Aditya Chadha

It’s been over 6 months since my last post, and almost 12 since the first one. A lot has happened in between. 

I left my old job, and started a new one. I met some interesting people at work and came closer to what I thought I should be doing with my life. I made some exciting new friends. I lost some awesome friends. I created new things. I almost achieved satisfaction.

Almost.

But not quite.

Satisfaction, unfortunately, isn’t easy. Satisfaction is actually quite boring. Being satisfied means not challenging yourself, not dreaming about change, or accepting the rate of change and not asking for more. Over the past few months I’ve been trying to figure out if that’s really what I wanted. And I’ve come to realize that it isn’t.

I’m happy for what I’ve achieved over the past year. I’ve taken some steps in the right direction but I’ve still held myself back, and I don’t know why.

All my life I’ve been focused on doing multiple things at the same time. I started working while I was in school, instead of focusing on doing well in school. So, I didn’t end up being the perfect student. But I picked up some hacking skills.

When I finally started working, I focused on what I was supposed to focus on but eventually got sidetracked by stepping out of the box that most corporate work environments stick you in and looking at the “bigger picture”. So, I didn’t end end up being the perfect employee. But I understood the corporate work environment and the way “big companies” think and act a lot better.

Now I’m at a much smaller company and wondering how I can start up on my own.

Maybe this is the last time I’m going to focus on multiple things.

And that’s where this blog comes in. I’d started writing a year ago to track my transformation from yet another cog in a big wheel to a free agent creating new things.

Somewhere in the last 11 months, something killed that dream.  That thing I believe was satisfaction. Satisfied with inefficiencies because I didn’t see a way around them. Satisfied at just getting the job done, because there was just so much to do. Satisfied because of the nice safety net that I’d spun around myself.

Well, I’m not satisfied anymore. Remember - Life is short.

So, I’m back here venting, whining, frustrated but optimistic. Atleast I’m writing again.

What happens next? I don’t know.

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Tags: satisfaction, entrepreneurship, life, work

Yep, that’s right. I quit my job, and lived to talk about it.

A couple of months ago, I was just like a large majority of people on the planet. Working at a very large company. Thinking that I was making a difference helping other large companies cut costs, or increase efficiency or something equally responsible. Being underrated because I wasn’t kissing ass. Living from paycheck to paycheck, working hard at something that I didn’t quite enjoy but did anyway, because it paid the bills and let me enjoy a certain lifestyle. Falling asleep in the toliet at work, you know.

And then, it hit me.

No, not the life is short cliche (although, that is a great speech and I am an apple fanboy!) - no, it hit me that happiness is not hard to achieve. Everyone tells you to do what you love, so when you’re doing something you don’t quite love, you quit. So, that’s what I did. I quit.

But, it’s not quite that easy. How do you find out what you love doing? Well, to be honest, you don’t. (ding! ding! ding!). Like most people I had no idea what I should do with my life (Po Bronson - 2002) - but I had been reading a lot of smart entrepreneurs and their views on interactive marketing and the new collaborative web (note: yes, the so called web2.0 but that’s another cliche I’m hoping to avoid) and then I read iWoz and that was really it.

I realized that I had been most satisfied when I was building things (software), the creative thrill of starting from scratch and ending with a finished piece of code that did what it was expected to do in a fast and efficient way had been sheer joy. And, in working for a big faceless corporation, I’d lost all of that, and I realized that I missed it. I wanted to be an engineer all over again. Badly.

Leaving isn’t that easy though. You need to have some sort of a plan.

subLucid, was my plan.

[To be continued…]

technorati tags:entrepreneurship, innovation, technology

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