breaking my habit of waiting for the big break
a tale of taking my desires seriously and finding consistency
Life updates
Since I’ve been laid off in April, I’ve had an eventful life - living the fool’s dream of full freedom and autonomy. I spent my time with fun and meaningful activities - and also a whole lot of slacking off. It sort of happened by itself. All in all, I had one of the best summers in my life!
Having had no day-to-day job allowed me to take a few steps back and connect with the bigger vision for my life, personally and professionally. There have been many changes in my life since my last post, culminating in my birthday yesterday: I celebrated life together with loved ones, doing the things I love.
And so it’s the perfect moment for me to take the time to reflect and write out some of the experiences and learnings I made in the recent months.
How do I envision my life, what elements am I happy with, what am I missing?
What are my heart desires?
It took some while to find inner clarity about my heart desires. And a crucial insight for me was that even with that clarity, I did not take myself and my desires seriously. But before going into that, I would like to talk about a habit of mine I discovered that doesn’t help me (anymore): waiting for the big break.
Waiting for the big break
In the past, whenever I have found myself at a crossroad in my life, I resorted to a single approach: waiting for the big break.
Again and again I felt at a point in life where I had been going through meaningful internal growth and a change of perspective that hadn’t yet materialized in analogous changes in my outside world.
My usual approach in these phases in life was to… send some vague signals into the universe and then wait for “the big break” to… just happen? It sounds weird to me when I’m writing it down like this, but this is the best description I can come up with.
For some additional context, my previous post about ‘Fooling Around’ actually has a high overlap with this approach:
When “the big break” was eventually happening by way of some big opportunity coming my way - moving to a new city, starting a new job, meeting a person pivotal to my life, having a huge epiphany about myself etc. - I embraced it with open arms and thus slided into the next phase in my life.
This approach of ‘Fooling Around’ carried me well through my teenage years and 20s. I estimate that it worked out about 90% of the time, a stunning success rate. I characterize it by two polar aspects:
On the one hand, it felt so easy-going and playful to move through bigger life decisions; all I had to do was to make some moves and then “wait for the big break” that would eventually arrive - being in full trust that the universe had my back.
On the other hand, it was maddening when this approach didn’t succeed. I felt not in charge of my life and dependent on a secret magic that this seemed to be built on. I felt without orientation and direction.
I have spent a lot of time trying to nail down the magic for why this worked so well, and have never succeeded. This was so infuriating. Because when my approach didn’t work - I had no recourse. The universe simply wasn’t in a mood to sprinkle me with luck this time and that meant I was out of alternatives in my small arsenal of life approaches.
But because it was a very effective approach, I was fine overall and I didn’t invest in developing different approaches. I will also say that I was very opportunistic and flexible which contributed to the effectiveness of my approach but probably also meant that I “settled” for many choices that weren’t much aligned with myself.
In the end, this approach still allowed me to experience progress. However, the underlying energy here was that I kept up the illusion of being helpless when the entire universe didn’t seem to conspire to support me. I symbolically threw my arms up in desperation and that was the end of it - keeping myself in a static position I wasn’t forced into.
Taking myself seriously
Now, what I experienced in the last couple months was very strange. In my efforts to find a new job, none of my previously successful strategies - derived from the ‘Fooling Around’ approach - seemed to work this time. Success rate of 0%. Crushing defeats left and right. A little overdramatic, I know. But the contrast to my previous job searches was dramatic.
I was at my wit’s end - where I experienced ease and effortlessness before turned into stagnation. At the same time, I was also connected to an inner calmness and I knew that there is a truth for me to learn from this experience. What was I missing?
To skip to the conclusion, one crucial element turned out to be that I did not take myself seriously, due to an inner negative attitude towards software engineering. Having had an unhealthy relationship towards work and a poor understanding of my needs and desires outside of work in the past, my love for software engineering had turned into bitterness and insecurity over the years.
I had been losing sight of what brought me to software engineering and computer science in the first place - a passion for the craft, the depth and beauty it offers, the fantastic expressive possibilities of creating and shaping software systems, and the chance to make tremendous impact in this world and people’s lives.
For years, it had been my desire to continue and grow my impact as a software engineer, but due to various reasons, even though I had clarity about what I wanted, I did not take myself seriously in this desire, and thus always side stepped the path in my professional growth.
Rather than improving my core skills, I questions and diverged from my own desire and took on other responsiblities outside of software engineering - this did allow me to learn many things but also distracted me from my actual main focus.
In my job search, this showed itself in the roles I was looking for. Rather than focusing on finding senior software engineering roles only, I was open to more hybrid roles like sales engineering, customer success, technical content marketing.
Making the decision internally to focus on pure engineering roles and taking it seriously was a big step for me. The next step was then to devote sustained attention on fulfilling this desire over a period of time. In other words, finding consistency.
Consistency - sustained devotion over time
There are parts in my life that I have already taken very seriously and which I honored with daily consistency - my art for example. For years I’ve been practicing my self-expression daily, be it through poetry, music, or coaching (coaching is a beautiful art form in itself).
The magic that revealed itself mostly through my daily Setar practice is - my growth and expansion is a continuous process that I value and invest in every moment, every day. I take my inner clarity and my heart desires seriously and stay connected to them also when exchanging with the world.
For my job search, once I combined the two elements - taking my desire to work as a senior software engineer seriously, and practicing daily consistency and devotion towards fulfilling this desire - I was able to reconnect with my love for software engineering.
During my preparation for finding a job, I then engaged with different topics related to software engineering on a daily basis - from exploring open source projects, building small side projects, finishing online courses, to reading books and finding community.
Eventually, I ended up landing an offer for a senior backend engineering role at a company that seems aligned with my own values where I will soon continue practicing my love for the craft in a professional context.
Embracing the value of inner clarity and daily consistency has brought much joy to my life and has allowed me to break one of my most rigid habits: waiting for the big break to happen, rather than channeling my creativity into creating opportunities and materializing change over time.
How can I, today, practice my devotion to life, love & beauty?
Addendum: What about the fool?
I am still very curious to understand the fool’s magic in its essence - even though I think that inherently it cannot be understood completely and trying to do so is detrimental to its effectiveness.
But my curiosity is bigger than that. Let’s see where it takes me. I still very much resonate with being a fool - one who takes himself seriously. That’s a funny combination, no?!
A side note… just before I landed the offer at my future employer, a CTO friend reached out through a thread on Twitter and mentioned his team was hiring senior software engineers. He encouraged me to apply. I was happy about this opportunity and appreciated his offer. I then learned that the company is only working on-site and joining would have required me to move to another continent. So I kindly declined.
I still have to chuckle when thinking of this experience, because a couple of years ago I probably would have accepted this offer with little hesitation. This was exactly the sort of “big break” kind of opportunity that usually had presented itself to me previously.
It also highlighted a difference in where I am in life today - I have found a home in Berlin and do not consider moving to another city (let alone another continent) for the foreseeable future. Here I have friends, various activities that I love and require my presence, and also - a physical home. I have a life to build and enjoy here. A very good feeling - and one that is not too familiar to me.
My conclusion for now is that my inner fool still got it and there’s an abudance of wild opportunities out there to be explored. It’s up to me to stay connected to my heart desires when life knocks on the door. To take myself seriously and to find consistency. Every moment in my life.