In previous posts I have mentioned various mistakes I've made in my life, such as destroying my career. The loss of my career has had a massive negative impact on my life looming over me like a very dark cloud. I didn't just lose my job, I flushed it down the toilet. That one event led on to many problems such as computer game addiction, a brush with alcoholism (which I had previously dealt with and left behind many years ago), damaged personal relationships, poor health, depression and a total loss of any sense of self worth. I messed up big time and couldn't seem to get over it.
A Change in Attitude
Then in 2002 a couple of things happened. Firstly I discovered the book "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill. I didn't really understand it when I first read it but it got me thinking and I started to feel as though my problems were within me and that if I could change myself, my attitudes and behaviours, that perhaps I could find a way out of this mess. From that book I moved on to many others by authors such as Og Mandino and Tony Robbins. I started thinking positively for the first time in years.
I decided to try and get a job; until then I had been working from home scratching a living out of internet businesses that were not fulfilling. So I started to brush up on my programming skills, I took out my CV and revamped it. I made another mistake here - I tried to hide the job from which I was fired by covering it with my business. The problem with this (other than the immorality of it!) was that it took away most of my commercial experience as a software developer. I couldn't find a job - not a sniff of one. It turned out that this was a bad time for the industry as many programmers were being laid off and there were lots of highly qualified, well educated programmers out there looking for work. Nobody needed a self-taught programmer with very out of date skills.
Off to University
I was quite despondent by this point as I saw no way out of my dilemma. It looked as though my career was lost for good. Then my partner suggested that I go to University. This would not only get me a degree but give me a chance to really bring my skills up to date and show them off via my University work. Seemed like a great idea except for one slight problem - how on earth would I pay for my mortgage and my bills as a full-time student?
For once I took a leap of faith. The books I had been reading told me that if I really wanted something that I would find a way to make it work. I still had my internet business and that was pretty much sustaining itself without much effort. So I applied. I had a long wait but I was accepted. I had to wait another 11 months before starting.
I wont bore you with all the detail of Uni except for one point. Throughout my time at University I had just one thing on my mind - rescuing my career. I figured that if I studied hard and did well that I might get of well with lecturers and be able to get good character references that would help me get a job despite my 'black mark' from the past. If nothing else, it meant that I could put off the job hunt for another three years!
Well the plan worked. I did work hard, very hard and I graduated with a first class honours degree in Computer Science and the award for 'Best Student' to boot. A handy boost for the CV. The sweetest part though was that I did indeed get on well with many lecturers and one of them lined me up with a job. She knew the company well and spoke with the managers about my history and told them the kind of person that I was as she knew me. I went to the interview and was offered the job right there without once being asked anything about my past discrepancies. Until then, I had spent seven years worrying about how I was going to explain away my past in an interview. All that worry was for nothing; it never happened.
A Time for Change
That was a year ago. On Graduation day I reflected back on the last few years and thought about the next few years. Now that I had a job to go to I was in a position to really put the past behind me and start afresh. I was a little afraid that I might screw this up too so I decided that I really had to make a conscious effort to not only work hard in the job, but to continue studying the books and journals pertinent to the job in order to catch up on the years I had lost.
As I stood in line waiting to shake the hand of the Dean I felt happy but I also felt drained and tired. A year earlier I had undergone some surgery and hadn't properly recovered. In my last year of Uni I hadn't attempted any exercise whatsoever and I had survived on a diet of convenience food. I was at my heaviest ever weight and my lowest ever fitness level.
A had a few days in between Graduation day and starting my new job. In those few days I reflected on my life as a whole and I made the decision to change it. Not just my job and my health but everything. Though as it turns out, those two things would predominate over everything else over the coming year. I set goals, a ton of them and I prioritised them. I started thinking about how I could put those goals into action. I figured there must be a gym near my work place (there was), so I would join it and exercise daily. In my spare time I would study programming skills and so on.
A Year On - How Did I Do?
The weekend just gone was the anniversary of that change. Looking back, I have indeed made many changes in the right direction.
Health
There was a gym five minutes away from the office. On the first day of my new job I was taken down the pub but on the second day I went to the gym and joined it. I started working out on the third day and have not looked back since. We have moved offices recently but I found a new gym which is also five minutes away. My use of the gym, and my routine has changed a bunch of times over the year as I tweak things but as you'll know if you have read recent entries from this blog, I now aim to exercise in one way or another, every single day.
I took up running in July. I have struggled with that and my progress has been very sporadic but I'm still going at it slowly.
One of the absolute best things I did shortly after starting my job was to start Karate. I did karate as a teenager and I really enjoyed it but once I left home I just kinda stopped doing it and as I got older I just never seemed to get around to it - you know how it is :) It had been at the back of my mind for a while but my main concern was that I wasn't fit enough to start it. I procrastinated quite creatively by laying down some physical prerequisites such as being able to run 10 minutes continuously. Thankfully, my curiosity got the better of me and I found a class 10 minutes from my house and realised it was on the way home from work. I checked it out, fell in love, and started the following week. I absolutely love it, it's the highlight of my week. Since August, I've completed three gradings and I'm now an Orange belt.
