Change companies or something else in life, learn more deep learning and other nagging thoughts

I am slightly drunk on a Friday night, so I want to jot down some of the things that are going through my mind right now.

1. I am ready to move out of Amazon and just need another company to accept me at the right level and compensation.
2. Irrespective of how my near future in career pans out, I do have this nagging feeling that I am not in the right place. But I also don’t fully understand that feeling right now.
   1. It’s not just about work but more general. For instance, we earn a lot of money and that’s obviously better than the alternative. But I sometimes wonder if we should be optimizing our life so much for money and whether we’d be happier with less.
   2. Life is too short to not do crazy things. Theoretically, the ideal thing would be to drop everything irrelevant and start something crazy tomorrow. But I don’t know what’s preventing me from doing that (and it’s certainly not Sneha).
3. I gotta stop learning new fields of computer science such as deep learning and become better at what I already know. It’s nice to explore new things, but that also can’t go on forever and I have already explored enough.
   1. Speaking slowly, clearly and confidently. This alone will help me be more successful.
   2. Distributed systems, programming languages etc., but only ad hoc.
   3. Real projects are better than passive learning.
   4. That book on becoming a good architect but I guess it’ll be more useful when I move to a new company.
4. I think I am not getting promoted quickly enough at work. However, sometime back, I also used to think I haven’t seen failure for awhile, so maybe that wish is getting fulfilled now! Moreover, this is nowhere close to end of the world.
   1. If I don’t trust my management after two years of being here, that’s a big sign I am not in the right place irrespective of the promotion aspect.
5. Distraction, especially picking up the phone to look at random websites or apps to kill time, sucks. In the near past, I used to limit such activities to half an hour or less but I’ll probably kill that altogether soon.
6. Instead of reading a new book, Flow, I’ll probably be better off spending time internalizing Deep Work for a few months first. I can pick up Flow after that.
7. Are my Bose headphones not clear enough?
8. CDs were probably a bad idea given how limiting the choices become and the hassle of managing the music myself. I earn enough, so I should stop over-thinking, pick one music streaming service, pay for and stick to it. I love music and this is the least I can spend my money on for myself.

That’s a lot of output for one night, even if some of it is a rehash of old ideas. Not bad!