Slashdot Mirror
What Should I Do With My Life?
Bamafan77 writes "FastCompany's website has an interesting article about what it means to be successful that I think builds nicely upon a recent Slashdot discussion. That Slashdot thread was about a study that wanted to find out if there is a link between college rejection and success. This new article asks a more basic question that many people struggle with: what does it mean to be successful and how do I achieve it? This article is an excerpt from a new book by Po Bronson which details the personal lives of several people, many of whom are very talented and superficially successful, who switched gears to try to find that 'thing' they are impassioned about. One interesting excerpt that might particularly hit home to the Slashdot community is Bronson's tidbit about a Rockwell manager who left his job because, though it was mentally challenging, lacked a deeper level of gratification. What is this man doing now? He's a cop in East LA."
I'd to be solvent when I'm old, and I think I'm not alone in that.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
...may be a bad thing. But, when you make your work and your play the same thing, then everyday is a joy. (First Reply tee hee)
Congratulations!
You are phenyl tetrachloride!
The media-fed society has a pernicious way of linking material success with success in general, no matter what price was paid for the material success. As individuals get free of social pressures to look good (defined as, nice car, clothes, and house -- not defined as "smiles a lot, and is at peace") they can really become themselves, not a shell wrapped around nothing.
Well, I was selling death sticks and making a handsome profit until some Jedi told me to go home and rethink my life...
So, maybe I'll become something less profitable, like a sysadmin...
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
..is world peace, having a comfortable house, a job you love, a modest paycheque and a loving family.
Oh yeah, blowjobs... plenty of blowjobs.
Trolling is a art,
I worked 2 years as a network admin for a law firm. Payed great, but the job just burned me out. It wasn't worth it. Sure after I left the place I found myself in some financial difficulty, but it was better than hating was I was doing.
I think my current CS professor said it best:
To me - Success can't be measured by numbers or scores, or anything tangible. It comes down to your heart and head. That is what really matters.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think I would like convert one of my "garage" projects into a business. Success is not, IMHO, a function of wealth, but a funciton of independence (which may or may not be wealth dependent depending on who you ask).
:), that is just icing on the cake.
The important thing to realize that most people judge success as a function of job satisfaction which I think is tough, if not impossible to achieve. Remember, the only thing you can control is yourself, and well a job, that is hard to control. That is why you are paid to do it.
I will never be a CEO, COO, and good help me if I make it to middle management. I am trencher, and will always enjoy being in the muck, but I would like to have a bit of voice when it comes to the decisions (which is probably related to job satisfaction). I guess, success as I define it, can be best described by how I spend my free time. The part I can control. A couple of toys and a paycheck that keeps me happy, healthy and wise
...guess what, I am going to enjoy it. We only have one chance [unless people can prove otherwise], and therefore I am going to adlib it. I am going to work hard enough to pay for the things I would like to do, but not spend my life working. I am not going to regret things I havent done. I honestly live my life on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis enjoying the things I do and look forward to things that I will hopefully be doing tomorrow or next week. I dont want money and to be hugely rich [granted it is nice - but I am not going to dedicate my life to obtaining it only to die with it all in the bank]. What am I going to do? Well, I want to learn about model helicopters, I want to race my radio controlled car. I want to go back to Australia and spend more time there. I want to write a perl compatible regular expression library even though PCRE already exists so I can learn how Non-deterministic finite automaton work on the implementation side of things. Doing things like this are far more important [in my eyes] than the pursuit of being rich and famous [which is what most people class as being successfull].
I am enjoying my life at the minute learning through my Ph.D. and hacking on my opensource projects. All I can say, is that I consider success not in monetry terms but in what I have learned for myself and the happiness that comes from it. Some people would say that I am being silly with all this and I should join the Real World. This is my Real World.
I suppose my final word is this, do what you want because it makes you happy, not because you feel you have to. Ultimatly the only person that can judge whether you have been successfull is yourself.
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
I know that there are a lot of flippant comments so far, but I'd just like to say that in my mid-thirties, I chucked everything and came to Thailand with US$1000 and two suitcases. I have successfully built a future here, and ther are many side benefits for me, as well (see my sig). Just the ability to read manuals in English, understand them without assistance, and explain them to Thais makes me profitable.
I make, in US$, somewhere from 500 - 1800, depending on how hard I work, but that amount is more than enough to support me and build a nest-egg for the future.
Did I mention the girls?
Put identity in the browser.
In other words, a writer and a magazine who made themselves by proclaiming that the only worthwhile use of your life is starting a dot-com, going public and keeping your stock price elevated until the lockup period ends and you can bail out are now embracing "money won't make you happy".
