Why I do what I do
A somewhat long-winded manifesto.
Read the original here: https://jocelynemurphy.github.io/whyidowhatido
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years meeting new people.
In these interactions, whether I’m meeting new classmates, setting up coffee chats, interviewing for jobs, or ✨networking✨ in general, I find myself recounting the exact same list of experiences. Almost through rote repetition, I have my answer to “tell me about yourself” down to a science.
When people meet you for the first time, they often ask what you do. Each conversation participant exchanges information about their job, university program, hobbies… interests… but the underlying question that rarely makes it into surface level discussion – the far more interesting question – is why you do what you do.
Not only is it undoubtedly the key to tying together awesome scholarship essays and nailing interviews, being able to articulate why you do what you do grounds you in who you are, helps you build healthy habits, and magically attracts people and opportunities that get you excited to wake up every day.
My aim here is to peel back the thought processes that have influenced my decision making over the years so that somehow what I've spent my time on (everything from musical theatre to competitive hockey to a career in software development) can be woven together into one semi-coherent life narrative (wish me luck).
This essay is also a letter to future me – I know I'll need it when I'm knee-deep in deadlines and need a reminder to zoom out, breathe, and look at the big picture.
So with that epic introductory paragraph, let’s dive in.
Where it began
With each door chosen, several others close. An abundance of choice has always been a significant source of anxiety for me, with forethought, pros and cons lists, and in-depth analysis being both my best friends and worst enemies for as long as I can remember.
Some of the best advice my mom has ever given me to stop my future-scenario-spiralling: “Future Joss will have more information than current Joss – let her worry about the decision-making.”
When I was young, being in a small pond was comforting – I actually did have the ability to join every club at my elementary school (and avoid choice altogether). But as ponds grew larger, my resistance to choose a path resulted in behaviour like touring every single local high school, frantically writing the SAT because I thought I wanted to go to film school in the US, overloading myself with prerequisite courses for every possible university major, and ultimately choosing (arguably) the most broad and flexible engineering program in Canada (full of classmates who seem to be equally torn about what to do with their time).
Strangely enough, I’ve never had a problem with dwelling on the paths that didn’t work out. I believe everything happens for a reason – or more accurately, when looking back at your life you can draw meaning and lessons from everything you’ve taken risks on and from everything that’s happened to you. Getting cut from hockey teams and falling out of touch with old friends are all experiences that sum up to be who I am today. I am proud of who I’ve been, who I am and who I’m becoming.
While I’ve been notoriously resistant to choosing a specific direction, something I’ve always known is ultimately I want to dedicate my life to making the world a better place. Cheesy? Vague? Yes.
The medium and timelines have varied and will continue to evolve as I get deeper into my life and career, but I know the work I’ve been most proud of, the ideas that make me most excited, and the people who leave me buzzing with energy are all somehow tied to doing things that make life better for others. As I make decisions about my future, I know that will be my north star. It’s cool to care.
Optimizing for Impact
The medium
I describe concepts best visually, so I present to you the following chart that's been sitting in the back of my brain for quite some time:
The principle is that with a finite lifetime and a limited number of actions that can be taken, one can have a finite impact on society. A choice has to be made – either have a large impact on a few people, or a small impact on many people (for the purposes of this analysis let’s assume the impact is good and I’m not conspiring to be a supervillain). If we were to plot individual actions that can be taken by a single human along this scale, it might look something like this:
Disclaimer: these examples are to give a "gut feeling" to the model. The relative placement of all actions is very generalized and highly debatable.
After sitting with this model for a bit I realized I didn't like it. Plot twist!!
Being confined to a world of tradeoffs was a bummer. So over time, gaining more curiosity, life experience, and audacity, I decided that this was my mental model, no one could tell me what to do, and I could change the rules. So I scrapped the sliding scale and started thinking of things as a 2D plane (yes of course things started to get math-y, I’m an engineering nerd what did you expect).
