{"id":4875,"date":"2015-12-01T03:08:31","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T08:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=4875"},"modified":"2015-12-01T12:21:28","modified_gmt":"2015-12-01T17:21:28","slug":"i-think-i-might-have-figured-work-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/i-think-i-might-have-figured-work-out\/","title":{"rendered":"I Think I Might Have Figured This Whole Work Thing Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ironically, just after posting that I was going to get back to blogging, and my first post back on how grateful I am, I got really sick, didn’t do anything, fell behind at work and so didn’t do any blogging while I caught up.<\/p>\n

So, here we are again and now I am really<\/em> grateful that I’m not sick.<\/p>\n

Recently, I went full circle, spending two days in San Diego, where my first daughter was born and where I moved away from thirty-one years ago, to attend a soccer tournament for my fourth daughter.<\/p>\n

\"Julia<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s been an eventful year. We received our third research grant, completed our second Kickstarter and our first accelerator program. Raised our first seed round.<\/p>\n

Thirty-one years ago, I was an industrial engineer at General Dynamics. I’d just won the world judo championships. I’d also just gotten divorced. That was an eventful year, too.<\/p>\n

You’d think after all this eventfulness I would have figured this whole life thing out. To some extent, I think maybe I have.<\/p>\n

I have worked full-time since I was 15 years old, much of that time either going to school full-time, competing as an international athlete or working a second (third) job.<\/p>\n

One thing it took me an unreasonably long amount of time to figure out was this:<\/p>\n

The work will always be there. The time will never come that at the end of the day you say, “That’s it. My work here is done. I’m finished.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Do a reasonable amount of hard work.<\/strong> Then quit worrying about it.<\/p>\n

You are not going to run out of work.<\/strong> Don’t think you have to take every contract that comes across your desk, accept every job offer, even if it requires you to work until midnight six days a week. There may be intervals, say,\u00a0 when you need to do that to pay for your child’s college education or found a startup but those should be INTERVALS in your life, not your whole life.<\/p>\n

You are never going to be good as you want to be.<\/strong> Even if I knew everything possible to know about a software language, I still wouldn’t be satisfied. There would be another language that I didn’t know.<\/p>\n

Enjoy the accomplishments. We were standing in line in a restaurant in San Diego when I just happened to glance at the jacket my lovely daughter had borrowed from me. It had a the logo of a tribal radio station on the back. I commented, “That radio station exists because I wrote the grant to fund it. It’s been there for years.”<\/em> There are a lot of programs and products that exist because I wrote the grant, wrote the code, designed the program. The second each is over, I forget about it and go on to the next one. I’m learning to pause every now and then, pat myself on the back and say, “That came out well.”<\/em><\/p>\n

\"stackCheck out Fish Lake and Spirit Lake – What I’m working on now. If you buy a copy, you’ll get a free license for Forgotten Trail thrown in.<\/a><\/p>\n

Strive to be better. Don’t strive for perfection or you’ll just make yourself crazy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ironically, just after posting that I was going to get back to blogging, and my first post back on how grateful I am, I got really sick, didn’t do anything, fell behind at work and so didn’t do any blogging while I caught up. So, here we are again and now I am really grateful…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-de-mars-general-life-ramblings"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4875"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4883,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4875\/revisions\/4883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}