Do the arithmetic on your own career once. If you started at twenty three and you stop somewhere around sixty six, you have forty three years of working life. Most people reading this are somewhere in the first third, and almost everything our industry celebrates is designed for the first five years of it. The intense stretch. The launch nobody slept through. The two years you gave to a company that does not exist any more.
None of that is wrong in itself. It becomes wrong when it is treated as the permanent setting rather than an occasional one.
The people still doing interesting work at fifty five are rarely the ones who went hardest at twenty eight. They are the ones who found a pace they could hold, and then held it for a very long time while other people cycled in and burned out and left. Compound interest is boring and it is undefeated.
Which suggests a few things worth deciding now rather than at forty five.
Treat sleep, movement and the people who love you as load bearing. They are the dependencies with no failover. Everything else in your working life has a substitute.
Take the whole holiday. Not the long weekend, the real one, long enough that you forget the ticket numbers. The second week is where the recovery actually happens and it is the week most people give back.
Count on call and night work as a real cost, and notice when it has been paid every month for two years with nobody keeping a ledger.
Expect fallow periods, and stop reading them as failure. There will be years when you are learning nothing and simply delivering, because a child was born or a parent was ill or you were tired. A career survives those easily. What it does not survive is deciding you are finished because one year was flat.
And keep one thing that is not this. Music, running, a language, a garden. Something that is still there when a company reorganises around you.
The future of your career is mostly a question of how long you stay in the game and stay curious. Design for forty years, not for this quarter.
– Asael Shinder
