go bold

I think the world should be a meritocracy.

There, I went and said it. Come and get me, I’m ready.

First, my definition of merit: the quality of a person’s contribution to a given environment for the role they have been commissioned to fill. This means hiring someone or rewarding someone based on what they can do, rather than what they represent. This means pressing every member of the team to step up and distinguish themselves in some way, rather than hiding in the back trying to blend into the background.

What about rewarding “hard workers”? People should be held accountable for the work they took on, and measured on the quality of the work they produce. In my environment – in a software development environment – if I’m lacking in a ‘knack for things,’ then I should go make up for it in any way I can find: reading books and blogs about my craft and industry, keeping on top of new and relevant changes, finding some way to fill some niche in my environment that has not yet been filled. A meritocracy is no place for complacency (and is apparently not very friendly for work-life balance, either) – everyone should be pushed to be better.

And what about encouraging destructive competition within a team? I think people are big enough to recognize that working together allows everyone to achieve more (I sound like an inspirational poster in a second-grade classroom). Helping others does not detract from the quality of your own contribution, and can often improve skills in other aspects of your life – ones that may become valuable in surprising ways.

More to come next week. Possibly not on the same subject. Can you stand the anticipation?

Note: I’ve formed a blogging support group (pair?) of sorts with a friend. So we’ll now find a way to meet up and/or blog together once a week, as we both recognize the value in: 1) writing down our thoughts in some structured way, 2) exposing our thoughts in a public forum, and 3) company while miserable. Or, at least, company while doing things that all too easily get pushed to next week’s to-do list. Hopefully practice will make perfect – and the quality of these posts will improve.

What would you do if you had enough money to not have to work? I recently said I’d still pursue software development – it’s exciting and fulfilling and interesting and I’d still want to find a way to contribute intellectually to the tech world.

The person I responded to (let’s assume he/she is male for pronoun simplicity) was less than enthused with my answer – once given a means to support himself financially, he would wrap things up and go find a way to help people in a third-world / struggling country.

So here’s my question: is it selfish to want to pursue your own interests over some greater good / social responsibility? His goal in life is to work in order to prepare for retirement, after which he plans to find a way to help others. But the world needs people to also continue their own careers, advance their fields. So who decides who does what? Are you only allowed to be selfish and focus on your own career if you’re simply blind to all the suffering going on in the world?

I understand that everyone has some sort of obligation to better humanity – but who’s to say to what extent? Should everyone who is able and aware stop pursuing their dreams (additional point – can dreams be selfish? I suppose they can – but then why don’t we push social responsibility to kids as much as “dream big, you can achieve anything”?) to serve others? How do you decide who has to give up their dreams (to be the best X, to achieve Y) for the betterment of some other society? Or – is helping other people automatically going to trump the fulfillment of achieving any of the previously identified dreams?

I’m conflicted. Frankly, startups, new media, and technology rank much higher on my list of interests than poverty and hunger. Does that mean that, hands down, I’m a selfish person for not caring about others? Does that mean all interests are ranked – some interests are inherently better or less selfish than others? Does being concerned about poverty and racial issues mean that you’re a better person than those who care about the environment? Or gender issues? Or socioeconomic issues within the US, versus those outside?

At what point do we start drawing the line and saying, “you don’t care enough about X. You’re being selfish”? Isn’t this a slippery slope – creating these strict definitions for “caring about others” and judging people based on it? By these definitions, I can care extensively about and for others in my life to the extreme and still be considered selfish. Can you set bounds within which caring is irrelevant? If you always deliver soup to sick friends – must you also donate and be involved in Red Cross / Salvation Army work to be a good person?

I don’t know where to draw the line.

I got into an extended argument the other day with a friend who made the claim, “MIT does an awful job of making sure its students know what they want to do after graduation.”

Another graduating senior choosing to pursue the one-year Master’s of Engineering next year (like most, to have some extra time to discover his career interests and direction), he is dissatisfied with how MIT has guided him along his path to graduation. A sound bite of his I can’t seem to forget: “I know less about what I want to do now than I did when I entered MIT.”

It makes me laugh, this sense of entitlement – the idea that a student enters this prestigious institution, often and widely advertised by its “huge range of opportunities,” and expect to be helped and told what he or she specifically is passionate about. The discovery of one’s interests, one’s passions, one’s desired area of expertise – these pursuits seem to need to be by definition self-driven.

Figuring out what you want to do with your life is a problem to deal with every year of your life, as priorities and interests change. It should be something to constantly search for, lest you find yourself at a point in your life dissatisfied and unfocused. As a student, it’s not the Institute’s responsibility to guide you. Provide lots of information and resources, yes – guide you and direct you, never.

It’s your responsibility to try our internships and research opportunities, to take an interesting range of classes, and to explore your field (academically and in the industry) as much as possible.

One other interesting viewpoint that came up when I discussed this with another friend was – MIT does an amazing job of challenging preconceptions. Plenty of pre-med majors are made un-pre-med by the Institute, simply because MIT makes them ask themselves, “Do I really want to do this? Do I really want to be a doctor (and go through this pain of being pre-med), or is this just something I’ve expected to do?” And I think that’s a positive thing – being forced to, as I mentioned earlier, constantly reexamine your own goals and expectations for yourself.

This is the time to explore – this is the time to discover yourself, and let your interests flourish. Why would you allow that responsibility to anybody but yourself?