An engineer’s guide to unlimited motivation in a corporate job
Without quitting your job. That would be too easy 🙃
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” - Confucio
Bullshit.
No matter what you do for a living, it will have parts you like and parts you don’t. Motivation comes and goes, but all great achievements require consistency.
How do you say consistent even when you are not motivated?
There are days I’m not motivated to work, and the same happens to other people. I spent time discussing this with my mentee.
My strategy seems to work for me and others. So I decided to write about it here.
In this post, we’ll learn to create our motivation. We’ll have it in our control, not at the mercy of external conditions
💎 Find your “why”
Some people are changing the world for the better and that’s their motivation. Their “Why”.
For others, their job is just giving them money. If they can attach a deeper meaning to it, they’ll see work through more positive lenses. For example, working to provide for their families
Still, I dislike this approach.
There are many ways you can provide for your family, why is this job the right thing? If your job makes you miserable, attaching a deeper meaning will create more pressure. It's like trying to glue 2 pieces together that don’t fit one another.
I found a different meaning of “why” in Ali Abdaal’s book “Feel Good Productivity”.
Rather than a big and deep why, the book proposes side-quests. In video games, besides the main storyline, there are smaller missions to complete. Super Mario wants to save the princess, but also get the 3 star coins in each level.
After I started applying this idea, I found more meaning in my work.
I like the idea of not pushing in life in different directions. I started writing a newsletter because it would make me a better engineer at my job. But now with a side-quest I found a way for work to make me better at writing my newsletter
👾 My side-quest
I won’t lie. Sometimes I don’t feel motivated to work my 40 hours + some extra hours here and there + commute + getting ready for commute + lunchtime in the middle of the day.
If money was the only reason… I’d still do it.
But I would be very transactional. And I would lack the motivation to try to get better. I don’t think money is enough motivation to get a promotion. Instead, I’d just try to get something that pays the same or more with less effort.
And I’d be proud to be a great engineer. I optimized my life resources.
But with the concept of side-quest, I saw my newsletter benefits from working at Amazon. I created a work log journal to write each day situations that happened and some takeaways. Some of these will never see the light, but many are the inspiration behind my posts.
Now, going to work every day is not taking me away from writing my newsletter.
Going to work is writing the newsletter.
🎓 The homework I gave my mentee
Alright, write here 3 side-quests you can have in your current job.
My mentee only found one that made sense for him. I encourage you to do this yourself right now.
You’ll realize how hard it is. Don’t stress yourself if you can’t find any. This doesn’t mean staying at your job is pointless. it’s just that you have to find a better way to align it with your other interests.
I’m not a fan of finding a pre-existent passion. Instead, work consistently into something. Become good enough to gain autonomy over your work and enjoy it. That’s the argument of Cal Newport’s book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”.
My mentee found a side-quest on getting good at Typescript. He was using it both at his job and his personal project.
🎳 Other side-quest ideas for you
If you want to become a good writer, pay extra attention to the documents you write at work.
If you want to become a good speaker, present in all demo sessions. Also lead team meetings becoming the scrum lead.
If your job pisses you off and you want to find a new job, interview other candidates. You'll be making progress in your own interview preparation.
🎯 Conclusion
So you see, even if you want to change jobs, you can find a side-quest that gives meaning to going to work that day.
Now leadership priorities changing wouldn’t impact me as badly as before. It’s a new scenario I can write about.
Writing all the code of a feature just to have it canceled before going to production wouldn’t impact my mentee too badly. He made progress in learning Typescript.
You control your motivation.
Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket of a single “why” and having an existential crisis when something goes wrong. Diversify your motivation by finding multiple side-quests
Motivation is something you can engineer.
👏 Weekly applause
These are some good pieces of content I found during the week:
How Razorpay Scaled to Handle Flash Sales at 1500 Requests per Second by
. Now when I hear thundering herd I’ll think a long queue of people waiting in front of a store for a flash sale.Communicate like a Senior: Use clear deltas by
. People perceive differently the same piece of work depending on how you dress it. Learn business writing.How to Build a Business that Lets you Quit your Job - Dickie Bush - I took a lot of notes from this podcast. It’s especially interesting the concept of “bottleneck thinking” for anything you want to improve in your life
- . We all experience impostor syndrome. Hemant here shares how the isolated events in your careers, like being laid off, don’t determine how far you can go.
- . Jumping into the extremes is bad. Agile doesn’t mean zero process. And agile shouldn’t mean you have to follow the agile process. In the end, it’s about working more effectively to deliver more vlaue.
I’ve never thought it like that, nice idea with the side quests! I’ve been using something similar, without naming it such :)
Here are my ideas for side quests:
- Use the work time to have a useful business understanding in the domain of the company. For example, if you work on Amazon (the e-commerce part), you can aim to understand the e-commerce world. Try to sell something with together with your team.
I’m in the Agriculture and drones world, and I aimed to better understand it. I got an FAA license for commercial drone flying, and spend a whole day in the corn fields of Indiana :)
2 weeks ago, we did the same with our whole team - I let everyone try to fly our huge $30k drone, and it was a great experience!
- organize a hackathon, and experiment with a tech you want to learn. It can be a small hackathon for just your team, for a single day, doesn’t need to be something huge.
A year ago I organized an Hackathon for the R&D deprtament, and used the chance to create a react-native app. That knowledge is still useful.
- experiment with methods from books. For me it’s management books, but it can be engineering books too. Trying out suggestions, and seeing how it works out. When you have some tenure on the team,
usually you can bring to the table and your manager will let you try it out.
My side quest will be to create content like reels and yt videos about my experience and what i learn from my full time job, and help others that are interested in becoming developers. Thanks for sharing this valuable advice.