I'm having a hard time deciding what to do, both personally and professionally.
Personally, I'm conflicted about lifestyles I want to obtain. One day I'm ambitious and want to devote my life to building generational wealth, only to dream of a humble house and spending my time cooking simple meals. It's not that I think I wouldn't find some happiness in any of those possibilities – what bothers me is that I cannot completely decide where on that spectrum I'd like to aim for. A good example of this is the question of living in the US (on H1b/L1) vs. Europe, where I bounce between the two on a weekly basis, making it hard to either move or come to peace with where I am and move on.
Professionally it's a similar story. I started coding in middle-school, and acquired generalist skills by working on many things throughout high school / college. I was and still am ambitious, albeit I lately started understanding it's a double-edged sword in a way.
Now I'm in late-twenties, came to FAANG straight from school, working on distributed systems at scale. My job is good, I get enough opportunities, get recognized very often, and there's room for me to grow. The shipping velocity and lack of accountability is not great but I don't think I can impact the culture enough for a meaningful change. Organizational overhead is frequently a mess and building trust with an ever-changing list of line managers and TLs takes away too much energy. Looking around, there aren't too many people I like or am excited about working with, but that tends to change often. I used to think there were times where all I wanted to do was clear – learn more about databases, or build distributed systems, or coach and mentor peers, or get more money, or build effective teams, or start a self-bootstrapped side business to squeeze more money out of my skills, etc. I used to be more excited about tech as well, now it all seems less meaningful.
In the past year or so, I've struggled to define a meaningful & fulfilling direction. My answer to "what do you want to do?" is rarely consistent for more than a few days in a row. I now realize I never really knew what I was after, and I was just lucky to be happy with whatever I had stumbled upon. Do I want to pursue being a depth IC, manager, founding engineer in startups, or even a founder myself? Hard to control scope in these decisions. Thinking this over day-to-day is a recipe for anxiety and endless analysis-paralysis.
Most of my life I have had to work hard to create opportunities for myself, and open as many doors as possible. I was lucky to open quite a few. I now understand that I need to deliberately close some of the doors to move forward, and it goes against what got me here, hence so much friction.
I'm looking for fresh perspectives on conceptualizing or thinking about situations like this. Frameworks that peers and mentors often provide assume that I know what I want to do, and are concerned more with how to do it.
How do I limit the scope of my decisions? How do I ensure I can backtrack in case of a bad decision? What is even a bad decision? How to find things (or thing) that I want to do and be sure to do it for longer than a week? How do I commit without looking back? How to think productively about dependencies between these decisions?
Curious to hear stories as well. Where were you stuck, and how did it play out?
Many thanks, HN.
But did you really? To me it reads like you got to the circle of doors at the start of your career, opened one (tech) and the ran down that hallway full pelt. You've got plenty of doors to open...but they are all in one narrow realm. Imho it sounds like you have a really narrow concept of what work/career is and what different jobs entail. Maybe take a year out and go do something completely different. Who knows maybe you like working in tech...but maybe you love hanging off the bough of a boat as it sidles along a dock to moor and your jumping over to tie it on 10x more than coding, your not gonna know if you have no exposure to the experience.
I took the opposite path, worked all kinds of jobs that aren't tech(mining, out at sea, movies). It helped me narrow down what I want...and firmly set in stone what I don't want. Maybe thats what you need? I dunno I find the concept of locking into one career especially early on incredibly daunting. You only have one life, imho you wanna try experience as many polar opposite things in it as possible to suss out what they are like before you lock into one. I couldn't think of anything worse than spending say 40 years in a career to discover on a whim that I enjoy something else more (I mean hell, I discovered I love stuff like concreting, who'd a thought shoveling sand for 8 hours and making concrete look like rocks was so much fun!?).
Always remember: indecision is a decision. The worst thing you can possibly do is nothing. That wastes time. Time is a resource you are always losing and you never get back. Use your time. Make decisions. If they turn out bad, make different ones. Just make decisions and execute on them.
