When a team member tells me they want to implement this big idea or reinvent how something is done, I am supportive, but stay a little skeptical at first. Is the intention effervescent, or will it survive contact with reality? Hearing them share their enthusiasm is great, since the world runs on optimism, but carrying it through is the litmus test. Will their actions match their words?

What happens when the first obstacle shows up? For instance, the tech stack is imperfect, the compliance team may impose impossible requirements, or an upstream team has no bandwidth to make the changes needed. There will never be a smooth path. Rebuilding from scratch is not an option. That would be like boiling the ocean only to discover you spent all that energy to make no measurable progress. And by the time you finish, circumstances will have changed anyway.

Carl Sagan put it well: if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

I often work with engineers who ask what they can do to grow professionally. Most sit somewhere between entry-level and mid-seniority. I like to use the conversation to discuss design patterns, statistical learning, and other foundations that sit under cutting-edge technology, rather than the tech du jour. The direction I take is deliberate and has two intents: to spark curiosity and to assess how serious the person is.

Most show mild interest, then quietly ignore it. I think that they were hoping to hear about a fast path to advance quickly. Such shortcuts are myths.

There are, however, those few who jump in and want to know more. They show curiosity, study the topic, implement a proof-of-concept, and end up developing a far greater understanding of the tech. The difference between the two groups over time is stark. Precisely because they engage, they show that they are serious; their actions do the talking. As a result, they earn more mentoring and coaching time, and get assigned to higher-impact projects. Coaching and mentoring are an investment, and assignment is risk mitigation (i.e., best fit for the job). Like any investment, you put your limited resources where the odds of return look better. Scarce resources don’t go to those auditioning for a tip.

Fast forward a few months and, not surprisingly, those who dismissed the conversation start complaining about their jobs. It commonly manifests as the Nirvana Fallacy, dismissing practical but imperfect solutions by comparing them to unrealistic, flawless ideals that ignore costs, trade-offs, and other realities. You hear complaints about everything, how any proposed solution will not work, and claims that if the company was serious they would invest in the person’s preferred technology. A job becomes meaningless fastest for those who demanded perfection from everyone else and practiced none themselves.

I am not above any of this. I have made the same painful mistakes. What I want to talk about is a mix of personal experiences and work I have done with others.

Where Do You Want to Be?

I ask this not as a physical location, but as a place in your career.

Here I want to share lessons with you that will change how you see and handle your job, and will have an impact on your professional career.

This essay will earn its value now and as reference material to come back to in the future, as you won’t have all the answers or be able to put everything in place at once. As I said before, there are no shortcuts. The only way forward is through it. So make a commitment to yourself to read it all, come back to read it again later, and work its lessons at your own pace.

The following may be uncomfortable questions, and are to be answered for you and you alone. It’s necessary that you do it truthfully, since change begins with understanding, and self-deception will only hurt you and impress no one.

Why did you take the job? Was it for employment and a steady income? There is absolutely no shame in that. These are valid and as good reasons as any other: a family with kids, a sick loved one, supporting a spouse’s studies. Life is concrete, and bills are real.

Others may answer that they want the fame of a hot company to rub off on them. “Oh, you work at XYZ? That’s cool.” But novelty wears off quickly. You’d need a perennial supply of new people to impress to keep getting the dopamine hit. Prestige is ephemeral and one reorg away from being ordinary.

Among all the answers, there is one we all share in common: the fundamental desire to escape the trap of drifting into disappointment by doing something that matters. Meaning is the elixir of a life worth living.

Here is the question that will make all the difference. Irrespective of whether you are working at your dream job or not, it all begins by answering: What do you want to learn and do?

Yes, it looks deceptively simple, until you stop to think, and give it the attention the answer deserves. This is the starting line from where you will pursue and find fulfillment.

Your answer doesn’t need to solve the meaning of life or be immutable. If you already know your purpose, excellent. But most people don’t, so start with small steps: What do you want to learn and do in the next six months?

Adjust the timeframe to your reality, but as a rule of thumb, avoid extremes. Two weeks is too short for anything substantial and five years is so long that the world, the company, and you will have changed.

Start Where You Are

It’s subtle and you may not notice at first, but you’ve likely built an invisible fence around your mind. Imaginary hurdles you feel you must clear before putting your hands to work. They usually appear as having to clear A or fix B.

