Someone recently told me that I need a narrative that other people can understand. This isn't the entire story, but it's a story that works.
- —
Two of my close friends confided in me recently that they'd almost died. Separate occasions. They don't know each other. One was at the Vegas shootings in 2017. The other was in Iceland in a car that flipped twice into a ditch.
At the same time, I was reading The Third Door by Alex Banayan. In the book there is an anecdote about Miki Agarwal, the founder of Thinx. She was supposed to be at the World Trade Center on 9/11. She would have almost certainly died, had she not overslept and missed the meeting.
So I was confronting the question of mortality in a very tangible way, through considering these incidents that teeter on the edge of life and death.
And I realized I didn't want that to be me. I don't want to have to face a near death experience to wake up, and I certainly don't want to be looking death in the eyes before realizing that there was so much I regretted not doing.
Incidentally, in The Third Door, Alex talks about how he spent his freshman year staring at his ceiling and trying to figure out what he was doing with his life. Because it sure as hell wasn't premed. And I realized I'd long been doing the same thing, except instead of staring at the ceiling I'd been staring into lines of code on a computer screen at nice tech jobs, wondering if this would be my life for the next decade.
I mean, I'm 23 and I've spent the bulk of my life chasing a dream that feels like someone else's. The smartest kids from my high school became software engineers, the best software engineers worked at Google, and the best among those started their own companies that raised millions in venture capital. This is a simplified narrative, but it's pretty close to the narrative I bought into.
These borrowed dreams led me to wonderful places. I've met amazing, sharp, driven, good people along the way. I've had the opportunity to work at well-respected organizations with some of the best practitioners of the craft of software engineering. I've learned a lot, about the world and the people in it.
But I've realized that I can only subsist on borrowed dreams for so long. So I've emerged from these last few weeks of soul searching with a couple of conclusions.
The first is my life purpose, or my personal legend [1]. I want to help other people unblock themselves and realize their fullest potentials. What gives me the most joy is helping others find and express their true selves -- whether that's through overcoming personal challenges or discovering a passion. I expect that in the coming weeks and months, I'll refine this goal for the short-term.
The second is the way I'll get there. I think software tools have immense power. But I don't know if they're the most compelling or the most direct way for me to move closer towards my goal right now. I also want to immediately build skills in marketing (storytelling), sales, and product design, among others.
The third is that I'm not playing the game of averages. While it's true that, on average, it's more difficult to be financially stable, respected, or widely recognized in certain roles than others, I am not an average. There are exceptions to every rule, and in actuality, among people who have contributed greatly to humanity, I believe there are more exceptions than rules.
- - -
[1] Paulo Coelho, from The Alchemist
To reply you need to sign in.