Reflections on Work and Life
Questions I’ve asked myself in my early twenties.
4 min readDec 29, 2020
- Should I set specific goals or figure out plans as I go?
- Do I need to determine a deliberate path, or should I be patient and see where life takes me?
- What distinguishes patience from passivity?
- To what extend can I control the direction of my life? To what extent is this desirable?
- What role does luck play in a fulfilling career? What role should luck and chance play in my life?
- If I accept that chance is important, how can I prepare myself to interact with chance most effectively?
- Who ends up being most satisfied — those who plan, or those who open doors as they appear to them? What distinguishes these people, and or do most successful people do some combination of both?
- How do I determine what I am passionate about?
- Will I ever find something that I feel passionate about? How will I know?
- What are the proper ends that I should be aiming for in work and life? Impact? Fulfillment? Excellence? Happiness? Balance?
- Should helping others be my ultimate purpose? If so, what does “helping others” actually mean?
- If helping others is my primary goal, then is it ok to do some things just because I want to? Is doing what I’m most interested in and most want to do what will allow me to most benefit others?
- What role should work play in my life? How should I think about balance with other things like family, community, personal interests, and recreation? Or should I even distinguish these at all? Should they be integrated or separate?
- Do we overdetermine the paths of successful people? Is it possible to recreate the path of someone that I find admirable? If it is possible, is this desirable?
- How do I balance wanting to do something “different” with the risks and tradeoffs of doing so? What does “doing something different” or “doing my own thing” mean? Will pursuing independent work give me more freedom and autonomy, or less?
- What is the best way to answer these questions? What insight can mentors provide? How many of these questions will I need to answer through experience and trial and error, versus reading, learning, and thinking?
- What difference will my planning and plotting today make on my future in 5, 10, or 20 years? Will I reach similar outcomes in any case?
- If I choose one career path versus another, how much of a difference will it make on the underlying components of my life — my values, my fulfillment, and my relationships?
- Am I creative? Am I capable of generating new ideas? Can I take these ideas and translate them into something real?
- Am I unsatisfied with my job? If so, what is it specifically about my current career that I am unsatisfied with? Are these sufficient reasons for a change? Will I actually find improvements in these factors in the alternative careers that I have considered?
- Are my considerations of other paths in life useful? Or am I devoting time to contemplate an unspecific future, rather than focusing on figuring out improvements I can make right now with the resources, knowledge, and time that I do have?
- What do I care about? What drives me? How do I answer these questions honestly and effectively?
- Should I push through resistance I feel about work at times, or should I view this as a warning sign that I am not motivated by what I’m doing?
- Is the perfect career for me out there somewhere, and I just need to determine what it is? Or is the problem in my way of thinking about work rather than the work itself?
- Is the continual search for new and better opportunities the point itself? Is it possible that what I’m doing right now is exactly what I should be doing? Is the iterative process of evaluating, searching, and processing new alternatives the way that I will find the thing or set of things that resonate with me?
- Will I ever dig in and burrow deep on one specific focus, or is that not my nature?
- Am I viewing work in the wrong way? What role should work play in my life? Is it simply a means to support my family and contribute to the community in some way?
- When I think about “making an impact on others,” how should I understand this?
- Should “impact to others” be understood as fulfilling a role that would not be fulfilled otherwise and making a unique contribution to society? Do I need to do something that would not have been done by anyone else to feel like I have accomplished my mission?
- Or, is this too high a standard? Should I consider that I am making an impact on others right now by showing up, participating to my fullest, being reliable, kind, and supportive, and doing what I am asked to do (and often above and beyond that)? Do I need to focus on what I actually can and would do, and attribute more value to the contributions that I am making right now?
