Identifying my inner motivation

How much you enjoy your life, depends on you and you alone. Nobody else, not the things outside of you. I am more glass, half full kind of person rather than half empty because it is possible. And I've seen it many, many times. It is possible to find things that interest you, that excite you in pretty much everything around you. All you need is a desire to look deeper, right?

It's not to say that one shouldn't strive to sort of improve or look for other opportunities. Now, that's not the case, but my attitude is be sure that you've achieved what you wanted to achieve. Be sure that you made a dent. Because for example, if I join an organization, which by the way, I see so many times on CVs of younger individuals nowadays, they spend half a year in a company and they disappear and then they spend half a year in a different one. And then you have a CV of five years' experience half a year in each company.

Some might say it's good learning, but I would say, I ask how much of a dent? How much of a difference has the person been able to make in each one of those? So when I come across a person who says, "Oh, I had nothing to learn." "Really? Did you not? Are you sure? Did you look deep enough?

I think in the tech industry, we're quite spoiled, right? A lot of us in tech are problem solvers and our job every day is to solve problems. Who gets to have a job like that? And it's an industry that has a lot of openings and there's a lot of problems for us to solve, so it's such a great place to be at if you enjoy that career. And I'm definitely like that.

It’s a Japanese term for purpose and meaning of life. Or meaning to life. So my definition or the definition that I found is where you meet what you're passionate about, what you are good at, what you can be paid for and what is good to the world, what the world needs, sort of the intersection of these four things is where I believe basically you're happy. And if you're happy, you're at your highest level of productivity.

I was in therapy at the time and one of the themes that I explored the most was: Where does meaning come from? Where does motivation come from? I think up to that point, I'd been living my life very outside in. I was thinking in terms of the milestones and what does this look like on my CV? And it was a little bit like collecting badges or something. It was a little bit like a game. And then you then pause to think, "Okay, but what about living from the inside out? What would that look like? What motivates me? What's intrinsically meaningful?"

We say the self, and we say the I as if it's the singled congruenced entity that thinks and wants a single thing at a time, but actually a better metaphor for me in thinking about reconciling all these different needs is to think of me as we, what we want.

And some parts of me will want... the reflective self will want the thing that looks good in retrospect. And then the experiencing self will want the thing that feels good to do at the time. And how do you reconcile different people that want different things? How you do it in a political project? How do you do it in life in general? You try to establish a dialogue between your different selves and then have each part be heard and then see if there's a solution that would work for everybody. And if not, maybe you take turns and you do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It's work in progress because you're constantly having that conversation. I never really finish having it.