Truth is, the excerpt was interesting and occasionally thought-provoking, and the book might well be worth reading. But the smarminess level here really rubs me the wrong way.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Now there's a philosopher-king!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I've been working in tech since I dropped out of college about 8 years ago with terrible grades. Computers were something I'd been raised around and had a knack for, and I could make a decent amount of money from them. That was enough for a while. Not anymore, tho.
For several years, it's bothered me that I don't really do anything to help anyone. Well, I do help them make money faster, but that's about it. I can't stand watching all the suffering in the world and thinking like I'm wasting my time building manufacturing systems so that some company can make widgets more efficiently. Instead, I've gone back to college. One semester down with a 3.7 so far, and I've got about 6 or 7 more to go til I've got my neuroscience degree, then on to med school, hopefully.
I understand that some of y'all are stuck in jobs you don't like because of circumstances beyond your control. And I'm sure that a bunch of you are doing things in programming and engineering that will one day improve the quality of life for those around ou. For the rest of you that aren't, take a long hard look in the mirror and see if you're happy helping someone else make money and playing with toys. I think, or at least I hope, that some of you might be a bit uncomfortable with that idea. At the end of your life, do you want your big accomplishment to be "I got my company ISO 9001 certified" or even "I raised my kid to work as a drone in the tech sector?"
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
I dream of big machines.
I dream of big machines multi-processor server beasts.
I fall asleep to the soothing whirr of RAID arrays grinding in the background.
Endless lines of monotous code fill my head as I down one too many Jolts with the coffee cup still on my desk.
I hold onto the mouse like a lifeline because it is.
This is what I always wanted. This is what I got.
I am not afraid.
ACK
My grandmother used to ask me if I loved my work and if it was fun. I'd always say I liked it, but it wasn't what I'd call "fun." Eventually I started saying "Work that's fun, that's a hobby. Work you wouldn't do if you weren't paid for it, that's a job."
Anyway, I guess my advice would be to not automatically assume that what you do for eight hours a day or whatever is necessarily who you are. I know PhDs that cheerfully drive cabs for a living: they never confused the job with their life. So find something that can fund what you really find worthwhile.May be you are right. But thats such a minimalistic attitude. It might give sense of completeness for a while but not in the long run. Then how and when do you say that you are successful. I'd say successful is a very relative term. Why? Becoz as human beings we measure our success based on something. Say your neighbour or your brother or the guy who got a nobel prize.
To be successful, I'd say just the opposite - 'never settle'. If you accept life as it comes, in due process, you will be eliminated as you violate the basic principle of evolution. You have to innovate and improve every second of your life. Now thats easier said than done. But I'd say this style of life would be much satisfying than sitting on a lazy-boy, gulping down beer and cheering for some football team.
The question of what one wants to do is important. I asked it over seven years ago - and am now in a satisfying IT career.
I love where I work. I love what I do. I love my company and my boss is perhaps the best I've ever had.
But I know I'm fortunate.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I have a satisfying, challenging, and fulfilling job. But that's not what I turn to when I'm asked what my life is worth.
Instead I talk about my wife. I talk about my relationship with my parents and my brother and my in-laws. I talk about my friends, my music, my writing, and the software I write on the side. I talk about the organizations to which I donate my time and labor.
Equating sucess with professional achievement and money blinds us to the very thing that makes life worthwhile: other people. Our whole experience of life revolves around the quality of our relationships. That's not to say work isn't important--it is an important tool to having everything else in your life work. But I refuse to have it be ALL I do, or even the main barometer of my "success".
I have seen tons of smart-ass comments here about the article but I think it applies, especially here. Like most of my coworkers, I did IT because I wanted to make a buck. Fortunatly I am pretty good at it, but it still makes my eyeballs want to fall out. I come back after vacation and say to myself 'WTF, I can't believe that I sit here all day' One thing the author failed to mention is that jobs that are remotly interesting pay substantailly less, the reality of it is that I would not have a house or a car for my family if I didn't do this kind of work.
I abandonded a career in chemistry (which I loved) because I simply could not survive on a chemist's salary.
love is just extroverted narcissism
What should you do with your life?
.
Go barefoot.
Get tipsy with friends.
Have lazy Sunday morning sex.
Enjoy your coffee.
Endulge yourself every once in awhile.
Realize you don't have to be rich.
Read Barbara Holland's Endangered Pleasures
Enjoy it. That's what you should do with your life.