Joss's Revised Mental Model on How to Maximize Impact™
With this plane, I plotted out different actions I could take – aiming to land on activities and careers that scored highly in both the quantity of people I’d be able to positively impact and the significance I’d be able to have on their lives. Generalizing individually-brainstormed data points, the following 3 categories stood out:
1. Software Development and Engineering
Improvements in efficiency can reduce needless waste of resources, while optimal human behaviour can be incentivized through increasing convenience or reducing costs. This has a significant ability to impact the climate, but also make other processes accessible and scalable.
Examples: public transit infrastructure reducing fuel consumption and improving public health, software enabling access to education in remote communities and managing healthcare appointment bookings, materials engineering in the green energy space.
2. Community Building
Creating spaces for smart and caring people to find each other and collaborate meaningfully will always result in joy and innovation greater than the sum of the individual talent brought to the table. Watching community form is the 8th wonder of the world.
Examples: SHAD Canada, Adventure 4 Change, Socratica, SVP Teens and Social Venture Partners, Universities, Hackathons, Fellowships, etc.
Media and Art
Media is a powerful way to change human behaviour and show people the world through different lenses, whether the intention is to inspire empathy or scare the 💩 out of you (re: climate change). Scary graphs aren’t always the best way to communicate, people have short attention spans. Social media feedback loops have a scary ability to polarize populations so mainstream media has a huge responsibility in influencing public opinion. Media directly translates to politics.
Examples: Black Mirror, The 1619 Project, TED Talks , Kendrick Lamar, Supersize Me , Free to Be... You and Me , Lin-Manuel Miranda, Shonda Rhimes, Dolly Parton, and public art (in particular Indigenous art)
The environment
Autonomy and trust have and always will be extremely important to me. As I’ve gained experience, spoken to people further along in their careers, and gone down internet rabbit holes, I’ve recognized that it isn’t enough to make a decision about the medium in which I want to work. The environment I work within is in fact more important to both my long term happiness and my ability to be effective in having large-scale and long-term impact.
Key personal takeaways (subject to change):
Not for Profit Sector
I have so much love and respect for the community leaders I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the not-for-profit sector. This TED talk explains (better than I ever could) the pain points of the industry, and why charities and NGOs are often unable to reach the scale of for-profit corporations.
Government
Government plays a crucial role in providing essential services and has an incredible amount of resources, but with that comes the responsibility to attempt to focus on many problems simultaneously as a part of an enormous workforce. I am also frustrated with voter apathy and voter suppression. I hope to work in an environment where I can move quickly and precisely towards goals I care about, where thoughts of re-election are not competing with my vision for what I hope to accomplish.
For Profit Sector
Working in the for-profit sector means there's a lot more freedom in what projects one can take on. There is also an ability to re-invest in the company without harsh criticism, and to hire and retain talent by paying employees what they’re worth. The alignment of financial incentives increases the likelihood of long-term project sustainability. Some downsides include that success is often measured in terms of strictly financial goals, which can sometimes lead to profitable decisions made at the expense of society (mental health, democracy, the environment, etc.), and that some problems simply can't be solved profitably.
With the medium, the environment, and my desire to make the world a better place in mind, my current direction is to pursue software development at mission-driven for-profit companies (with a particular interest in ultimately being a founder).
The software industry is an unrivalled ability to scale, extremely low startup costs for new projects, and a demonstrated potential to redefine all other areas of life (including how we consume media, form communities, diagnose illness, increase accessibility, and educate populations).
I also believe that as technology outpaces regulation, the technical leaders of tomorrow should think beyond ‘moving fast and breaking things’. It’s important that people who spend a lot of time thinking about global issues join this workforce. I’m very wary of the belief that every social issue can be solved with a web-app (because they absolutely cannot), but adding software development to my set of tools for implementing systems-level change is something that feels worthwhile.
Metrics vs. Values based goals
So that was a lot. I’m aware.
How does one break down lofty objectives like “optimize impact” or even “get really good at software development”? Growing up we’re taught to make SMART goals. My project management and business friends are in the back screeching “what are the KPIs?!?!?” (if you’ve never heard of KPIs, now you know).
There’s a reason these concepts and frameworks exist: they are effective at motivating teams and corporations to achieve long-term objectives and measure their performance over time.
