Boring or Fancy

This question keeps following me. Do I pick boring or fancy work?

I keep reframing it, but it always comes back to motivation. Why am I saying yes to this thing right now?

Early in your career the trade-offs usually look like this:

I used to chase these in sequence.

First challenge, so I could learn fast. Then control, because I wanted to shape decisions. Then money, because after enough years you stop pretending compensation doesn’t matter.

Now it’s less idealistic and more practical.

I don’t need every project to be sexy. I can do boring work if the team is strong and the upside is real. I can also do chaotic frontier work, but I respect the energy cost more than I used to.

My best zone is usually boring work with one hard edge. Enough discomfort to grow, not so much chaos that everything feels like a fire.

I’m seeing both extremes right now.

At Motif we’re building the first independent wealth advisor, agentic, working only for you. Exciting. Technically brutal. Some problems are pure R&D. You solve one hard thing, two new unknowns show up.

In parallel, I have a tech leadership mandate at MCO (My Compliance Office). By startup stereotype, this is “boring”. But the business performs really well, people execute, and the economics are healthy.

If you want a final conclusion from me, I don’t have one.

Fancy work drains you fast. Stimulating but fragmented, hard to stay in flow.

Boring work can trap you too. You coast, do just enough, slowly stop pushing.

Right now my answer is to run both lanes on purpose: