[Career] Meaningful 7000 days

We are on day 2 of our first weekly series (#1) discussing careers.

On day 1 we established the significance of careers in our life. Today let us dig deeper around making those 7000 days really count.

Now that we know we are spending only a small part of our whole life in careers (7000 days out of 36500 days), a natural question to ask is, how should we spend it?

The most obvious answer to that question is "duh 🤷‍♀️ we must spend it WELL".

The answer sounds easy but is it? are we truly spending it well?

Slicing and dicing those two questions, it is evident that our intent for our career wellbeing is the same. We all want to spend it well. No one says, "I must torture myself with my career". So what is causing the dip in the wellbeing with work and life.

I think, the answer is in the AND.

It is not just work. It is the work and the work that we love. It is the work that we love and we have skills for. It is not just competence. To produce meaningful work with others our ability to collaborate also counts. It is not enough if we can collaborate, sometimes we must co-operate as well (agree to disagree). It is not enough if we are competent, collaborative and co-operative, it is important to have the necessary ethics and integrity (aka character). It is not enough if competence, collaboration and character comes together, the work should be lucrative as well. It should be worth more than the time and energy we spend on it. The list goes on.

Doing all the above everyday and for a lifetime for all those 7000 days gets exponentially harder. The hardship is worthy when all the AND comes together. It feels significant. Suddenly career gives purpose and meaning to our existence.

The meaning springs from those intersections.

🥂 to AND!

In December 2020, I started a program called LEARN STREAMS. The idea was simple. If we spend an hour everyday in a live stream for 60 days with a practitioner (who has been there, done that and doing that even today) and compound the learning, we can learn product design.

In the learnstreams, we dedicated the last two weeks to deep dive into design career paths.

There has been phenomenal demand for understanding product design careers from a number of designers as well. So we are opening up the module to a wider public to take the career streams.

Join the career streams: https://learnstreams.xperian.xyz/#career

Please, pass this along to your friends who are aspiring to become a designer or who is already a professional designer but want to know more about growing in the career path. Appreciate your help my friend 🙏