Sep 06
Reading Eric Schmidt’s quote the other day:
“Life is short, work with people you like”
Got me thinking about passion and how lucky I am to be working with and having worked with what I love and have a passion for, for the past 20 (gulp!) years. Including my current job working on secret project I’m not allowed to talk about yet. I’ve been lucky enough to work with technology that I love with people that I love working with and for. I’ve been using this saying that I most likely stole from somewhere but I don’t recall from whom, that there are three important things about your work.
- What you do
- How much you get paid for what you do
- Who you work with
What you do and how much you get paid for what you do is interchangeable. I.e. I spent a summer while in school sorting dead mink skins in a factory. By length and by color. It was the most boring, brain dead, job ever and I think my mom found me the job to tell me that if I didn’t do good in school, that’s what I be doing for the rest of my life. But I was paid really good money for me at the time so I didn’t mind it so much. If you get paid what you perceive to be a good paycheck to do something you don’t like, it balances itself out. If, on the other hand, you get to work on something that you love and that you’re passionate about, you’ll happily accept less money. For example, I would have loved to have worked at Lucasfilm 15 years ago and would have happily worked for half my salary. That was, of course, before George Lucas decided to ruin our childhoods.
The one factor of the three above that can not be undervalued when looking for a job is who you work with. Who you work with every day is almost as important of a choice as who you decide to marry. You spend as much, if not more, time here in the US at the office as you do at home. If you don’t like who you work with, you’re going to eventually hate going to the office, because who likes hanging out with people you don’t like? Same thing goes for hiring people as a manager. If you don’t like someone, you’re not going to hire them.
Thinking back to the products I’ve worked on throughout my life so far, including CyberCop Scanner Ballista, PGP.com, ExpectID IQ and my current secret project job, they all have something in common. They are solutions to problems challenges that I’m passionate about solving. Being lucky enough to work on what you’re passionate about (and getting paid to do it!) is something I wish everyone gets the opportunity to do in their lifetime.
So how many of you out there are passionate about what you do? What would you work on if given the choice? Interested in your comments and feedback.