The problem with how we’ve been conditioned to set goals is that when these principles are applied to our own lives, our self-worth and how we value others becomes tied to things like completing 200 leetcode problems, getting 500 likes on Instagram, beating your PR by 10 pounds every time you go to the gym, having 100,000 subscribers on Youtube, getting internships at top 5 companies, having a 97% average…
Not only are many of these metrics largely out of our control, there is no limit to the number of carrots that fellowships, employers, social media companies and educational institutions can place in front of us. For those who are intense and achievement-oriented, hyper-competitive environments and the mindset with which we’ve been conditioned to approach goal setting is allowing companies to profit off of our ambition at the expense of our well-being.
It’s exhausting, and it’s unhealthy.
Human beings are not corporations. We do not need to apply business concepts to our own lives.
So where does that leave us in our pursuit of living our best lives? With our values.
One of my favourite quotes of all time:
Shout out to friends of for having excellent quotes on their walls :)
What does that look like in practice?
Say no to “mid” opportunities. If it’s not helping you become who you want to be and it’s not making you jump up and down with excitement, it’s a no. What you spend time on signals to the world what you care about. If you’re not being true to yourself, your outward persona will keep attracting opportunities you’re not that psyched about.
Protect your time so that when you do feel that excited, you have the capacity to say yes. To quote Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec, "Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing”. Working your ass off to do a fantastic job at something you really care about feeds the soul. Being spread too thin leads to burnout, frustration, and disappointing yourself.
Align your identity with your goals, and don’t tie a number to it. Be proud of being someone who worked really hard to understand the concepts on the exam, even if your grade suffered from dumb mistakes. Be kind to yourself when you have an off day at the gym, after all you are an athlete, this is a long-term lifestyle.
Diversify and pay attention to values that don’t get enough love. I once drew this diagram for a friend after a particularly tough time on an assignment:
If you tie your whole identity to school (or your career, or some winning some competition... etc...), the losses hit harder than they should. Regardless of how talented you are at the things you love, remember the side of you that’s a musician, photographer, or basketball player. Remember how much of an impact you have on your younger siblings, the time you were the comfort person your friend turned to when they needed to cry it out, or how excited your grandparents are when you come to visit. These are values that are inherently not tied to metrics and are easy to forget. Remember them, prioritize them.
Values-based goals allow you to be extremely intentional with your time without the anxiety and self-disdain that come with concrete numbers and timelines. Making decisions – and sticking to them – becomes infinitely more straightforward when it comes from a place of “is this in line with who I want to be?" instead of “did I achieve?”. It also makes it easier to take risks, as when you’re moving along steadily through life, grounded in who you are, you can moonshoot at really cool opportunities without putting your self-esteem on the line.
You, steadily chugging along on the train of life while still lasso-ing cool opportunities that you spot along the way.
What self care really means
Your body will take a rest – the only choice your brain has is to collaborate on the time and place or be forced to accept the consequences when it revolts and wages war.
I had a really tough time earlier this year. Rebounding from this period led to me taking care of myself more aggressively than I ever have in my entire life, and what has truly pulled me out of my funk was coming back to my values and remembering who I am outside of the pandemic bubble.
An Instagram quote that hit particularly hard during this time was “treat yourself like someone you are responsible for taking care of”. Thank you Instagram.
It sounds bleak, but the world works best when everyone puts on their own oxygen mask first. It is your job to negotiate your salary, your job to communicate your feelings to friends, your job to remove yourself from environments that are toxic (embrace your villain era), and your job to be gentle with yourself. I often take myself for walks (like a dog) or go outside to feel the sun on my face (like a… plant?). I stopped viewing taking a night off as a “cheat day”, but as an investment in future me.
No one can do anything about their goals or the state of the world if they are breaking.
When I came to the University of Waterloo, a part of me became… extremely dormant. I convinced myself that as a Woman in STEM™, I needed to lean all the way in at the expense of everything else I loved. I filled all my hours with design teams and hackathons, and due to convenience and necessity (and because they are genuinely some of my favourite people), my entire peer group became fellow engineers, who I bonded with on Fridays... by staying up all night… completing physics assignments.
