Is it all worth it?

In this year alone, two of my good friends got diagnosed with cancer. One of them with late-stage, possibly terminal cancer. Both those pieces of news devastated me. My heart went out to them and their families. I was angry and disappointed at life and all the mysterious forces that govern it. The thought exploding in my head was, "Why do bad things happen to good people?". After the initial wave of anguish passed, I realized how fragile, unpredictable, and utterly precious life is.

As I head into my mid-forties, existential questions about work, life, and family swirl in my head daily. The biggest question I grapple with regularly is, If I somehow know that I am departing to the great big unknown tomorrow, what thoughts will run through my head today? Would I have regrets? Would I feel sad that I spent way too little time with my family? Would my family say good things about me? What would my friends, ex-colleagues, and random acquaintances say about me? 

This post is an exploration of my current state of mind, nothing more, and hopefully, it helps anyone else going through similar phases of their lives. 

Family

Tuco (from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly) - "Even a tramp like me, no matter what happens, I know there's a brother somewhere who'll never refuse me... a bowl of soup."

If you leave tomorrow and cross over to the great big unknown, no one will miss you more than your family. About seven years ago, I had a minor health scare that eventually turned out to be nothing. In the throes of that health scare, I realized how fragile life was. I realized that If I crossed over tomorrow, no one would truly miss me besides my family. I am sure friends and some work acquaintances will be sad for a few days, but no one will physically miss me and be painfully sad besides my family. 

Since that fateful week, I have decided that nothing is more important than family. I hug them, kiss them, and tell them I love them every chance I get. I am not perfect, and sometimes I get mad at them for dumb reasons, but I always, ALWAYS make peace with them. I forgive, forget, and apologize freely (especially to my son). Because I know that even if the whole world goes topsy-turvy, they will always be by my side. 

I remember this one work-related incident that happened almost fifteen years ago. I was the lead engineer in a high-profile project, and we were way behind. It was another late night, and I was grinding away with another senior engineer in the office. At about eight at night, the other engineer's wife called him a few times, and each time, he declined to answer after picking up the phone to see who was calling. After the third time, he turned over to me, smiled with a touch of pride on his face, and said, "Yeah, the project is more important than the wife." In that moment, I silently applauded his bravery and sacrifice, but now I know how misguided and misplaced his priorities were. 

The takeaway, my friends, is to realize that when you go, your family will miss you the most, so act accordingly. Hug them, tell them you love them, forgive, forget, and apologize freely.

Work

There are no two ways about it; work gives us a sense of meaning. I think it is foolish to think that we are all working only for the money. I think money is important to a certain extent, but that is not the only reason we all work. We should be finding deep meaning in the work we do. After all, we sink more than eight hours of our waking hours into it every day.

How do you find meaning in what you do? For me, it is two broad things. 

1. Am I positively impacting the lives of the people around me?

2. Do I spiritually align with the purpose behind the work I am doing?

People

Jose Gonzales (from the song Cycling Trivialities) - Who cares in a hundred years from now

Who'll remember all the players

Who'll remember all the clowns

About six years ago, I read 'Road to Character' by David Brooks. Yes, yes, I know he is a tad bit controversial because of his conservative views on politics and religion, but that book changed how I looked at my 'end goal'.

For the longest time, my 'end goal,' the 'top of the mountain,' was to be rich. Brooks' book completely changed my perspective. In his book, he talks about building your eulogy values along with your career values. Up until that point, I only cared about career values. Getting to that next level, the next promotion, the next raise, the next hot company, and so on. I never truly thought about my eulogy values. Brooks encourages his readers to ask themselves, "What will the people at your wake say about you?". 

Every company I join, I make it a point to leave it in a better spot than when I joined and that always means building a team that likes working with each other on the specific problem the company is working on. That meant hiring great people, elevating them, and getting out of their ways. Along the way, I make it a point to create a personal connection with everyone I work with. I am freely vulnerable with my team and encourage them to be vulnerable with each other and myself so that we can support each other. I am transparent (sometimes to a fault) with my team and believe that teams and individuals make the best decisions when they have all the information. For e.g, If the company is not doing so well, I am transparent with my team about it. If the due date for a project is not 'really' that important, I just tell them so that they don't kill themselves trying to hit that date. If the team messes up, I don't go trying to find who was responsible but instead push the team to learn from it and move on.