As well as all this exercising I have of course been dieting. My aim was to lose 1lb a week but that was only going to happen if I stuck to everything perfectly which I did not do! I have blogged extensively about my fat loss on my health blog so I won't go into detail here. But over the course of the year I have lost 23lbs of fat, gained 2lbs of muscle, dropped two clothes sizes and I look and feel much better for it.
Overall, physically I have come a long way but I still have a long way to go. That really is a great place to be. When you start out on a journey like this and you're at your lowest point it's really depressing and daunting but once you've started to make some real progress it can lift your spirits and make you realise what you really can do. Ok I've made slow progress but so what? If I lost another 23lbs next year I'd be looking pretty good! At least now I enter my second year knowing what's possible.
Career
Oooh my career. This has been an interesting ride. As you might gather from the earlier sections of the post, my life has been focused around my career for some years now. If you've read recent posts on this blog you'll know that I now want out of my career! I now have a burning desire to quit my job! What on earth went wrong?
Nothing.
When I first started my job I was ecstatic. I threw myself into the job and even more so into extra curricular study of related books. Over the year I have read 8 technical books. No where near as many as I would have liked but probably more than I had read before put together. In the first few months of working I was able to put all that new knowledge into practice and I learned a lot in the job too. Many things had changed in the industry while I had been away and I had some catching up to do. And catch up I did.
After a few months I found that I was reading more and more material that I couldn't apply to my job. At the end of the day you have to just do the work they want you to do and you can't just play around with new ideas and technologies when you feel like it. I needed a pet project and so I started fleshing out ideas of a game I wanted to write that I could use as a test bed for all my new found knowledge.
As time progressed I began to experience frustration at work. I felt that it held me back creatively and that my innovative nature was being suppressed by those in authority. At first I was really alarmed. Had I just wasted all those years at University? I had resurrected my career so why on earth wasn't I happy? Looking back now I can see that I needed to get a job and be employed simply to lay to rest the demons from my earlier job. Once I had done that, my creativity and entrepreneurism started to bubble to the surface again.
I have been self employed for 8 years of my life. At age 19 I started my first business and entertained visions of being a millionaire :-) I'm sure I'm not alone with that fantasy. Deep down I am a free spirit. I like to do what I want, when I want to. I do not like having to be at work for 9am every day, I don't like having to ask permission to come in late so I can go to the dentist. I don't like being told what to work on, and being told how to do my job. Now I'm sure that 99% of people don't like these things either. But where there is a difference is that I suspect many people are not really sure what the alternatives are but for me, I know exactly what I want to do.
It took a while to get there. I first started to realise that I wasn't happy in my job around Christmas time. At first I was in turmoil because I just couldn't picture my ideal life. I wanted to write software and yet I wanted my freedom. What job could give me both the satifsfaction and freedom that I wanted? I entertained the thoughts of self employment but at first it was marred by memories of my time spent at home after I was fired. These were not good memories. But as Tony Robbins is fond of saying, "The past does not equal the future". It took me all the way until May this year to finally figure out what I wanted to do with my life from a career perspective.
When I first started my job I had the mindset of "must fix career - make up for lost years" so I immediately thought about my future in the industry. I imagined where the job would take me over a number of years and one of my first goals was a secure and big fat pay rise in the first year as I had started on a fairly low salary. I had my yearly review last week and I didn't get a big fat pay rise. I realised then that in fact I was silly to set a goal like that because it's something that is out of my control, and that is exactly what I hate about working for somebody else.
When you work for yourself, you are in charge of how much you earn, not your boss, not your bosses boss, just you. If I won the lottery tomorrow it would solve a few problems but it wouldn't make me happy because I want to make something of my life by myself. I want to build something up that is useful and say "I did that".
I sense that I am rambling and drifting off the original topic of this post which was supposed to be about my year since I decided to change things. To summarise my career then - well I got one and I've not been fired so that's a great start! I've increased my technical knowledge, I've gained a realisation about just what I want to do with my life and I've started to make steps towards it. This is all great progress and I'm happy with that.
What Else?
My career and my health have dominated my thoughts over the last year and that's been a good and bad thing at the same time. On the one hand it has been good because by focusing on them so intently I have made consistent, steady progress towards them both. On the other hand, some of my other goals have been left to the wayside to some extent.
I've managed to reconnect with my family a little. I've taken my mum out for a day trip which is something I've not done before and she really enjoyed it. I've done some fun stuff with my friends but not as much as I would have liked. I've actually had a holiday for the first time in seven years which was nice but not quite enough.
Other areas took a nose dive. I'm a gamer - computer gamer that is but this year I have completed only ONE single player game! Wow! But is that bad or good? The main reason for that is that I've been spending my time exercising, studying, spending time with my family etc which are all very good uses of time. I think I've done the right thing by sacrificing my gaming time for my 'higher' goals but ultimately I'd like to be able to have time for everything!
Well, that's pretty much it for this year, I wonder with eager anticipation what awaits me in the coming year. Here is a list of some of the goals I've set for the coming year:
- Build a business income and quit my job
- Reduce body fat to 15%
- Run Race for Life (5k race)
- Grade to purple belt in Karate
- Learn to speak French
- Throw a surprise birthday party for my Mum
- Do a bungee jump
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