Day 1 — Hopping off the Mañana Train
The Journey of Transitioning from ‘Working-Dumb’ to ‘Working-Smart’.
What am I going to do now? what can I do now?
I’m sure the feeling of uncertainty after graduating is quite universal. I’m sure all of you can relate to the closing of a chapter of your book that took quite a few ups-and-downs to write. There are pages you wish you could rewrite, some pages you wish you could erase, and some pages you don’t want to finish writing.
Now, I am definitely not saying that my university life was full of deep experiences that made me who I am today. In fact, I can easily say that the past 3–4 years of my life in Japan has little to do with who I am right now. I think I figured myself out while trying to find my soul in the streets of Quito, chasing the next high. A similar feeling of getting run over by a bull in Cotacachi, back in 2013:
Currently, with the looming Covid-19 situation, I find myself between a rock and a hard place (heads up there will be many more cliches): Can I keep using this situation as a legitimate excuse for not being able to land a full-time, fulfilling job? Or, am I going to have to suck it up and admit to myself that I didn’t use the past 3–4 years to my advantage? Leaning towards the latter.
What have I been doing? I worked jobs that I knew how to do because my priority was just needing and wanting some change in my pockets. From the day-night biweekly-shifts at a kimchi-pickle factory in Fujimino to doing 23:00–08:00 shifts in Sagawa, I did whatever I needed to do to pay for my expenses. I didn’t have a set goal in mind. I was still the hungry stray dog that I was when I lived on the road but under the orderly conditions of Japan’s palpable culture: my “goals” were set to snooze for tomorrow in place of a bone today. I guess I never let go of the mañana culture. Probably a consequence of developing a habit of “living in the moment,” to the extreme.
They say there’s ‘working-smart’ and ‘working-dumb’ (I’ll let you think of what they mean). I guess I was on the fence. I knew I wanted to do something, but after failed interviews and failed interviews, I was beginning to realize I had no real valuable skill that I could offer. The only thing that I was proud of was that I could work like a horse in any manual-labor type jobs, and do it with a smile. I had the: “You want me to dig a hole? I’ll dig you a deep deep hole” type of mentality. I was a ‘working-dumb’ (zero self-deprecation here, just being honest). Even during my small stint working with startups in 2019, it just didn’t fit me. Something seemed off. No bad feelings towards the organization(s) and the people I had the chance to meet and work with during that period; the truth of the matter is that whatever I was doing then, didn’t resonate with me.
And, I guess that’s why it’s humbling to be here at HENNGE. It’s an opportunity for me to see what ‘working-smart’ is, and to see how professionals from all kinds of background work together. It’s unfortunate that Covid-19 took away the reality of everything, but the effort everyone at HENNGE pours in day-in and day-out is applaudable. What puts the icing on the cake for me— ever since I set a realistic goal for myself — is having the chance to talk to and hear professional developers talk about their projects and knowledge. Even merely joining the Monthly Technical Sessions (MTS) is inspiring and makes me push myself even more to reach my goal of becoming a front-end dev. These folks are encyclopedias.
To sum things up here: I think getting the chance to be at HENNGE has shown me a great part to understanding the “what-can-I-do-next?”, and a chunk of clearing up some of this uncertain horizon, the “what-am-I-going-to-do-now?”. I set a goal for myself, I have a great chance to learn and to take in as much as I can from the folks here at HENNGE. It’s like going back to my first day sleeping outside on the on-ramp of an interstate road in the dead of winter, or my first day joining the R.O.K. army conscription straight after South America: completely clueless, not much idea of what anyone was talking about. But what is different now is: I feel like I have a compass that works parallel to my goal. No more riding a hot air balloon tied to an anchor.
Trust the process and head towards the goal.
That’s it.
I’m not sure if you got anything out of these nearly transitionless paragraphs, but…Thanks for spending a minute.
This article is part of the HENNGE Advent Calendar 2020. An Advent calendar is a special calendar used for counting down the days ‘till Christmas. HENNGE Advent Calendar 2020 presents one article by one HENNGE member per day for 25 days until Christmas, 2020.
