I’m not going to have a “summary of 2008″ post, as others do. While I’d love to, I don’t feel I could spare all the details here. Instead, I’ll just share the insights I’ve had through the past few weeks, as well as what I’ve been doing.
I’ve been a computer techie for a long time. I made it my course of study, and then my work. I made it my recreation as well. That is what I’m going to change.
A big part of 2008 was unhappiness. A big part of that unhappiness was having no time for other things – in my definition. Through the years I have had some tech-related goals which I didn’t achieve: master many programming languages/systems, become a successful/famous open source developer. My own work for the past few years was good, but these goals lay outside of work. So, what I wanted to do was work on tech for work, and even more tech after work.
That has to go. A number of events have shown to me that I was obsessing too much with things – an unhealthy form of perfectionism. Perfectionism that leads to unhappiness because the Perfect can’t be achieved. So now I’m recalibrating my goals and setting my life direction to have less tech overall.
Less tech overall means better work. I’ll put all my tech effort and study into work. Work is good and it challenges me. That reduces the need to find an outlet elsewhere. Work also gives me other people to work with, other people to teach. As they learn and do their own tech thing, I am happy that others get to do it. One of my frustrations has been, why don’t more people do this-and-that – as since they don’t, it’s my obligation to do it. If other people do it, then I feel I don’t have to.