There’s no need to wait for any of those reasons to roll up your sleeves and get to work. This isn’t an all-or-nothing situation.

Which brings you here. So, what is in it for you?

Regardless of your situation, there will be many lessons to learn and things to do that overlap with your answer to the question.

By the way, about your answer, write it down and be specific. “Get better at welding titanium” beats “grow as an engineer.” Objective targets give you something to aim at when the daily noise comes to wreck your attention.

Even if you’re working in a different field, it can still be a place to learn invaluable lessons:

• Why a process works a certain way.
• How to prospect for customers.
• What is needed to scale a company.
• When to invest in marketing a product.

The list is long, very long. Your job is to find, learn, and practice the lessons that interest you. And the best part of it? This is a fair trade. You’re getting better at your job, and as a result you become a more effective employee. The company shares its lessons and pays wages (perhaps even a promotion or a raise). Everybody wins.

And while you’re at it, drive and optimism are contagious. People want to work with those who bring positive energy.

Then, if or when you decide to move on, you will leave the place better than you found it.

Guard Your Focus, Mostly

Every day a new, interesting, or urgent matter comes up. A breakthrough in tech, a worldwide emergency, a new flavor of snake oil. Take your pick, the opportunities to get distracted will far outnumber the reasons to stay focused.

Predictably, those distractions may be influential to the point of persuading you to change course, do something different, react to the new trend.

To steel-man this argument, sometimes changing your mind and switching priorities (i.e., pivoting) is the right move. Sunk cost can cause tunnel vision and trap you into doubling down on a dead-end path when course correction would be wiser. There is no way to predict with certainty what will work and what will fail.

Still, the things you want to learn and do come from an internal drive and conviction that likely carry a stronger signal than the constant noise from the ether.

What you need to internalize is that every material change can be expensive. Deliberate or accidental, each pivot resets the clock and sends you back to the starting line. Compounding effects require long stretches of time. If you restart too often, you’ll be robbing yourself of the chance to grow. You can’t be a rocket scientist today, a marine biologist tomorrow, and an architect the day after.

Pick two or three things worth your attention and protect them. Evaluate as needed, but not due to hitting a challenge, boredom, or the latest trend.

Explanations Over Beliefs

Explanations are better than beliefs in nearly all professional circumstances. A belief inevitably attaches to your identity and becomes immutable. In contrast, an explanation is something you hold lightly and are open to adopting a better one when it shows up.

There is no amount of evidence I could come up with that will convince you that your favorite sports team is not the best. I could back up a truckload of data and still argue in vain. This inflexibility comes with no advantage for you at work. On the contrary, it’s likely to hold you back.

In 1687, Isaac Newton published the law of universal gravitation in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. For over 200 years it served us well. It was the best available explanation at the time. But it also falls short for several aspects of planetary motion and for the precision required by GPS turn-by-turn navigation.

Albert Einstein introduced special relativity in 1905 and general relativity in 1915. Those theories gave better explanations of gravity and its effects, and they enabled technologies that Newtonian physics alone could not deliver. GPS would drift by miles, not inches, if engineers ignored relativistic corrections.

People are generally open to better explanations and to change their minds when it yields better results. The same can’t be said about beliefs.

Being able to explain to yourself why you want what you want allows you to course-correct when a better explanation shows up. In contrast, if you believe you are destined for something, then enjoy the ride, because you’re likely to stick with it no matter what.

At work, beliefs such as “I’m a backend person,” “This company is political, so effort is pointless,” and “I’m waiting for a better manager” are career self-deceptions.

If nothing could change your mind, you’re acting no differently than a sports fan defending a jersey. Explanatory knowledge makes for a better strategy.

Learn the Machinery, Skip the Politics

There will be domain experts at the company. Those are the people who know the reasons why a process works as it does, how to build a product, when to market to customers, and what closes a sale. These are but a few examples of interesting things to learn. And the best way to learn them? Talk with those people.

They are usually skip-level managers and executives. Yes, they are busy, but you can earn time with them. Office hours, water-cooler conversation, and other assorted opportunities. Engage in short but meaningful conversations. Avoid vagueness such as “pick your brain.” Soon, more opportunities to talk for longer appear.

