, I'm not a photographer anymore. Like that was in my past and cool, like I did it, I'm done now I'm on to bigger and better things. I think a lot of times we feel guilty that like, oh, I told someone that I was a photographer so I need to keep up with photography, but I don't really like it, but I better do it because people think I'm a photographer. Well, you're like, alright, I did the photography thing great, it was fun, it was rewarding and now I'm doing other stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. In high school it was a really great outside activity. In college there were lots of really great outside activities that were all of a sudden available to me. And I found out that I'm less passionate about photography than I am about human rights. And so, yeah, it was an interesting experience, though.
