Hi there, this is my first post with a more personal touch. I’ve spent some time this week doing some deliberate contemplation (read quarter-life crisis) — so here’s an article more personal. Some background about myself, I studied Mathematics and Economics in my undergraduate years. After graduation, I joined the government in a role that performs data anonymisation. After a year, I realised there was so much more that I wanted to learn about using data for change and wanted a different pace at work so I spent the next 3 years working in a fast-paced online grocery company as a product analyst and began pursuing a masters in business analytics at NUS. Most recently, I’ve moved into a fintech start-up and hope to become a data scientist some day, maybe. As someone who enjoys learning and being challenged, the decisions I’ve made as well as what is written here are likely going to be heavily biased in that frame of mind.
I would like to share what I think makes a job fulfilling and some things that I wished someone had told me earlier. This article is heavily influenced by a book I’ve read a long time ago The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau. Although I’m not a software engineer myself, the principles applies and I would recommend the book to all hustlers in the tech industry. I do find myself going back to the book from time to time as a reminder to myself, so this article is for everyone as it is for me!
To have a fulfilling job…
You want to focus on high leverage activities.
Leverage = Impact produced / Time invested
Leverage is essentially the ROI for the effort that you put in. It measures how much impact you’ve created per unit time. In tech teams that adopt some form of project management methodology i.e. Agile, priorities are usually set for the engineering teams at the beginning of the sprint and are hopefully already planned to maximise leverage by the leads. In my personal experience, this is less so for analysts and are often neglected, especially in start-up with minimal resources. Product analysts are often required to work on multiple analyses and projects all at once. Prioritisation is usually done at an individual level, which is why you would want to constantly remind yourself to focus on high leverage activities. It’s easy to become a machine churning work after work, writing queries after queries. Always remember Pareto’s principle — 80% of impact comes from 20% of the work you do.
When you get the important things right, the small things often don’t matter. That’s true in life as well.
What I wished someone told me: Never confuse easy wins to be high leverage activities. It took me 3 years to finally realise that just because a task can be done quickly doesn’t mean that it should be done immediately. As someone who is to some extent obsessed with being productive and checking off my to-do list, I find it difficult to put some tasks behind when I know it can be done quickly. I’m learning that it pays off to take time to evaluate all my tasks because many high leverage activities require consistent effort over long periods of time to achieve high impact.
Adapted from The Effective Engineer — before beginning any task, ask yourself:
- How can I complete this activity in a shorter amount of time?
- How can I increase the value produced by this activity?
- Is there something else that I could spend my time on that would produce more value?
You want to optimise for learning.
You want to invest in your rate of learning. You want to put yourself in situations where you learn, instead of situations where you effortlessly succeed.
We’ve heard enough that compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. Learning compounds too. Knowledge now gives you the foundation that enables you to gain more knowledge, at a faster pace in future.
When we spend our work hours on unchallenging tasks, not only are we feeling unfulfilled and boring ourselves, we are missing out on the chances to learn. We are paying the price of opportunity cost in missed learning and the long-term cost of compounding is huge. This is why it is crucial to invest your time in activities with the highest learning rate. Don’t shortchange yourself.
What I wished someone told me: To invest in your own growth, you should carve out your own 20% time to work on a side project to make the company better. Make a daily habit of improving your skills 1–2 hrs each day.
Unfortunately, not all jobs will be able to provide the environment required for us to optimise for learning. When seeking out a job, The Effective Engineer recommended several factors to consider in a company:
- Fast growth → lack of growth leads to stagnation and politics
- Training → any team that understands the value of ramping up new hires quickly will invest in time for training
- Openness → look for culture of curiosity, where people are encouraged to ask questions and information is proactively shared
- Pace → work environment should iterate quickly and have faster feedback cycle to enable you to learn faster
- People → surround yourself with people who are smarter, more talented than you. Who you work with can matter more than what you actually do.
- Autonomy → freedom to choose what to work on and how to do it drives our ability to learn
You want to show up and contribute. Preferably with an opinion.
Having an opinion reveals your thought process and what you value (in the project). Having an opinion helps you to accomplish a task with intention instead of blindly churning work out for the sake of doing it. When you do things with intention, you sweat the details and go beyond looking things at face value. That’s when you create true value and show your value.
The biggest career mistake (I think) I’ve made is being indifferent. When I first started out in my career, I was too aware of my lack of knowledge and experience. As a result, more often than not, I sit on the fence. Admittedly, being fresh in my career may not be the only reason. It can be attributed to my innate personality of wanting to be a people-pleaser and I’m still trying to correct this bad habit daily.
“Doing A has XYZ benefits, but doing B could help other 123 people too….” yes, there are always trade-offs to be made. Forming an opinion on top of the awareness and understanding of these trade-offs will train you to think deeper and consider the context of the situation. It also helps you to explore other potential scenarios/opportunities that you could have missed if you had not thought deeper. Hopefully after these considerations, you’ll realise that you do have an opinion and would find the courage to express yourself.
What I wished someone told me: For an analyst who is often not the decision maker, it is still important to give your recommendations at the end of every piece of analysis. First, it helps you to identify the why of your analysis. Why are you doing this at all? This ties in with the first principle of working on high leverage activities. Second, it helps with the how. How do you want people to use your analysis? Personally, I still struggle with this and hope to do better. If I can’t provide actionable recommendations, I’ve learnt that perhaps I could start by asking questions and share the analysis with the relevant teams who could provide better ideas.
These are top 3 factors that can make a job and your life fulfilling imho. Hope it illuminates as much as it encourages you to think about your personal definition of fulfilment! 🙂
And I’ll leave you with a quote that I read in a book recently:
The perfect work life would offer enough challenge to be interesting. Enough ease to be enjoyable. Enough camaraderie to be nourishing. Enough solitude to be productive. Enough hours at work to get the job done. Enough leisure to feel refreshed. Enough contribution to feel needed. Enough silliness to have fun. And enough money to pay the bills. Even the best jobs have trade-offs.
