As a kid I asked questions incessantly.

My mom tells me that her friends used to tell her to stop constantly answering my inquiries. But she didn’t. She’d take the time to answer no matter what or how much I asked.

Kids tend to ask all sorts of questions. Why is the sky blue? Why does it get dark? They question everything. Even the most fundamental concepts have to be proven from scratch to satisfy a child’s curiosity.

Children also don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. Through the help of their parents and the society in which they live, they learn not to say certain things, not to act certain ways. They learn the obstacles that others place in our world, and soon enough they learn to create their very own.

As we grow up, we somehow stop asking questions. I’m not entirely sure if it’s because our curiosity is quenched or because we are taught that it’s bad form to ask too much.

At one point, we figure out possible outcomes and condition our lives around them. Instead of pushing the boundaries we learn to live within them. A simple no is enough to stop us from trying. We even makeup excuses to reassure our lack of persistence. ‘I didn’t really want that anyway.’ or ‘Who needs that?’ are statements most commonly used by people who didn’t get what they really wanted but aren’t willing to admit it to themselves.

Remember when you wanted to go away with your friends for the weekend and your parents wouldn’t let you? (or a sleepover, a concert, you can substitute just about anything) Did you give up after asking once? If you’re like most teenagers, I bet you came up with a million creative ways of asking. You tried begging, bartering, pleading, threatening. Some of you might have even sneaked out for the night, although you never got the green light to go. The answer no was simply unacceptable. Where did all that creative energy go?

How does that non-relenting teenager become the adult who can’t overcome a simple obstacle? Since when does a lack of degree stop you from achieving your dream job? Or lack of previous experience from trying something new?

Not only do we not try to overcome obstacles as strongly as we used to, we also stop questioning the fundamentals. When I was interviewing for a job during my senior year, my decision came down to two firms: the firm I work for now and a well-known consulting firm. There were many advantages and disadvantages to either, which I won’t go into here, but my decision was easy once I figured out how the consulting firm worked.

The firm had a few pieces of software that were built in-house. Genuine solutions built from client requirements. Most likely built by good coders/designers, but who knows? Since then, the firm had been tweaking and changing bits and pieces of the original code to make it work with any new client’s requirements. They never really took the time to figure out what the client truly wanted, they just listened with an ear towards how they could tweak the current software. I could never work in that firm.

A common occurrence, especially in the ever-evolving and expansive world of technology, is people trying to fit problems into their pre-prepared set of solutions. This consulting firm had an available set of solutions and somehow no client needed a different something new. Since when did we start fitting the problems into the solutions? Since when did we decide repeating what we knew to make us look good was better than expanding onto the unknown? Since when is taking the opportunity to learn something new and to truly listen to the client’s needs a bad idea? When did we become such copouts?

As adults we reach a state where we’ve done something a certain way for so long, that we never ask the original why again. We never go back to the fundamentals and try to see it from a different perspective. We never see it without all the preconceived notions we hold.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we forget to ask all the important questions.

Previously? Multitasking.

I’ve been thinking about work a lot lately.

About why I do what I do that is.

No, I’m not independently wealthy, and yes, I know that I work so I can make money. But I also know that there are a million, billion ways to make money. So I guess I’m not talking about working as a concept as much as my actual job itself.

I graduated college, that’s university for my British readers, almost five years ago. Upon graduation, all too sad to be leaving the breathless beauty that is Pittsburgh, I moved to New York and joined an investment bank, which I still work for, as a programmer.

In my first three years, I worked on multiple projects, all on the UNIX platform with the amazing Motif GUI libraries or the even more fun TK ones, and coded shell scripts, perl scripts, and C code. I traveled to London several times, and even lived there for a few months because of a major project. I learned a tremendous amount in those three years, mostly from the very intelligent people in my surroundings.

My department also had an overwhelming amount of evening and, at times, weekend support work, so I spent what easily qualifies as obscene hours working.

In my forth year, I was asked to go to Tokyo for an extended business trip. Two of the team members there had recently quit, leaving the group in a very difficult situation. Since I’d previously worked for that manager and knew him to be amazing, I seriously considered the offer. Six months without Jake in a country where I didn’t speak the language, and one that was incredibly far away both from New York and Istanbul, seemed a bit insane.