I enjoyed the companionship and humor of other software developers and now enjoy the companionship and humor of oil patch workers. The work can be dirty, long, hard and physical. Cracking the "greenie" label and being accepted by the rough and tumble crowd is satisfying. Its not for everyone, I don't know where I'll go next but I am not afraid to try. And besides I hear some great new jokes and sayings like "...that lease is so far fucking north they have to truck in sunshine!"
One can read the "Northwest Passage" and be amazed at early artic explorers. The drive they had is nothing new, its been around for centuries. We are doing that today in different ways as this articles points out. They explored new lands which is essentially what we are doing today only the landscapes have changed.
At University I wanted to be a computer programmer, drive a Jaguar and play Roland keyboards. All very material. I've achieved all that. There never really was an emotional side to the plan. But...
There's a lot more to life than work. I can speak from recent experience here, as I'm about to become a husband and also have a baby daughter. Work is just how I support the remainder of my life - trust me, nothing in work can compare to the satisfaction to be gained from raising your own kid, or from finding the right person. Nothing. Current culture glamourises the working world because it has to - it needs you to make money in order to sell you things. Try to look beyond that a little bit.
if he were happy.
He thought about it for a few mintues and then said, " I don't know. I've been so busy doing what I want that I've never even considered the question."
Now *that* is success.
And don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
What amazes me is how long it takes some people to figure that out, like the author of this article, for instance.
KFG
Y'know, I appreciate all the innocent and simple definitions of success, but many of them gloss over a financial fly in the ointment: it's horribly difficult to have fun when you are flat broke, or (more commonly) completely in debt with no way to pay it off.
Some of us are lucky: we have jobs about which we are passionate, spouses we love unconditionally, houses tucked in at the base of mountains in locations where the quality of life is excellent (hunting, fishing, camping, in a city of 8500 people). But the truth is, my life would suck if I had to perform actual physical labor.
Yes, I could make more money working somewhere else, as a DBA or a programmer or a systems engineer or a middle manager of other geeks. I am not underpaid, though I haven't purchased a new motherboard in 3 years. But if geekdom didn't pay so well, I would not be nearly as happy as I am now.
So it isn't the money, entirely, and it isn't that I love my work, entirely. It's that I receive a decent paycheck for something I enjoy, and I've found the people I want to live among, and work with.
But if it weren't for the pay, I'd probably be doing something that paid more but I still love, like finish carpentry.
I think that's the key: a person can be "successful" at whatever they decide to pursue, as long as their goals are modest, their abilities competent, and their capacity for happiness unbounded.
But it's hard to be happy when you get payed $6/hr to peddle inferior products to disrespectful customers for a boss who sees you as a replacable commodity.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
TYLER
I see in fight club the strongest and
smartest men who have ever lived --
an entire generation pumping gas and
waiting tables; or they're slaves
with white collars.
Advertisements have them chasing cars
and clothes, working jobs they hate
so they can buy shit they don't need.
We are the middle children of
history, with no purpose or place.
We have no great war, or great
depression. The great war is a
spiritual war. The great depression
is our lives. We were raised by
television to believe that we'd be
millionaires and movie gods and rock
stars -- but we won't. And we're
learning that fact. And we're very,
very pissed-off.
The older I get (I'm 35), the more I realize that the only really important things in my life are the people in it. I'm lucky, though. I like my job and I'm paid well and treated well, but my job doesn't define my life. The people in my life are the most important thing in my life. My family and friends matter the most to me, but my employees, cow-orkers and the people I regularly buy things from also matter to me.
As someone wiser than me once pointed out, the question you should be asking yourself is: What do you want people to say about you when you're gone?
So more important than the advice to ditch your life for a new one, I would suggest finding ways to deal with bad situations to make them better.
I think it all comes down to defining ones values. Conflict comes from either not knowing ones values or doing things that go against ones values. The answer, I think, is to strongly define ones values and stick with them, despite the consequences. Don't quit banking because you're asked to do immoral things, don't do those things and work to change it. Don't quit IT because your tired of being a Microsoft slave in the certification rut, liberate yourself by learning a new skill (like Linux) or solving problems in new ways. You don't need to farm fish or join a monastery to find satisfaction and happiness, that's just one way. Work from within to simply hold onto your values and the job will transform. If you don't know your values or need to redefine, well, that's your next step.
Yes, it's simplistic advice, but it accepts the fact of suffering in life and that sometimes bailing is not always an option. I think we bail on too many things in this culture: jobs, relationships, school, marriages, religion, etc. Life is difficult for most people, especially when there's uncertainty and doubt. Get your head straight, define your values, follow them, and let the chips fall where they may. Change attitude, not latitude, to paraphrase a popular beer commercial.
