You Can’t Act Like Someone Else Everyday For the Rest of Your Life
Many of the career choices we make to build an external identity for ourselves rob us of our identity on a deeper level. The sense of accomplishment, societal approval, and financial stability often come with cultures of conformity that reject the nuance of the callings that got us there. While this conformity is rarely demanded explicitly, it only takes a couple snide comments or words of advice from our professional circles to keep us from rocking the boat.
For the majority of our lives, we waste energy putting on an act, energy that could go towards our work, continuous learning, relationships, hobbies, and side endeavors. This unrewarded effort drains us, leading us to associate work with misery. To cope, many either buy into the idea that work is inherently miserable or let go of the sides of themselves not fostered by their current environment until they stop missing them.
Both approaches limit potential, but in intangible ways that go unnoticed without a control to compare with. While we can force ourselves to work long and hard, coming up with the innovations that add the most value requires both a genuine interest in the project and exposure to diverse ideas. It’s hard to truly care about something we associate with feeling stifled or come across new ideas living in a bubble. Unless our parents are complete helicopters, we learn how we function best as children. Then, adulthood boxes us in, sending us the message that fitting in is more important than being our best selves.
A line from a friend’s podcast made me rethink the compromises I’d made for my career: “you can’t act like someone else everyday for the rest of your life.” After setting aside my social and creative pursuits to spend almost every waking hour coding for a year, I felt my creativity fading and with it, my value to my then company. As an entry level engineer, I knew it’d be a while before I could contend for best coder on my team but felt confident in my ability to find avenues to improve efficiency and reduce waste in our products and processes. Yet, as my sphere of exploration shrunk, so did my sphere of thought from holistic ingenuity to following in outdated footsteps.
Realizing this approach wasn’t sustainable, I prioritized learning and work styles that channel my best qualities instead of suppressing them over conformity. Without a roadmap, it’s a lot of experimentation, but my old baseline of mindless compliance with peer pressure was easy to beat. Despite former coworkers and contacts insisting there’s only one path to success in software engineering, I’ve since found multiple.
There are always many roads to any destination and many destinations along any road. Only you can decide which are right for you. The world doesn’t know your worth, so don’t let them restrict your destiny.
Call to action: How can you be more true to yourself in your career?
