Hey friends,
Hope you had a good weekend.
Here’s this week’s 1-1-1.
1 Doodle
Last week, I had a coffee chat with a friend of mine. Let's call him Chris for privacy. He's been successful in his career, but he was curious about how I define the purpose of work, especially after my recent transition from Intel to KLA.
I shared something I've been thinking about for a long time: I believe the purpose of our work has two sides. One is about what we gain, and the other is about what we give.
The self-focused side is about you. Your salary, your curiosity, your opportunities to learn, and all the things you like or dislike about your job. For some people, it's the money. For others, it's the excitement of learning something new every day. Neither is wrong. It's about what matters to you.
The other-focused side is about what your work contributes to other people.
For some professions, this second side is easy to see. A firefighter rescues someone trapped in a car. A nurse performs CPR and saves a patient's life. They can immediately see the impact of their work.
But for many of us, the impact isn't so obvious.
As a semiconductor engineer, I may never see the chip I helped produce end up in a surgical device, an airplane carrying a father to visit his daughter, or a phone connecting a grandmother with her grandchild across continents.
Through honest conversations with myself, I started to realize how my small contribution connected to something bigger.
And it's not just engineering. A teacher may never know how much they changed a student's life. Many careers have this delay between the work we do and the impact it creates.
When hundreds or thousands of people contribute to something, your individual share might seem like just 0.000000001%. But as systems become more complex, our individual percentages naturally become smaller. That doesn't make our contributions meaningless. I'm happy to contribute my tiny fraction!
This week's doodle puts these two sides together and creates four quadrants:
- Disconnection (Low Self / Low Other): You don't gain much personally, and you don't see much positive impact on others.
- Personal Growth (High Self / Low Other): Your work benefits you, but you struggle to see how it benefits others.
- Contribution (Low Self / High Other): You make a positive difference in others' lives, but your work gives little back to you.
- Fulfillment (High Self / High Other): Your work rewards you personally, while also allowing you to contribute to something meaningful beyond yourself.
1 Do
Look at this week's doodle and ask yourself: Which quadrant am I in right now?
Have an honest conversation with yourself. Go somewhere you haven't been before, maybe a new coffee shop or a park. Take a notebook and write down whatever comes to mind.
Think about what you're gaining from your work and what you're giving to others. Are you happy with both sides? Is one missing?
1 Direction
It's easy to judge our work by what we can immediately see: a paycheck, a promotion, a new skill, or a completed project.
But some of the most meaningful outcomes of our work happen far away from us, sometimes years later, and we may never hear about them.
That’s all for this week.
Warmly,
- Ehsan /a-🌞/
P.S. If this newsletter made you think of someone, feel free to forward it to them. They can read all past newsletters here and subscribe if they like.
P.P.S. I recently made a video on What to Talk About in Your 1-on-1s. You can watch it here.
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