Almost 20 years ago as a child, I wanted to become a graphic designer. During high school I wanted to be a web developer.
These were plans based on what I thought I was good at. And this focus on only myself destroyed my potential.
Currently, as a web developer I am almost exactly what I thought I was good at. I picked up my skills very early during high school and mostly on my own time.
After 7 years of working in this field, I feel unfulfilled. I’m definitely at least a little bit good at what I do, but I have no hunger to get any better at it. When I look uphill at the mountain on my journey of mastering my field, I can see that the skills I have and would learn are being used mostly for profit and not to actually improve anything for the better.
I feel like I have to do mental gymnastics to argue that marketing and “working for the internet” do anything else. The idea of engineering a strategy or marketing collateral to increase sales and capture more attention makes me feel physically ill. And to me, my beloved internet is approaching the totality of being just a marketing vector.
I would rather be a real engineer. Solve real world problems.
During those times I thought about my future occupation, I didn’t have a healthy empathy and I didn’t have a good understanding of needs other than my own. I didn’t pay attention to the world’s problems (or even to other people’s, honestly) and where I might be needed for my creativity and effort. A good example of this was actively antagonizing members of my school’s environmental activism club.
I lacked consideration when I set my sights on a type of work and down-adjusted my determination to achieve. I didn’t hear the groans around the world produced by a need of an innovation that didn’t exist yet. I didn’t experience anger on behalf of the victims of the cosmically unjust.
And now, when my eyes and ears are open and my heart hurts the most, I don’t have any education, qualification, or experience doing what the world needs.
Hubert is currently exploring options to reskill into a field with more immediate impact. This may look like gaining experience at an entry level job doing things that might change the whole world for a few people, or rebuilding a set of qualifications from scratch, beginning at improving high school marks to enter into a new undergraduate program, after having identified an area of impact that can be made after 5 years.
Here’s a list of resources related to this journey:
- 80,000 Hours – “You have 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for a solid 40 years. That’s a huge amount of time. And it means that your career is not only a major driver of your happiness — it’s probably also your biggest opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.”
- TVO ILC – Online, accelerated high school credits for all ages