Dear friends,

How are you? I’ve been happy and well… and we have a new member of the family! We recently welcomed our daughter, Ria, into the world. The past few months of watching her grow have been so fun. We’ve been cocooning as a family of three, surrounded by the loving support of our community. I feel so lucky.

I took some time off work for maternity leave and have since returned full-time. The last time I had such a long hiatus from working was back when I was first job searching after college. More on that later! But what I mean to say is that now, being back at work after giving birth and with a baby girl in tow, things feel different.

I’ve been reflecting on work, on my relationship to it- among many other things. Parenthood has brought a whole new level of reflection for me as I become more aware of my own views, and how I might help shape hers.

For as long as I can remember, I have sought to do good work.

It started early in life with good grades, neat handwriting, and quietly listening in class. I noticed that my parents and teachers paid attention to this industrious behavior. They smiled and said, good job! I learned over time that being this way brought them joy, which made me feel proud of myself. So I slowly cultivated these qualities and walked this path.

When I graduated from college, I did not have a job lined up. The month I spent searching for that first one felt like the longest month of my life. Without a student title or a job title to anchor me, I felt adrift. All those years of schooling — gone to waste! I applied to jobs ravenously, barely reading the descriptions or understanding what the companies did. I just wanted to fill that big gap in my identity.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I finally accepted my first role: an entry-level job at a marketing firm. Hooray! It was a brief moment of success, but I knew there were mountains to climb ahead. I wanted to continue doing the same kind of good work I’d started in school. I tried to be dependable, productive, proactive. Lots of “sir, yes sir” and an eager absorption of this new way of being in the world. In this way, being a salaried worker came easily to me. I followed what my managers did and made friends with my coworkers. I learned the nuances too. No one ever told me to wait until my manager left before going home, but somehow I knew. I absorbed it quietly, like so many unspoken rules of what it means to be “good.”

Later, when I started my own company, I dove headfirst into the excitement of startup and entrepreneurship world. I attended networking events in New York and San Francisco. When I introduced myself to someone new, it was my company, myself, my self-worth all blurred together into one. I worked without set hours and tried to contribute to our success in any way I could.

And now, working in technology — an industry built on the promise of optimization and scale — I catch myself believing that the more I do, the better off the company will be. Nowadays, I still want to be the Good Employee.

But where there is a good employee, there must also be a bad one. Those were the people who didn’t work as hard, who didn’t do their research beforehand, or who didn’t respond to emails as quickly as I thought they should. I complained about them to my friends and family and judged them. And yet, on days when I was sick or had other things going on and couldn’t give it my 100%, I felt like the bad employee myself. Some days, this even made me feel like a bad person.

Surely these good vs. bad concepts were real- I was certain they were. But when I look at them closer now, I get confused.

I’ve noticed too that when I’m with my daughter, my mind drifts to work. When I’m working, I think about how much I’d rather be playing with her instead. What’s up with that?

These labels: bad employee, bad student, bad mother- are shortcuts, I realize. Magic tricks of the mind to tidy up a complex world. The labels feel real to me because they’ve helped me for as long as I can remember.

What I’m slowly realizing lately, too, is that none of us were ever bad at all. Just tired, focused on something else, inexperienced, or shaped by reasons I cannot know based on my limited view of another person’s lived experience. I was shocked when I first realized this. I had spent so much time and energy judging myself and others, trying to discern the difference between good and bad work. Now I’m seeing more clearly (at least in the moments when I’m paying attention and not falling into old habits!) that we’re all human, trying to find our way within the systems we live in.

Our shared culture values productivity and ROI. There’s always more to do, more collabs, more campaigns to optimize, more to reinvest and do it all over again. I participated willingly, believing it was correct and that my role was to quietly assimilate.

Now, I’m beginning to ask myself in earnest: what does it actually mean (for me, not for others) to do good work? And why does this matter to me in the first place?

I don’t have the answers, but each time I pause to ask the question, something in me softens. I see the younger Nisha who was trying to make sense of how the world works. I see my daughter’s eyes looking inquisitively at me, my reflection in them, and the mother version of myself finding her way through the world anew. And I feel that simply being witness to these questions is wonderful.

Thank you for reading these thoughts! I would love to hear how you see work in your life, or how becoming a parent has changed the way you view and do things.

Warmly,
Nisha