Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive
Remember that 'What You Do' and 'Who You Are' are not inextricably linked now and forever. And why you should take a walk to think about it.
Pieter van Noordennen |
Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive
Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive.
This is a phrase I say to myself when dealing with stressful work situations or feeling that all too common sense of listlessness that can be a feature, not a bug, of modern technology work.
Wallace Stevens would walk to work every day past Elizabeth Park in Hartford. During these walks, he’d have his secretary follow him as he dictated poetry on his ambulatory commute.
It was on these walks that he perfected his great works like “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and (my favorite) “The Snow Man”. These works continue to inspire and console readers long after business impact he had on the insurance industry.
Stevens had an impressive ability to maintain his devotion to work (as a Vice President of what is now The Hartford), while also focusing time on his true calling and passion: poetry.
It’s easy to let our day-to-day work get in the way of that. The friction and frustration of solving complex problems in a networked matrix of smart people, and shipping new creations to customers who may or may not accept them, takes its toll on your mental health. During these times, it’s natural to feel disconnected from the reason you came to this place in your career to begin with.
Maybe you fell in love with coding. Maybe you like creating beautiful things. Maybe you enjoy the camaraderie and competitiveness of team sports. Or, like Stevens, the feel of words juxtaposed just so. Hopefully, it wasn’t just for the money.
In 2021, I attended a “Birds of a Feather” talk at the Open Source Summit in Seattle, co-hosted by the Tidelift company and Alexander Scammon, the head of the Open Source Project Office at G Ventures. Alex is one of the truly great technical minds in open source and one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. But the focus of this talk wasn’t technology — it was burnout.
Tidelift had surveyed 3,921 tech professionals and found that 61-percent reported some level of burnout.
The top reasons mentioned?
- Unmanageable workloads (25.3%)
- Insufficient rewards (15.7%)
- Lack of control over work (15%)
- Lack of support from manager (13.4%)
Sitting in a room surrounded by some of the best engineers in the world, and hearing their stories of deadline pressures, personal crisis, and organizational fatigue was both humbling and profound.
Alex pointed to his love of music (a true passion for him) and involvement in a generative music technology community as a place he went when he needed to rekindle that creative spark.
It helped me reflect on the things that energize me — namely, writing and learning new technologies.
No matter your motivation to get into tech, there will be times when it feels like you’ve fallen off course and need to reset.
So wherever you are reading this right now, remember these two things:
- “How you make money” and “How you create value” are not one in the same.
- When in doubt, take a walk.
When I’m having a rough week, I like to picture old Wallace on a sunny day in early spring, the snow melting around him as he casts off lines of poetry, making his passion a priority as he heads into work.
And then I head outside myself to think about what that means for me.