I have a friend who’s a mechanical engineer. The startup he was CTO of recently fell apart, so he’s been looking for a new job, and was discussing with me yesterday the idea of working for Amazon doing something involving data centers. It would be a fine job and would pay well, but he didn’t want to do it – for a number of reasons, one of which stood out to me.
He said to me, “If I went back in time and talked to my 10-year-old self, and was like ‘Yo, you’re going to grow up to be a Senior Data Center Engineer II for Amazon’ I think myself would slap me. Just, that’s fucking lame.”
I asked, “What would your 10 year old self want you to be doing?” and he replied, “Building spaceships.”
This is where most people would have said something about how we’re destined to disappoint our younger selves, because we had ambitions and dreams unchecked by reality, so we should console ourselves with the Deep Wisdom that having a good life is what really matters, after all, and stop feeling so bad about it.
That’s not the advice I gave my friend, and that’s not what I’m going to write here, because I don’t believe that. If you want that advice, you can read it from a million other sources. But I, personally, am a big believer in being cool by 10-year-old-you’s standards – and this comes from someone who, at the age of 10, wanted to take over the world.
Even so, I am going to say that you need to appreciate how hard it was for you to get where you are. In my friend’s case, he grew up poor, to the extent that he told me writing emails as a part of his job makes him “bourgeoisie”. And yet now, in his late twenties, he’s living in SF and was just working as CTO for a startup that died through no fault of his. I mean, I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I would call that a hell of a success.
Still, I can sympathize with the thought of “this isn’t want I wanted to grow up to be, I’ve failed myself”. I think if I grew up to just work for Amazon – if that was actually the best I would ever do with my life – my 10-year-old self would also think I was lame. But that’s the point. Your life isn’t over yet. What you do in your 20s, 30s, 40s… that’s not “what you grew up to be”. Until and unless you decide your career is over, it’s not over.
If you were one of those kids with a dream like “be President” or “be an astronaut” or “build spaceships” or “cure mortality”, fulfilling your dream will be really hard. But if you do choose to do something your 10-year-old self would approve of, put in the effort and make it happen. Don’t give up on it, and don’t give up on yourself.
I’m a great believer in luck. And I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it.