I'm always thrilled to hear stories from people who have or reach this level of self-awareness, about what determines their mood/satisfaction. It's so wonderful

I'm always thrilled to hear stories from people who have or reach this level of self-awareness, about what determines their mood/satisfaction. It's so wonderfully freeing to know yourself to that level, and understand part of what makes you tick internally. I myself am a former-engineer and current-manager, and I also remember absolutely loathing meetings as a waste of time, explaining things to people who don't really care that much about what I have to say, and plus why should I contort myself to speak "their" language and why can't they be bothered to learn to speak "my" language as an engineer? But over time, I think I've come to develop a taste for, the style of communication that happens in most typical business meetings. If you think about coding and entering a "flow" state, to me the core of that flow is being able to clearly and concisely conceptualize the software abstractions you have in your head, mapping them effectively from business concepts or technical requirements and into code, and being able to just churn out a beautiful representation of all those things into something tangible (an application, a service, etc.). Believe it or not, in roundabout ways, meetings can achieve that kind of "flow" state as well, creating a shared understanding of a beautiful abstraction, and resulting in high-bandwidth exchange of ideas. Certainly it is much harder to achieve "flow" for meeting communication than for coding/engineering (IMHO at least) since it involves lots of other people with lots of different backgrounds and different levels of understanding, but I find that nonetheless it is something I can find enjoyment from the pursuit of that state. Not every meeting succeeds in reaching that "flow" state, but more and more I can perceive and introspect why/why-not it didn't, and come out with tangible lessons for myself for improving. So long as I have a flywheel for getting better, it doesn't feel so draining or so pointless anymore even when I "fail". And sometimes, I really do come out of the most productive meetings feeling very energized, and hearing from my peers how much clarity they gained or how much more confident they are about a decision that was previously questionable/uncertain, is truly a great feeling (at least as good for me, as producing a solid piece of beautiful code).