Developing a Work View

I recently took the Designing Your Life Stanford course. It is an interesting course that applies design thinking to 'transform our present job and our experience of work by utilizing the designer mindsets'. During the course, the part where I struggled or had to spend the most time thinking was about developing a 'work view'. We have 80,000 hours in our career, which makes it important that we consider how we will be spending those hours. For most hard questions in life, there are no 'right' answers. But it is still important to ask the 'right' questions.

Anthony Robbins said:

"The quality of your life is a direct reflection of the quality of the questions you are asking yourself."

So while developing my personal work view, I ended up asking myself a lot of questions, which I think are useful for anyone going through a similar process/journey. As Plato said: "An unexamined life is not worth living."

Finding your Ikigai:

Oftentimes, it seems like you can't find complete joy from your day job. It seems like often you have to divide between work that pays your bills and work that gives you satisfaction, where you exercise your creativity and express yourself.

We want to optimize for the most fun in our career, so how do we find a balance between the demands of the world versus chasing our interests? Hint: look up the concept Ikigai.

Expert vs. Generalist:

Is it better to pick one area of tech and specialize? Or is generalization better?

It seems like the economy is set up to reward people who specialize, which means it is recommended that you develop your competitive edge by picking a thing you are uniquely good at. Compounding is a powerful force, and you should set your career so that it becomes harder and harder for other folks to compete with you in the long run. But that's just one opinion. In the tech world, the equation gets much more complicated and learning-to-learn is the ultimate meta-skill you can develop. From a financial point of view, it can be better to spend 9-12 months learning a new technology, catching that wave of the tech cycle, and using it to produce business value for another 3-4 years. Here, the role of fundamental concepts in math (taught in first-year college) and CS (algorithmic thinking, etc.) is often not discussed. How many times do we get the opportunity to go back and polish the basics during our career?

Money:

We know money can buy us freedom.

How much should we value financial freedom in our life? Should we actively chase it? Is entrepreneurship the only gateway to financial freedom?

Mental Health/Mindset:

How should we stay positive? Should we develop a fundamental belief or habit (e.g. meditation) that keeps us in good mental balance?

Given the broader challenges ahead, both political and climate related, it is important that we maintain a healthy mental state and an overall positive mindset.

Ethics

What should be our moral compass? How do we establish a personal system of ethics in business?

When it comes to ethics, many companies have no soul and are involved in cut-throat competition or are effectively monopolies. Everyone has a different ethical boundary, what's considered good/bad. The debates about morality go back to Plato and Aristotle. However, it's important to develop a set of values that you think are important. An interesting thought experiment is to ask yourself, 'how would you raise a kid in the modern world?'

Politics:

How do we resolve disagreements and navigate work politics to get things done? Do we take a strict, uptight, serious personality route, or should we be flexible?

They say absolute honesty gets you nowhere. Yet I'm a believer in karma, and fundamentally believe in having a system of ethics and being kind to our colleagues (but then there are deadlines, so it's tricky at times...).

Inspiration

As a scientist, what are some of the positive human accomplishments that you personally find exciting? Or, put another way: if aliens discovered us, or if 15th-century scientists could time travel, what would you show them first? What are the unsolved big problems of your time, and what are you doing about them? If you were to write your own eulogy, what would it look like?

I hope you get to spend some time thinking about this stuff as well.

"In the long run there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one's position, state it bravely, and then act boldly. Action brings with it its own courage, its own energy, a growth of self-confidence that can be acquired in no other way."