Three questions we struggle to answer with clarity and conviction
Why do you exist?
Who do you serve?
What’s your contribution?
These are the three questions that every professional and business must answer if they want to cut through the noise. There is so much competition out there that you need both conviction and laser-like clarity if you want to garner sustained attention.
They are also the questions that I’ve returned to, time and time again, throughout my career.
We’re all running in place, struggling to keep up
Industries are reshaping so fast that you cannot develop a skillset before the market loses interest. The consequence is that we are sprinting in place, running on treadmills, and exerting effort just to keep up.
Technology professionals have long experienced blistering change in their daily work. A common complaint of Software Engineers was that they could never thoroughly learn the current hot framework or technology stack before the industry transitioned to the next one. Yet, even for a profession accustomed to a lifelong struggle with change, the pace of advancement, tooling, and re-skilling brought about by Generative AI is exhausting. Efforts to remain current are futile. There is an incessant requirement to restart, reevaluate, and relearn. It’s disconcerting.
Humans like to know where their next meal is coming from
We don’t deal well with uncertainty. We like to know where our next meal is coming from. Unfortunately, the world outside your window is accelerating faster than ever. Each moment that you’re not upskilling, you’re stagnating relative to the specialised competition in the market. How do you maintain an impressive CV or résumé when each day a new tool, workflow, or system lands and upends what made you special in the first place?
You cannot peek behind closed doors, so you never quite know how well you’re performing versus your peers across the industry. If you cannot benchmark your skills against anyone, then it is difficult to know whether you’re performing well and remaining employable. Living under threat of disposability, redundancy, or replaceability is uncomfortable. If you can’t know with any certainty that your work today will be worth paying for tomorrow, then how do you make any long-term financial or family plans?
People tend to keep pace with technological advancements at their place of work
The risk is made ever greater for those who operate in slower-moving industries, or simply in more steady-state organisations. Not all businesses and groups are interested in keeping up with the state of the art. Many companies and public institutions are happy with the status quo provided they continue to make a profit. Whilst this may feel proportionate for the leaders of these organisations, such an attitude fails the employees who are unable to find internal opportunities to push the boundaries, try new things, learn, fail, and innovate. If these employees do eventually look beyond their current employer, then they may discover they’re either entirely unemployable, or, at the very least, worth considerably less than they thought.
People tend to keep pace with the technological advancements at their current place of work. Whilst some particularly entrepreneurial or innovative employees may dedicate personal hours to learning, the vast majority of the workforce believe their employer has a duty to teach them what they need to know. Regardless of your personal viewpoint on learning outside of core office hours, we cannot deny the fact that if you are not being provided with learning opportunities at work, then you must either proactively seek new skills outside the job, or you’re simply not learning at all.
There’s nothing more dispiriting than being replaced by an artificial colleague
Believing that your years of amassed experience, qualifications, and skills have been reduced to nothing is dispiriting and gut-wrenching. Ironically, younger people are now experiencing a phenomenon that older professionals have lamented for many years. For those professionals in their latter halves of their careers, they’ll understand the struggle of securing good work ahead of their younger, cheaper, and more tech-savvy peers. The intriguing shift we’re witnessing today is that younger models are being replaced by cheaper, more tech-savvy artificial models. AI is, by definition, tech-native. Go figure.
Artificial influencers on Instagram,
Artificial actors in films,
Artificial programmers building software,
Artificial COOs streamlining businesses,
Artificial designers producing graphics and logos.
…And all for a fraction of the price of a human.
We’re experiencing a crisis of identity
Why do you exist?
Who do you serve?
What’s your contribution?
Never before have these questions been quite so fundamental to our sense of self, nor so challenging to answer with any clarity or conviction.
In history, your career would have been dictated by your family business. Perhaps you worked on a farm or at your father’s blacksmith’s? Then, as the Industrial Revolution took hold, you may have found yourself labouring at the local factory. In more recent times, you could take more authorship over your work and train to become a Lawyer, an Accountant, a Banker, an Engineer, or a Doctor.
