Work for yourself

This is the third article in my perspective from 30 years of software development career. The series starts here

In this article I want to focus on the adage "work for yourself". What it means and how it shaped my career.

A long time ago, in the early 2000s, I was responsible for a large account.? In those days, work was crazy busy as we were growing fast and running multiple things at once.? Thus, my work day used to start at about 8:30 AM and go on some days until 2 AM.??

We had a client representative who was a good friend and we used to meet for the occasional after work drink or two.? Given the busy work schedule, we would typically meet up on a Friday evening or even weekends.? He made it a point to never talk about work and used to talk about various other non-work topics.??

As I mentioned about the hectic days,? telling him that I had no time for self-care, he interrupted me with a thought-provoking query: "Vivek, you're achieving success and advancing your career, but when do you? work for yourself?" Frankly, I could not make sense of the question. Intrigued, I asked him what he meant by that?

He elaborated that during our professional journey, we excel in our core competencies, optimizing our work, and learning new skills to achieve excellence in our roles. We develop skills relevant to the present and perhaps one appraisal cycle ahead. However, what about the next decade or even a lifetime ahead? This is the essence of "working for oneself."

Imagine life in your 20’s. You could party till 3 AM and then get a couple of hours on the nearest couch, hit the shower and get ready for the day at 8 AM as if nothing happened.? You still looked like the Greek Goddess? / God with a perfect slim body regardless of how many pizzas you ate or beers you guzzled.? This is a lifestyle that spells disaster for 30 year olds.? They know it very well since they feel the aches and pains.

Why does this story ring a bell with everyone?? Why is it that we are unable to maintain a great food habit, workout schedule and lead a balanced life?? The number of people who fall off the diet / workout bandwagon far outweigh the number of people who stick to it.? I have one simple theory that connects back to working for one selves.?

In our 20s we never had to worry about health.? We took it for granted since we had a scarce understanding of what is good health, what is good food and so on.? We were driven more by hedonistic choices than what is good for us.? Importantly, we didn't have the foresight to see what would be good for us in our 30s.? If only we understood how diet and exercise worked, we could have started both in our 20s, maintained both in moderation and achieved a balance that would work well into our 30s and 40s.??

Working for oneself is about building a set of habits today that will provide us results for the years ahead.? Some examples are

1. Focusing on our career in the long term in the sense that you can see where you want to be decades from now, identify the skills needed to get there?
2. Focusing on our health and tuning our lifestyle today to meet our health goals decades from now
3. Deciding how we want our friends and families to perceive us decades from now and building a set of relationships that will get us there.

While the concept is very similar to long term planning of our life, there are certain subtle differences in terms of how this works.??

1. First is the fact that you are doing this for YOURSELF - be it career or family or health it is all for you.? If you want the success you own the failures too!
2. You have a vision for yourself in terms of how your life should shape up.? Envisioning is a powerful way to ensure that the future you want is clear to you. .
3. Having created a vision, you don't simply sit on it and let it be a fond dream, but you start working on it.? This is the part that is immediately obvious when we say “work for yourself”.
4. Essentially you author your life with purpose so you now have a clear goal to shoot towards,? leaving you with no lack of motivation or plans at every stage in your life.?

Working for ourselves involves committing ourselves for our own long term success.? Learning what works in the long term is not easy, but it is a habit that we can build over time.? This is an important habit since this forms the foundation for determining our long term life. So in the next part in this series, we will explore how to look ahead in life and be that magical soothsayer that will help us navigate life and career.