Happiness is a legitimate goal

21 August 2013 00:00 AEST

Career

It’s okay to put “be happy” at the top of your to-do list. It’s okay to set that as a goal. And it’s okay to talk about how to achieve it.

This is a universal problem but I see it a lot more in adults than children, and usually more in males than females.

I teach, coach and mentor a lot of people and it astounds me that when I ask them if they’re happy with how things are going, almost invariably they say no. When I ask if they’d like to feel happy, they look at me as if I’m a Martian. It’s almost as if they think that they should just be happy, and that if they’re not then there’s something wrong with them rather than their situation.

It takes courage to accept that you’re not happy and to try to change it, because what if you fail? Then you’re both unhappy and a failure? Bollocks.

It’s okay to do things just because they make us happy. It’s okay to change things because the status quo is making us unhappy.

Being happy is a valid desire and a valid goal.

Work

I'm Head of IT & Engineering at Etax, one of Australia's largest tax agents. Other interesting places I've been before Etax include Octopus Deploy, ThoughtWorks, Readify, Zap BI, Realex Payments and TRL.

I'm a fan of high-quality code, domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, continuous delivery and, most importantly, shipping software that works and that solves people's problems.

I have a number of small open-source creations, including Nimbus, ConfigInjector and NotDeadYet, and am an occasional contributor to several more.

I'm a regular speaker and presenter at conferences and training events. My mother wrote COBOL on punch cards and I've been coding in one form or another since I was five years old.