The Career Three-Body Problem 🪐
Exploring one approach to simplify the difficult task of trying to find balance in our professional lives!
The Career Three-Body Problem is an impossible to solve puzzle where we try to balance, in our professional lives:
Fulfillment/happiness 😀
Making an impact 🚀
Career growth 💼
In the following video, I talk about some ways we can solve this puzzle! 🧩
If you prefer a written version of this, my article on this same topic might be just what you are looking for.
You can also find this video on X / Twitter and LinkedIn. If you found this content helpful, please like/retweet/share my post. This not only introduces my content to a new audience, you will also help me in my battle against the social media algorithms! 🤖
The Career-Reinforcing Hobby
In both the video and the article, one of the solutions I describe for finding balance is to not look for it as part of your professional career. Instead, I suggest having a career-reinforcing hobby. This has always been my preferred approach for several reasons, so let me talk about why that is the case.
More Predictability
It is difficult to control what happens in your work environment. Like I always like to say, we are always one reorg away from working on something you don’t want to work on or (worse) working for someone you don’t want to work for. If you have a career-reinforcing hobby, you have much greater control over choosing how you work. You’ll be insulated from the the many out-of-control things that are inevitable in corporate and startup/entrepreneurial environments.
Makes You More Proficient
A career reinforcing hobby is like a gym that you train at before participating in a competitive physical event:
Replace participating in a competitive physical event with delivering on what’s expected of you in your career, and the analogy still holds.
For example, everything I do here on KIRUPA is a career reinforcing hobby that helps me as part of my day job as a Product Lead at Google. Internally, a large part of my job revolves around taking complex ideas, simplifying these ideas, and communicating them at a level of detail appropriate for the audience I’m working with. Externally, the end-users for what my team builds are developers who like to design, code, and ship things.
You can sorta see how this relates to what I do here. With every video I record or article I write or something I design/develop for the site, the skills I refine directly correlate with my day-to-day professional activities. This site (and all the related tasks around it) is my gym. It’s my training ground.
Conclusion
Life is short. Fortunately or unfortunately, we spend a significant part of it pursuing professional activities and goals. Given that reality for most of us, what can we do to ensure that the time we spend during the daylight hours on weekdays is meaningful? That’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about, and I hope my explanation using the Three-Body Problem helps paint a nice picture for you.
If you’d like to discuss this further, post in this forum thread or add a comment by replying to this message.
Cheers,
Kirupa ⚗️