Number 1.

I know now that most men live a life of quiet desperation. And that your competency as a man, is the one true measure of your value in today’s society. I mean competent in the fullness of the word, you protect, you lead, you provide. You need all three, to the fullness of their meaning too. I don’t know where I am positioned on that pyramid. I can only talk about my progression and what has changed over the years.

We are all different in our nature as human beings. Needless to say, some of us have talents in fields, sports or even instruments we have not invented or discovered yet. We all have our unique offerings, which are all equally important in the grander scheme of life. I unfortunately had to go through the same training as everyone else I know, as I navigated through my early education to getting our degree. Our options are already narrowed down to just but a few from the beginning.

So if you find yourself drowning in the competition, it’s imparative that you audit your abilities. You know the things you are good at and you know what ‘pays the bills’ so to speak. A good start would be close that gap between what you love and what pays the bills, until what you love pays the bills. If you ask me, what feels meaningful to you is what you should be figuring out how to pay the bills from. However long that takes, it’s the road least travelled.

I am a self taught programmer but when I left school, everyone had the impression that I didn’t value education. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am a knowledge junkie, I learn everything that I come across. Somehow some things stuck longer than others, so I stuck to them. I stopped trying so hard to learn things that didn't stick, and focused on everything else that did. By reading a lot of books. Which I should say was much easier to do without the pressure of school.

Our true colors show when we shine in our light. In all my academic career, my best grades where always in computer science. I know I passed O’Level mathematics because I had hacked my DAL caculator to do advanced calculus. When I finally left school, I had nothing else to do in my day than to just code. I always knew what I was coding at the time, but I wasn’t sure what I was doing in life. I was just aiming in the general direction of Zuckerberg, Musk, Tovalds…

Tune into your frequency. I must have coded about 10 hours a day from that time. I never went out, I was always broke. I watched the social network a 100 times, slept late woke up early on repeat. Even though nothing made sense then, I made enough at the time to barely pay rent and put something to eat on the table. I learnt more during that time, than anyone would have been able to convince me to do in school.

It’s a cosmic display of beauty. All of my best work came out of this chaos. It was during these uncertain times, that I was able to hone my abilities and use them to help myself. I tuned my mindset from interview ready to invoice ready. I had so many prototypes in my archives that it was easy to prove my skills to potential clients. I rarely mentioned my degree, the fact that I had over 5000 coding hours was indeed a fact. Like so, we all owe it to ourselves to reach the best version of our selves, to shine in our own unique light. No one knows what you are capable of, to reach the top in any field in such a distracted world takes more focus than skill.

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