Friend, when I dropped out of college to focus on freelancing back in 2012, I set 3 ground rules:
- Projects you enjoy
- Users are customers
- Stay in shape
Everything else can fluctuate, change, blow up in my face, or take a wrong turn. Those 3 rules stay. Because your career needs a vision, guidelines.
Working on projects you enjoy means you'll do a better job. You focus better, you stick through the hard times, and you crush every task all the way.
All that because you enjoy the work.
And guess what happens next – you gain confidence, take on more responsibility, get better projects, and flourish.
When users are customers your business incentives align with your users. You're not getting millions addicted to outrage so you can sell eyeballs to advertisers. You're not abusing gig workers to scrounge razor thin margins from consumers.
No, you sell value to your users.
When users like what you got, they pay. When they don't, you improve.
And you can feel good about what you do. ✌️
You gotta stay in shape. Work is not worth your health and your brain needs a strong body to thrive. Healthy mind in a healthy body.
How can you expect great things from your brain, if you keep feeding it crap? How can you solve big problems, if your energy crashes every day at 2pm?
Plus a nice workout sesh creates the perfect buffer between work-day and rest-of-day. Leave work at work and focus. 😉
Cheers,
~Swizec
Continue reading about Tips for a fulfilling tech career
Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4
- How I stopped chasing mice in 2021
- Trust your wings, not the market
- Own your career like an expert
- DO more _work_ less
- The Passion Paradox
Learned something new?
Read more Software Engineering Lessons from Production
I write articles with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. "Raw and honest from the heart!" as one reader described them. Fueled by lessons learned over 20 years of building production code for side-projects, small businesses, and hyper growth startups. Both successful and not.
Subscribe below 👇
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails 💌 on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. 👌"
Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.
Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.
Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.
Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev
Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization
Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections
Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog
Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com
By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️