Your unhappiness is due to your expectations
I was having a meal
with a friend and there were a couple kids lightly horsing around at
the table next to use. Which brought us to a conversation.
"Do you think kids being loud at restaurants is annoying?"
I
reply "no it doesn't really bother me, kids are kids and I'm sure the
parents are trying their best to quiet their crying baby"
He replies "yea I'm not annoyed either, but I know some people who would be so irritated"
So
I think "hmm well it depends, if you were on a date with your wife and
the table next to you had a screaming baby then you would be annoyed
because it would ruin the experience"
"Oh right" he agrees in
that case it makes sense. Maybe at a nice restaurant it'd be different,
but at a family it would be expected.
And that conversation
triggered a memory of what Tony Robbins had said: we are unhappy when
our expectations do not match reality.
If we expect our body to
be in good shape but we have a beer gut then we are sad. But maybe don't
expect to have low body fat because we love food and "want to live a
little" and instead feel lucky to have been promoted at work. Then we
are ecstatic.
In our restaurant discussion, the
reason we are unhappy on our date at the nice restaurant with the
screaming baby is because we didn't expect that. At the family
restaurant we would have expected a noise and so our expectations would
match reality.
So if we go with the idea that happiness is based off our expectations, we have 2 ways of being happy: either raise reality or lower expectations.
Raising reality is certainly possible in many cases. If you lose those 15 pounds you will be happy with your body again.
But for many cases, changing reality is the only way to go because our version of reality might be false. Think about how many young men and women are depressed because they see their friend's highlight reals on Instagram and Facebook and think that that is the norm.
But once you know the formula for happiness, then you can put together a plan to increase it.
For myself, being in the bay area, I always felt like I was "behind" as peers of mine got ever nicer cars and prestigious job titles. Another way I shifted my reality was through travel; stepping out of the bubble and realizing again how much I have to be thankful for. I continue to gratitude journal each day to keep that reality in check.
Back in my enterprise development days. The company that I was working at acquired another company. One of the senior engineers that was inheriting the new code base remarked how ugly the code was.
Another time as a junior engineer for a different company, I was required to dig into some legacy code from the founding days of the company. I couldn’t believe how poor the code was as I struggled to understand it.
I’m convinced that Mark Zuckerberg’s original code for Facebook had to be terrible and I’m sure that if he showed it to enterprise developers he would be laughed at. However, I’m also convinced that both the enterprise developers and the solo founders are doing the correct thing.
And that’s what I’d like to talk about today; the difference between enterprise software development and Indie software development. I’ve recently switched from the enterprise world to the indie world so it’s been something on my mind. Both require you to sit down and crank out code. You drink coffee. Sit in front of a computer and code away. But they are far from the same and if you neglect the differences, it can really hinder you.