It’s the things you’re willing to do late into the night that you should pursue in your career.
Everyone’s busy in college. There are days we don’t stop doing things until we put our heads down to sleep at night. I’ve had a lot of late nights and all-nighters. There are two types of late nights. There are those that you grind through, hoping for it to be over so you can sleep. And there are those where you lose track of time and are excited to continue working, willingly working late into the night.
I remember staying up late into the night, doing homework I didn’t really care much about, worrying about passing a class, and asking myself “will I ever be using this later on in life?”.
The answer I’ve come to is: If we’re asking ourselves that question, probably (hopefully) not. If you’re desperate to finish your work and go to sleep, then is this really the type of work you want to pursue? Do you want to be sitting in your office, counting down the minutes till you get to go home and watch T.V?
Thinking back on the memorable nights that I had at Rice were those spent in the basement of the engineering lab, soldering/assembling boards, designing PCB’s, debugging waveforms on oscilloscopes, and programming microcontrollers. Wires everywhere, working with a small group. Staying up late, past 1 or 2 am. I couldn’t fall asleep afterwards, feeling so excited and challenged to solve the problems I was facing.
It is the things you willingly stay up late for that you should pursue in your career.
These things could even be small side projects or hobbies that we happened to pick up along the way. Even when we have a full, busy day ahead of ourselves, we somehow still manage to find time do fit these things in our schedule, even if it means doing them late at night… for the pure enjoyment of them.
I was talking to someone that had graduated and now had a really cool job in hardware. But he said that in college he had really enjoyed staying up late and editing photos from other people’s photoshoots. So now he’s taking a big pivot and planning to travel across America and photograph weddings full-time. It’s a big change from hardware engineering, but it’s what really pulls him towards it.
Think about your college experience. What are the things that you willingly stay up late to do? These are probably things worth pursuing or doing later in life. They could even be small side projects or hobbies that you picked up along the way and continue doing. And if some of us haven’t found these yet, we should keep on looking…
Footnote:
At the same time, I’m not saying to drop out of college and follow your hobbies… It’s probably still worth it to finish your degree and do the things you must, but it’s good to value these things and keep them in mind when making life decisions.
Great advice Manuel 🙂