I remember a conversation with my wife about a year after graduating, we were living in Washington, D.C. at the time and I was working as a Patent Examiner, with a plan to attend law school the following year, I'll be kind and just say that I didn't particular enjoy reading patents all day, and I wasn't particularly looking forward to law school. My wife was working at a law firm and was commenting about how unhappy all the lawyers at her firm were. She said something I've never forgotten, "I don't want you to come home everyday unhappy and talking about how much you hate your job."

We both quit our jobs a few months later and moved back west, I wanted to try my hand at starting a company because what I really wanted was the flexibility and joy that comes from building something from nothing. And what my wife really wanted was for me to come home from work happy each and every day¹.

I bring this up because I've been recently working through some old hard drives that are just full of all kinds of things from the last twelve or so years of my life. One of those old documents contained an employment survey I had filled out in the distant past, the Career Consultation section was interesting.

While I'm embarrassed about a few of those answers, I think it's interesting what I focused on when asked what is most important to me, where I wanted to be in a few years, and what my ideal job was. The only thing that mattered to me was to do something I enjoyed and was exciting to me.

Even back then, I wasn't motivated by money or prestige, I was motivated by the desire to enjoy what I do, because when you spend so much time at one place, and there are going to be so many bad things about any job, you need to really enjoy it when it's good.

Hopefully, everybody will strive for something better than just not hating your job, a good test to see where your true feelings lie about your current employment comes from Senator Schumar:

"I have a little test, when you wake up monday morning, do you feel in the pit of your stomach that you want to go to work. And if you can say yes to that, you're in great shape."

I hope all of you are in great shape :)