I recently took the design 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 are i think useful for anyone going through a similar process/journey. As what plato said holds true: "An unexamined life is not worth living".
Finding your Ikagai:
Often times, 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: lookup the concept Ikagai.
Expert vs Generalist:
Is is better to pick one area of tech and specialise? or is generalisation better?
It seems like the economy is set up to reward people who specialise, which means it is recommended that you develop your competitive edge by picking a thing that 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 complicated and learning to learning is the ultimate meta-skill you can learn. From a financial point of view it better to spend 9-12 months learning a new technology, catching that wave of tech cycle and using it to produce business value for another 3-4 years. Here, the role of fundamental concepts in math (taught in 1st-year college) and CS (algorithmic thinking etc) are often not discussed. How many times we get that 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 fundamental belief or habbit (e.g meditation) that keeps you 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 its important to develop a set of values that you are 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 navigating the work politics to get things done? Do you take a strict, uptight serious personality route or should we be flexible?
They say absolute honesty gets you nowhere. Yet i’m a believer of karma, and fundamentally believe in having a system of ethics and being kind to our colleagues (but then there are deadlines, so its tricky at times...).
Inspiration
As a scientist, what are some of the positive human accomplishments that you personally find exciting? or put it another way if aliens discover 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.”