Aligning your personal goals with your company's mission can be a game-changer in achieving both professional success and personal fulfillment. When your values and objectives resonate with those of your employer, every project becomes more meaningful, and motivation naturally increases.
Your personal goals become much easier to achieve, and you have more fun achieving the company goals because they're also helping you.
> Aligning your personal goals with your company's mission can be a game-changer in achieving both professional success and personal fulfillment.
That’s a fairly dangerous way of doing thing in my experience. Unless it’s your company, you have very little say in what the company actually does.
Generally speaking, I advocate keeping a sane distance between what you do for a living and the rest of your life. You are not defined by the company that pays you.
Find a job which helps you achieve what you want to achieve, work honestly and leave work at work.
Not an expert here, so I'll quote one from the highlights I have reading the following book:
“Harsh as this sounds, if you’re not in the right job—a job that is moving you toward where you want to be in life—then you’re wasting almost all the time you’re spending at work.”
“First, “you should do what you love” means finding work that “matches well with your expertise, your creative thinking skills, and your strongest intrinsic motivations.” Intrinsic motivation means liking the substance of the work for its own sake. The second part, “you should love what you do,” means “finding a work environment that will allow you to retain that intrinsic motivational focus, while supporting your exploration of new ideas.”
Excerpt From
168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think
Laura Vanderkam
Don’t take it wrongly but "you should do what you love or your life is meaningless" is a very bourgeois idea.
I personally very much enjoy what my salary allows me to do despite actively disagreeing with most (but not all) of what the company I work for does. My role has an overall positive but fairly minute impact on this trajectory and I’m fine with that. I’m not defined by my work.
I have plenty of space outside of my job to actually actively advocate for things I genuinely care about without mingling the two.
> Don’t take it wrongly but "you should do what you love or your life is meaningless" is a very bourgeois idea.
I agree with you but it is not what Laura said or mean. She said,
> “Harsh as this sounds, if you’re not in the right job—a job that is moving you toward where you want to be in life—then you’re wasting almost all the time you’re spending at work.”
I'd like to point out 2 things:
- Perhaps it is understood without saying: there's no "the right way" here, as different people have different utility function. The corollary is that the alternative of what Laura is proposing can be equally fulfilling or more.
- Sticking to Laura's proposition then, is that you only have 168 hours a week. Work constitute to 30-50 or more hours, a significant chunk of your total amount. So, that's what "you’re wasting almost all the time you’re spending at work" means. Note that she's not saying this defines the meaning of your life. She's saying plainly that majority of your quota (hours) is spent towards work, if those amount of time is not spent towards "moving you toward where you want to be", then those time is counted as wasted, in terms of "moving you toward where you want to be". In order words, you need to be moving faster in the remaining amount of time you have elsewhere to compensate, which is harder. (Compare to another hypothetical you that can "moving you toward where you want to be" in both portions of your time, which would almost surely make more progress.)
In your case, you mentioned "actively disagreeing with most (but not all) of what the company I work for does". Having read Laura's book, I don't think in her definition yours must be "wasting almost all the time you’re spending at work". Because as far as I understand her book, if what you're spending time doing at work is, for example, building up a skill you want to build, or solving problems you like to solve, then this constitute towards "moving you toward where you want to be".
The more dangerous situation Laura warned against is something like the majority of the time spent at work, say 20+ hours, are spent towards meaningless things that don't advances you, such as attending many meetings you are not needed there, performing a duty that is not your duty and not something you want to develop a skill in, etc. I.e. what "advances you" is defined by you, but the author is actively guiding the readers to seek these out and defines it clearly.
> She's saying plainly that majority of your quota (hours) is spent towards work, if those amount of time is not spent towards "moving you toward where you want to be", then those time is counted as wasted
Well, yes, that’s the bourgeois part.
The fact is, most people work to survive because they have to. That’s perfectly fine and respectable and it doesn’t need a large amount of self-realisation guilt tripping thrown on top by people who want to sell self-help books.
People don’t need to strategically tackle their career and its progression to live meaningful life. They can if they want to and have the luxury of being able to do so but I will always oppose anyone describing work as wasted time on principle.