However, it is not all rainbows and unicorns. In some cases, making the team better might mean making painful decisions that seem painful and unnecessary in the short term but are beneficial to the larger team in the longer term. If there are individuals who are not pulling their weight, are not self-critical, don't align with the internal vibration of the company, or are just not a good fit for the team, I don't hesitate to make the tough choice, even if it makes me seem like the bad guy. Even while making those tough choices, I try to do it in a way that isn't outwardly cruel. If there are people out there who are reading this who thought I acted cruelly, I am sorry. But I haven't made a single tough decision that I didn't truly believe would help the larger team. I have never cratered somebody's career for personal or spiteful reasons, and that is a line that I will never cross, and neither should you.

I am a big fan of the short-lived British show "Yes Minister". Paul Eddington played Jim Hacker, the clueless cabinet minister (and later Prime Minister) in the show who is perpetually outwitted by his crafty permanent secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby, played by Nigel Hawthorne. 

Eddington died of a rare form of cancer called mycosis fungoides that he had kept secret for four decades from the public. Four decades! For four decades, he has been pondering about his eulogy values! The press actually asked him about it towards the end of his life. Shortly after he went public with his diagnosis, he went on BBC to do an interview (his last one) where he was asked how he wanted to be remembered. This is what he said-

"A journalist once asked me what I would like my epitaph to be, and I said I think I would like it to be, 'He did very little harm'. And that's not easy. Most people seem to me to do a great deal of harm. If I could be remembered as having done very little, that would suit me."

That is what I aim for in any company I join. Bring great people together and create an environment where they can be the best versions of themselves. A place where people would want to work forever, and when they do decide to leave, they leave with skills that allow them to be even more successful. Do more good than harm. Nobody will remember how many basis points of customer engagement you moved; they will remember how you made them feel.

Every job is worth it if most of the people you interact with in the company agree that you did more good than harm.  

Spiritually Meaningful Work

Walter White (from Breaking Bad) - "I Did It For Me. I Liked It. I Was Good At It. And, I Was Really…I Was Alive."

Aligning people is only half the equation. For a fulfilling career, one must find business problems that align with spirituality. You have to be able to point to something meaningful that helped the company (the company, not your team) and say, 'I did that, and I am proud of it.' Our brains are not designed for passive participation. They want to solve problems. They want to feel a sense of accomplishment. If you go too long without dopamine, you will start burning out and will eventually start to disengage and start heading down the path of disillusionment. 

Practically, it means that you care about the mission of the company. You care about the success of the company. You care about the success of your company's customers. You know how your company makes money and the major channels through which it makes money. You show the same urgency that your leaders do, and you feel the same pains your leaders feel when teams miss goals.

When you deeply care about the success of the company, aligning the goals and future of your team to the company's north star is trivial. This is where many engineering leaders (even experienced leaders) falter. They have goals like 'reduce tech debt,' 'reduce cyclomatic complexity,' etc for their engineering teams. All that will make the engineers very happy, but it won't work with the rest of the executive team, especially the C-Suite. This is the kind of engineering leadership behavior that often drives a wedge between the engineering team and the rest of the company. 

Simply put, if you can create engineering-specific goals that align with the company's north star and you are energized and motivated to hit those goals through your team, then you are in the right company. If you can't come up with engineering-specific goals that will energize your C-Suite, or if you are not motivated enough to hit the goals you did come up with, it means you are not spiritually aligned with the mission of the company. 

I have heard a lot of leaders say, "It is all about the people". Largely, that is true. However, as a leader, you will remain emotionally unfulfilled if you are unable to align yourself with the long-term mission of the company. It sounds cheesy, but you have to want to drink the Kool-Aid to a certain extent. I have worked in places where I didn't want to drink the Kool-Aid, and it made a big difference in how I showed up daily. I was enthusiastic about my team but nothing else. If everything outside your team bores you, you are working in a spiritually meaningless (for you) job.

And that is all I have to say about that. Whatever that is…..whatever that was….

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