Finding Purpose in Your Work

So I recently watched this YouTube video which says that most young people, read millennials, are very dissatisfied with their jobs because they do not derive any sense of purpose from them. Apparently, millineals are a very purpose-driven generation and feel frustrated when engaged in vocations in which they cannot see a purpose. Being both a millennial and dissatisfied with a number of things about my job, I decided to take a closer look at my job and see if there was not a meaning in there which could help me feel more at peace with just waking up every workday to go stare at a screen and type innumerable lines of computer code.

From experience, I know it is hard for a software developer like myself who writes code for corporate software to feel any sense of purpose. In fact, many a time I hear people with similar jobs grumble that they are only enriching others. Unfortunately, while enriching others could be a purpose too, it irks the hell out of the enricher if the enriched is already a few more commas richer. Anyway, because I could not easily delude myself that all my code was somehow changing lives, I decided to take a different route to finding purpose from and in my job. I resolved to start by writing down ten things I love about my job. In the end, I had a list of twenty items which not only bolstered my motivation to keep doing my best at work but also prompted me to write this article.

First, I realised that my employer has given me so many first experiences — things I may never still have done had I not joined Eclectics International. The firsts that stood out to me were my first plane ride, my first foreign travel, first vacation to the Kenyan coast (to any coast really), and of course the first pay check that was kinda big enough to make me smile with pride. They say in life it is the little things that matter, and these little things mattered to me because they knocked off a couple of items from my bucket list. My career bucket list, specifically, contains such diverse things as mastering JBOSS, microservices, iOS, and machine learning with TensorFlow; I also intend to get a Prince2 certification, become a marketer, maybe get a PhD like I always dreamed, and eventually shift to wearing a suit to work everyday, you know, just to go to meetings and sign papers all day, because why not.

Second, I took inventory of the skills I have gained under my employment and was blown away. In one and a half years, I had learned Ionic, Yii2, EMV card processing, uncounted libraries and third party APIs, JBOSS, EJBs, a number of ISO standards, and gotten a golden opportunity to work with card-processing, Android, POS devices which greatly enhanced my experience in mobile apps development. Further, I occasionally found myself in boardrooms meeting with CEOs, continental heads, board chairpersons, regional directors, managers, etc. until I finally found my voice and got comfortable with expressing my opinions and explaining my stand on any particular issue. But beyond the technical and soft skills, it is at Eclectics where I practically learned that I was worth so much more. Essentially, working here raised the ceiling of who I am and what I think I can become — it raised the standard of what I demand from myself professionally. 

Third, I have made wonderful acquaintances and developed some amazing friendships with people who have very different life experiences and beliefs. I am drawn to people who can express themselves, but more to people who can make a crazy assertion and go on to defend it sufficiently enough for me to actually want to research deeper for myself. These are just the kind of people we have at Eclectics — opinionated, intelligent, talented, helpful, life-long learners, and humble enough to listen to and consider opposing views. I stopped counting the number of times colleagues have helped me not only in writing code but also by offering me chances to broaden my experiences and expand my perceptions as a human being.

In addition to all that, it dawned on me that one of my complaints, being overworked and over pressured, is not entirely a bad thing for me. See, I work out, and in my exercises I know that growth and positive change only start happening past the point of pain — everything else is just warm up! So when I reflected on the times I had been most pressured or had the biggest load, I realised that those were also the times when I delivered the most and accomplished the things of which I am most proud. These were also the times I had had to learn something whether I felt like it or not; basically, these were my moments of growth. Pressure has made me deliver more than I thought possible; pressure has forced me out of my comfort zone into finally learning things I knew I needed to learn to grow in my career; pressure has helped me redefine impossible as “something that someone is not committed enough to do”.

But, when all is said and done, perhaps the best thing I have gotten from Eclectics is the direct and indirect mentorship of my more experienced colleagues. Notably, while working on the UBA project, I learned from James, our Head of Products, the necessity of articulating requirements, of seeking clarity, of creating consensus on what needs to get done from the outset, and of making hard decisions with finality so that the people you are leading are confident to proceed in one common direction. From our DMD, Sebi, I actually wish to be able to emulate his affable persona, his down-to-earth leadership style, his modesty, and the ease with which he fills his position, seemingly so effortlessly. And finally, our MD inspires me to sharpen my business acumen and my marketing skills; and he reminds me that there is no cap on ambition or vision, and that if you are willing to work even odd hours of the night, you can dream as wildly as you want.

In conclusion, when you open up your mind to see the bigger picture, you realise that there can be purpose in anything we do. I believe, much like the existentialists do, that purpose cannot be found from external things. Rather it is for us to infuse our actions with purpose; we decide if what we are doing has meaning or not. If you decide it is meaningless, you do it half-heartedly and do not get to do your best job. However, it is just as easy to decide that everything you do shall be an expression of your deepest beliefs. In which case, you stop seeking meaning and purpose and start creating them, much like I did by writing this story which is now a page of my biography even if the rest of it is never written. Similarly, your code tells a story of how you think and reason, and you do not want that story to be poorly told especially when you are the one telling it.