Welcome to my worldview

Call me crazy, but sometimes I think life's timeline is a Git repository, and the different branches are Side Quests, which are (if we follow the analogy) enhancements of your central life. You can merge Side Quests into your Main Quest, integrating these improvements in a streamlined way.

Missing activities in your Main Quest may harm your later life if you keep playing the playbook of the path you're travelling to (e.g., not going to high school may hurt you if you try to enter the corporate world, but if you prefer to be an independent worker you may do well in life, given you genuinely put your heart at it).

If you’re an overthinker like me, you might think broadly about issues in your industry. Whether you’re an employee, contractor or entrepreneur, there’s always the opportunity to cause some or significant impact in your field.

This post is inspired by the Work on what matters blog post by Will Larson. Though this post only focuses on the impact part of influence, whether your impact is made visible or not, it is up to you to factor visibility in the kind of impact of your choosing. It also broadens the scope of influence in that it’s not just organizational change that you could be looking for.

It is long known in the self-help literature that mindset is the origin of our actions, in such a way that even if you repeated the same steps, these wouldn’t lead to precisely the same results because of the intent (the why, so to speak) is not the same. The origin of our expression is the mindset in any shape or form. So, it’s our most precious treasure, a treasure which cannot be stolen away from us, but it can be evolved or damaged if we allow other people that.

In the hypothetical scenario that you want to optimize your finances as an employee, you have two options: Reduce your current expenses and increase your salary. Since both of these options are non-exclusive, you choose to do both.

Many words have been written about reducing your expenses, so today, we’ll talk about the latter option: Increase your salary.

If you want to ask for a pay raise, in short words: Don’t. Stop right there. Most of the time, you’re not ready to ask for it.

More often than not, we as employees keep to ourselves radical ideas that would be beneficial to organizations. Our bosses ask us to “think outside the of the box,” but when coming up with the ideas after our personal brainstorming, we tone down our ideas, or adopt ideas from someone else, falling victims of groupthink or worse, adopting HIPPO’s (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).

My standpoint on technical certifications is a mixed one, and it mostly depends on several factors. Does your industry require you to have it? Is your company asking you to get certified? Is it the pursuit of knowledge or merely just compliance with a component of peer pressure? Are you sure you’re getting the most value out of it? I’ll do my best to answer these questions in this post today.

Let me start answering this question with some caveats. In general terms, professional experience does matter, and it matters a lot. However, people tend to confuse “experience” with “exposure,” and that’s where the argument train derails from a sensible standpoint.