It’s not something I talk about a lot these days, but several years ago I was at a critical fork in my career path. I had a few years experience in technology, but because I didn’t know myself or what I really wanted to do, I thought that the only way to really build something was to transform myself into a developer. What blows my mind is that through pure chance, I didn’t continue going down that path.
Rewinding back to end of 2012. I took the money I had saved from working full time, consulting work through my digital agency, and living frugally, and I had 18 weeks to take a sabbatical from working for money which I devoted to teach myself how to code.
I created my own learning to code plan, executed my plan (with the help of many talented developers!), and secured a job offer for an entry level coding job. But, I turned down the offer.
Decision Time
The whole process came to a head in January 2013, when as the final step of my leaning to code process, I set out to secure an entry level programming job. Simultaneously CitySourced’s CEO reached out to me to ask if I would build and run his sales and marketing at CitySourced.
In all “deals”, it’s amazing to have the leverage of multiple options. But, in the case it was the most conflicted I have ever felt about a step in my professional career. On one hand, I had this nice entry level job offer to be an engineer at a digital web agency in Los Angeles. The company had office space in a renovated airline hanger formerly owned by Howard Hugues and was building cool web tools for clients; best of all, I would receive guidance from more experienced engineers. Back then I knew that I never saw myself being an individual engineering contributor and I didn’t see myself managing engineering teams. I wanted to get my skills good enough that I could build my own tool, venture out on my own, and create a company.
At the time, I was heavily influenced by the godfather of YCominator, Paul Graham:
The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.
I had just spent eighteen weeks “paying myself” (aka dwindling my savings) to learn to code. But, I also had this other opportunity to walk into a leadership role at young, ambitious software startup with a small, loyal customer base and lots of upside potential. In the end I knew it was the right decision to lead sales and marketing at CitySourced because it fit better with me and my personality and who I am; but I still felt a little embarrassed telling people that I had just expended this time, energy and money to teach myself a skill that I wasn’t really going to put to use in tangible manner.
Fortunately I didn’t let my ego get in the way and used some humility to say that this eighteen weeks was a great learning experience I’m going to carry those skills forward, but I’m ultimately not going to pursue it long time. It’d be too easy to say I wasted my time.
Removing Ego
Unfortunately, at the time, I didn’t really know myself well enough to realize that while I believed this path as a coder was a means to an end, it wasn’t really something I enjoyed or would have been successful at long term.
It’s really hard to admit that when you take a path, personally or professionally, that ends up being a dead end for you. Hindsight is 2020; and with the perspective of time it’s clear now that that itch that I scratched actually helped me realize where I wanted to go and what I wanted to build.
Finding Your Path
It’s really easy when you look back on a career path and use history to remove the stumbles and blunders. And this smoothing out process leaves you with a well defined passage from point A to B. It’s comforting and our mind impresses a cleaner story to memory. In reality, most of us have lots of starts and stops. These aren’t failures or mistakes. Our path isn’t predetermined so that we’ve got to uncover it, these explorations are all just a part of our process to grow and learn as we develop our path.