As I've grown and aged, I've become more and more satisfied and self-assured. But in the wilds of modern life, is it justified? Or do we just become our skills, our opinions, our social groups, and the life arcs we paint in the moments of not knowing? And is that okay?
Fair warning, this post is probably mostly for my own benefit, but why not put it out on the internet for everyone :)
Here I am sitting in a café, studying Mandarin (traditional), when I'm struck by the thought (or maybe the vibe), am I just my skills? It was a moment where I felt the awareness of my current skillset, and thanks to the success of my company, awareness of the skill sets I don't have or which are nascent. I'm a great engineer, that I know; but I'm not a great sales person, nor a great org builder, nor am I a great manager (though I think I do pretty well). There was a time, common among engineers of the last thirty+ years I'm sure, that I thought "I don't need to sell, I don't need to market, I don't need to politic - I can just pursue the latent truth between technology and the market". ('"I can" and what?' being an obvious follow up)
The closer you are to these other roles, and the longer the arc of the Thing you are building and shepherding, the more you realize the incredible value of synthesis and alignment across these domains. I hate to give a point to Elon, but he was right about the value of capable generalists: often the framing of the problem is half the battle, and so many of my former peers saw everything that wasn't "the code / design" as a begrudging chore of the job. They liked the problem solving.
I love the problem solving too, but I was fortunate enough to learn early how flexible the problem definition really is in the real world. I was "lucky" to quit my first job at 25 to jump into a solo founded software startup. It was a terrible financial bet at the time, but it showed me that people pay for and use for the value, not the solution, and the value was a function of the problem for them. Don't mistake me - powerful solutions are also what reshape our value frontier, as they make previosuly ludicrous strategies or problem rotations "an insightful idea, actually". (why you don't settle for less than a 10x value increase when betting big on innovations)
I suppose you could say this gave me a small amount of "worldliness": I had to do more than pay lip service to the other components of building a business. I and to understand those domains, and to construct a believable strategy, which forced me to also see the bounds of my chosen domain (engineering) and its interactions with the others. Unfortunately, I was also taken in by things like "content marketing" as an answer for building commercial interest, and luckily have now learned that nothing beats pavement-pounding cold-calling sales blood sweat and tears. (most of why I'm not starting something solo any time soon)
All that to say, these domains forced me to construct a narrative space that my profession lived within, that connected it to "the way the world works". Now to land this plane: I think this largely explains why I am in the position I'm in now, compared to the positions of my peers at the time. I exposed myself to problems and growth-demands and perspectives that pointed the gradient of my growth here. Each challenge demanded growth, and the sum of those challenges plus "just quit my first job" me is now current me: my skills, my taste, my worldview, and yes, my shortcomings. And not in some "if you squint" way: my skillset and profession determine how I think about chores, and whether I hire cleaners or spend relationship conflict to solve it instead. It's how I think about what problems I should solve myself or delegate to others. It's how I prioritize what we plan to do, and what of those things later we defer based on new information. It's how I think about fixing the "god I need to get better at watering my plants" problem. It's what consumes my free time. It's what whole regions of my brain have been optimized over years to understand, embed, and operate with. It's the topics of conversation that interest me most. You get the drift.
The easiest thing is to just keep going. There's an inconvenient version of it that is "go harder", leaning deeper into specific or more recent narratives. Something like "become a great leader", or "always do the right thing for your relationship and community" (though figuring that out is hard). Then there's the harder end of the space, truly questioning your mental model, incentives, and the opinions of those around you. There's a reason the latter is hard, and we mostly know why. This thought is freeing, in a way: once you have it, you can now strategically choose to walk that dimension of your growth/worldview. You can meta-policy your growth by picking a domain where you feel opportunity, and to decide to take more risks, inject more noise.
Oh, yeah - noise! Randomness. I should have mentioned that earlier. I think "fortunate noise" is what I was the beneficiary of in my "let's solo-found a company at 25!" adventure. At the time I did not understand the world enough to truly see the value of the experience it would give me. But it was an extremely high variance bet whose influence on the challenges and problems I saw day to day, month to month forced me to grow in a way I benefited from. Tangent: I want to be extremely clear that it isn't "the" way, and that there are likely many ways and directions that result in highly valuable growth. Almost the best thing you can have these days is "a really good problem".
I think this topic is on my mind these days because a big part of my identity is now under internal strain. Probably up until the pandemic, I held technology and software high: it was the literal lever we used to pull ourselves out of drudgery. I was ambivalent at the trash pile facebook had become, but software's (even commercial) value very much eclipsed its societal costs and risks. These days, that is obviously in question, and the arc of humanity looks to be headed for incredible tragedy or revolution (or both) because of the maladaptive incentives and circumstances it creates. (unfortunately "optimization" is at the heart of many of these systems) I now have to reconcile what I find to be beautiful from what I find to be horrific. I would never work for a weapons manufacturer because of the obvious direct harm. Now the same is true for Meta, and a growing list of other companies.
I think I need noise in a domain or on a dimension I can't yet predict. I fear naively becoming more "my skills". I yearn for inspiration in something that feels more true for humanity than what we have. Vive randomness, I suppose!