We’re all searching for meaning in our lives.
In fact, a lot of our identity is tied to what we do for work. You are what you do. The average person spends a third of their life at work, a third of it not working, and a third of it sleeping.
I eventually became a civil engineer, but long before that, I had ambitions to become a graphic designer. I spent many childhood evenings drawing superheroes, designing snowboards, and laying out golf courses. Despite the creative itch, I was reasonably confident I knew what I would become and never thought twice about it after graduating high school.
The job was fantastic, and I was extremely fortunate to go to college and work locally, but a few years in, I felt… unfulfilled. It’s insane that we’re supposed to know what we want out of our professional lives when we’re in college, let alone high school. Life can change so much when we’re young, evolving our ideas, opinions, and ambitions.
It happened to me when my first wife passed away from cancer.
Elizabeth’s passing was a watershed moment that pushed me from “curious about other work” to “full-on pursuit” of a new career. She taught me that life here is short, and we should make the most of each “third” of it.
A few years before she died, I was on a construction site, and one of the older contractors realized he had already worked on this road before… 25 years ago.
Holy crap, will I be working on this road AGAIN in 25 years?
The idea that I would be doing the same work repeatedly for years wasn’t very appealing. In high school and college, I never considered that might happen.
To be fair, as a civil engineer, there are millions of different projects that don’t involve roads, but the contractor’s comment awoke the entrepreneur in me. It spoke to my heart, not my head. Somewhere deep in my soul, I already knew there was something out there for me that wasn’t civil engineering.
My hobby at the time, writing code, started to take on a new light. “Maybe I can turn this thing into a career someday.” I thought.
After Elizabeth died, that’s exactly what I started to do.
Fast forward a few years, and I’m behind a desk in a corporate job writing automated programs for a healthcare’s technical infrastructure. That’s nerd-speak for, “I worked in the IT department.” I was learning so many new technologies and immersing myself in a large corporate culture for the first time.
My inner entrepreneur led me to work with great people and on cool projects. On the side, I explored my creative side, which had been sleeping dormant since middle school, by teaching other people about candle making (a story for a different time).
By my fourth year, I was yearning for more. Not more work, but more meaning. Writing code for systems so far from the front line of the healthcare company’s customers made it hard to see that what I was doing mattered.
On top of that, the natural bureaucracy of being in a large corporate setting started frustrating me. I was surrounded by tons of intelligent people on good teams that all FELT like they were working on the most crucial thing but were effectively rowing the boat in different directions.
I also longed for an easier way for all of us to work together on meaningful work. That’s a tricky problem to solve when you’re talking about mashing teams that prefer to use scrum with traditional project management mindsets – and that doesn’t even begin to cover the TOOLS those teams need.
I only wanted three things:
- To allow our team to work however we wanted to
- To easily collaborate with other teams without arguing about what’s more important
- To do work that matters
I’ve started using the term “strategic collaboration” to describe how a team, or a team of teams, can work together on meaningful work. It also includes the synergy of working efficiently AND effectively.
Efficiently means using good processes, clearly defining the work that needs to get done, and improving the delivery of that work: doing things right.
Effectiveness means doing work in the context of a mission, goal, or vision: doing the right things.
But I’m realistic.
I believe the only way a team or organization can succeed with strategic collaboration is with culture. An organization’s transformational journey will be filled with friction if it lacks leadership and people who buy into a common mindset.
However, even the most robust culture cannot succeed without the right tools, and that’s where Tetheros comes in.
Tetheros is a modern collaboration platform that allows teams to align their effort and impact. It can’t fix a broken culture, and it might not be the right fit for everyone, but I want to help teams achieve their mission with clarity.
The first version of this product will address some of my frustrations by enabling teams to organize their work using any framework. It also exposes how aligned everything is with the mission.
We’re all searching for meaning. Tetheros will help ensure you’re doing things right and doing the right thing so you can work more on fulfilling your mission on this planet.