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Next week will be a welcome break, with me being off work and spending time in Spain with my family. But before that, there's still a bunch of work to do, so let's get right to it!
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Mentor Monologue
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Happiness is a career booster
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One of the biggest myths that are holding us back in our careers is that the key to a successful career is hard work. This way of thinking is highly influenced by the protestant work ethic of old that claimed that work is a noble duty for the good of society, and that happiness has its place, if at all, outside of it. Have you ever thought about why your salary is also called a "compensation"? This whole notion is bullshit.
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In fact, science tells us that happiness and job satisfaction are much more than side effects. I recently found a great talk by Alexander "The Chief Happiness Officer" Kjerulf on how happiness is a much more effective career booster than hard work. In this talk, he leads with the fact that happiness tends to make everything about our lives better. As a paper published by the American Psychological Association titled "The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?" concludes:
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Numerous studies show that happy individuals are successful across multiple life domains, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health. The authors suggest a conceptual model to account for these findings, arguing that the happiness–success link exists not only because success makes people happy, but also because positive affect engenders success.
Let that sink in. It's not just that success makes you happy; that's obvious. The reverse is true, too. Being happy leads to being successful. Let me give you a summary of the many ways this works.
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A happy mind works better
We've all experienced situations when we were stressed and struggling with thinking straight. That's because our body still follows a programming that's many millennia old and kept us alive as a species. This means, on the other hand, that the more relaxed or, ideally, happy we are, the better we are able to focus and create good results.
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Happiness makes you a better collaborator
When they are in a happy disposition, people are generally more helpful. We're more generous when we share with others, and that doesn't just pertain to material things. It also affects our readiness to share our knowledge. Time, attention and affection, too: happy humans are more empathetic and caring.
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Optimism inspires action
In psychological studies, participants who were primed positively about their chance of achieving a successful outcome showed a greater willingness and persistence in tackling their tasks. The reason is that when our brain is anticipating the sweet hormonal rewards of success, it's happy to do what it takes.
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Happy people are more resilient
It's not always fun and games, though, is it? Well, turns out that happy people are better prepared to weather darker times. And it's not just that they have a better outlook on life. Studies show that happy people get sick less and need their coping resources less often in the first place.
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Happiness is contagious
It's a drag having to deal with an unhappy person. My wife avoids going to a specific post office in town just because she finds the clerk there abrasive and unpleasant. But I'm sure we've all also had the experience of spending time with a positive force of a person and leaving feeling better ourselves.
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Employees who are happy care about their work
When it comes to careers, happy people have the upper hand over those who just knuckle down with gritted teeth. Not only do the aspects I outlined above give happy employees a significant advantage, they also actively care about their work. In consequence, their managers don't have to fall back on the old "carrot and stick" technique (it doesn't work effectively anyway).
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Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
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What does that mean in practice? It means that it makes real practical sense to seek out work that makes you happy, and a workplace to go with it. It'll complement your domain expertise and social skills in boosting your career. Moreover, positivity that springs from one area of your life (e.g., work) will permeate all other areas with its effects.
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At times, slogging through will be necessary, but when that becomes your default mode, I propose it's time to reflect and make a course correction. One of my favourite TV series recently, "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds", shone a new light on the antique motto "Per aspera ad astra", Latin for "Through hardship to the stars". However, I join Alexander Kjerulf in proclaiming the opposite: "Per gaudium ad astra!"
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From the blog
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As time goes on, you acquire new knowledge, skills and experience. But do these efforts actually lead anywhere? To help you with the answer, I wrote about how you can tell if you're improving.
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In The Server Room
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Since the holiday season is going into high gear and I'll be traveling myself, I decided to not plan any new events for the next few weeks. We'll ramp up community activities again in late August!
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Recommended reading
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As an online teacher, I always recommend additional material to my students with which they can expand their horizon. Here's a list of reading tips I've curated for you.
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Last Epoch, like many online games, has a distributed system as its backend architecture. Its launch was rather rocky, and this extensive retrospective looks at the causes and solutions.
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This is not only an evergreen question worth asking regularly. The author's answer alone is giving me food for thought: How do we transfer experience from people like me who don't associate "cold aisle" with the fish section at the supermarket, and later generations of SRE who have always been able to conjure cloud infrastructure with a simple `terraform apply`?
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"Unfortunately, the problem with striving for perfectionism is that it can also manifest itself in other, much more significant, aspects of our lives." Hm...
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Sometimes, tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, even if it's Reddit, yields really good results!
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IIRC, I mentioned Filippo's call for sustainable open source maintainership in the past. Now he's back with his own professional maintainership business.
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Thanks for reading!
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I hope you found my News from The Server Room enjoyable and helpful. If you have any feedback or questions, simply reply to this email!
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Jochen, the Monospace Mentor
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