One Thing I Wish I Changed

Enjoying the holidays even with ambitious goals

First, I want to say thank you for reading my newsletter. I often reflect on how lucky I am to write for as many people as I do. It wouldn’t be the same without your support; I appreciate it and I hope you’re enjoying the holiday season.

Today, I’ll share a “real regret” I have when looking back on my career. Many regrets are not actual regrets since they are only obvious with information you didn’t have back then. However, this regret is “real” since it was clear even with what I knew.

When I first joined Meta, I was so excited about what I was working on that I didn’t take much vacation. I turned down many opportunities to travel and planned my life around my work. And I don’t regret doing that.

I still enjoyed myself occasionally and got a lot of satisfaction out of my work. However, I wish I did more outside of work during the holidays rather than trying to push ahead when there was less value in working.

In December, many people are on vacation, so collaborative work is slower. Also, there are often code freezes, so you can’t land any of your code in production until the holidays are over anyway. Working hard during this time will be less efficient. At the same time, you won’t miss much if you take this time off.

That’s the mistake I think I made. I could’ve gone on vacation during the holidays and still had the same career trajectory. The only exception was my Staff promotion since I was leading holiday infrastructure operations for our org. Prior years I didn’t have anything that depended on me being there during the holidays.

If you’re ambitious and pushing for some aggressive career goals, consider if taking it slower in December will even affect anything. If you can still get what you want out of your career and make more out of other areas of your life, it’s a win-win.

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This week, I recorded a clip answering the question “what is some career advice that most people ignore that you could start doing today”. It’ll come out officially in an upcoming collaboration video that I’m doing, but wanted to give you a sneak peak. You can take a look here (the answer starts ~30 sec in).

Also, If you have any questions you’d like me to address in a future article, feel free to drop them here. I will use these to make sure I answer questions you care about most.

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Thanks for reading,
Ryan Peterman