How Corona got me off my ass and doing something real.
Before
I, like you, had only one reaction when I first heard about the alleged coronavirus taking over the world. “It’s a fad, it’ll go away in a couple days.” For a couple weeks, my stubborn self could not believe that something like a virus could simply overtake the world by storm. It seemed unimaginable. It STILL seems unimaginable. So, for a while, my life continued without any changes. Everyday I would brace myself for the brutal Michigan winter with my jacket equipped, my bag on my back, and I would head out to handle my daily responsibilities: schoolwork, clubs, and my various social duties.
When March 6 came, I was hardly ready. Washington University became the first university in America to close because of the outbreak. It was then that my rationality took over my stubbornness and I knew that I was gonna be leaving my freshman year at the University of Michigan prematurely. What a slap in the face. When I was in high school, all I could think about was getting through each day so that I could get to the college of my dreams and finally be able to just relax. Well that clearly was not gonna happen.
But this story does not end with me wallowing about how life is unfair and that my time was wrongfully stolen from me by a force out of my control. I definitely couldn’t imagine what happen next.
After
I arrived to my humble abode on Long Island on March 16. The immediate surprise was that my family was all together in the same household for the first time in years. Since my brother had gone off to college and then moved to Philly and finally New York, he had not been living in our house for a while. But he was home. My parents, my brother, my sister, and I were all under one house again.
The most surprising thing that happened to me, though, was my level of boredom. In high school, it felt like I was always alone and off doing something to pique my interest. Whether it was learning to play the piano, developing some software for a client, or just stumbling upon an interesting book, I was always occupied with solo tasks. Yet, after being in a social environment like college for the better part of a year, I completely forgot how to keep myself occupied. I was used to walking across my dorm hall to say hi to my neighbors or messaging a friend to study or just bang on my friend’s dorm so they could keep me occupied if I was getting bored. There was never a moment to be alone and it was certainly never dull.
So coming home again meant having to relearn how to occupy myself when I get bored. I couldn’t go to the gym. I couldn’t meet up with my friends. I could barely even go outside without getting yelled at by my mom. What could I do? Well, the simple answer was just do nothing. The internet definitely made that socially acceptable. Instagram and Facebook were filled with people making TikToks, binge-watching popular shows, and catching up on the newest, greatest memes.
That was not gonna fly with me. While I definitely have my fair share of procrastination issues, I start to get angry at myself if my productivity levels decrease too dramatically in a given time period. The constant thoughts of “you could be bettering yourself” or “you could be building something new” always seem to crowd my mind as I re-watch the Shawshank Redemption for the third time. It was an incredibly frustrating feeling.
As I was having this internal struggle, my brother was in the room next door and was talking to his main designer for his company, Nick. My brother is an entrepreneur and has built his company, Dandy, from the ground up. However, he was talking to Nick for a particularly interesting reason. Nick had some startup ideas but not the software engineering skills to build them. My brother, knowing that I had an unbelievable itch to start working again, introduced me to Nick. The rest, as they say, was history.
Sumpixel
Starting a company from scratch for an entirely new, untested idea is not easy. In fact, it is probably the most difficult thing you can do. You have no foundation as to what the product should be, you have no idea how you are going to attract customers, and you certainly do not know if it will even succeed even if you put 1000% of your effort, time, and money into it. And yet, this uncertainty and risk is what ultimately yields the highest profits and most successful people in our generation.
However, when you factor in that Coronavirus is sweeping the world right now and putting pretty much ALL of your responsibilities on hold, you start to wonder if there really are any risks. On the one hand, you could put all your time in and fail. If this happens, you lost a bunch of hours trying to build something that otherwise would have went to your binge-watching habits. At the very least, you learned the intricacies of building a business, whether it be product development, customer acquisition, or how to use modern SEO tools. You have now made yourself a more marketable hire in the job market because you have learned a set of skills that your competitors have only learned about it in class. On the other, you could put all your time in and succeed. Wouldn’t that be nice?
My company, Sumpixel, is trying to fix two main problems we currently have in the graphic designer hiring process. For one, designers who do not have the best ‘credentials’ (i.e. didn’t go to a top university) but are still very talented are not getting the right looks from recruiters because recruiters overvalue the brand a university has. This problem leads me to the second problem: recruiters have to scan many untalented individuals before they can find the talent in the rubble. Recruiters should be spending their time interviewing only the designers with talent and that are best fit for their business rather than wasting time with individuals who are obviously not a fit.
Our company fixes this problem by displaying only talented designers to a recruiter that are pre-vetted by our in-house designers. Through a three-step evaluation process that takes its form in the way of a quiz, a portfolio analysis, and design challenge, we ensure a top-level of quality. We also give feedback and a score to recruiters for each designer we have on our platform so that they get a general idea about how the designer will perform in the real-world.
Check us out below if you are interested:
Tl;dr
If you skipped all the way here just to read my take-aways, here it is. If you’re bored because of Corona and doing nothing is getting to you like it did to me, start building a business or start developing the skills you need to build one. I wanted to build a company because there is less risk now than there ever will be at any other time in my life and most likely yours as well. There are a lot of things you could be doing if Corona wasn’t around, but there are also a lot that you could be doing even though it is around. So take advantage of it.
