The book - Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse is about a journey of a young boy in search of wisdom and how he learns through his experiences in life. While Siddhartha had set off from home to attain wisdom about life, he soon realised that wisdom is not something that could be passed down from the best of Gurus. When he did attain wisdom, it was only after experiencing the worldly pleasures of lust and materialism.
Sheryl Sandberg, the COO at Facebook in her book ‘Lean In’ describes how after almost 2 decades after her graduation from Harvard Business School, most of her male classmates were working in professional settings while a sizeable number of women were stay-at-home mothers or a part of part-time workforce. While I do acknowledge that societal expectations from women and support from their partners do play a very important role here, another way to look at it is that some people (men and women) do make these choices out of their free will. So, while every student does get imparted the same education, people choose different paths to attain wisdom – some make a choice to be outside the corporate workforce, while some choose to join back the workforce even after a long break.
Carol Fishman Cohen, CEO and Co-Founder iRelaunch, in her TED talk states examples of men and women who have joined the workforce after long career breaks. My interference is, that the career breaks helped them gained wisdom and discover a purpose for their existence, and once they chose to join back the workforce they discovered how they could use their skills to contribute towards making a better world.
Having been a part of the Corporate world with multiple breaks, I have experienced how working with different colleagues and different career-breaks have made me wiser. The journey towards wisdom goes through personal experiences, and knowledge just acts as a strong foundation to find the purpose in whatever we do.
