Approach to work | 2025 Dec 6

As with all of my writing, this is a snapshot of some thoughts at the time. Subject to change. Written in a way that sounds prescriptive, to be straightforward, but more meant to be notes to myself rather than advice for the general public. Grain of salt–take it with one.

Work is a big part of life. It is important. I did a double take coming up with the title of this blog post because they blend together so much that I wasn’t sure whether to call it “Approach to life and work,” or something else.

I want to work on awesome stuff that makes a difference and learn about everything I’m curious about. That’s what I find fulfilling, learning and creating.

How do I get there? I can think of two ways:

1. Creating my own opportunities.
2. Proving to others I’m the right person for an opportunity.

And more likely, some combination of the two.

Creating my own opportunities purely from scratch is hard. While it may allow for more freedom initially–since you don’t “work for someone”–it is really unlikely to go anywhere. Survivorship bias dominates success stories. There are countless unseen failures. And it is not clear whether those failures were valuable, or if it would be for me compared to an alternative. An upside is you can technically choose to work on exactly what you want…but not exactly. Some things require a lot of money, people, and skills you don’t have. You can work on what you want, but will need to work on many other things in order to keep working on what you want. It’s best if what you want is to do everything (or at least most of the things) involved. You can do this with a great amount of persisted determination, but you might not be the right person to do that (at least right now), and that may not be exactly how you’d prefer to spend your time/effort. The reward is tremendous and uncertain, and the work is ongoing, so you really have to love the majority of the work.

Proving to others that you’re the right person isn’t easy either, just different. Importantly, in this path, it can be easier to stack small wins. This also involves plenty of work you never necessarily wanted to do (at least at first), because you’ll have immediate term results to deliver, created by someone else. Your first couple jobs probably won’t be ideal, not because the job itself is that bad, but because the ideal is being incredible and doing awesome things, and you don’t just come out that way. It must be earned. Jobs might be great for a bit, but maybe you’ll change your mind. You’ll most likely go through some sort of Gartner Hype Cycle with each one. Expect these things up front, and you won’t feel so reactive. Lots of things are not so complicated, but just require a little bit of foresight. You’ll have the chance to prove yourself in small ways, gradually increasing in size, if you do things right.

Both involve hard work, consistency, and finding a way to enjoy the process.

On my side of the internet, and maybe in the US in general, I feel like I’m often told that success is defined by creating my own opportunities. Going all or nothing. For glory. It’s all possible through the magic of sheer determination, which is something you must have, right now, and at all times. By parents, and some other form of conventional wisdom, I feel like I’m often told to play it safe. You don’t have to really do what you want, and instead settle, and be happy with what you have. These can be conflicting, and neither end is alone very satisfying. As usual, I have to take the ingredients I like and make my own recipe.

What is my recipe?

Frankly, I don’t really know. But right now I’m coming to a few realizations.

I am interested in creating my own startup one day. I don’t necessarily have to, but I wouldn’t put it past me. However, I don’t think that’s what is right for me right now.

I am curious about physics, chemistry, and building hardware, but am inexperienced. Although I’m learning, my skills are in software. There’s still a lot of incredible software to write, and if I look at how I choose to spend my free time, I clearly still love software. I’d be happy to work on something as a solo developer. However if I have full control, I’m interested in writing software I like, not just software that makes money, which don’t necessarily overlap all the time.

I’ve been going through my own Gartner Hype Cycle with my job lately, and I think I’m exiting the trough of disillusionment. The rest of this post will be a synthesis of some things I’m learning as I enter a new chapter.

It’s supposed to be hard. Engineering is hard generally, and there are thousands of complicated decisions to make and questions to answer every day. Some examples:

Where is the issue? Is there a way to find this? Can we confirm this? Should I ask this person this question or look deeper in the code/docs/threads? Where is this defined? When should this run? How should I decide this boundary? How does this differ from where something similar is done? Does something like this exist already? Why was this written this way? Why is this inconsistent with that other spot? Why is this broken? How big of a priority is this? Should I investigate this right now or workaround it? What are the consequences of this? Is the right way simpler than I expect? What’s the status of this? Why does this constraint exist? Is this necessary? How do we verify this? How often is this happening? How will we catch this in the future? How will we remember to do this? How long will that take? Where does this happen?

At the end of the day, my job at a company is about results. Everything that is required to deliver results is just what needs to be done. If you can focus on getting things done and less about what people think of you, whether you love every little thing you have to do, etc. you’re going to be less stressed and be able to just execute.