In each aforementioned case, you were your job (at least in the UK and the United States where work and identity are closely aligned). Our second names were often derived from our employment (e.g., Smith, Baker, etc.). There’s a reason people ask “So, what do you do for work?” as their opening gambit when they first meet you. It is because, until now, we’ve been able to guess a fair amount about someone's personality, interests, lifestyle, and ambitions by knowing what they did for work.
But such a question no longer stands the test of time. What you do today may not be what you do next year, next month, or next week.
Did Software Engineers, just five years ago, believe that their job would amount to validating AI-generated code and implementing safeguards for agents? I certainly didn’t. I still vividly remember sitting in my bathroom between 2019 and 2021 reading online Reddit forums and blog articles debating which frontend web framework was the best: React, Vue.js, Angular, and then later Svelte. Programming language wars and cults were alive and entertaining; you described yourself as a TypeScript developer, a Python user, or a Rust programmer. We joined a tribe. We nested within our communities.
You could tell a lot about a programmer based on the tools they adopted, but that’s no longer true. Programming language has, sadly, become a null point for most developers today. Learning the nuances of programming languages is now just a niche hobby or interest for old-school programmers like myself. In-vogue developers are, instead, more concerned with harnesses and token allowance.
Whilst, in theory, traditional programmers could re-skill and adopt the new paradigm, for many it’s just not that exciting for them. Delegating all coding tasks to AI? Where’s the fun in that? It’s just not a game I’m interested in playing.
I accept that for domain experts and business leaders, it’s thrilling to see the barrier to entry fall so considerably and to be empowered to create software solutions that were previously beyond their realms of design and technical capability. But for programmers like myself who genuinely enjoyed understanding the inner-workings of computers, this leap in abstraction away from the underlying source code is unfulfilling.
I’ve read several articles about longstanding, well-established programmers leaving jobs at Google and Meta after deciding that this new world wasn’t for them. They liked the programming paradigm they operated in, not the one they’ve been forced to adopt.
When the work and craft you love are eradicated, no salary or company perks can replace what you’re grieving. You’ve lost your identity and the work you trained for. Your source of intrinsic motivation has been decimated and, regrettably, extrinsic motivation cannot fill that hole for any sustained period of time.
You reinvent yourself from the ground up, only to watch the ground fall away again
Why do you exist?
Who do you serve?
What’s your contribution?
All of the questions are unanswerable whilst in grief.
You reinvent yourself from the ground up, only to watch your newfound future be displaced and superseded, yet again, by another technological advancement. When the world progresses at such blistering speed, how can you ever feel that your future is assured? How can you ever find a stable identity that survives?
You’re not a single-use plastic
Firstly, you must learn to dissociate who you are from what you do. You’re the artist, not the art. Social media, and particularly LinkedIn headlines, encourage us to design ourselves, market ourselves, and then sell ourselves. Influencers and personal branding culture have led us to believe that we are the products that need to be sold.
But how can your particular concoction of interests, fascinations, and unique fingerprint ever be captured within a job title or headline? I promise that I’ve tried. Many times. I’ve tweaked, iterated, rewritten, and discarded my LinkedIn headline more times than I care to count. Why? Because each iteration felt wrong: as if something was missing. I’d present a very narrow view on a small part of me and bury the rest. If I couldn’t tell the world who I am in one line, then do I even know myself well enough? The issue is that you’re not a single-use plastic. You were never meant to be defined by a single statement. You’re a rich, all-encompassing, complex, erratic, and irrational human being. To think otherwise is a toxic and limiting belief to hold.
Consider what happens when, not if, your job or your interests change. What do you do then? If you’re like me, then you likely have a crisis of confidence and identity as you grapple with reconfiguring who you are. You must re-declare to the world that you are no longer the same person: you’ve been reborn. You are, in fact, an entirely new person because your job has changed. That’s a lot to internalise and reconcile. It also sounds rather ludicrous. People didn’t despair or break down when they were promoted from Engineer to Manager. They may have experienced growing pains as their responsibilities shifted, but I’d hazard a guess that they didn’t face an identity crisis thanks to promotion.
Marketing ourselves and believing that we have one true purpose is holding us back. It’s too much to take on. It’s a weight that society and popular culture have instructed us to carry. No wonder we’ve become so fearful of career change; our entire self and being are on the line. We’re like the discontinued iPod being superseded by the iPhone.
