I agree with Elle Griffin that Social Development > Self-Development:
This might sound obvious, but I think we live in an era of “secure your own oxygen mask before helping others,” and while that might be a helpful mantra for airplanes I think many of us don’t seem to recognize when we are already wearing oxygen masks. We don’t need to keep adding even more oxygen to ourselves, we need to start directing our attention to others. We need to focus less on self-development and more on social development.
Elle goes into wonderful detail about what this means at a practical level—highly recommended post. Also worth noting no one is saying self-development is bad. It should just be a balance:
Those who participate in self-development and self-care in a healthy way, and for the benefit of themselves and their communities, are not the subject of this essay. But in excess, self-development can create a world of self-interested individuals and that’s what I’m up against here. I’m against the continual process of self-betterment at the expense of community-betterment. I’m against participating in too much theory and not enough action. We can focus on being more loving and more empathetic and more compassionate all we like but we won’t actually be any of those things unless we do something to help our families, our close communities, and even the world at large.
I thought about that piece as I was reading Mandy Brown’s What is your work now?
When talking to people about their work, one question I often ask is, “what is your work now?” Not what is your job or career, but what is your work. Jobs and careers are, at best, the means by which we get our work done while also keeping a roof over our heads; but our work is always bigger than that. Our work is not only what we deliver for a boss or an organization, not only the metrics we’re unjustly measured on or the revenue targets we’re held to, but all the change we make in the world, all the ways we we use our unique gifts to contribute to a living world, to our own liberation and to the liberation of every living being around us. This is the work that rarely shows up on a job description but we can never let go of, the work we yearn for even when we’re tired, the work we grieve when we’re cleaved from it.
The key here being, “all the ways we use our unique gifts to contribute to a living world, to our own liberation and to the liberation of every living being around us.” It feels like this is a good time to think about what our jobs are for. What do we work for?
I know that for me, my job is about shipping value to customers, but for the last few years my work has been to show engineers what good product management looks like, and that we can move mountains if we partner together well. Suddenly that feels like too low of a bar though, so… time to revisit!