Tips for a fulfilling tech career

Friend, when I dropped out of college to focus on freelancing back in 2012, I set 3 ground rules:

1. Projects you enjoy
2. Users are customers
3. Stay in shape

Everything else can fluctuate, change, blow up in my face, or take a wrong turn. Those 3 rules stay. Because your career needs a vision, guidelines.

Working on projects you enjoy means you'll do a better job. You focus better, you stick through the hard times, and you crush every task all the way.

All that because you enjoy the work.

And guess what happens next – you gain confidence, take on more responsibility, get better projects, and flourish.

When users are customers your business incentives align with your users. You're not getting millions addicted to outrage so you can sell eyeballs to advertisers. You're not abusing gig workers to scrounge razor thin margins from consumers.

No, you sell value to your users.

When users like what you got, they pay. When they don't, you improve.

And you can feel good about what you do. ✌️

You gotta stay in shape. Work is not worth your health and your brain needs a strong body to thrive. Healthy mind in a healthy body.

How can you expect great things from your brain, if you keep feeding it crap? How can you solve big problems, if your energy crashes every day at 2pm?

Plus a nice workout sesh creates the perfect buffer between work-day and rest-of-day. Leave work at work and focus. 😉

Cheers,
~Swizec