Subzero Blue

Last night, I sent a little tweet on twitter asking: “What do you do when even fate is having trouble deciding what do with you?”

It was a question that occured to me and that I thought was quite funny, after a little surprise I found waiting for me in the evening, that reminded me how sarcastic our old friend fate can be, and how it sometimes chooses to mess around with your mind for fun.

The message on twitter got replicated on my facebook wall, on friendfeed and elsewhere; and it got a number of interesting replies, one of which was by my friend Amine Kochlef, that got me thinking more about life, fate and its inner workings.

Amine’s take was: “We decide for ourselves, fate is just a mirage built upon our cultural background.”
Very beautifully said, but I don’t totally agree, yet I don’t disagree either.

That view eliminates fate altogether, implying that everything is in our own hands, we decide for ourselves, we build our own lives, make our own choices, and go wherever we want to go.

The problem with that view, as much as we’d like to believe in it, is that it only works in a world where we’re alone, with no exterior influence, only affected by our own actions, with a direct and clear cause and effect relationship for everything.

The thing is we’re not in such a world, and people’s actions are complexly intertwined in a way that a little action by someone could have a direct or indirect effect on someone right next to them or someone else halfway across the world; now multiply that by several several times. 
All these actions are things that a person has no control over, but are all factors that come into play in their life, and affect the outcome of their own  decisions and  actions.

This plethora of actions taking place around us, sometimes fall into place to work in our favor, and in other times against us; and some of the words we have created to describe all this are: luck, coincidence, jinx, …etc.

One of the definitions of fate is: “An event (or a course of events) that will inevitably happen in the future; Your overall circumstances or condition in life (including everything that happens to you)“.

This view eliminates our role in determining what happens to us, putting it fully in the hands of this so-called fate, which basically means that whatever we do, the results will be the same as it’s all pre-determined no matter what we do. That of course cannot be true, because it goes against basic logic and truth.

Like most things in life, I think the truth falls somewhere in the middle; we don’t live in a strictly direct action/effect world, and neither do we live in a world where only the effect exists no matter the action taken. I think it’s more like a bunch of  actions/reactions/effects combinations.

These combinations of actions, reactions, effects, coincidences, lucky strikes, jinxes and what not are what I think fate really is; a living ever-changing sequence of intertwined acts that touches every single one of us, plays games with us, gives us a break at times, blocks a road some other times, puts us at a crossroads every once in a while, and creates the circumstances around us that we operate and

The end of the year is approaching, and with it comes the whole end of year evaluations frenzy. As a manager and a friend, I’ve had a number of people coming up to me, from my team and other ones, to talk to me about the coming evaluations, trying to get a sense of what to expect, and asking for advice on their careers.

And after having repeated the same idea in different words so many times, I thought it would be interesting to just put it in words on my blog, and share it with everyone.

I think a lot of people have their priorities all wrong when it comes to their career lives; they’re starting out thinking about positions and money, when instead of that they should be thinking of themselves, their knowledge and experience.

Building a career is just like being in investment, you can’t expect big gains without investing big and investing right, and in your career life that big investment is in yourself, through the knowledge and experience you acquire, through the serious work that you do, and the great reputation you build for yourself. Positions and money will follow automatically from there, as a direct result.

Your motivation should be how great a profile you can build for yourself and how many interesting things you’ll be able to work on; not what position you can get to or how much you can earn.

Working with the sole objective of getting a certain position or more money means that you’ll be losing focus of the most important thing that will justly get you there, your work and how much it matters.

I’m not saying a person shouldn’t have professional objectives to grow in their career lives and take on more responsibilities, of course they have to, but they have to understand that the only way they’ll get there is by putting their work first, building their profile to a point that will entitle them to the position they’re going after.

Another problem that is caused by people having the wrong priorities and losing focus, is that they can also end up taking the wrong career choices, choosing to change companies solely based on salary or position, neglecting the most important point which is how beneficial the new company will be for their experience, how will it build on to what they’ve acquired up to that point, and how will it get them closer to their overall professional goal?

I see many people quitting a certain company, throwing away all the experience they’ve acquired and all their accomplishments there, to start a new job somewhere else where they start over, not making use of most of their knowledge, and not getting anywhere near what they want to accomplish in their lives.

This can also be because of a lack of vision; I think it’s very important for everyone, to take some time out with themselves, and think really seriously about what it is they want in life, where do they want to get to professionally, and not let go until they have a clear picture in their heads.

That vision, that goal, will serve as a guideline for their career lives, and help them in their career decisions, making sure that they only take a step that will move them forward, in the direction of making their dream come true.

I could go on for hours, I guess, but I think I’ll just end this here, having talked about the main points I had in mind, and will leave the rest to another future post.

Good luck to everyone getting to your destination in life.