BrnDmp

Planning your Career or the Boundary between Private and Professional life

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled:  Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write an essay of no more than 500 words. You can read Hans’ post with the same title  here.

The rat race

To me, life is easy. I never made a career plan and I don’t care about the rat race. Well, I do have a career plan which consists of 2 easy steps:
1. Win the lottery
2. Quit my job

Unfortunately, I never bought a ticket so my chances of winning are pretty low. However, if I would win the lottery and quit my job, would that mean that I’d stop doing the things I call work now?

No.

That’s because I like doing most of the things I do during work: the swarm, open source software and working with creative, motivated, open minded people. As long as these ingredients are present in my working environment and not hindered by things I dislike (lethargy, ignorance, idiocy), I will love my job. I strongly believe that people are most productive when they do things they love without having to do them or someone telling them to do so. Consequently, in my opinion, workaholic is a ridiculous term. It generally has bad connotation but what’s wrong with doing things you like?

My grandma has a gambling problem

Therefore, to me, the boundary between a so called professional and private life always seemed a bit odd. Especially if you’re a knowledge worker like me. Like you stop thinking about some algorithm when the clock strikes 17:00 and pick it up again next morning at 9:00. I don’t think it’s a specific spatial or temporal environment setting the limits between private life and work. I think it’s people. There’s people you connect with and there’s people you don’t connect with, the latter being the vast majority.

Of course there’s personal things you’re not likely to share with your colleagues like your grandma’s gambling addiction. But those are things I’d also not share with e.g. my biking mates or my family in law. Persons who are part of my private life. The same applies the other way around.

Fact remains that I am motivated to do a lot for people I connect with in contrast to people I don’t connect with, regardless of them being my colleague, biking mate, family in law or client. If I read my office mail at night and a favourite client has a problem, I help him. If it’s a red mail from my annoying boss, I ignore her.

The absurd road to happiness

Reflecting, the conclusion is: life is easy, just do the things you like with nice people. The crucial point being: do you really like what you are doing? That’s the one thing constantly racing my mind; isn’t there something I’d like to do more? The answer is: you never know until you tried.

Until now my career has been a serendipic path of seemingly unrelated jobs. The common thing being that each new job was an opportunity to (re-)optimize the things I value in life. As I don’t have any goals or specific things I want to achieve in life, that seems the best I can do.