For those of you who I don’t talk to regularly, I’ve spent the past few weeks figuring out how to get off script and start figuring out what might make me happy.  To that end, I’m leaving my current gig to work at Indeed, the job search engine.  They have some fantastic people over there and alot of great problems that I’m looking forward to wrapping my head around.  During my discovery process, I had some conversations with folks over at Google and Facebook, but in the end, I found that it wasn’t time to leave Austin.  There is more work I need to do towards figuring out (and in a way, remembering) what it is that makes me happy.

Passing on Facebook was tough.  The people there were amazing, my friends would have been super-impressed that my obsession with math had earned me a job at the hottest company on the planet, and if the hype is to be believed, I would have almost certainly made many millions of dollars via stock options.  I haven’t found many people who understand why I did it, even among close friends.  Conversely, I have a hard time understanding how they could not understand why I did what I did.  It’s all been very confusing, so I’m going to try to lay it out here.

Two things you need to understand about me: 1) I don’t worry about whether or not I’ll ever make millions of dollars, because I will.  I worry about the way in which I’m going to make millions of dollars.  2)  In the set of all problems to work on, there are two mutually exclusive subsets– My Problems, and not My Problems.

I understand that my first point might sound a little arrogant, so let me explain it a bit.  In my life, I have passed on several opportunities to become a millionaire.  In all likelihood, so have you.  For example, I could have gone to law school after college and gone to work for a big firm.  I could have gone to NYC or Chicago and become a derivatives trader or a quant.  These are both clear paths to lots of money that I passed on, and I feel like it’s easy to understand why: those lifestyles kind of suck, and alot of the people who go down those paths don’t end up being very happy.  I’m not saying Google and Facebook are crappy places to work, I’m just trying to establish that there is more to life than money, and using money as the primary driver of life decisions isn’t generally a good idea.

There are a lot of problems in the world that I find interesting– both in the math world and in the business world.  Within the set of interesting problems, there are a few isolated islands that are My Problems– the problems that I feel a connection with, like my mind was designed to solve them, and working on them is akin to a religious experience.  I don’t generally know where I’m going to come across one, but my experience over the last several years has given me some guideposts.

At the end of the day, that’s why Indeed won– I became bewitched by a particular problem that I felt I could solve there.  Facebook and Google both give off the “Place with Interesting Problems” vibe, and I feel like I could have found something I would have enjoyed doing at either place.  But that’s not ever going to be as compelling as having one of My Problems staring me in the face and getting the opportunity to earn my wealth by solving it, because that’s how I want to make my way in the world.

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