I first got exposed to it during a career navigation workshop that showed us this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SemHh0n19LA&ab_channel=TEDxT...
They also published a follow-up called Designing Your Work Life but I haven't read that one.
Some decisions might also seem more consequential to you than they are. Whatever job you pick, it will still be a job. Wherever you go, people will have the same basic interests and needs.
Many seemingly big decisions are also kind of reversible. If you quit your current job, you can always get another equally okay-ish job at a megacorp. If you move somewhere else, you can also move back. Only if you plan to start a family you might want to be close to your relatives, but YMMV.
My "fresh perspective" is that maybe none of that matters that much? What matters is that you enjoy your work colleagues, work is bearable and sometimes interesting, you make a lot of money, and you have a life (friends, family) to attend to after work.
I think it’s stupid that in the current environment you must apologize for your perceived location in some sort of privilege hierarchy in order to lament a (perhaps) universal experience for humans: where am I going? Why? What does it mean?
Not your fault (and not an answer, other than to say “yes, I too have wondered where I am going, what I should work on, what I should do with my life”), just the way of things I suppose.
For me it was art, especially concept art. You have to find yours.
tl;dr: Facing the same set of walls like you, and writing journal entries about them spanning more than a year, I eventually arrived at a list of 'core values' that I go back to when life throws itself at me. This serves as a framework for me to make any important decisions, while reminding me to keep marching ahead despite the headwinds. (I pasted the exact copy of it from my journal entry at the bottom of this post)
I will re-order your questions a bit.
"How do I commit without looking back? How to think productively about dependencies between these decisions?"
- Commit but do look back. Patterns often repeat themselves, only at different scales. And most decisions provide invaluable experiences that aid us in making a similar decision down the road.
- Understand what you value in life, your set of core values or principles that serve as a framework to make all important decisions.
- Act. Move over your decision paralysis. Make peace with the fact that reasoning is infinite, unsatisfiability is core to being Human. Nature and your Mind is endlessly complex. An answer to the question we seek is often a beginning of a new mystery that is mostly turtles all the way down. So, keep re-working your core values.
"How do I limit the scope of my decisions?"
- Do they improve your understanding of your core values? Bonus points if one decision positively ticks the needle forward in multiple core values. Remember, Reasoning is the root of all values that makes us Humans.
How do I ensure I can backtrack in case of a bad decision? What is even a bad decision?
- A decision taken based on the above framework can't be considered 'bad' - as it contradicts your root value of Reasoning. All decisions will unlock an answer that you necessarily wanted - helping you set your next duck in that row. Suffering is an essential part of being Humans, and in the story of your life, bad decisions become important foundations on which success is built.
- Most mundane decisions are reversible. For the critical / irreversible ones - try to break it down into smaller achievable (and often reversible) steps - keep getting those ducks in a row. (e.g. leaving a comfortable high paying job for a more strenuous low paying one still would be a good decision, because now you've come out knowing that what you really value after all is a comfortable high paying career)
"How to find things (or thing) that I want to do and be sure to do it for longer than a week?"
- Read. A lot. Follow a ‘T’ shaped learning – broad on some topics, but deep in at least one. Explore many but exploit one. Curiosity (and hence Creativity) is a natural result of combining the functions of the Right and the Left brains, that power our Imagination and Reasoning. Think Mozart, Einstein, Doudna.
----- My framework of Life:
> Be honest, especially to yourself. Respect and Recognition (our primal talents) comes for free.
> You get to re-live your whole childhood again when you raise your kids. Your memories are just playing back to you, only this time, you are in your dad’s shoes. You have been dealt a ‘Get Lucky’ card from Nature and Nurture to reach here. Use it wisely.
> Love people unconditionally. Start with your family, then the communities you are a part of. Give yourself for them.
> Get inspired by Nature, the Universe, its inhabitants, and its Creator. It has solved an amazing array of problems already.
> Build bridges between your practice and your passion, stretching the fabric of your knowledge. Wealth (our other primal talent) comes for free.
Together is how we all grow, as an infinite single stream of consciousness.
----- Edits: Formatting.