"I'm not actually this altruistic, why was I so insistent on my brother taking a gap year? Then it hit me: I wanted to live vicariously through my brother. Fundamentally, I wanted to take a gap year."
Talk about how great Mark43 was
Talk about my thoughts going forward
Starting to feel a bit nervous - this could be good
The alarms immediately sounded off in my head. My freshman fall was the most impactful semester in my MIT career. It was when I met some of my closest connections that exist today and when I learned the most about living on my own. To rob my brother of that experience was in my view unacceptable. The idea of a gap year was completely foreign to my brother and parents. But I pleaded with them day in and day out that he should do it. That he needs to do it. Finally, after taking one of my weekends to go to Long Island and discuss alternatives, I was able to convince them of a better use of Danny's year than to pay $50K for Zoom University. He will now be enrolled in Lambda School this year and go into his own MIT career with some practical software experience.
Something was odd about my insistence for my brother to take this gap year though. I'd like to think I do really care about his future, but my excitement about this opportunity for him seemed much higher than expected. Why was I so excited by this?
It then hit me during a phone call with my mom after that weekend. "Man if I was in Danny's position, I would..." what would I do? A sizable portion of my excitement was due to this intense desire to live vicariously through Danny's gap year to have a gap year of my own. I realized that this was something that I deeply wanted too. For twenty four years I have been on this predefined path of school to college to full time software engineer. What would a gap year even look like for me?
A Blooming Curiosity
When I look at my online portfolio, the summary of my work publicly available to the world, I'm embarrassed. All of my experience has fallen into one of two categories. Either it was work I did with the intention of securing a grade for a class, and it was now deleted. Or it was work I did to justify my W2 salary, and it was now behind a company firewall. Therefore, looking at what I have left, there is nothing to see.
How would I fix this problem? Afraid of the prospects of an enormous pay cut, I tried to work on side projects. Unsure of whether I could hold myself accountable, I made sure there were other people working on what I was working on. Stuck in the same mindset that I had just convinced my parents and brother out of, I couldn't conceive of what future employers would think if I just spent any amount of time not at a tech company. These fears held me back doing the same processes I had been experiencing for years as if something was going to magically change now.
The turning point came in July. I enrolled in a writing course called Write of Passage. I have been discovering that the more I wrote about what I was learning at work, the more my coworkers found value in it and I wanted to develop this skill further. Write of Passage expanded that limited scope further. It opened my eyes to the idea that the more you share what you create and learn with not just your company, but with the world, the more you encounter exciting opportunities. My interest in becoming an independent employee of the world was already growing before this class based on the successes of various entrepreneurs I followed. Write of Passage blew the doors of this idea wide open. I needed to find out what I would be capable of as an independent online creator.
By the end of the course, I had developed systems for maintaining my new writing habits and new relationships I made. Then a new opportunity presented itself to me. A fellow Write of Passage classmate, Jonathan Hillis, was so inspired by the class that he wanted to start a fellowship that encourages people to start creating online full time. This was the spark that lit the dynamite in my head. Whether I got the fellowship or not wasn't essential, though it definitely helped that I did. But it inspired me to put into writing what I needed to do and how I could create my own gap year inspired by my brother's current opportunity.
This vague curiosity swam around in my head for months. It finally clarified itself to me after seeing it in someone I cared about and being exposed to a group of people with similar ambitions to create. I made the decision that this will be my last week at Mark43.
An Ode to Mark43
I first interned at Mark43 during the summer between my senior year and my Master's year. The internship was incredible. I worked under the guidance of mentors that helped shape how I viewed an engineer's role in a company. They allowed me to ditch the intern project so that I could be more integrated with the team and see what the actual day-to-day life would be as a full time employee. It was also the first time I experienced working for a group of people that were part of a rapidly growing movement. The excitement associated with that growth was motivating.
That final reason proved to be the biggest influence on the decision of where to take my first job after graduation. In a company that is experiencing growth, I felt I could grow more with it. This theory has been confirmed over the last two years, where I feel like I learn more in any given quarter than during my entire MIT curriculum.
However, I saw a noticeable decline in my personal investment in the company during the last 5 months, probably in huge part due to Coronavirus. I love office culture. Going to a central place with a community of people that are all aligned on a common mission is an incredible motivator for me doing the work I do. As excited as I am about the remote work revolution happening, losing that community engagement played a role in feeling detached from the mission. I saw this start to spiral in a way that made me feel incredibly guilty and was unacceptable for me to allow it to continue going any further.
There were long-standing problems that had plagued the developer experience at Mark43 that I wanted to improve by shifting to a role focused on these problems. After almost three quarters, initiatives centered at resolving these problems weren't gaining any progress. Frustrated by this lack of progress, my attention would drift. It would get drawn to other initiatives in my personal life that started seeing actual progress: writing, side projects, etc. After a half hour or so of being distracted, I would have an "Oh shit, I need to get back to work" moment. Then, I would hit another roadblock at work and the cycle would perpetuate. It was a ticking time bomb before someone would call me out on my lack of effort. So in the final performance review, I called myself out instead during my self evaluation for this observed lack of investment and shared it with my manager. I noted that it was time for my relationship with Mark43 to end as my answer to next steps.
I am deeply appreciative of everything Mark43 has given me. Coworkers criticized my critique by arguing that I was being too hard on myself and that there were forces out of my control. This focus on results I think misses the point. The problem was the decrease in my input, not necessarily the decrease in my output. When I compare how much time and effort I put into the company now as I did a year ago, it's laughable. The bulk of my mindshare was starting to shift elsewhere. An idea that I needed to explore with 100% of my attention, not just as a vehicle for distracting my day job.
Realizing both the curiosity of pursuing this gap year and my waning investment in Mark43 solidified my decision to make this leap last week. With each 1 on 1 conversation I had surrounding the topic, the more I became confident that this was the right move for me. I kept getting more giddy about the freedom I would have to pursue the projects I would find impactful. There are numerous people I will miss working with and hope that I could stay connected to in some way. But I have the personal motivation, the lack of dependents, and the support community available to take what will be the biggest risk of my life.
My Plan for the Year and Beyond
My plan is best communicated by the landing page of my site: Nomad, Engineer, Writer. I want to further refine my niche in each of these three areas and use them to create a public impact on the world.
I had previously written about my decision to become a digital nomad. I'd like to create the version of NomadList that enables people to experience this lifestyle with a community of people, always staying in any given place with 7-11 other nomads ranging from close friends to completely new faces. These experiences will inform my writing, a skill Write of Passage empowered me to continue systematically. The communities I meet through my travels and writing will then inform my engineering, my most practiced skill. By becoming involved in these communities, it will become easier to brainstorm and create small tools that could bring value to them. The feedback loop of building in public for communities I care about will motivate me to continue finding new ways of doing so.
All three of these areas intersect at a central message for me which I have coined as "Public Citizen of the World". The dream is to become someone who considers his address to be the world, is employed by the world, and makes his work entirely public to the world. I want to be known as this moniker one day, so much so that if you were to type the phrase in Google, my landing page would become the first result. If I'm successful, I want to use what I've learned in this process to teach others how they could tap into their own passions and what they want to create in a way that becomes financially sustainable.
If this turns out to just be a gap year, the risk would be deemed a failure. I no longer want to have a work-life balance. I want to from now on always be living the life that most excites me.