Doing what you love
By: Saurabh Badhwar
Tags: Lessons, Passion, Energy, Work, Not Stepping Down

Year 2020 has been a complete imagination of things which I never thought will happen. A year of lot of events, defining a new way to live the life, where hanging out with friends is less common but rather an exception, changing work environments, moving to remote working situations, blurring the concept of time for some. But this year has also given the much needed time to reflect on yourself.

Over the last couple of years, I have been constantly finding myself in situations where I will like to leave certain things in between even though they are easy as anything, while not letting go off things which come with a tremendous amount of challenges. This writeup is a self reflection of why I have always found myself in such situations, why I felt like leaving certain things half way, while sticking to the other ones no matter what, and I guess a lot of you might be able to relate to this.

Doing what you love

Every one of us have something which we love. For which we are passionate about, it could be swimming, dancing, cooking, writing, and what not, and when we are doing those things, we don’t want to be disturbed. We can’t stop talking enough about them. That passion just reflects when we do those things. For me, this passion is about solving problems through the help of software’s. It’s about building software’s that solve the problems people face, building products which people want to use.

Start a conversation with me about software engineering, and I can talk hours and hours about it, including what I like, different experiences, how we solved challenges, what I wish can be improved. It just happens naturally.

Being in a position, where building software solutions is my day-to-day job, what can be more awesome than that for me? Yes, I am excited. Is this excitement present every day? Oh, hell yes!

But what you are passionate for demands much more than just being passionate. Following your passion requires a lot of perseverance, an ability to fight back and doing things which are right and not just what you are told to do and to be honest, I do feel frustrated when something I love is sub-par, with no plans for improvements. It just feels deceiving and not genuine enough.

Playing the top game

When you are so much interested in doing something, you naturally try to up the game. Try to deliver to the best of your capacity and at times even exceeding what you thought you can do. For me, I just love it. At times when I am working on things, there are plenty of ideas that keep coming up, even when a feature or a product has shipped, the thoughts about how this can be made more useful, can we add something which will make this easy to use. As someone who is passionate about what I build, I will also want to see the people who use what I built to have a pleasant experience.

This also brings in another aspect, I like to work in an environment where there are challenges. I usually get bored easily when things are just pretty much instructional in nature, do this to achieve this. While building software solutions, I am not just interested in how I can translate a given engineering design into code, I am interested in the whole thing. Maybe I am not yet accustomed to it, but I want to be there, see the process of how that design came into existence, rather than being told, this is what we should do.

For what I love to do, I want to improve upon it and not be done with “I think this should serve the purpose”

Not backing down

Challenges can come up anytime, how we respond to them defines our commitment. When you really want to do something, you don’t see challenges as the end of the road, you see them as an opportunity to level up.

This happens quite frequently with me. Sometimes when working to build something, there have been enough times when we have hit roadblocks. But somehow, they just feel like a steppingstone and not something unachievable. At times, I have found myself just looking there trying to figure out, why this thing is not working or thinking, this doesn’t seem to be something which has happened due to something I did, so it’s not my problem. Oh! I am damn interested in whatever has caused it. Maybe, it will take some time to solve it, but I definitely want to know what went wrong. This just prompts me into hours long debugging sessions, and when they are done, I am not a little bit tired.

There has been times when things are so much screwed up and it feels like, nothing is working, but when you are really interested in them, you don’t back down, rather you come at them with even more energy and curiosity, diving into areas which have never ventured into earlier and eventually solving the problems which you thought were unsolvable. And that feeling of satisfaction is just unimaginable.

So, when you are about to give up, you might just be close enough to the solution to keep continuing on it.

Doing what you love brings a different amount of energy, when you accomplish something which helps you reach those goals, that feeling is just great. Even though things may go wrong, you don’t feel insecure, because you build that confidence that you can turn those lows around, and even though not everything goes as per the plans, they seem like a lesson and not something which is the end of the tunnel. If you are someone trying hard to accomplish what you have been really passionate about, all the best! Things might get tough, but they will surely turn out great.