2024-12-01 Journal Entry

Today’s journal is mostly a brain-dump for a piece I want to write about leaving Stripe. But of course it’s really not at all about leaving Stripe – it’s really about what growing up means in the context of my career. I really don’t want it to come off as condescending to folks who still work at Stripe, or in any corporate culture for that matter, but at the same time I also want it to be clear that I really don’t want to work in a large corporate environment like that again.

There’s several different things that were on my mind, and I’m really not sure exactly what the thru-line of them all is, which is why I really just want to brain dump for a bit. On the one hand, there’s this idea of doing work that’s uniquely yours. I don’t want this whole article to really come off as a tumblr post, but in a way that’s sorta what it is: a personal mood board for my career. I also don’t want it to be just “I don’t know what I want but it’s surely not this” type of thing, but that’s largely what it feels like.

Perhaps the values that I do want will become more clear in relief.

So the first thing is the idea of agency, that as one becomes more agentic one feels the need to go after the things that you want and that you may feel somewhat disgusted by the idea of working towards what other people want – which is just ambition. Sheila Heti talks about shopping like an artist, which is that you shouldn’t buy things that are expensive (since that implies that a lot of other people want them). Instead: “Buy the things that other people don’t want–that only you want, because it’s the right shade of green.”

Much the same can be said for our own careers: don’t have the career that everyone else has. Don’t chase after the high salaries or prestigious roles, but chase after the things that other people don’t want to do, that only you want. Treat your career like an artist. What’s your magnum opus? How do you get there?