A Roadmap to Fulfillment and Success
Uncertainty: You’ll go through it several times in your life. The tech sector moves lightning fast, so you’ll probably experience highs and lows numerous times throughout your career; it’ll be much faster than your non-tech counterparts. Just when you feel you have it figured out, you’ll have a wrench thrown into your plan. You’ll have to be adaptable and understand that sometimes you have to throw it away while other times you simply change your strategy.
I believe that most of us understand that we’ll need to be lifelong learners from this point on. There are numerous benefits to it. However, there are people that don’t see it. They believe that it’s just an out-of-work homework assignment. If they simply change their mindset and slightly modify their “strategy,” they’ll be able to see the benefits of being a lifelong learner:
- Lifelong learning helps individuals grow and develop as people by expanding their knowledge and skills, increasing self-awareness, and developing a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them.
- It can help individuals stay current with the latest trends and technologies in their fields, which can lead to increased job opportunities and promotions.
- Engaging in lifelong learning can help keep the brain active and healthy, leading to improved memory, cognitive function, and mental agility.
- It can help individuals develop critical thinking skills, problem-solving skills, and creativity, which can be applied to various areas of their lives.
- Lifelong learning can bring a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction as individuals pursue their interests and passions and achieve personal goals.
Not good enough? Change your strategy again. What if your focus is health in your life? It could be personal; it could be for your kids. Whatever the case is, cognitive health is as important as physical health:
- Lifelong learning helps to keep the brain active, which can improve cognitive function, memory, and mental agility. Engaging in mentally stimulating activities such as learning a new language, taking up a musical instrument, or playing chess has been shown to be beneficial for cognitive health.
- It may help to reduce the risk of cognitive decline and dementia later in life. Studies have shown that engaging in mentally stimulating activities throughout life can help to build cognitive reserve, which is thought to protect against age-related cognitive decline.
- Learning can be a relaxing and enjoyable activity, which can help to reduce stress levels. Engaging in activities such as reading, writing, or painting can provide a sense of calm and help to reduce feelings of anxiety.
- Lifelong learning has been linked to improved physical health, possibly due to the cognitive benefits it provides. Studies have shown that individuals who engage in mentally stimulating activities may have a lower risk of developing conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease.
Now that you understand the benefits of lifelong learning, how difficult would it be to modify your career strategy and incorporate it into it. All of a sudden, career advancement becomes an enjoyable part of your life. It’s not a task anymore if you focus on your health objective.
What happens though when you hit a plateau? You understand the benefits of lifelong learning and you’ve been focusing on it through your career but you’ve hit a plateau now? I’ve gone through it plenty of times and I’ll share the most recent one with you.
My career strategy hit a turning point when I graduated college. I had one of three options:
- Continue education, get a PhD in Computer Science, and teach.
- Continue with my business. I had a business simultaneously while going through college. It’s partially why it took me 14 years to graduate.
- Move through career advancement in the business/tech sector.
I chose the third one. Without going into too much detail, it was the right choice for my life-strategy.
In order to remain marketable, I decided to take lifelong learning to the next step. A portion of it involved writing on the topics that I’m interested in and that would simultaneously help advance my career. I chose Medium as the platform for those articles. I also saw the benefit in writing books. Neither of these were platforms for making money, but instead were used for promotion. You also tend to learn topics in full when you’re teaching someone the topic in the process. There’s less opportunity for shortcuts.
I continued to map out my career advancement and have achieved it in a relatively short amount of time. And while everything is going great, I see a huge shift around the corner. We’re entering (have entered) the age of AI. Chat GPT is just the first impressive one out there. AI has been utilized for years now and will just escalate from this point on. If I want to stay competitive, I can see that it’s the next logical domain to become proficient in. The ones that already fully understand it will have an advantage.
Previously, I understood the benefits that having business sense would bring to growth in IT. Now I see that having AI sense is also a valuable skill. Businesses will need someone that understands it and can help lead their teams, which, in my head, means that individuals that have hands-on experience will benefit the most (as long as they check other boxes as well).
I started working on a Laravel book. It’s partially for helping people learn Laravel, but the other part is for me: to help solidify every concept of it. Why Laravel? Because that’s the framework that I’m most familiar with. The next book will be AI and Laravel. Why?
- It’s something that I would find interesting.
- It’s something that others might find interesting as well especially with this move to AI. Companies will look for use-cases. There are quite a few companies that utilize Laravel already.
- I get hands-on experience with AI.
- I get to stick out amongst the candidates. It helps me continue in my career advancement goals.
- It helps keep my brain healthy. You thought the health benefits was just some random example? There are no coincidences.
While I’m writing that book, another book will be writen simultaneously. It’s the second part of my “An Illustrative Introduction to Algorithms” book. This time there will be code. The code is already written for it; I simply need to write the book itself. Why write this book? Because there will be a part three, which will be focused on AI/Machine Learning (machine Learning is just a subset of AI).
We could go into my overall Life Strategy, but I’ll keep that a mystery :). To finish off, as soon as I started to think “why am I doing this?” I knew that it was time to re-evaluate my strategy. Most of the time you can continue to do the same things that you’re already doing but change the goal. Let’s continue to adapt.