Doing what you believe in

The biggest trap that most people find themselves in is working in a job where the pay is good but they aren't doing something that they really believe in. If you had a high paying job and was doing something that you didn't really care about/felt somewhat dubious about would you give that up to do something else (which you don't know yet?)

The calculus of making decisions without knowing everything is a tricky one and it is sometimes with people that have a healthy disregard of thinking too far into the future that can make interesting decisions.

I came across an article written by an ex-MIT student working for a consulting company, which sometimes equated to being a monkey looking for data to support some predetermined conclusion that someone wants proved. Numbers are jiggled to make thing work out, but despite being paid really well, the author had some moral reservations. Maybe being fresh out of university and being idealistic is a factor at play here, but for older people with mortgage and a family, it really becomes a calculus of knowing what they can get by on that forces many people into a trap of doing things they might not really enjoy out of necessity.

A job's a job as some people might say.

To be honest, I believe that people lose a part of themselves when they come to the point of accepting a job out of necessity instead of what they want to be doing. I think that it is unfortunate that many people don't or haven't the opportunity to try and find the things they might enjoy doing as a job. Many of the most interesting business or things made have been made through an act of curiosity or passion. I've written about this before when it comes to finding/doing what you love.

As much as I like quantitative analysis and working on optimization problems, how does one do a price/performance calculation on sacrificing money to something enjoyable, I simply do not know. But there is a value in knowing how to follow one's feelings.

As for me, I ironically work on display systems stuff that will be used for TVs. I haven't owned a TV or watched anything regularly in the last 5 years, but here I am doing what I do. All that I know is that I shouldn't be doing this forever and will need to move on to do something I really care about, but there are some interesting events coming up in the future that is keeping me around for this project for the time being.

There are times when you just can't do what you want, when you want to. As much as I would like to come up with some golden rules or something, there just aren't any. It's all about knowing how to make the "right" decisions, but that might be a topic for a different post.

It's 2:30 am and I have work tomorrow...