Sid Savara
My name is Sid Savara, and I am a recovering workaholic.
Growing up I was always the best. If I wasn’t the best, I worked harder until I was – even as a child. I scored a perfect 800 on my Math portion of my SAT, graduated as valedictorian of my 600 person class, and went to college on a full scholarship. I was a spelling bee champion, active in student government, and co-captain of the math team. I took every single Advance Placement level course I could, and entered college as a sophomore (or close to it – I don’t remember).
This trend continued into college, and finally into my first job – working as a software developer at a Fortune 500 company, DirecTV. DirecTV was a wonderful place to work – I had a manager who to this day I speak with and ask for advice, and worked on a team with some of the smartest people I had ever met. Our software was critical to the business, and I knew going into it that it was a high profile (internally) team that had to deliver – always. I believe we were some of the best software engineers at DirecTV, and we always had to deliver on time. Always. If that meant 80 hours one week, not sleeping the next, and crashing for 3 days on a long weekend, so be it.
I loved it. I loved the pressure, I loved the constant challenges being thrown at us at the last minute. We were paid well, and I could have left that job after a year and worked anywhere – the types of problems I solved and the system I worked on was so much bigger than just about anything anywhere else. The commercial software that we used within our system was stretched to the limit, and the companies that wrote the software used us as case studies for white papers – showing prospective customers what was possible. I was so proud.
This is not a tale however of someone who works 80 hours a week and burns out. Perhaps if I had kept that pace up for another 10 years that would have happened – I did it for 3 years, and did my Master’s at the University of Southern California in the evenings to boot. It was a slow decision that started when my best friend left California to move back to Hawaii, and I started considering leaving as well for a simpler lifestyle. I realized I was unable to spend as much time working out, playing guitar, playing tennis, etc – the pursuits I had once enjoyed. Due to my experience at DirecTV, I didn’t even need to look for a new position – I was being recruited practically every week. One week I looked over the list, called two of the recruiters back, and landed both jobs.
I accepted a position in Maui (also software development) that turned out to use my skills well, but that was much easier for me and much less pressure than working at DirecTV. The pace of life slowed down, there was no traffic, and it was sunny every day. I actually MISSED the pressure though. Some nights I would lie in bed, unable to sleep, my brain firing on all cylinders. I missed the challenge of working on problems that really stretched my limits.
I left that position shortly after to take up another in Honolulu, HI – as metropolitan as Hawaii gets, but still much more laid back than working in Los Angeles. Our first demo was a week later, and that first week I worked my heart out, even putting in hours my very first weekend on the job – I had missed it for so long, that I actually enjoyed it.
That week was an unusual case however, and since then my life has been much more balanced. I now find time to blog, work out, play guitar and enjoy life – and my job no longer defines who I am. I work 40 hours a week, and while I still do the best I can, I am light years behind my former DirecTV coworkers who have since also reached a more balanced lifestyle, but know so much more than I do. Was it the right decision? Time will tell.
Sid Savara
http://sidsavara.com - Personal Development, Maximizing Productivity and Life Hacking