Books/articles like this is presenting a world view. I don’t think they think this is the only way we should view the world. But I guess they are preaching a way to view the world, and as any preacher does they try to convince you why this is a better way.
(Somewhere they did mention not all people have the luxury to practice this, but she did documented examples where people in less-than-ideal situation have it turned around and do what they love.)
Regarding self-help, she said
“There are other ways in which 168 Hours does not aim to be like many self-help or time-management books. I approach this not as a productivity guru, but as a journalist who is interested in how successful, happy people build their lives. I am particularly interested in how people who are not household names achieve the lives they want, and what we can learn from their best practices. There are plenty of books out there on Fortune 500 CEOs’ or celebrities’ tips for success. I’m more interested in the woman down the street who—without benefit of fame, outsized fortune, or a slew of personal assistants—is running a successful small business, marathons, and a large and happy household.”
Excerpt From
168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think
Laura Vanderkam
“Ferriss downplays the idea of dream jobs. As he writes, “For most people . . . the perfect job is the one that takes the least time. The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfillment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is.”
And then she further elaborate from there, discussing how to create the right job, bridging the gap between the ideal and the reality. Here's the 3 levels of changes to do that:
“... If the answer is “no” to any of these four questions, what can I change? In the next week? In the next year? Can I create the right job within my organization? Another organization? Or will I need to go out on my own?”
I know we're not in a book club, and I, even the author, does not have to ultimate answer. But as she argued, there are things we can have more meaningful/fulfilling life from our 168 hours a week and it is not as pessimistic as it seems. I invite you to give the book a chance.
Excerpt From
168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think
Laura Vanderkam
> You are not defined by the company that pays you.
Find a job which helps you achieve what you want to achieve, work honestly and leave work at work.
I am genuinely _fascinated_ with RDBMS. I tinker with them in my free time. I watch syscalls during reads and writes to better understand what’s happening. I test theories when someone asserts “Postgres is better at X than MySQL” to see if they’re correct.
The fact that I get paid quite well to run DBs is an absolute dream.
This is what I aspire to. Work will always be work, but if my interests could align at least somewhat with my day job, then acknowledging that I have to spend so much of my time working would be so much more tolerable. Happy to hear it's achievable.
My interpretation of this was that it's really nice to believe in the companies mission, and even nicer if your own goals happen to match it. This probably isn't possible at most generic "tech" companies, but for a lot of more domain-specific company it totally is without making your a stooge.
> Aligning your personal goals with your company's mission can be a game-changer
Maybe it's my own experience, but I've never worked for a company whose mission didn't funnel down to "make money".
They might play lip service to "changing the world", "make products customers love" or "engineering excellence", but they were all done for the purpose of making money and would often be dropped without discussion if it impacted the bottom line.
I could see how industry selection could align with personal value (e.g. weapons versus healthcare), or if a company invests a lot in technical skill (because they think it makes them more money) and provide you with an environment to gain skills you personally want to gain, but in the end it all comes down to money.
Not to be overly cynical, I'm just sharing my own experience.
My personal approach is to go in eyes wide open (it's all about money), figure out what I want to get out of the job, and take advantage when the two overlap. But the entire time knowing it's likely temporary and to be prepared to jump ship if things change.
It's a two edged sword though in my experience, because it can lead to self-exploitation. I found it much easier to separate work from private life in jobs where I didn't personally identify with the outcomes.
I believe that great leaders facilitate this, whether by setting a meaningful mission in the first place, or by aligning company needs with the personal beliefs and needs of individuals in a team.
That being said! I think the likelihood that you land at a company with a mission that truly aligns with your own is approximately the same as the likelihood your equity ends up being worth a damn at the end of the day.
This makes me wonder, as a misanthropic European software engineer, what would be the best way to get into the weapons or (governmental) surveillance industry?
If you are applying for a junior role, I don't know much about Europe, but in India the defence and security sector often have internship programmes for university students.
Alternatively, same as all other jobs, keep your eye open and make sure your CV and cover letter is catered towards the job.