Anxiety and guilt comes from feeling behind. From lack of action. The solution is to take a deep breath, clear your mind, focus, and start making progress. That progress will be relieving, satisfying, and motivating.

Anxiety will sometimes prevent you from getting real rest. That is the real poison of procrastination, it wastes your work time and your non-work time. It just turns all your time into this half-baked toxic anxiety-filled waste.

Action precedes motivation. Write this ten times on the chalkboard.

This happens to everyone (I don’t actually know but it helps me to think so haha). It’s not just you. It’s easy to get lost. Find things difficult. Get anxious. It takes effort to do things well. Need to remind yourself, and reorient.

It is easier to be an A student than a C student. A B student is an A student that wasn’t consistent.

Just passing is actually as hard or harder than excelling. It’s more stressful to be inconsistent, get anxious, fall behind a little bit, and just do enough to get by. Then you don’t feel confident in yourself, you don’t like what you’re doing as much because you don’t feel you’re that great. Then you spend a bunch of time demoralizing yourself, and making you think you don’t like something when really it was a skill issue.

It takes a little more effort, but it makes things easier to be great. Motivation compounds when you feel you’re good, when you get things done, and feel that satisfaction. It might not be your life’s work, but progress is healing.

A mistake I’ve made: starting out I thought “this is a great organization, I want to absorb how things get done here, and continue the great trajectory.” And although I’ve learned some concrete things from how people work, I’ve learned the only way to do things well is to form your own desires about how things should be, and push for them. It’s very difficult to be just average. You’re either a positive contribution or negative. If you’re not actively trying to push things forward, you’re likely dragging things backwards. The best service you can do to others is try to do your best quality work as efficiently as possible, according to standards you want to see.

Some examples of ways to execute this:

Work more hours. This will give you a little relief because you will feel that you have the time to complete what you must get done. It doesn’t have to be toxic, and it doesn’t have to be everyday, all the time, or forever. The time you put in is a lever to pull. Fortunately or unfortunately, incredible things are often done by fewer people working more.

Have opinions. Either you are mimicking others’ opinions–which will always be at best a discount version–or you’re pushing your own. The opinions I’m thinking of are regarding the quality of work, the urgency, craft, processes. You want things to get better. To get faster. To do more and greater things.

Accumulate knowledge. The ultimate destination for knowledge is the brain. The utility of knowledge increases dramatically when it is in your brain vs. in the computer. In work, writing is important for remembering things/offloading things because your memory can only store so much, but more importantly it’s for synthesizing. You can only cook with the ingredients in your kitchen.

On time spent in large organizations:

In big organizations, a lot of time is spent talking to other people to find answers. It’s people’s goal to become more self-sufficient, but the onboarding time is greater because you spend a lot of time waiting on others’ cognitive I/O to import knowledge vs. with a textbook/problems your mind’s CPU clock speed is the primary inhibitor to your onboarding.

Similarly, there is a synchronization between people’s brains and the actual code/engineering. Sometimes they are out of sync and this leads to a lot of confusion. One is a quick-ish almost-truth, and the other is a real source of truth, but takes much longer to dive through. Difficult to tell when to consult which, or even how long each will take.

All non-trivially sized organizations have this property, but smaller organizations have less of this. This means more time is spent elsewhere. I like that! This is probably the largest reason for me to seek a smaller organization, or at least more self-contained work. That being said, many of the worlds greatest wonders are complex enough to require some of this. The goal is not to avoid learning the whole system because it’s complicated, but to reduce complexity, and minimize time spent on synchronization. The most fun and valuable part is the engineering/creation.

Things I’m learning about myself:

I like to write a lot of code. I like loosely defined problems, to set standards for execution, to grapple with design decisions, to build simple things, that iteratively become more and more. That medium spot where it hasn’t become bloated and your velocity is still quite high, but you’re not just starting from scratch, is very fun and exciting. I like to create.

I enjoy reasoning about computers/physics, not necessarily logic. Might not be the right words, but the main distinction is I like engineering things around the reality of the tools/resources/constraints of the world, not human-made abstractions/constructs. The flatter the hierarchy, the closer to reality, the better.

I enjoy good craft. This also compounds. It is easiest to just continue the current quality of a product, and if it’s bleh, it’ll become more bleh. If it’s great, there’s momentum to keep it great (you don’t want to be that person who starts the enshittification). It is satisfying to make things well. To get details right. To be proud of someone coming along later and seeing what you made.

That’s all for now. This wasn’t a super cohesive story, but things on my mind. Hope you enjoyed.