Daily Endeavor Blog

World 2, come in. World 2, this is World 1, do you read me?

Jessica Hagy has the talent to distill. Like a lot of it.

She unfurled a beauty yesterday that nails the main correlate to a sense of entitlement: disappointment. High expectations are good. Expectations of guarantees are more than risky; they’re guaranteed to come up short.

We’ve all known a few people who, when they finish school, say “Ok world, I’ve slogged it out, now drop off all the riches right into my lap and be off with you.” Armchair critics will respond with “too self-involved” or some other quick explanation.

Sure there are always one or two overly entitled people who need a Reality Check, but the vast majority of people are following perfectly healthy self-interest based on what they know. What looks like entitlement in many cases, may in fact be individuals trying to follow their own path the best they understand it.

Straddling two worlds

Graduates are in one of the few life positions (the other is probably before/after having kids), where they’ve mastered one world and are on the precipice of a new, highly different one — one they know very little about. How could they? They haven’t lived in yet.

When transitioning from one world to the next it’s easy to overestimate how valued your experience will be. You have great experience, it’s valuable. Rather, the calibration is difficult, especially given all the cues going on. After all, you’ve just accomplished every academic task set in front of you for 20 years, you’re at the top. That’s a huge achievement and milestone, and everyone around is saying so (and they’re right).

It’s also easy to underestimate the enormous volume of others (millions) who headed off into World Two each year before this one. They too are looking for spots, but they haven’t been on campus for a year or more, so they’re not on the radar.

It’s not your fault. It’s the nature of the transition, or more specifically, the nature of living apart. The mis-estimations are due a complete lack of mixing between the two worlds. For example, I truly don’t know what it’s like to be a parent because I haven’t been one yet.

When combined, these two — mis-calibrating how some hiring managers may view you and underestimating the large number of others vying for similar spots — can look a lot like entitlement. But I don’t think they are. They’re natural perceptions that can arise in anyone when heading from one world to the next.

This brings us back to Jessica’s graph. She’s right. When there’s real sense of entitlement, disappointment reigns. Yet even when there’s not entitlement at play, but instead people honestly trying to negotiate the very large college to career transition, there’s still often a big set up for disappointment.

Let’s change that.