About motivation and my next career move...

During the new year day of 2005, I made a resolution to start a website for myself. I was very serious about it for the initial few months and believe me, I even wrote up quite a few articles in preparation for it, but a few months later all of that got buried under lots of other things, both at the personal and work front. This is the usual way of life - priorities keep changing unless you are very careful and do follow ups every other day. Unless some motivation factor exists, it is most difficult to keep the priorities unchanged over a long period of time. Unfortunately, I found none and the whole thing was forgotten for long time, till about half an year back. During this period, there happened a few changes at the work front for me. My project lead made a decision to move out of the team, and a few of us who were working with him for the past couple of years were jolted by this news. Although, he tried his best to ensure everything went on smoothly during the hand-over, there was an un-known, un-spoken, un-fathomable feeling of loss over this among all of us, his team mates. It is not an overstatement to say that he was the driving force for all of us. All through my career, I've never worked with a guy so pro-active, knowledgable, understanding and compassionate.

Focus swiftly started moving away from the work we did in the group. I 'enjoyed' for almost 2-3 months at work, with nothing more than 'browsing' the net; at best, I spent time on learning some useful technologies. All of a sudden, I felt that 'worklessness' is threatening my career, like it never did before. Not long afterwards, I started to feel awful, as much as a 'cheat' not to do any work, but get my paycheque credited to my bank account duly at the end of every month. I talked to my manager about this, who couldn't do much other than ask me to 'go, look out for more work'. In fact, the problem was none of us knew where all the work we did over the couple of years came from. While a good amount of work we did carried obvious value, a large percentage of that didn't really benefit the group. However, since it benefited all of us in terms of learning, we carried along under the direction from our project leader. But, now things started to look different. I decided to quit what I was doing; and this needed some action from my side.

I revived my 2 year old idea of creating a website for myself. Websites are good portfolio setters for individuals. People appreciate you for what they read and see there. I believe that the effort and the money spent on it, is really worth that. My wife too joined me in this effort, who wanted some web-space for herself to host her teaching materials - she is a physics teacher at an international school in Bangalore. We decided to share the space and then, on came another use for it. My 4 year old kid too wanted some space for his nursery rhymes, photos...So, finally we came with http://www.my3dots.com after 2 months of effort. I had put up many of my own creations including some whitepapers, articles, downloads and even a 20 page biography for the entire public to see. No sooner than it was ready, I sported my site's address in my resume and circulated along in the Bangalore's vast job market. Exactly 2 weeks is what I took to land up in a great job. I talked to two guys from outside India during my interviews, one from the UK and one from the US. Both of them had been through the website prior to the interviews and infact, we even spent sometime talking about it during our discussions. It was evident that both appreciated my efforts in setting it up, even more than the actual contents I had made available through it. Presently, I've decided to move on from my present job to take up the new assignment on the month of February, 2007.

So, this is essentially what I've to say. Motivation is a must-have ingredient to enable you work on anything. Nobody else can supply that to you, or inject you with that. No amount of listening to stories of motivation or reading similar books will help in achieving that. It is something invaluable and all your efforts to gain even a tiny of amount of that will pay off finally. I was lucky enough to have a situation that could motivate me into doing something that is as - seemingly, but not really - trivial as creating a website. Not all people, may've this luck; but, in such cases, look around and you will definitely find some means to it. One of the good ways to achieve this is to talk to your own friends, colleagues or even neighbours. Most people will be able to derive motivation from peer pressure or pressure from the society we live in. Yes, it is the case of an artificially generated 'motivation', but it still will end you up somewhere good!