(working title)
Who do you want to be in life? — Somehow as a kid this question was easier to answer. I didn’t care about money, status or position. My answer was based purely on what I wanted to do and who I needed to become to do it. “Want to be a hero who saves lives?” — become a fireman or a doctor, maybe a policeman? “Enjoy science?” — become a professor. These are all great options that seemed like great possibilities for me.
As I grew up this question became tougher to answer. At each stage, I had to factor so many things: career goals, parents’ expectations, my age, experience. It seems to me that a question about your career and what you like to do with your life gradually grew apart and became two different questions. You know what you can do and what you love to do and often what you love to do has little to do with what you end up doing.
I like technology. I like sports. I like art. I like to lead, innovate, create, meet new people, learn new things. Somehow these things seem disjointed, yet they are me.
The main challenge in life for me is to find a career path that covers as many of the above points as possible. But this is not a secret, everyone knows this — what I argue that often a career path is essentially purposely chosen to avoid these. You separate your life from your work.
Often doing what you love is considered unproductive, waste of money and time. As I am writing these lines, I realize that some might consider it as a waste of time as well. But is it? It seems to me that the approach to demand quantifiable and observable productivity (e.g., grants, paper publications) is contra productive in a long run. You force yourself to produce when you don’t have an idea, or enough ideas to output anything useful. Connecting the dots is not a very straightforward process, in my mind. By forcing the process, you end up with a half-baked often premature “result”. Things like mentoring, brainstorming ideas often viewed as a waste of time, if by the end you don’t have a measurable outcome. This is insane! So essentially this forces a very specific type of mentoring, one that focuses on “what-is-in-here-for-me?” attitude.
When it comes individual goals and ambitions modern workplace is very restrictive. Sure, there are some exceptions, e.g., companies that allow you to bring your pet to work, work from home and even pick your outfit, some like to work in their pajamas, but ultimately they would only allow you to do so if you are not productive in what you are assigned to do.
So when, as a postdoc in academia, I was asked what I plan to do in the near future, not too long ago, I realized that I I didn’t really know the answer to it. I knew what I should answer, e.g., I would like to have few strong publications, patents to establish myself in academia or industry. But honestly, there are just so many factors. For me, research is an exploratory process where you dive into a problem without knowing what the outcome will be. There is no failing this journey — it’s like art, you can only fail by not doing it. Nevertheless, in academia, you are forced to produce papers [1]. They are your measure of success. Other fields are also full with these labels: the yes-or-no of this world. There is no getting away from it unless you choose to live in total isolation. Eventually, you start to believe in it yourself and they become your personal measure of success. So much so, that you don’t realize the affect it has on you. For example, I get sad that when my paper is rejected for a conference submission — no matter how many times I’ve been told, and was telling this to someone else myself, this is actually part of the process, feedback is always welcome, reviews are a subjective process and no indication on quality of your work. This rejection will make your paper better in the long run. Yes …yes…I understand, yet I still get sad from something that is a good thing. Why is that? Well, presumably somewhere deep inside I think I failed.
I enjoy the process of connecting worlds, ideas and people. I like building software. Is there a job for me? Should go be an engineer in a big company and make my way to the top? I was told once you get to the top you get to do what you like — I doubt it, but who knows!?
You are bound to feel lost, when your passions do not align with what I you are doing. Sometime, I believe, things are how we choose to see them. Any “bad” situation, is really our perception of the situation based on what are our initial presumptions and expectation.
Ultimately, these questions are not easy to answer, there is no formula [2] that you can apply to make the right choice. I feel that when it comes to choosing your path, it comes down to a few moments in life where you can decide to take a course which takes you to where you are going. It is in those moments you have to stay true to yourself and think of the long-term goals. This is harder to do than it might sound. What does “staying true to yourself” even mean?! Perhaps it is the internal belief that ultimately your happiness and fulfillment will get you to a better place than the current reality fix. Can we leave it all to faith!?
What bothers me is that a lot of the time we are motivated by fear. We fear to fail? be disappointed? Fear drives our decisions and blinds us from other possibilities. We are afraid to take time out, despite every proverb out there tells us to do so. We even have some who preach the art of “stopping-and smelling-the-roses”.
The current pace of the world is relentless and we are pushing ourselves to keep up. If you stop for a second, you’ll miss the boat, things will happen without you and you will need to start all over again. There is always something missing, we cannot stop! Somewhere this fear is justified; you do miss out and without means to support yourself, you are quickly becoming desperate to get some sort of income and if you overcome the hard times, they stay with you and if you don’t have years to spare on soul searching you are indeed in a risk of getting lost. This is why, presumably, we are all holding to our straws to make sure we have a job. I think of it as a form of slavery.
— [Update March 18, 2017] — It seems I am not the only one who thinks that way.
“Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable. We forget that our world was created by accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society but also our fears and dreams. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is natural and inescapable part of who we are. Therefore we seldom try to shake ourselves free, and envision alternative futures.”
— Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
There is no magic to it despite all the fairytale stories we read about or see in the movies. Waking up in the morning and running through crowded streets with “Eye Of The Tiger” tune playing in your earbuds won’t magically win you the fight.
People will cheat, gamble or just be lucky. Everyone chooses his or her own way to meet their calling. It’s a compromise. You balance what is at hand, measure the risks and make your bet. I think the important part here is to stick to it — keep making bets, hustle! Alternatively, by being risk averse you are at a risk of being at “local” optimum in your own function of life.
For now, I will conclude with this quote from Richard Feynman:
“So I have just one wish for you — the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom”
(the above quote is taken from http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/ees.2016.0223)
Footnotes
[1] Apparently I am not alone in thinking so, as this article “Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and Hypercompetition“ aptly describes http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/ees.2016.0223)
[2] I recently read a booked called “Fortune’s formula” which talks about how scientist tried to bit the stock market, and even in some cases succeed. This notoriously known as impossible task. After reading the book, I thought about the parallels between making career choices to and way you managing your stock portfolio. In other words, you trade with your time and want to get rewarded with a better overall position. Let’s look at Kelly criterion that was extensively discussed in the book. Very simple formula: Edge/Odds = f. The edge is your subjective probability for a particular event. Often applied to gambling, where you edge means the value you think you will get from the back, while the odds are what everyone else thinks. Kely formula gives you the percentage on how much you should bet on the event. It is not perfect but overall a similar (in spirit) approach can be applied to choosing how to spend your time.
