A massive dam on the Nile, the cure to burnout, and why gratitude works

A massive dam on the Nile, the cure to burnout, and why gratitude works

🌊 Whenever you spend billions of dollars and divert huge amounts of natural resources, that is going to impact a lot of people. That can spark curiosity, even as we marvel at the engineering achievement. We’ll talk about one such project in this newsletter today. 

Additionally, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, or nearing burnout, we’ve got something for you to!

👀 In today’s newsletter:

  • A new, mega hydropower plant in Africa

  • Where to focus on to overcome frustration and burnout

  • 🔥💵 Hot Job – AI Semantics Engineer

MUST READ

👀 A new dam in Ethiopia is both an engineering marvel and a controversial project.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) will be the largest hydropower plant in Africa and among the top 20 in the world.

This dam is huge! It’s 1.1 miles long, 509 feet tall, and was estimated to cost around $5 billion USD.

⚡️ It was built to support Ethiopia's struggling electrical grid, with a planned capacity of 6.45 gigawatts. 

Construction began in 2011–the first phase of reservoir filling began in 2020, and it is said to have completed filling in September of 2023. 

But of course, the water from the Nile River has other countries that are downstream of it, so building a dam like this has controversies around water rights, especially with Egypt and Sudan. This makes sense as Egypt relies on the Nile for about 97 percent of its freshwater resources, so any changes could have a huge impact on that country. 

Negotiations have stopped and started at times, with the United States getting involved in 2020 to help facilitate discussions.

🪨 From an engineering and design perspective, aside from just building the large structure, there are critical management issues to solve such as how to handle sediment. 

Essentially all of the sediment that enters the GERD reservoir will be trapped unless they find ways to mitigate the issue. It’s currently estimated that it can hold about 100 years of sediment, but that doesn’t result in long-term sustainability. One potential solution is releasing what is called turbid density currents, but there are many ideas in play.

However you put it, this dam is an engineering marvel, and it’s amazing to see what we can do!

Career tips

💤 How to overcome frustration and burnout in your career?

"You are your own worst critic" — we hear this a lot, but does it have to be true? Do we always have to be so hard on ourselves as we try to make progress and reach new goals?

Goal setting, resolutions, making progress, and reflection is something many people do at the turn of a new year. Yet many people set goals only to not reach them, and get demoralized and stop trying.

💆🏽‍♀️ So how do we actually find happiness in our lives and careers?

The answer—lack of happiness, frustration, burnout, and dissatisfaction is driven mostly by focusing on The Gap—the difference between where we are now vs. the idea that we want to be true. This focus gets us spending so much time feeling that sense of lack - "I'm not good enough, I don't have enough, things will never be how I want them to be…" And on and on.

📈 So how do we turn it around?

By focusing on The Gain—the progress we've made, how we have improved, feeling gratitude, and more.

The idea for The Gap and The Gain first came from Dan Sullivan, founder of the Strategic Coach, who in 2021 partnered with Benjamin Hardy to create a full book about the concept.

The basic idea is this—when you are in The Gap, you are measuring your current state against the ideal, always seeing there to be a gap no matter how successful you are at this point. When you are in The Gap, you feel like you haven't accomplished anything at all because the ideal is a moving target. This gets you feeling like you have failed, wasted time, or continue to fall further behind.

Alternatively, when you are in The Gain, you are measuring the progress you have made from where you used to be. The wins, the people you've met, the things you have learned, the growth of relationships, financial progress, and more. This focus allows you to have a sense of having achieved something and will motivate you to achieve even more!

One of the strongest ways to focus and shift your thinking towards The Gain is to journal about it. Here’s one I like to do on a quarterly basis:

✍🏽 Take 15-30 minutes and complete the following activity, using 5-10 minutes for each item.

  • What wins or gains have I had in the last 30 days? Who have I met? What have I learned? How have I made progress? How have I changed?

  • Do the same for the last 90 days

  • Do the same for the last year

Just make a bulleted list. Once you've written these things down, look over the lists and experience a sense of gratitude for how far you've come.

I promise if you do this, you'll come out of it with a more positive mindset and motivated to tackle more challenges and opportunities!

🧗🏼‍♂️ By focusing more on the gain, you’ll see clearly how much you’ve grown and progressed in the past, and be mentally and emotionally ready to progress even more in the future!

    This week’s hottest jobs

    In this section you’ll find the latest jobs as featured on: jobs.interestingengineering.com 

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    trending articles

    “The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.”

    Dan Sullivan 

    book recommendation

    The Gap and the Gain

    👩🏾‍🏫 If you liked the career tips content above, you may want to go deeper into the content and read the whole book on the subject. 

    In this book you will learn that measuring your current self vs. your former self has enormous psychological benefits. 

    And that's really the key to this deceptively simple yet multilayered concept that will have you feeling good, feeling grateful, and feeling like you are making progress even when times are tough, which will in turn will bolster motivation, confidence, and future success.

    🎯 If you're finding that happiness eludes you no matter how much you've achieved, then learning this easy mindset shift will set you on a life-changing path to greater fulfillment and success.

    Need help with advertising? Reach 150,000 engineering and tech professionals. Contact us 

    Written by 

    Jeff Perry

    Engineering Career Coach

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