A new beginning
Accelerating change in our world is quite noticeable; the chart below still amazes me. No one knows for sure what comes next, and even as a software engineer I know the profession isn’t immune to massive shifts. I don’t know what will happen, and it’s natural to feel fear in response. I’d rather focus on finding ways to thrive in the face of unpredictability. I believe that adaptability is the best course to thrive amidst unpredictable change.
I bet you’ve got plenty of personal experience of change feeling uncomfortable. What about making the process enjoyable? Voluntarily undergoing discomfort can cause such a shift; consider the punishment of being forced to do exercise versus near universal enjoyment of practicing a sport one loves. I’m choosing to change and reinvent myself voluntarily before I’m forced to so the process becomes more enjoyable and controllable.
I’m not throwing everything away, I love and plan to continue building software. I find personal experiments to test what works and pick what works best to keep doing long-term to be effective. Find ways to test piece by piece before making longer-term changes. Examples include: changing one food at a time and measuring the result working better than any particular diet and living in a new place for two weeks telling me more than months of research/thought. I’m starting to share more broadly about the experiments I’m already running and done, I’m calling the effort: An Experimental Life. My sharing is also an experiment and I bet that some of the experiments will be both interesting and useful to enough of you to make sharing worthwhile. Sometimes I’ll miss that mark, and I’ll learn to do better along the way.
I felt and still feel afraid of sharing this. I’ve rewritten this post repeatedly in search of the perfect expression of what I’m thinking. There is a desire amplified by social media to show how amazing and perfect one’s life is. It’s a facade, there is imperfection and mess in everyone’s life. Personally, my life feels simultaneously amazing and messy. I’ve found that trying to hide my mistakes and learning process ends up slowing me down with shame, makes me less relatable, and leads to people repeating similar mistakes who could have learned from mine. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way and I look forward to finding more of you that do. I’ve repeatedly found imperfect action consistently beats inaction, I’m working on living that way consistently and finding out how it plays out. My next action is to post more than once a week for the next year. More to come shortly!
