Hi brother - just know you have intrinsic worth beyond what the world sees (or what you think the world sees). You have overcome lots of challenges in life to even get to your 40's; no one escapes challenges.
Might I recommend an outward approach? Look for an opportunity to serve someone around you and evaluate how you feel after that experience. The lift in your emotions will also power you to overcome the next challenge you are facing/will face.
I also strongly recommend therapy. It has literally saved my life. I had to bounce around to a few therapists before I found one that really resonated with me, but that external resource gave me a way to evaluate my life and decisions without my own bias.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness and introspection in your question.
I have found that different types of activities bring me joy/energy/fulfillment, and others do not. Identifying which activities do this for me took a few years of thought, coupled with asking people who know me well about what they observe. I realized about 10 years ago that I'm most fulfilled when I'm teaching - literally leading a formal learning session with students. I find opportunities to do some of this in my work (I'm a co-founder with tons of autonomy in my role), but ultimately I've decided that my job is the means to open up more doors to teach. I'm getting an MBA to open the door to be an adjunct professor in business.
I share this because once you know what activities bring you joy/energy/fulfillment, you can rearrange your life to maximize how much time you spend doing those things.
Huge Zapier fan and user here. In fact I wrote an article on LinkedIn a while back about how many heads I think their product is saving us. And we have our own developers - there are just so many instances where using a service like this saves us the opportunity cost of building things for our own customers. Almost all of our use cases are around automating data connections for internal systems we use and love.
Helped form these at my former company, so I'm biased. But the memorability and thoughtful definitions really helped these stick (to this day):
https://www.entrata.com/company/values
I've had a similar approach for the past few months, but with some changes:
- I have my wife manage restrictions; only she knows the passcode
- I have Safari set to only a whitelist. This means when friends send me a link, I've got to get to a computer to open it.
- I have no access to "unlimited" content: no app store, no news aggregators, no google
- My home screen has primarily utility and "creation" apps (Drafts, Day One, Trello, etc)
- I've turned off almost all notifications. Mail has no sounds, alerts, or badges. I do have badges and alerts on text messaging and slack, but am probably going to turn off slack notification completely.
- I've yet to remove all games. I should. I've yet to remove Hacker News and Tech Crunch, but don't currently feel an incessant need to check those.
I'm a former healthcare administrator and just want to point out that many many administrators work much more than the 9-5.
I'm also working at a healthcare tech startup aimed at reduced the administrative burden to doctors, administrators and insurers of managing their patients at home, which is where the worst outcomes often happen.
Each segment we work with feels this burden, it is not isolated to the physicians.
46% of apartment traffic is now mobile as well. I work for a company that hosts 10,000+ apartment websites and pulled the google Analytics that we aggregate across all of them.
I lived in Mongolia for two years as a missionary and taught ESL at schools every day. The schools systems there are what you would expect from a 3rd world country but it never ceased to amaze me how many bright, gifted Mongolians that had innate desire to learn and improve their situation, even with very troubling situations at home.
I lived in Sukhbaatar in Mongolia for a year and though the summers were great. Winter, on the other hand, freezes the condensation on your eye lashes so that when you blink you can't open your eyes without effort.
A wonderful book that is similar in concept to this post is "Leadership and Self-Deception". I think the first part of the book: "Self-deception and the Box" is what Derek is describing here and he's working on getting out of the box.
Be aware that you will burn some customers and lose them. Customer feedback is a scarce resource that you can burn up before converting it to an asset.
Glad someone posted this. The comments on this post should probably get turned off though as the results in and of themselves are what is really compelling here. Commets will just lead to arguments.
Process is not a replacement for thinking. It's a tool to be used as enabling repetitive tasks to be higher quality and allowing the doer to focus on higher thought.
This smells like a resume to apple from someone wanting to be hired. I can't fault that, but using link bait initially to score high on HN, getting on Apple's radar makes me feel used.
Might I recommend an outward approach? Look for an opportunity to serve someone around you and evaluate how you feel after that experience. The lift in your emotions will also power you to overcome the next challenge you are facing/will face.
I also strongly recommend therapy. It has literally saved my life. I had to bounce around to a few therapists before I found one that really resonated with me, but that external resource gave me a way to evaluate my life and decisions without my own bias.