12 Questions to ask yourself to take your career to the next level
Tags: devjournal, softwaredevelopment, softwareengineer, beginners
Published: 2023-01-05 04:39:05

Do you want to know a secret?

 I failed my 1st semester in college.

I never told anyone about it but plummeting from being a topper in school to a failed student in college was gut-wrenching.  

Little did I know that steps I'd take here would define my entire life.

Fast forward ten years. Today I am living the dream. I love what I do. I am surrounded by people I love.

Looking to take your career to the next level? Here are the 12 questions you need to ask yourself!

1. What struggles are you willing to tolerate to get what you want?
 
I experimented with everything to realise I love spending countless hours with electronic circuits and programming them to make them do what I want.

2. What you will likely be better than other people at?

In college, everyone was focused on academics. Being good at it won't help me stand out. So I concentrated on building projects and became an expert in implementing theoretical concepts.

3. What childhood passion you lost to adulthood?

I was playing badminton. I was good at it, but as I grew, it became harder to spare time for it.

4. What activity should you revisit, just for the fun of it?

I would always go back to writing and drawing. It activates my right brain and feels much more relaxing as most of my work relates to logical thinking.

5. What do you genuinely enjoy doing?

Programming and travelling turned out to be something I truly enjoyed doing. Everything I am doing today is supposed to lead me to do more of these two things.

6. What scares the shit out of you… for good reason?

Failing to build a livelihood with what I am doing today. I took a huge risk by starting up my own company especially after marrying and having a kid.

7. What problem do you care about that’s larger than you?

Education. I love to teach. This is one thing I believe is broken in today's world. People seem to take advantage of parents instead of teaching students something meaningful.

8. How you can make a difference?

I can enable people to bring their ideas to reality through technology. This is the premise of our company @vadelabs. We are working on building a platform that could democratise application development.

9. What you were passionate about all along?

Building something out of nothing
Helping others to do the same thing
Educating others so that they can help themselves

10. How you should spend your time?

I wish to have more freedom so that I could work on implementing and experimenting with ideas that could help others to be great.

11. What is most important to you?

Well-being and happiness of my family
My health and mental sanity
Team and Customers of VadeLabs

12. What values should guide your actions?

Never lie to the person in the mirror.
Never play the emotional game and hurt anyone emotionally.
Never give up. No matter what happens. Never give up.

Taking your career to the next level requires careful consideration and self-reflection. Asking yourself these 12 crucial questions can help you clarify your goals, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and develop a plan for success. 

Thanks for reading this.

If you have an idea and want to build your product around it, schedule a call with [me](https://calendly.com/pragyanatvade).

If you want to learn more in DevOps and Backend space, [follow me](https://dev.to/pragyanatvade).

If you want to connect, reach out to me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/pragyanatvade) and [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pragyanatvade/).