Hard Mode

[00:00:00] You're listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? My spouse likes to say to me, "Babe, you chose to be on hard mode with your career from day one." He says this because I chose to work for myself from the beginning and I learned everything on my own, everything on my own dime, in fact, and never on the dime of an employer.

[00:00:38] And you know what I've learned? When you learn on your own dime, it's a lot of pressure, but you are also forced to innovate, improve, and modernize quickly. You find yourself jumping headfirst into big and intense situations and you learn very quickly and you learn a lot. And when you wear every hat, you can control everything.

[00:01:03] And that's pretty nice actually. Especially if like me, you have a lot of opinions. But at least for me, there have been two things missing in my professional life. First, the skills of working with a team day in and out, which are very different from the skills you need for collaborating with other independent consultants or freelancers.

[00:01:27] The dynamics are just very different on a lot of different levels. And the second, getting to work with people who care as much and work as hard as you do, and maybe bring a similar level of expertise from another angle to the plate.

[00:01:49] My spouse, he is an engineer, and often when people meet us and learn that I'm on the software side and he's on the engineering side, they nod and say, "oh yeah, that makes you two a perfect fit", which is always hilarious, but also not far from the truth. We make a very good team because we share a single vision, but we come at it from different angles.

[00:02:14] And when you put that together, you get pretty close to the vision you've imagined. My brother and his wife are the same way. They are both insanely creative with a great eye for photography, but her mind works more on the artistic side and his mind works more on an analytics side, put it together nd you have a solid photography team where one person leads the creative direction and the other leads business development. Then you put the four of us together and you get an engineer, you get some software, photography, business development, and oh yeah, All of us have done our fair share of project management and all of us know how to code.

[00:02:55] One day I'm gonna figure out how to put all the talent in my family together and do something. It's probably a pipe dream, but it's fun to think about. So. Hard mode. What comes next on this hard mode career path I found myself on? You know, even creating this course that I'm working on is kind of hard mode.

[00:03:19] Like I'm doing it on hard mode. Because there are so many easier ways I could have done this, and yet I have chosen to do it in the way that I'm doing it, which takes a lot of effort, you know, videos and transcripts and images and gosh, there are so many things. You know, each lesson is, it takes a lot of work.

[00:03:47] I don't know. It's day 79 of The Daily 5 and already the stuff I thought I'd be doing back when I started this on day zero and the stuff that I'm doing now, it's so wildly different that it's hard to predict what's going to happen. This podcast and doing it every day, and I mean literally every day is making me realize in a very visceral way, how much time can pass by without you creating something of substance so easily, because you get bogged down in the daily stuff.

[00:04:21] I'm still thinking about that crossroad I talked about yesterday, by the way. It's just that I don't have an answer yet, but the pressure is mounting, so I'm gonna choose to just stand still till the end of the month and see what happens. The crossroad update will probably come in April, I think. Thanks for listening.

[00:04:47] Talk to you tomorrow.