🤔🤔Every once in a while it is worth asking yourself “why do I do what I do?”. Okay that sounded better in my head. But you get the point.
I write these blog posts and make YouTube videos as a side hustle, and as my main thing, I’m doing this Ph.D. and a summer internship. But why do I do any of it?
📈 Being brutally honest with yourself is kinda trending these days, you know, the no bullshit stuff. So I decided to do this experiment by Elizabeth Philips called speed dating yourself, where there are a bunch of questions that you answer about yourself as honestly as possible. The answers sometimes make you feel bad for not being the publicly displayable perfect human being but it’s important to know yourself.
🎯 The experiment lead me to the age-old question “Why is my work important to me?” Surprisingly it was easier to answer for my side hustles than for my main things.
🎨 Side Hustles:
YouTube, Blogposts, Skillshare courses, Notion Templates
⁉ Why do I do it?
- It helps people.
- It’s exciting.
- Once in a while, I get overwhelming comments from people, like my video about making a low GPA matter less for grad school applications ending up on a cancer patient’s YouTube feed. The person saw my video, loved it, shared it with his son, and commented how it gave him hope for his son’s future because his son doesn’t have a great GPA in his bachelor's.
- Another time I got a message from a nice lady who became interested in restarting her career after 20 years of staying at home and giving up on her career because her husband and in-laws didn’t want her to work. She told me my video about learning to code made her feel like she can learn to code and get back out into the field and have a career she used to be passionate about.
⁉ Would I do it if I didn’t get paid to do it?Absolutely. Right now I’m literally losing money by making more YouTube videos because I have to pay out of my own pocket for the equipment, video editing, thumbnail design, and more. So if you enjoy my YouTube videos or my blog posts, I’d appreciate your support through Patreon or just by Buying me a coffee once in a while. On average it costs me $400 a month to put out this content so any help is appreciated. But yeah, despite not earning from these side hustles, I will continue to do these because I feel passionate about them.
👷♀️ My Main Things
Ph.D. , Internships
⁉ Why do I do it?
I honestly don’t know anymore. As a child, I wanted to be a doctor and an engineer at the same time so the logical path was a doctorate in engineering. After graduating as an engineer, I did not want to stay at home or get married so a Master’s was the obvious choice. After MS and after one year of working in my dream job, I started feeling suffocated and a misfit in my environment. I wanted to move out of the country so enrolling in a Ph.D. program seemed like the easiest path. But now that I am where I wanted to be, do I have a reason to continue my Ph.D.? Perhaps not. I still sorta see it as a means to an end. I want to have this degree in my hand so that if in a few years I want to join academia again as a professor, I can. But does my Ph.D. serve anything more than a means to an end, a great amount of work for the sake of having an option open for me? To be completely honest, I don’t think so. My internship is exciting, but in the end it’s exciting because I want to work at the company and make a lot of money.
⁉ Would I do it if I didn’t get paid for it?
Absolutely not. Both my Ph.D. and my internship work aren’t something that I would do for free, let alone if I had to spend money from my own pocket for doing it.
⁉ If I wouldn’t do it for FREE, is it worth continuing it?
A lot of people feel like they have to love their job. If you don’t feel passionate enough about it to be willing to do it for free, it’s time to switch careers. I don’t believe that. Your job may or may not be your passion. It’s okay to have a boring job that you don’t love. It’s okay to have a job whose sole purpose is to put money in your pocket. Because in the end, you DO need money to pay rent and buy food and buy iPhone 14 Pro max. Your job is still contributing to your happiness even if you don’t love it, by enabling you to afford and enjoy other things. I would still continue my Ph.D. and my internship and other jobs in the future until I’m at a point where money is no longer the object.
That’s it from my side. It’s your turn now. Send me your one-line answers to all three of these questions. I might anonymously feature them in a future YouTube video.
Take care!
Sadia ❤
❤My Favourite Things
🎬YouTube:
I loved this video about feeling exhausted.
📝Quote:
“I constantly tell the people in my lab and other scientists, ‘You’ve got to do the experiment.’ You cannot go into it thinking that you know the answer and not do the experiment because your dogmatic belief says, ‘This is how it’s going to work.’ You’ve got to do the experiment.” — Dr. Matt Kaeberlein
🔍I’m Learning:
There is some scientific evidence behind sharing publicly whatever you’re learning. Apparently it makes you more consistent in what you do. So I have started sharing my touch typing learning journey publically as daily tweets. Follow me if you’d like to keep an eye on my progress.
I see that you’ve made it to the end. If you liked this blogpost, check out the other stuff I talk about on my YouTube Channel. Don’t forget to subscribe!😉