Understand What You Want

Hello, the amazing Dev.to community member,

Whether you’re a seasoned software engineer or just an aspiring developer, every time you engage with some project, you make a decision. A decision to dedicate your precious time and attention to something. It may be that you’ve barely thought of this or spent hours joggling those thoughts, as I have.

Anyways, any decision to spend your time on something entails an implicit decision to give up on something else. Opportunity costs, as the economic theory names it.

Either you start contributing to another open-source project, or assume a promotion at work, or anything else like pursuing a degree or dedicating more attention to your health, you implicitly decide to abandon, at least temporarily, something else.

And there’s nothing wrong with the fact.

What may be wrong, though, is if you make decisions like that based not upon your true values, principles, and objectives but upon something that just casually captured your attention.

On memes floating around, similar to “Launch a startup to get free from office routine” or “Pick up a remote work to travel”. On psychology complexes that may originate in your childhood. Or on purely material motivation like getting a raise for performing better at work.

These things, of completely different nature each, together with other stimuli form our behavior and drive our decisions. And ultimately define who we are and how proud we are of what we're doing and have done so far.

For me, having achieved something I’m proud of and being a person I would admire myself, is important. For you, something else may be important.

Despite this possibly huge difference, I truly believe each of us shall be conscious and skeptical enough when it comes to deciding what to do. How to spend our time. How to live the life.

If that subject resonates with you, please take a look at my approach to How to understand what you want, where I cover things listed below.

• Introspecting into your past.
• Taking small steps from where you are.
• Discarding shallow and embracing helpful memes.
• Getting inspired by the right examples.
• Establishing a healthy examination routine of your values and progress.

In case you find the approach I describe to be controversial, please also share your experience and thoughts. I hope to get a good discussion around this. And thanks for reading up to this point 🤘