You don't need to be a misanthrope to work in defence and security. Despite the bad PR, it's comforting knowing that your work is making the world a safer place.
That 'making safer place' is 50:50 at best, every single arms/bombs/rocket/ammunition manufacturer has seen its products used for smaller or bigger genocides of civilian population across whole age spectrum, with obviously the biggest being US and Russia/CCCP.
Its supremely dumb to blame manufacturers in any way of course, they are just (pretty efficient) tools.
The same way than any other companies: they advertise the positions they are looking for.
But you will find very little misanthropy there. The salaries are not that great so most of the engineers are either genuinely interested in the complexity of what they build (aerospace and naval is often like that) or invested in the mission (serving the nation).
Amen to that. I work for an organisation that operates in a sector that I care about deeply. I am a high performer, but ‘doing well at work’ is more a byproduct of me following my passion.
Employees are more likely to quit than get made redundant. Therefore it would seem that employers are more disposable than employees. You can't quit a job for another job with a higher salary and then moan about being made redundant.
Generally I think you hope for the best and plan for the worst. If you're a good employee then employers won't want to lose you. If you're not then what do you expect? You wouldn't stay with a shitty job.
> If you're a good employee then employers won't want to lose you.
That's very generously assuming somebody above you actually has a clue who's valuable and who is not, which I have to tell you that I have witnessed, yes, but rarely.
I would say then you have chosen the wrong employers. If you're working for someone who doesn't see your value then you're unlikely to be properly recompensed for it. Choosing a company with less hierarchy and more of a meritocracy would help.
The point is that you can create a rich text editor that stores the data as markdown.
Note how I said that git and markdown could be abstracted away, as in hidden from the user who can’t be bothered to learn. Use them under the hood, so at the end of the day your entire wiki is just a repo.
> The point is that you can create a rich text editor that stores the data as markdown.
Both Nextcloud and XWiki do this.
Now, why not git+markdown? I'm not sure it exists so we can't really know if it can work well or not.
I have my doubts:
About Markdown: I believe it is fine for very basic content, but you will probably want something more powerful to cover more advanced needs. HTML will be too low level for this, so you will probably need something to extend Markdown with custom macros, at which point you may as well adopt something that already exists.
For git: wikis tend to have versioning per document, not of the whole stuff. You will want to have easy and efficient document history manipulation (access of old revisions, comparison between revision, rollback). And you may want the wiki to remain efficient with a large number of documents and revisions, even when multiple people are writing to the wiki at the same time, and the git repository might be a bottleneck.
For a single user with simple note taking needs, I believe git+markdown can have good characteristics. I'm not sold on the git+markdown thing for a multi user wiki. It would need to be proven, but should someone do this, they should not solve "How do I write wiki software based on git+markdown", the problem should be "I need to have a wiki that's efficient in such and such cases, and git+markdown is a good basis because [...]".
Emotional maturity, physical maturity and intellectual maturity are definitely different things. I was a year ahead at school but struggled because I wasn't emotional and physically as mature as my peers.
Unless we hit another AI winter. We might get to the point where the hardware just can't give better returns and have to wait another 20 years for the next leap forward. We're still orders of magnitude away from the human brain.
Most story structures start with exposition, i.e. the background info. However this is quite boring normally so to get you through that they often add a "hook". That's what's being suggested here. So normally a story is hook, exposition, conflict, resolution. That's what's being suggested here, just not very clearly.
If you spend 40 hours on this and it only gains you a 1% increase in salary then you earn that back in 2 years. I would say that it will generally earn you much more so personally I see it as a good investment. If you enjoy the take home you're also more likely to enjoy the role so it's also a filter for you. If you're not enjoying the take home then stop, but if you're finding it interesting then it's well worth it. These things are also for you to assess future Jon opportunities. The best take homes are as close to actual work as possible for a reason.
Aligning your personal goals with your company's mission can be a game-changer in achieving both professional success and personal fulfillment. When your values and objectives resonate with those of your employer, every project becomes more meaningful, and motivation naturally increases.
Your personal goals become much easier to achieve, and you have more fun achieving the company goals because they're also helping you.