Destiny

Destiny is a funny thing.

I’ve been watching a lot of Avatar the Last Airbender recently. The more I watch it, the more I resonate with Zuko and his internal character conflict. The good and evil part doesn’t resonate with me as much as the destiny. His whole struggle, his drive, is centered around this idea that he has to fulfill a destiny given to him by his father. His goal is to be something his father told him to be.

I’ve been thinking about why I work. Growing up, the path to “success” was so straight – high school, then college, then work, then work, then work. The first time I ever even though about what a different path could look like was when I was visiting my high school councilor. He gave me the idea that in high school, your classes, and your life was already set by the high school grad requirements. Then in college, you get a little more freedom. You can choose your major, choose which clubs you want based on your interests (instead of which clubs would get you into the best colleges). After college, the world has very few constraints on what you do, and they change even more than the high school and college requirements.

20 years ago, it was much more common to marry younger, buy a house younger, and then have kids younger. It was seen as successful to get to these stages of life. If I look at my own life and where I’m supposed to be, I look at none of those goals as measures of success. To me, it makes no sense to buy a house here. You spend 1.3 on a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom single family home. Does the dollar value of the house match the intrinsic value of the house? We only associate the price with the location. Then the decision becomes, “Do you like Silicon Valley that much?”

The reason I’m thinking about money so much is because I’m considering living a less traditional life than the one my parents taught me, and closer to something like my uncles. I can take some time off work without worrying about expenses and prolong my career if I take a break. If I take time to sharpen my axe, I can come back to industry with a clear goal of becoming staff when I get back.

The more and more I think about this, the more sure I become that this is what I want. I don’t want to work in this scenario where I’m working from home all the time and can’t leave my house. It’s not productive for me, and I’m no good to any company. I’m easily distracted, unmotivated, and unfocused.

Mini-Retirement

I have a whole year planned out with OKRs. I have a few spiritual, a few physical, and a few technical goals that will occupy me for the year, and provide more individual technical growth than continuing to work will. If there is a clear technical benefit from me working on my own projects, I don’t see any reason to stay at a job.

This will also give me more a “self-taught” engineer experience. I don’t want to be an engineer who’s only successful in BigTech. I want to be the kind of engineer that’s successful at leading mid sized companies (100 - 1000).