danielAsaboro

Posted on Jul 23, 2023

I took a BIG Leap, but Backwards. Here's why and how it's panning out

#beginners #learning #productivity #tips

Just before June ended, I got a message from my old-time friend.

The content was plain and small, but it was big enough to make me revisit the thousands of micro-decisions that compounded down to where I am today, what I'm doing, and for whom.

While I promised to revert, sadly, since then, I've not. This is my attempt to keep up to my word.

But first, a quick clarification

It's easy to connect the dots looking backwards, particularly if you are making progress, but the same can't be said in the reverse. So please note that it was a series of tough decisions down here, but I'm glad I made them.

I made my debut a long time ago

I got introduced to Programming my last year in High school — Think when Adobeflash and Actionscript were still a thing. Like most beginners, I wasn't fully immersed as I was doing it alongside other things.

This continued till my first year in the University.

Then I got introduced to MicroControllers and even competed at various competitions. There, I had to use C++ and learnt it to solve most of the difficulties I faced.

Simultaneously, I was also learning Html, CSS, Js, PHP, and MYSQL (the languages of the web then).

This was in 2017/18. Jquery was the trending library at that time. And suddenly, I stopped coding: C++, Microcontrollers, Web development — basically everything.

Then covid came out of nowhere!

By this time, it was like a year's break from everything programming. And funny enough, I'd dipped my hand in the Graphics world. You know the usual suspect: Photoshop, Illustrator, and a little bit of Lightroom.

But I got bored, and quickly.

For one, I could replicate most designs I saw since I knew the tools, where to find them, and what they could do — but I couldn't create a satisfactory design from scratch no matter how hard I tried.

Yes, I studied colour theory.

The wheel. The Psychology. I knew what analogous colours are, what complementary is, and what it means for a set of colours to be Triadic. But I couldn't compose them into something meaningful. Something beautiful. Or, thumb scrolling.

No matter how much I studied and tried, I just couldn't.

Perhaps, I'm not good with colours. In some way, it reflects in my clothing style to date. You'd hardly see me deviate from the Neutrals: white, black, brown and other shades in between.

Perhaps, I wasn't creative.

But I couldn't stay Idle, so I jumped into 3D.

At first, It felt exciting.

All I wanted to do then was translate everything around me into a 3D digital representation. But I slowly dropped out, albeit painfully (My PC couldn't handle the workload).

Then, for some reason, I dabbled into Marketing.

First, it was copywriting.

I studied the greats: Gary Halbert, Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, and Joe Sugarman. I read books like Tested Advertising Methods, Scientific Advertising, and Great Leads — not once, not twice, but over, and over again.

I picked interest in B2B saas (that was where the money was).

As a result, I learnt Content Marketing because I realized that relationships are everything in B2B. You have to "nurture" people with "value" so they are comfortable buying from you.

I did this actively for two years.

And in that period, I learnt about SEO, ABM, Customer Research and all that kind of Marketing Jazz. Overall, I improved my writing skills (I'd wrongly assumed I didn't need to be good at writing since I would be an Engineer).

Coincidentally, that was when I started realizing a few, fundamental, but painful truths about life. I will go over them briefly:

Don't do hard things

Down to the course I'm currently studying at the University, all my choices in the past were predicated on doing hard things.

I didn't need to like them. I just get satisfaction from completing them. But life is too short to spend time playing unnecessary games, you will only end up with unnecessary prices.

I learnt this lesson, painfully.

As you grow old, you will realize that society doesn't reward you for doing hard things. Instead, it rewards you for doing things it values but thinks are hard to get.

It's a subtle distinction but with profound implications

It reminds me of Naval's quote about society paying you for things it needs but didn't know how to get. It's what made Henry Ford, Rockefeller, and Elon Musk who they are in society.

They gave society what she needed and got paid for it. In my experience, solving problems at scale with software is one of them, but Marketing isn't.

I think Marketing is tougher than software development. The space of possible solutions to a problem was unlimited and nondeterministic unlike software, yet people value it widely less (the salaries show it)

Two, I was naturally a computer guy

There are several things I know without trying about computer systems that most people have to actively invest time, energy, and resources before they can.

It might feel like a brag, but it's the truth.

I was spoofing wifi since I was 13. Did your files got deleted from your USB disk? I could recover it in a few minutes. I was already using cmd to shut down a pc, get a wifi password, or **

Did your laptop start showing a blue screen error and wouldn't boot up properly? I could diagnose and fix the issue without resorting to professional help or spending unnecessary money on repairs and on and on.

When I talked at a young age about PCs then, people listened.

So you can imagine my shock getting into marketing, and two years down the line finding myself in a back-and-forth argument with people who don't have the slightest idea about marketing yet always want to give advice on it — it's uncommon in the software world.

I was getting dissatisfied internally as a result. So, I started looking into jumping ship. The opportunity came in February this year.

I volunteered for a small Political Party

It's February. My country was holding a presidential election. So I decided to volunteer for a small Political Party with a vision to restore hope, combat corruption, and bring positive change.

That short month was intensive for me, it set the foundation for my switching back to computer programming. For one, I got to see firsthand, how useful tech is, and the big impact it can make.

And two, one of the directors there saw my friend and me using our knowledge to help others, unblock them, and move our cause for being there- forward.

So along the line, he pitched an idea he was working on and asked if I would like to be a part of the developers on it. After a few deliberations, I jumped on that opportunity, the rest, they say? is history ...but that's the not the whole story...

I've been struggling to pickup software development since 2019

Year in, Year out, after a month or two, I'd always drop it. This time was different. I've stuck with it for over 3 months and counting. It's getting interesting with each day passing and I don't see myself stopping anytime soon.