25. Interesting Work

Finding something valuable to work on

Different people have different relationship with work. I treat it with importance. I come from a culture and family where I had to work hard to get out of the rat race. While that has many side effects, it taught me very high work ethic and hard working mentality (at least I believe so). If I find the right problem, I'll be the hardest working person in the room.

I want to work on important things and I ended up in technology field. A large part of life in technology can be shallow. But it also has the power to create world changing companies.

For example, I wouldn't feel anything meaningful working on an email marketing software company - So the next best thing I could do is build things in industries that matter. I started my first startup because starting up sounded cool, and I thought I could make a lot of money. I started my second company because I found an interesting problem to work on. The latter has taken me to places I thought I'd never go. There are good side effects of working on important things beyond the impact. It helps you become financially stable.

I never want to stop working. My retirement goal is to be able to work on things that I'm interested in - 100% of the time.

For the past few years I've been working in an industry that helps companies employ people anywhere in the world. The thing I like about it is that it bring opportunities to parts of the world that used to get less opportunities. Of course, this might not change the world. But access to the right opportunity can change someone's world, and at scale many people's world. Software enables scale. I have been denied opportunities just because of my location in the past - I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that as well.

While I'm a big proponent of life outside work, the work I do matters a lot to me.

Once in a while I stop and think about what I'm working on and how I'm spending my time. Importance changes with time. 

Find important things to work on. Dream big. Have fun building.