Win City

brianball
asked me what some of my wins this week were. This fascinates me because a message I constantly send him is that him sharing his wins never helps me and I'm always begging for his losses as well. 

Here are some of my wins this week. Hope some of you will share yours as well.

  • i improved Adagia's notification system slowly without stressing.
    • Now you won't need to click a million times each time some post you were involved in gets a bunch of comments. The site will be smart enough to figure out which notifications are related to the one you're clicking and mark them all as read.
  • Improved an Admin profile dashboard without stressing.
    • I'm part of a small health startup where I work on infrastructural tools. Things that allow the team to be able to mark and tag video data -> stuff like that. 
    • often this project stresses me out more than things like Adagia because the connotation of infrastructure makes me think i can slack on a lot of the UX. But then after the fact I kind of lament the fact that I slacked on a big portion of the project. 
  • Wrote fiction consistently this week.
    • Mid way through the week I began trying to force writing for a particular story. When that seemed to move kind of slow I instead wrote character sketches unrelated to a larger project. Those flowed smoothly and once I got into that flow I found it pretty easy to also write for the longer projects.
  • Didn't feel too bad about only doing that this week.

Not many wins in the concrete form. The biggest win though is progress towards disassociating my work from my personal identity. It's a fine line to ride. Because usually to be passionate about a project means one's identity is tied directly with the work. But I'm slowly finding a way to not allow the work to dictate my identity but at the same time be passionate about the work. It's hard to explain and even harder to pull off, but this is how I want to live. 

I don't want to be someone who's self worth is tied 1:1 to work. Likewise I don't want to be someone who has no purposeful work dedication that helps teach me who I am and what I value. 

Basically I am trying to become someone who uses work to learn about myself instead of someone who uses myself for the work.