My wife and I both had the same epiphany. I was making plenty of money, but when I got laid off, we both realized what my ever-increasing income had really gotten us: a lot of debt. We had fallen into the same stupid pit so many other people fall into.
;)
...
Instead of hunting for a job that paid just as much, I took one that paid half as much -- teaching high school. You may expect me to say that I found it really rewarding or something in spite of the pay. Well... no. I don't like teaching. But, we ditched the high-priced suburbian house and the two car payments for a much simpler lifestyle, and now I'm back into programming, but not for the same money I was raking in before. We're both going back to school and playing it by ear for now, but we'll end up doing something "meaningful" and not worrying about much more than food and rent. And my broadband connection. I'm not going back to dial-up, even if I have to lay the fiber connection myself.
I'm very lucky that my wife and I both came to the same conclusions. I'm sorry yours didn't, but I'm glad to hear you found someone who does now. (I'm also glad I'm not a dateless wonder... My wife is taller than me, brown hair, chocolate eyes, long legs, and a size 6... those hip-hugger jeans look reeeeeally nice on her *g*.)
>> On second thought, I'm starting to think this whole 'growing up" business is vastly overrated
I certainly don't plan on growing up. Older? Sure. Wiser? Most certainly. More experienced? Without a doubt. But "grown up"? Never.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Travel, live in other countries, get to appreciate other people's point of view, strengths, learn from their weaknesses. For me personally there is no better thing than learning about other people. Your house can burn down, your money can be taken away (you might do something stupid like investing into Enron with it), but your memories and your experience will always stay. And when I say experience I don't mean job related experience but experience in life.
Just my $.02
All the comments I've read are making me think of a song by a French singer, Francis Cabrel, called "Photos de Voyages". I'll translate a bit of it, to the best of my ability:
Like a child of the islands,
wearing nothing on his skin.
He quietly watches the tourst boats cross.
You get off the boat and walk up to him,
money in your pocket, and take his picture.
At the end of your trip, sitting
in your living room, you see his
face again staring up at you from
the bottom of a shoe box.
You have your money.
He has the sun.
He has all his time.
You have your camera.
You take back your pictures, your travel photos. You think you're as happy as he is.
You have your business lunches
and your nights spent at work.
He's sitting outside, hair down
to his waist, repairing a net
to catch fish at the coral reef.
In the middle of your city,
you're all bundled up.
Sometimes the temperature drops
to 15 degrees below 0.
Sitting in his little cabin in
the hot sun, he's drinking
coconut milk.
============
Sorry for the crappy translation, but that's the general idea. The person with the money, going on vacation, taking the pictures is really just trying to convince themselves that they're happy with all their possessions, even though they spend most of their time working to maintain them. The guy living on an island in the warm sun, drinking milk and fishing off the reef has no money, but all the time in the world.
While I don't want to really be at either extreme, I like the message the song delivers: don't get so caught up in working for stuff that you don't have time to enjoy life.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
...try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations, and, finally...
I've spent the last year doing nothing in far-off places: in short, I took a Gap year. I met people who's dreams ranged from seeing a sunrise in every country in the world, to seeing one plant grow in their yard. Why did I take a year away from my future and spend a great deal of money on the process? To try and uncover the surface of this post - what do I want to do with my life. Did I find the answer? Not especially. I found a what a whole bunch of other people want to do with their lives, but couln't come to grips with what I wanted with mine. And then it hit me, while sitting in the Auckland airport.
I want to create something beautiful. I want to bring something that I see as beauty into the world.
I haven't found what that will be - will it be a memory of a scene in a foerign land, will it be a circuit so efficient and well made that the only fittign word is beautiful - but that's what I want to do. But to generalize, isn't that what we all want to do? Pick anyone famous, and within a few minutes you can find the beauty the sought to produce. Plato? The idea of the rule of the people. Einstein? A family (but look what he cam up with to get there). Hitler? A pure aryan race - he saw that as beauty, despite the fact that most of us don't.
So there you have it. What do I want to do with my life? Make something beautiful. Now, I just have to discover what that's gonna be...
Cue The Sun...
I highly recommend Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" for a 3rd approach. He states that with both theism and atheism there is a point at which you make a leap and state something. "There is a god" or "There is no god" and from that assumption there falls a series of logical conclusions. His approach is not to make that leap. It's a stance akin to zen buddhism. Essentially, I don't know, and have no means of knowing. This is where the absurd portion comes in. He compares existence as being like a man wielding a knife running in to a room full of men with machine guns. We are so obviously ill equiped to understand much of anything. So why not focus on the things that we can know. And that is (according to Camus) only what you believe (Sartre disagreed fairly strongly, another good read and essentially Camus busting on Sartre is The Rebel).