A weekend filled with viral posts and memes of some Indian founders and chairs advocating absurd 70-90-hour workweeks brought to mind Albert Camus's "absurd hero" from his profoundly brilliant title essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus".
What drives someone is always an intriguing angle to explore in truly getting to know the person. Passion for work looks fundamentally different from unchecked ambition that seeks to rise at any cost. Any leader who has known passion first-hand knows it to be rare, intrinsic/autonomous, and impossible to mass-manufacture on command - you only stifle it by being a control freak!
Self-awareness, or the striking lack of it, is something that inevitably shows through in your behavior, revealing a great deal about how wholesome, graceful, and human your rise truly was in the first place. Yet, cultivating it requires introspection and hard work on one's inner self - an undertaking that might seem like an utter waste of time to many high achievers; and thus, we sadly end up with many lesser realized humans at the helm of things!
P.S. Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk, "Your Elusive Creative Genius", beautifully captures the essence - and even the struggles - of creativity and passion.
#selfawareness #passion
A couple of years back, I took part in an engineering leadership MBTI test alongside 15+ other IC and org/people leaders. I topped the introversion scale with a perfect 30/30! Next in line, three points behind, was a seasoned principal who was never spotted at regular group meetings - a true recluse I met only that one time. He seemed to have already attained his self-actualised state, while here I was, accepting every random meeting thrown my way! :-)
For me, the IC path is as much about my personality - an existential habit of questioning and seeking meaning and value - as it is about my love for high-caliber tech work. The path is a non-default one - you chose it, not because the system nudged you toward it, but in spite of it. In much of the tech industry, the management track tends to branch off too early - often before one gains any experience, let alone accomplishments, in the more seasoned, high-maturity technical roles - leaving those roles less directly understood outside the immediate community. In one talk, Ted Neward likened developer and management roles as coming from Venus versus Mars, where what fuels one often puts off the other - a pattern that persists into leadership roles.
As Khalil Gibran beautifully put it, "I have learned silence from the talkative". In my career across consulting and engineering, I've often learned as much - if not more - from those who "role-modeled" what to avoid, as from those who showed me what to embrace. People often describe IC roles as "solitary" - that's again where your personality comes in - it's precisely your love for quiet, focused, higher-end work that drew you to this path. You relate well with techies and thrive in tech discussions, and you would much rather troubleshoot a system than a human any day. :-) What makes the role challenging are the parts you never signed up for (especially true in the tech and architecture consulting industry) -
- Being surrounded by stakeholders with a distinctive love for elaborate meetings, ceremonies, plans/reports and the presence of spectators.
- Dealing with non-technical stakeholders who can't even tell the difference between functional and non-functional requirements, or between architecture, high-level and low-level design.
- Getting drawn into low-value meetings as a "standby", just to field adhoc tech questions at any level of detail as may arise.
- Being pulled in to front-end raw and non-technical context-gathering exercise (in lieu of documentation) that require little real technical maturity.
- Fielding urgent tech feasibility inquiries from non-technical stakeholders - where you see so many more dimensions than they can, and where any spot response feels like handing out a half-truth.
#TechLeadership #ICCareer
[Re-posted from my recently authored posts on LinkedIn]