In high school I stayed balanced by spending a significant amount of time playing hockey, soccer, and running with friends in the forest. I allowed myself to be mediocre at things. I got my leadership and volunteering fix by leading an organization called SVP Teens. My friends dragged me out to do fun things on the weekend. I semi-maintained an art account. All of this coexisted with math, science, and engineering, and I felt a lot more balanced.
A great exercise to remember who you are (shoutout to Anson for this one) is to make a list of “times I feel most like myself”. Here are some of mine:
Times I feel most like myself:
Letting the hours melt away when getting deep into a creative project (especially if it's a really high effort joke or extremely personalized)
Sprinting up and down stairs for excercise until I can barely walk, lying down at the top, glowing and basking in the victory of pushing myself to exhaustion with the help of Nicki Minaj
Conversations with smart and caring people who genuinely want to be there, moderating and extracting takeaways in a meeting context
Intensely humming while I work (my friends can attest to this one)
Skating and appreciating the crisp sound of blades on ice, feeling powerful and balanced and weightless and free
Volunteering and working with kids, especially when particularly shy or defiant kids start to open up, laugh, and bond
Drawing diagrams and mapping things out, trying to make sense of complicated topics and systemic problems
Playing Bridge, Catan and Cribbage with my grandparents
Playing piano by ear & for the love of it
Solo driving at night so I can karaoke as loud as I want
Rushing outside to feel the buzzing air of an impending summer storm or lingering in the cold for a few extra minutes to feel the sun on my face in the middle of winter
With a big move to a new city, I thought a lot about what values I wanted to drive my summer, and I came up with this chart (yes, another chart. Are we surprised? No. At least I stay on brand). It’s been excellent at keeping me on track and prioritizing things that make me happy and healthy long term, and every month I look back and assess which quadrants need more love and which I’ve over-torqued on.
Did I accomplish every goal here? Absolutely not.
As expected, the tangible "deliverables" in each category grew and changed as I went about life.
But as I write this at the end of the summer, I am happier and healthier than I've been... maybe ever. It’s the first "life-orientation-framework" I’ve been able to stick to – entirely because it is values-driven – and I think I’ll keep it up for the foreseeable future.
I put the chart on my Instagram for accountability, and what was purely for me actually seemed to resonate with a lot of people (probably because of the epic google doc ✨graphic design ✨).
The response I received confirmed my gut feeling that an extremely significant number of people are longing to show up more authentically and show love to the parts of themselves they've tucked away.
Externally we are all pretending to be experts, influencers, tech bros, professionals, and overall-winners-of-life but we are so much more <3.
Be a human being.
No one likes conversations where everyone is posturing, dialogue that sounds like “blockchain blockchain web3 crypto investing leetcode machine learning”. To clarify, I’m not calling out those who have genuine enthusiasm and curiosity about these topics, but we are all guilty of pretending to know what we’re talking about just to look cool. Including me.
Once at a student networking event someone asked me: “When did you become an adult? How do you have time to spend your entire day thinking about startups?”
I laughed and told them about my day: how after my 10am to 12pm nap I ventured outside, where I walked for a bit until I found a nice patch of grass, where I proceeded to take a second nap. Groggy from my second nap, I returned to my apartment, where I was so exhausted from my previous nap that I took another. After that I arrived at the dinner.
After opening the door to being vulnerable, I then learned how one attendee was not a great swimmer, another not a great driver. We took hype beast photos in Waterloo park and now I consider them friends. All it takes is one person dropping their act to start genuinely connecting with people.
The great thing about this principle is that people don’t age out of wanting to have fun. Custom slack reactions, running jokes with coworkers and professors, it all makes the hard work more enjoyable.
My absolute favourite question to ask people when I meet them for the first time (in any context) is to “tell me their life story in 5 minutes or less…. or more if that stresses them out”. It takes people by surprise to be asked about themselves as people (outside of their resume), but learning about Italian grandmothers and past careers as music producers helps you understand why they do what they do, and is way more interesting than what you could easily find on their LinkedIn. Everything in life is more fun with friends.
