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Replaceable me in a corporate world

I often encounter naive people who talk about how everything will become disaster if the person leaves the team. That's only true for someone who's very specialized in something (researcher, professor etc). However, at a commercial company, most of us is doing non-creative, repeatable tasks. This means that everyone is easily replaceable. 

 I'm sorry if this has never occurred to you. Please recall what you do at work. 
  1. You compose an email
  2. You call a meeting
  3. You execute your core competency (project plan, product manage, coding etc)
  4. You communicate with stakeholders 
  5. You coordinate sh*tty work
Your replacement might not be as efficient as you at day one but eventually, the person will get there - acquire same knowledge as you do. That's how a company works. Your team / company will run totally fine without you.

 That's not an exception for me either and I'm totally fine with that part because anyone can do my job just fine, seriously. Note that I will not go further to say that robot can do my job because anything involves grey area decision making requires humans' judgement. Humans are better at handling those grey area than robot in my opinion.

 So, what am I ranting about? The question here is how long you want to be a piece of replaceable parts in a corporate world. I need income to support my family and I'm only skilled to do what I'm doing now. Hence, I need to work in this corporate world until I retire. Along the way, you try to motivate yourself by climbing the corporate ladder, find a new challenge to work on.

However, when I step back, I realize that it's risk-averse me that's preventing myself to go and explore more opportunities (volunteering, gardening, culinary) in the world. I'm especially bad among my friends. Some of my friends work at a corporate and explore other opportunities (multi-tasking). There are many people out there who also paused their corporate life moment. I see some people who absolutely loved their decision. I hear some people who came back to corporate world after-all.

I'm still a little bit confused with what I want to or should do here. However, I think we all should give ourselves moment to breath and reconsider what kind of life we really want to live before we hit our retirement age. At least it's spring time, so we should take this moment to think about it :)

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Deep breath... Rethink your life...

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