Transitioning Careers: The move from Engineer to Writing made me feel DUMB

How did the transition from engineering to writing make me feel? Pretty DUMB, I must admit. 

In Pune, you signed up for engineering if you were smart. You signed up for commerce or arts if you were…“Dumb”.

It was a deep-rooted bias in our city's DNA.

One afternoon, during an annual college fest, my engineering classmates were standing outside the mechanical drawing hall, watching students from other colleges, visiting us. My classmate deflected his chin towards a few girls parking their scooters, and said in Marathi “hee arts college chi mulgi kiti dumb distay”. (These girls from art colleges look so dumb). The stereotype was hardwired— arts, creatives, and commerce meant “sparkless and stupid”. 

I loved engineering— I couldn’t imagine studying anything else. Subjects like Mechanics and Statistics came intuitively to me (though I shied away from probability and thermodynamics). I was blessed to go to a college where many of us were non-IIT material (haha)— it helped me shine academically. Intelligence for us engineers meant marks, maths and numbers. Later In office, I'd be spending hours over excel spreadsheets creating models, calculations and insights from data. 

It all happened within a year.

I moved cities, teams and projects, all at the same time and it was over my 29th birth year, when I found happiness in creative pursuits. I was engrossed in the visualisation of data, learning R coding just to make pretty & creative graphs. I found my zone in writing, photography, colours, design— It pulled me into a newfound high. 

A conflict surfaced when my friends began recognising me for my writing. It worried me.

Arts was for the dumb, no? Am I becoming dumb? What if people think I am dumb? "She's dumb, that's why she writes".

There is no metric to prove smartness in the arts. There was no metric to prove my non-dumbness. No longer could I say ‘When you plot this data into a log-normal distribution, it reveals there is non-trivial data on one side of the curve, and the 80th percentile is the cut-off’. Ohhhh that sounds smart. No one can dispute your smartness when you talk about ‘percentile distribution and ee raise to aii pi’.

But writing? Am I now that arts girl my colleague made fun of? -- ‘kiti dumb distay’ (looks so dumb).

I fought the ‘battle of the dumb’ for years. In arts, there is no clean way to get the appreciation that we humans, though in denial, often crave.

Do you know how it got fixed?

When I now say ‘I’m on my third book’, suddenly it all seems legit. Undisputable. People light up. Writing might still be a dumbo job, but the effort, focus and discipline in writing 3 books, beats smartness. 

Focused work outplays intelligence over time.  

What does this mean for you, dear readers? Find one goal and stay focussed. 

#writing #careers