I’ve been on a journey to realize my full potential as a young person. I’ve done all the work that you’d think a twenty-something who would make the former statement does. I listen to audio books and tell people I “read”. I pontificate on the meaning of life. I even meditate once a month just so I can keep saying I do it. This is all excellent, but something was missing. A hole in one’s life is a bad feeling, and I’m not going to say I’ve gotten to the bottom of this one, but I have theories. I’m not here to riff on a one size fits all remedy that solves bad feelings. I’m just here to report something that’s helped me. I realized there are two different kinds of work I do. As a young professional, there’s work that I do to make myself more marketable. This includes all the work that earns me a salary and ultimately benefits my employer. Though that work is performed to make a company money, it’s also performed in the hope that it adds to my stock of industry knowledge and makes me a more valuable employee. Most are referring to this when they refer to “work”. The other kind is work that I don’t want people to pay me for. Things like studying nutrition, reading philosophy, and taking long introspective walks. This is the kind of stuff I do just because I think they’re good things to do. The stoics called it self-actualization. Ryan Holiday constantly reminds us about Seneca’s cold plunges and Cato sleeping on the floor. It’s quite the misnomer, but those interested in their full potential would also call these things “work”. A friend of mine recently turned me onto the term “self-improvement junkies”. I dig it. The problem is I get lost in all this “work”.
There’s a certain number of long walks you can take before you look up and ask, “where’s the day gone?” That’s the bad feeling. I was talking about this with a friend when I realized I was spending too much time trying to transcend, and not enough trying to move forward. I think the problem might be in giving such different efforts the same attribution: work. Since then, I’ve been attributing my work based on the intention backing it. Work that I do for myself goes in one bucket, and work that I do for my career goes in another. Striking a balance between these buckets is of interest to me. I strive to go above and beyond professionally, and I’m lucky in that the work I do as a web developer is much more than a means to an end. I write code to pay my bills, but I also do it because I feel like it. The main reason I started doing it in college was that it sounded better than the jobs my peers in the business school were getting. I still hold this sentiment, and coding has been as much of a sanctuary as a source of income for me over the years. This has me sometimes doing very similar work to that I get paid for in my free time as well. But I’m a man of many interests. I truly just want to become the best person I can be, and though coding is part of that, so is taking cold showers. So is sticking to a strict workout routine. So is spending entire afternoons in nature. But this is what I meant about “getting lost”. There was a point when I realized, (probably in a cold shower), that I’m a professional web developer but I don’t even have a website… That’s the bad feeling. The buckets were off balance.
I decided to be intentional about the type of work I did for the next month. Outside of my nine to five, I started to divide up my free time into work I do to make myself more marketable, and the rest. It’s weird how the buckets can so easily become blurred. There’s plenty of ways to move forward professionally, and who’s to say those won’t help you transcend as a human too? They will. That’s why intention has become so important to me. When asked for his thoughts on work/life balance, billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya responded that balance is limiting. He then described his process as, “monotonous and regimented, but it’s all the time, except when it’s not, and that’s also monotonous and regimented.” My interpretation is that he’s working towards serious professional goals, but he also knows when it’s time to work towards other things instead, and he wants to be all in during either time. This is what I mean by intent. There are certain things I do for a specific professional goal, and others for a more ambiguous goal of wellbeing. Neither type of work is superior, in fact both are imperative to feeling good. I’ve found that when these types of work aren’t properly balanced, they both start to seem futile. If philosophy is the love of truth, it doesn’t make sense to do nothing else but study it. You’ll have no use for the truth! In a much more apparent sense, professional goals become futile without a likened goal of transcendence. Though we all seek transcendence where we please, the loneliest, emptiest people are rightfully depicted as those not seeking it at all. And it’s often been said that the search is really the good part anyway.
So, I’m constantly experimenting, trying to find the right balance between them. It’s caused me to dial back the truth self-actualization at times and set some hard goals that develop marketable skills. It’s good to reevaluate your own balancing act ad hoc. Since doing so I’ve finally put up that website that I’d been too caught up in deep breaths to build. Many will find themselves in the opposite camp, focusing far too much on their career. If this is you, try to believe that you can create your identity from much more than a resume. There’s a lot more you can do with this consciousness we all share. Get to know it! And don’t be upset by the imbalance. I constantly feel myself sliding in one direction or the other. The only compass I go by is how I feel. I hope this dares you to think about the work you do differently and come up with new reasons for doing it. It might just take a shift of intent.
For me, writing can fit into either bucket. Though my blog has been focused on introspection so far, you might also enjoy my professional work. I’ve written my first technical post on how I built my website. Check it out here.
If this made you think, please share with a friend.
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