Funny story: I once was discussing the Roman Empire with a C-level executive from a former employer. We were talking about Augustus’s lifelong friendship with Gaius Maecenas and the importance of their correspondence. The conversation then morphed into how internal ML inference engines were taking longer to give an answer than the connection’s TTL (Time To Live). From that chat, germinated an asynchronous solution we launched later that year. Access and interactions compound when you bring value to the table. Skip levels respond to signal. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

If you want to break the ice, ask the reason why a certain process is necessary, how a tech was chosen, and what questions the company asks customers to get feedback. This visibility starts giving you a map of the sprockets in the machinery. Knowing that map keeps you from suggesting the obvious or repeating failures without understanding why they failed. Sometimes you will try again differently. Understanding the first failure is what tilts the odds of the second attempt.

Adding value means being effective (i.e., having impact). Being a smart-ass for its own sake only annoys people. Teachers may have pets because they are paid to develop students. In a company, you are the one getting paid. The expectation is that you will use your smarts to do something useful. No one will be impressed by how clever you are.

Two related questions matter together:

• What do you want to learn?
• What do you need to learn?

One without the other becomes a hobby or a drudgery. The overlap is where professional growth happens.

Our brains are wired for aiming, learning, and achieving. When we stop learning and lack a purpose, complacency settles in. It becomes a downward spiral from there: dissatisfaction, quiet quitting, endless complaints. It’s a slow death by a thousand cuts, not a noble protest.

These are important questions for you to think about:

• Which parts of the machinery interest you enough that you would study them for the sake of it?
• What valuable lessons can you take with you whether you stay or leave?
• If you could change one thing, how would you do it? Consider what second-order effects would follow. Who could green-light this? (Sometimes the right answer is: start your own company.)
• Who already does excellent work, and what can you learn by shadowing them?

As you consider and do those things, beware that you will meet people who treat information like a throne. They try to create artificial scarcity by gatekeeping access in a political zero-sum game. However, instead of refusing to talk with them, learn how to handle them. One of the best ways is to ask them direct questions. They can’t withhold answers without risking policy violations and the consequences that follow. Decline to play the political game.

Define What Done Means

The Sirens, from The Odyssey, sang the most enchanting songs, capable of luring sailors to their ruin. The melodies promised knowledge and pleasure, and rendered their victims incapable of acting. They remained spellbound until death.

Just like one of the bewitched sailors, you may be tempted to remain in the learning phase forever. Yes, learning is a life-long activity. Nevertheless, the purpose of learning is to do something with it, rather than hoard it. Databases and AI model weights already outperform you at that job.

One of the lessons is discovering a purpose, even a temporary one, but something you will do. You must define what done means for that stage. It can be as simple or as complex as learning enough to fix an issue, ship a new feature, or build a new product. In all cases, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.

A hard truth to admit is the fear of the unknown after the end of a lesson. There is the worry that once that milestone is crossed, there will be nothing else to do. But right after stepping over that line, the opposite turns out to be true. Completing one stage is only the beginning of the next one. Just like Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the quest is circular, where end and beginning overlap.

Define what done means. Make it tangible, such as “I can apply state machines in production and am able to explain it to a junior engineer,” in contrast with “Keep learning design patterns,” which is a fog bank.

Own What You Mean, Mean What You Own

This work is continuous like the streams of a perennial river. Every time you do it, you will get a surge of energy that will carry you for a little while.

Meaning at work is built from choices: what you study, what you ignore, whom you ask, what you finish, and how effective you become. Companies only offer conditions, but they cannot instill purpose in you.

Merit matters more than narratives about belonging to a brand. Competence compounds and stays with you no matter where you go. Performance reviews, titles, and cool office stories lag behind the reality of whether you are effective. If that sounds harsh, good. Soft stories about passion and culture fit have left too many people stuck, under-skilled, and surprised when the ground shifts beneath their feet.

Make the trade fair and explicit: your best labor for their lessons, wages, and access to hard problems. Then keep your side of the bargain. The rest follows and flows from it.

Revisit this essay until it becomes muscle memory. Can you explain why you are learning what you are learning? Have you defined done? Are your actions matching your intentions?

Companies sell culture decks, belonging language, and brand glow. None of that compounds as value to you. Competence does. People who outsource meaning to a logo wake up skilled at nothing except chronically complaining about their disappointment.

The way forward remains through learning and doing with a purpose, one cycle at a time. Meaning is for you to extract, or you are left with a hollow story in a branded hoodie.

I ask you again: What do you want to learn and do?