Working Alone

Working Alone

Slow by Slow Green is a collection of our thoughts behind the trees. 

Happy to hear you thoughts - feel free to comment below. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Working Alone

 

This is a very personal topic for me - as it would for you if you were facing the same decision. Slow Green, for the past two years, has involved mostly working by myself, and starting Slow Green is a decision for me to face and accept myself more than anything else.

 

Well, I am not a people person. I'd most of the time go as far as actively looking for reasons to not like the people I had to deal with. I don’t show it on the outside but I know. This makes an extremely unfitting and horrific ingredient in the recipe of my past career, finance, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) more specifically.  After more than 10 years working in M&A, I'd say the no.1 and no.2 requirements to be successful in it are an unsatiable desire to make money for yourself at the expense of anything else and, a natural-born ingrained penchant to socialize with people. I, for better or worse, do not possess either. Between 2010 and 2020, I actively tried to suppress or overlook this fact, and chased 'success' in career without facing the fact I was not born with the personality to enjoy for long-term in the career of finance. At that point, I could choose to stay and rise to a mediocre heights when I reach 60 and make a modestly indecent amount of money, and thereafter live to wonder what life could have been for the last 20 years of my life; or I could face and accept myself who is a loner, a much creative loner at that. And I chose the later. So far it's working modestly ok. Not the most easiest path but calming. Less spiritual suffering.

 

I probably am a Andrew Jackson type of person, tough in heart, believe in the ethics of hard-work, but mean in demeanor, and don't give too much of a damn about what other people think. This has gone unchecked in such a satisfying manner in the course of working on Slow Green. I am enjoying it.

 

Although honestly speaking, from a purely materialistic point of view, working alone certainly does not make the fastest way to wealth. Specialization in labor and then co-operate are the time-tested way to a nation's prosperity, much the same for a person. At this point in Slow Green's journey, I am forced to work mostly by myself due to limited resource. Which means I have to do almost everything by myself, that's not a task for the faint hearted. I tell you that much. I'd also advise against young people before their 30 to confine themselves to work alone. When you are young, you'd gain more by working on more elaborate tasks and meeting new people. This should be as self-explanatory, as not marrying the first girl/guy you befriend.