You are the maker, the builder, the creator
What you make or build or create is a unique manifestation of yourself, your worldview, and your fingerprint. You’re an artist. Your job is to build and nurture something until it’s self-assured and strong enough to make its own way in the world.
Parents don’t (typically) identify themselves by their children. Parents are the custodians of their offspring. Eventually, the chick flies the nest. Take the same attitude towards your work and your career. Build something external to who you are. You are not your job.
The beauty of this mindset correction is that you’re then free to change style, use different raw materials, pivot what you make and sell, but it will never change who you are. You’re the maker, the builder, and the creator; you’re simply picking up new skills, knowledge, and technologies along the way that augment your capabilities, increase your productivity, and allow you to reach further than you ever believed possible.
You are not your job.
By this point, you should feel empowered to answer the three opening questions with satisfactory answers that hold longevity. Here’s what I propose:
Why do you exist?
To life a good, wholesome, and holistic life. To be happy. To love. To learn. To relax. To engage with community. To inspire change. To lead others through tough times. To be an excellent family member. To see the world. And to breathe.
Who do you serve?
Whoever you want to, whenever you want to. That might mean helping out at your allotment, or supporting your miniature railway group, or playing for your hockey team. It could mean serving your customers and clients. Perhaps your priority is to be there for your family. It could even mean serving yourself: when was the last time you stopped to ask how you could serve yourself better?
What’s your contribution?
Anything you produce that’s of value to someone (including yourself) is a contribution. You don’t have to change the world, or launch a VC-funded startup, or lead an enterprise for your contribution to be meaningful. If you produce something (it could be an idea, a thought, or a conversation) that has a positive impact on someone, something, or some place, then you’re contributing.
We’re born into a system our ancestors designed.
We’ve all been pre-programmed by societal norms to pursue activities, routines, and standards that were never our own. Sometimes, all it takes is someone to expose a belief we hold that was never ours in the first place to help us recognise that we’ve been trapped in a game we never agreed to play. We are all born into a system that our ancestors have designed for us. But this system was designed for a different time.
The rules of that system are rapidly breaking down because technological advancement and economic growth are changing what career and work mean. They’re redefining what life means.
Our manifesto
You might be wondering how this article came to be. There was no larger-than-life inspiration that drove me to publish this. I never planned it. I just wrote it: line by line. I sat down pondering how I would answer these questions if someone posed them about TEE.
As I began answering these questions and exploring my own thinking, this article was born as a result. It’s the result of meandering through my own subconscious.
Why does it exist?
Who does it serve?
What’s its contribution?
TEE is what I’d love to see in the world
I want TEE to inspire people to live more authentic lives. If it encourages people to jump off the hamster wheel they’re trapped on and take steps towards a life of authorship, then it’s a success.
TEE is about helping people navigate change
It’s a compilation of my personal thoughts, feelings, learnings, and experiences. It’s my way of helping people at scale. I’ve pivoted many times in my life and each time it’s been hard. People often ask me how I did it. The answer is: I just kept moving forwards, despite the anguish, confusion, depression, and anxiety. I chased what I was curious about, I ignored the noise where possible, and I leaned into who I’ve always been. I reflected on what I used to love and what I continue to enjoy today. I’ve rediscovered interests that I’d left behind.
TEE is a positive, zesty, and refreshing brand
It’s honest, transparent, and human. We publish writing that speaks directly to people to make them feel something, and to help them cut through the noise and see the world differently. TEE is bright, just like your future.
TEE is for those who feel out of step with the world
If your view of the world no longer aligns with what the media is shouting at you to believe, then you’re not alone. In fact, you’re in very good company. If you’re navigating change and want mentorship, guidance, advice, or companionship, then TEE is for you.
TEE is a little bit of comfort and familiarity in your inbox
Each time our email lands, know that we’re with you. You’re part of a community that understands you. We’ve been there, we are there, and we’re travelling with you.
TEE is your permission to breathe
TEE is the permission you so desperately needed to take your foot off the gas and slow down. It’s for those who believe the working world is no longer working for them.
So wherever you’re at today, stick with us.
We’ll get there together.
Stay thoughtful.
James.