And in the name of making friends, don’t gate-keep opportunities! A rising tide lifts all ships, if you’re at the table make a bigger table, introduce your friends to each other, call people in, all that good stuff.
Your privilege is a tool that will only keep levelling up. Be intentional about how you use it.
You’ve heard it before, but it is so important so thought I’d throw it in here for good measure.
The people worth keeping around care about YOU, not what you do for them.
This year my friends and I got into the habit of organizing extremely high-effort, day-long birthday extravaganzas, with the prep work becoming increasingly anxiety-inducing with each occasion. Important contextual fact that will shortly be relevant: I am a birthday pie kind of person (call me Ryan Reynolds).
For my own birthday, I let it be known that “If I spend my entire birthday alone because you were making me a pie, I’m cancelling you”. Cancel culture can occasionally be used productively.
“Stop making the pie” has turned into a shorthand way for my friends and I to call each other out for getting so wrapped up in perfectionism that we forget the most important thing is just showing up. People want you. They don’t want the pie.
Well they do want the pie but only if you’re there to share it.
Though according to quoteinvestigator.com there is “no substantive evidence that Theodor Seuss Geisel wrote or said this expression”, it’s been a long-time favourite:
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
One chilly winter day I was at my parents’ house, truly goin’ through it and hiding from the world, trying to focus on my upcoming calculus midterm. This is a rare endorsement for phone procrastination, but a message from a close friend popped up that I’m glad I saw immediately:
A textbook cry for help.
I hopped in the car, picked her up from her apartment, and we spent the next 24 hours giggling, falling asleep on the floor, and learning more calculus than I thought humanly possible. The visual I have for this one is semi-related to triangles being the strongest shape (ah! back at it again! I’d apologize, but I aim to both educate and delight. You’re welcome.).
When you find friends where you pause between ugly crying to laugh at how dumb you both look, where you don’t have enough strength to stand on your own but hold each other up like two crumpled playing cards, where the logical equation of [ sad + sad = more sad ] is instead somehow [ sad + sad = mutually beneficial productive giggling ], hang on to them.
They will love you even when you’re a mess. If they matter, they won’t mind.
To bring the lesson back to my career, at the conclusion of my first co-op job, I felt I owed it to my first employer to return for another term. I’d had such a great experience and felt a sense of loyalty since they’d invested in me. Looking back I’m immensely grateful to my coworkers for telling me that that loyalty to companies is dumb, that they were happy to have been a part of my journey, and that while personally they would love it if I stayed, I needed to go explore (even though it was scary).
An important question I ask myself every time someone from the startup world tries to convince me to drop out of school: does this person have my best interests in mind, or do they just want me to work for them? This doesn’t mean people looking to hire you are evil, but conversations like these are when it's important to remember that everyone (including you) is responsible for taking care of themselves. It’s not wrong for them to want to recruit you, in fact it’s a compliment! But you are also responsible for evaluating if life-changing decisions are in line with your values and reflective of who you want to be (and if they are, go for it. I know people who have dropped out and are having the time of their lives).
Personally, I’m really excited to finally get an in-person university experience and to spend more late nights (some of which could maybe include activities beyond physics assignments) with friends who I hope stick around for the long haul.
It’s taken me a long time to be able to say this, but I am truly in no rush.
Looking forward
So here we are, I’ve been writing for at least 4 hours and I am tired.
I hope this comprehensive essay helps connect some of the dots on my resume, explains why I pivoted from leadership and the charitable sector to software development and startups, and shines a light on why I’m trying so hard to build community at Waterloo while I’m here. I know I’ll come back to this manifesto when I need to remind myself what really matters.
Maybe one day I’ll transition to a career in the film industry or maybe I’ll just keep making mini vlogs. Either way, I'm excited to keep learning, growing, and optimizing my impact while taking care of myself and showing up for the people I love :)
That’s all!
Joss
If any of this resonates with you, if you have things to add or if you passionately disagree, let me know.
If you read this and thought “wow, do I ever have an opportunity that sounds perfect for you!”, please let me know.
My Linkedin DMs are open and I’m always down for a coffee chat to talk about big ideas.
Also very susceptible to a good old-fashioned nerd-snipe :)