But I decided it was exactly what I needed. I was having problems with some of the people I worked with and there was way too much politics going on in my group in New York so work-wise it was the best alternative at the time. And I figured that if Jake and my relationship couldn’t survive a six-month long distance, it was better to find out now. I also decided I needed to challenge myself. I needed to find out that I could live without Jake, if I had to, and that I could go to a totally foreign country and make it just fine.

So even though just about all of my friends recommended otherwise, I accepted the offer.

And it turned out to be one of the greatest six months of my life. I loved the people I worked for and with, even the work I did was more fun. I got promoted. I learned not only more about coding, but I can also now speak Japanese. I was totally unfamiliar with Japanese culture and had never been to the Far East. I found out that I could do on my own just fine. My relationship with Jake got ten times stronger. And I decided that as soon as I returned back to the States, I would change my job.

I came back to New York on May 19, 2000. The very next day, I flew home to Turkey to celebrate my mother’s fiftieth birthday and my twin nephews’ first one. While there, I decided that what I really wanted to do was work part-time. I wanted the time to do other things. I wanted to go to museums. I wanted to volunteer. I wanted to take more classes. I wanted to enjoy life more. Read more books.

I came back to New York with the intention of looking for a part-time job internally until the end of the summer and if I couldn’t find one by then, I would look elsewhere. People kept insisting that there were no part-time positions in the firm and that I would end up having to quit. And of course that wasn’t the case. I had several options and finally accepted the job that I currently have.

Now I get to write an application from scratch. That’s a dream job. Most people in companies like mine get to fix or enhance other people’s code. My team and I get to decide our database schema, our system flows, our platform, the languages we’ll use, and even the GUI layouts. To top it off, I only work Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.

Sounds perfect, right?

Well it was. It is. But I still spend many of my days asking myself why I do this. Is this what I really want to do? What do I want to do? And I can’t get the questions out of my mind.

I love coding and I don’t see myself ever giving it up. I write code for myself, for my friends, and for Jake. But I also want to feel like my work helps others or the world in general. I want to make more of a difference. I want to work with people who will challenge me. And I also want to work from home. I want to be able to work in my pajamas. I want to have my own hours.

And, of course, the question that keeps recurring is: Why don’t I?

Why don’t I just do it?

Previously? Criticism.

I generally feel pretty excited to be at work on Wednesday mornings. Especially this week, since Friday was a holiday, after the five-day weekend I was totally ready to walk in there and kick some butt.

And I did.

For a while.

I cancelled all my morning meetings and did a huge amount of work. I made decisions, I figured out some of the stuff that had been frustrating me awhile, I called my teammates and organized stuff. By the time I walked into my 1pm meeting, I’d already accomplished more than half the items on my to-do list and I felt good.

I was in the zone.

The 1pm meeting wasn’t even for me. My application is supposed to use this library that’s written by another team and they wanted me to explain some of my object model so they could be sure the library would function properly. As I sat there explaining my system and its parts, they started talking about how I should organize the information so it would work. And I sat there trying to decipher what exactly they meant. I’m not familiar with the library as much as I’d like to be and I kept getting more and more frustrated as they spoke.

By the time I left the meeting, I was kaput for the rest of the day. I sat in my chair, deflated and unwilling to do anything. After a few minutes of trying to listen to my thoughts, I realized that it was my lack of knowledge that made me mad. I hate the idea of being involved with something I don’t fully understand. I’m not just talking about the fear of starting a new project where you’ve never done such a thing and you feel clueless and don’t have any idea where to even begin. This was worse than that. I have to use this library. I have to really understand it or I’m screwed. And right now, I don’t have the time to sit and learn it. I have a million other things I’m supposed to do for this project.

I think this is why I take so many classes, I hate being in an environment where I’m clueless and I have this intense need to learn everything so the two put together make my life all about school.

I guess it could be worse, though I’m not really sure anymore.

Previously? Conditioning.