Continuous chase of non-linearities
What’s your marginal return on time spent?
It’s never easy nor nice to do a retrospective on one’s career. Yet it is a process of importance one cannot stress enough. Having had a few conversations lately about the concept of career, time, and management thereof I decided to jot down a few resultant thoughts.
When was the last time you experienced a non-linearity in your life?
Be it a life step change or a period of seemingly overwhelming and ever accelerating growth? A significant job change, having kids, moving to a different country or taking time off to travel the world?
One analogy that comes to my mind is thermodynamics. It is full of complex processes which describe how matter changes its state with respect to temperature, pressure, and volume. You can usually find a path between two different states through a combination of processes. For example, two isothermal curves cannot cross each other but a gas can move from one to another through an auxiliary adiabatic process. The key fact here is that such state transition needs to be executed through a different process.
Absent any change, it is impossible to change one’s “trajectory” drastically in reasonable time. It is the point on the curve that your marginal return on time is okay but not great compared to other “trajectories”. One can keep grinding but it won’t dramatically alter the path unless there’s a non-linear switch.
Taking the first career step to the side 3 years in
Shocking, perhaps, but it’s now been more than 7 years since I joined Facebook in NYC on the H1B visa. Even though people do not usually stay in the same company for that long, I have been recently feeling more reinvigorated than ever. There is no job in the world that is perfect at, but being part of the vibrant and fast paced company helps you rediscover yourself every so often.
Throughout that time there have been 3 distinct stages. In between each of them I dug deeper into myself and explored all options possible. In fact, back in Jan 2020 I strongly considered moving to SF or Vietnam only to be grounded by upcoming lockdowns. I ultimately switched internally to Instagram to work on Explore but quickly ended up on the rocketship of Reels. At the time the non-linearity came not only from the work itself, but mostly from the fact that I decided to become a nomad exploring the world for the experience.
Lesson learnt: sometimes you don’t know where the opportunity would come from, but you need to put yourself out there when you feel stagnant.
Post covid point of reflection
By the time that nomading novelty wore off in early 2022, I decided to take another deeper dive into exploration of myself. Avoiding omicron winter in NYC, I took a sabbatical at work that I became eligible for. I left for the Himalayas to pause and rethink next steps yet little did I know that Russia would invade Ukraine 5 days after I would come back. Just as I was processing early war experience and rethinking my life, my career at Instagram would be flipped upside down again.
Back in May 2022 my team’s purpose changed which unleashed a whole new level of creativity. It let me to thrive and practice skills that I previously did not have a chance too. Literally everything at work has changed and I have been drinking straight from the firehose ever since. It is a very addictive feeling that once experienced does not give you any other choice but to keep trying to repeat it again and again.
With hindsight, it was clearly a non-linearity that I did not expect but was lucky to be at the right place at the right time. If I switched teams and missed that one critical month, I would miss the tide that I am still learning from.
It’s not the time spent but being intentional and open
Being in my early 30s, I have had plenty of conversations among my friends that concerned serious relationships or decisions whether to have kids or not. They often touched upon doubts of being ready or being at the wrong time in one’s career. Clearly everyone is very opinionated as these are major life decisions to make.
Yet, being a fairly analytical individual, I love to look at those decisions from the perspective of marginal return on time. One can always grind one or two years at work longer postponing these decisions, but the return seems bleak unless there’s a potential for experiencing a non-linearity. It may seem daunting at first, but taking an educated leap of faith exposes you to new areas you did not consider before.
What is the angle-changing plan for your life?
