When life keeps throwing lemons, don’t keep making lemonade
Instead ask yourself if making lemonades is your purpose in life.
When life keeps throwing lemons, don’t keep making lemonade, especially when you don’t know if anyone drinks them. Instead ask yourself if making lemonades is your purpose in life.
Ups and downs in a career trajectory are completely normal. And during downturns, many advise to “keep going at it”. But that advice of blindly trudging forward can be a recipe for stagnation. I’ve been there and done that.
What I’ve come to learn is to instead, “keep going at it; but keep measuring the impact of your work”. Because despite best efforts, some times things just might not work out. And knowing that inflection point for yourself, is the difference between owning your destiny and drifting where the wind takes you.
When I wrote my first javascript program as a middle school-kid, it made it easier for my dad to automatically apply a 10% commission to the total, before sending invoices to his customers. I was thrilled that a piece of code could actually save my dad time from manually inspecting invoices, and ensure revenue was not lost.
Fast forward a few years later, I found myself writing software at a finance team for a mid-sized consulting firm in my first job. Sure I was a Computer Science graduate by now, but I was a disillusioned “software analyst”. I was writing mindless SQL queries and one-line code changes with no idea what any of it meant to our users or the business.
People advised me that this is what a professional environment was supposed to be. So I kept making lemonades. I created new goal posts for myself to do more and rise up the ranks, hoping things would get better. In reality, the opposite happened. As time passed, I started to question if Software Development was even the right field for me.
One day my dad asked me if I could help build a website for him. It was the internet era, and he wanted a space on the web to advertise his services. What followed was a memorable weekend. Sure the website was pretty basic. But it was satisfying to see a change in my dad’s business exposure as a result. Measuring that impact was gratifying.
Thanks to my dad’s benign request, I got lucky to reconnect with the same feeling that once got me interested in Computers as a middle schooler. I decided I was going to leave the consulting job and pursue higher studies in tech, that would open me doors in a different part of the world.
A move that put me on the path to solving customer problems for the next two decades. And to-date, I haven’t stopped measuring; and pivoting when I sensed a change was needed.
#MeasureImpact #EmbraceChange #Pivot #Purpose
