Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to talk about how taking an initiative can help, but we don't know when it will help!

Paying Dividends

Sometimes we do something but we don't see results of what we did for a while, sometimes years later!

I've been one that likes to do things in a detailed and helpful way in terms of the work that I do. I also really like to make sure that everyone around me is doing well, and that has been a key to what I think is my career success. One of the things that can seem a little challenging though is that the efforts that we put in now, sometimes don't come back to pay us dividends for a really long time!

In one of my pet projects at work, things that I was doing that wasn't necessarily in my job description but was something I was doing just because, I took a look at what we had for documentation and improved it! The team I'm working on has been around for a long time at this point, but one of the challenges is that the documentation that we had was fairly minimal and sadly also fairly outdated. Combine that with a busy work schedule and you've got a recipe for some issues in staying up to date on the stuff..

I took it upon myself in my spare time on various days to take a deep dive into the documentation and re-write it so that it was far more useful. I did this for two reasons: one is that it helps me learn and understand the products a lot better and two it helps my colleagues keep themselves refreshed and up to date.

I finished that pet project in the first draft about 2 or 3 months after I started it, and that was 2 years ago now. Fast forward to recent events at work.. where a sizable chunk of my team got laid off. It was a very unfortunate event to have occurred but it is what it is, and it's business.

I thankfully retained my job and got a bit of a promotion out of it but I think one of the reasons that I was able to do that was because of things like the above initiative.

I didn't NEED to do what I did. I could've easily just stayed in my lane exactly where I was. I was effective in that I could deliver great projects and bring them to completion but I could've stayed with just that. Thankfully it's not in my nature to do that.. so I made sure to do what I enjoy doing! I had a few other initiatives that I worked on and had decent success but this documentation thing was for sure the highlight.

I think taking on personal initiatives like this are really important for us in our careers. Sure people can sit there and screw off at work, scrolling through social media and shit when they aren't actively doing something but that's not really something smaller companies are interested in. They need people around that are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work on something, so that they can keep improving.

When I started my little project, I didn't really know what the implications would be later on, but I knew that it was the right thing to do and that it needed to be done. Things like this are what I hope more people do, in that they see a need in their work place and they find a way to fix that need even if it means doing some extra work. There's no saying when the extra efforts will pay us dividends, hell they may never pay us any at all at the company. I think there are more ways that we get paid with these types of things though, and that's a great thing.

What about you, do you think that you got a new job, promotion or anything of the sort by doing extra work in your spare time? Let me know in the comments!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI. All pictures are mine unless otherwise stated}

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