Calculating my value

At the beginning I was really money orientated. I was like, "I'm going to go and work for a big bank because I'll get loads of money and I'll get loads of kudos." It was ego and money and what have you. I stayed there for quite a while. I worked for a consultancy and then worked for big bank. I ended up starting a side gig. I built a cocktail bar with my other half from scratch. I fucking loved it. It became TripAdvisor's number one nightlife attracting in Southampton, Winchester and Manchester as well. I loved it. I was like, "Oh my god, I need to do something more like that." I'd moved to New York to work for the bank. There comes a point, with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where you're like, "Actually, money isn't doing it for me anymore. I need something more than that, achievement, goals, self-actualization, that type of thing."

So there's a couple of different sources that I recommend. First is, a lot of agencies do just kind of publish reports on average salary by different roles in different regions. You can Google that. You'll find a PDF report. You can look them up.

I do find that quite often, because they usually look at kind of national averages, they can often be undervalued, I would say. So you might see average front-end engineer is 50K, but you might expect a bit more. Things like Glassdoor and Indeed and others obviously do publish summaries of salaries across all of the jobs posted as well. That's another good source. And then I would say platforms like cord or other equivalents are a great place as well to get a sense of what current salaries are. That's especially important in times like we have at the moment, where we're seeing a lot of salary inflation. The last year, we've seen some big jumps. If you're not paying attention to that, you might miss out on that opportunity of kind of pushing up your salary.

Initially you graduate university and you're just looking for a salary and a job title and some experience, aren't you? You can do internships and all the training programs that you want, but you don't really have any understanding about what a career is and what you get out of it. And I think the longer I’ve worked, the more I've realised that the things that I'm good at and the things that I have a passion for are probably the things that are going to end up generating a salary as well, because if you're good at it, you're probably going to succeed in your area, but also deliver value outside of salary. So there is always that standard of living that you want to preserve, but I think once you have enough to live a comfortable life, then enjoying what you sign online to do every day has a value beyond the salary you take home at the end of the month.

I don't know where value comes from. In ascribing value to brand names, I was living from the outside in. I was taking the world's established conclusion about what constitutes valuable. And I was delegating to the world the decision of what it is that is valuable.

And then my therapist said, "How about the other way around, inside out?" And I said, "I don't know what that looks like. What do you even mean?" Try to explain to a chronic high achiever what it means to not be meeting other people's expectations. And he says, "Well, love." What you love, by loving something, you infuse it with value. He says, "I love the work I do. Therefore, it's valuable to me. And no single soul in the world can tell me otherwise. Love is a way of ascribing value to something." And it completely blew my mind. I was like, "Wait, what?" So many things. You're saying I can be the source of what constitutes value? I can make that decision by loving? Wow.

I never really thought of myself as being particularly skilled at something. I find the Product skillset to be so elusive. What is it exactly that we do? It's like kind of bringing together of people. So I think in my mind, I would compare myself to, I don't know, if you're a doctor and you go to Doctors without Borders, and you have a very specific skillset, a very specific problem, we need to solve it. Whereas the way I experienced myself, certainly, it wasn't that, "Oh, here I'm a highly skillful person with a very specific skill bringing it to this problem." I think I experienced myself more as I am someone willing to work hard and I really care about helping you. And if those two things are true, then something good's going to come out of it.