I don’t often get caught out in business, but as we rolled into 2025 I did and I very quickly learnt what the best investment I’ve ever made is – me.
The mistake was simple: I forgot that change is the only constant. Technology changes, economics changes, politics changes. Businesses need to adapt to survive.
The project I led in a small company had been bought – employment contracts included – by a large company. My problem is that I’m the tech requirements person. I have to be customer facing, because the initial draft of the requirements is never optimal.
The problem I have in a large organisation is that I need to battle through about 3 layers of “customer success manager” to talk to an actual customer. When the business decided it was going to introduce technical product management, that seemed like the ideal place. I could lead the long term technical strategy of the product and it would be much easier to talk to customers. What could go wrong?
In the first year I cleaned up on all the corporate achievement awards, so I figured it was a good choice. Then I noticed that the company was slowly backtracking. As we moved into 2024, questions were being asked about why I was spending so much time on technical work.
Right as the clock ticked to 2025 it became official: the business had gone completely the other way. Instead of having technical resource in product management, they were going to move technical product management responsibility into development. In the wave of a hand I went from being a keystone in the operation to being an expensive white elephant.
My knee-jerk reaction was to get back into engineering – and fast.
Then I remembered who I was and left the company.
Sure, transferring back into engineering was the safe option. I’d keep a great package, I’d be back on home turf and there’d be no shortage of work. I’d could just tick along, drawing a decent salary with very little to worry about.
But the reason I ended up where I did was, ultimately, because I took on a project to do something that had never been done before in a company of 25 people with dwindling revenue. Being a dwarf at the bottom of the code mines of a large company is not me. I can’t just turn the handle and churn out code. I need more than that.
I need passion.
I was also done with feeding the machine. There’s a tonne of overhead you have to put up with when you work for a large company. You can’t just do a good job, you have to deal with the friction and at some level you do have to play the corporate game. It was slowly, inexorably, eating my soul.
But I promised you a tale of investment, not a timeline of the opening months of the year. It’s up there a few back – “then I remembered who I was“.
Back in the 1990s it got called “Hippie crap”. Today we call it mindfulness, we call it self-care and one of the most useful side effects of being a mindful person is knowing who you are.
That might seem elementary, but if we’re not careful it can get buried by who we think we are, who we want to be and who we want other people to see us as.
Our society puts pressure on us to fulfil a bunch of stereotypes. We must be successful and the particular type of success we’re talking about is defined in terms of power, responsibility, notoriety, wealth or some combination thereof. We must have the perfect car, the perfect house, the perfect partner; the 2.4 children playing perfectly politely on the perfectly mowed lawn.
When I was a kid I genuinely thought that was who I was, largely because those were the accepted markers of success in the society I grew up in. It took me a long while to realise that these things, in truth, mean nothing to me.
Perhaps they are important to some people. Perhaps that is who they really are. That’s not important. What is important is to be able to cut through the stereotypes, the peer group pressure and see who the person beneath really is.
Thankfully it’s not that difficult. It certainly doesn’t need you to book a month in a Himalayan retreat to find yourself. You don’t need to fill a room full of joss sticks and om your way into a new level of consciousness. You just need to take a few minutes every now and again to look after your mind as well as your body.
That’s the investment I was talking about. The journey of life is never a simple straightforward one, but I’ve consistently been able to make good decisions, ones that result in me being a happier, more contented person, because I understand who I am.
Investing in self care is time well spent.