Is there a similar saying to ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ for when the shit hits the fan? If there is, I haven’t heard of it, but that’s what this article is about.
This has happened to me a few times in my life, twice of late, actually.
2017
My girlfriend and I are living in Koh Samui, Thailand for the year after quitting our corporate gigs, I’m trading the markets and I have this new business idea. Thing is, I’d need a complex website as the entire idea is online, only, I don’t know how to program a drop of code. My background up to this point was in finance, I worked on a trading desk at a stockbroking firm, a world so far apart from tech as one could probably get. Also, if I were to outsource the website build with the complexity of the website I needed, it would require a ton of cash that I don’t have. So I thought to myself – how hard can it be?
Well, if I’m being honest, it was pretty damn hard! I had never had ANY feel for programming, in fact, it would be fair to say I was more than a little terrified of it. But it was either this or I was going to eat the couch, so I just started fiddling with it, a little bit every day.
2018
It wasn’t until 2018 when the pressure really got turned up. My girlfriend and I were back home in South Africa, unemployed and my new business that I had built the website for would need at least a year to get all the licenses in place, and at 29 years old, I was back living with my parents, this time with my girlfriend… Fuck me, is there a lower low for a grown man!?!
So, while waiting for these licenses to come through, I had gotten more than a little bit frustrated with my situation. My girlfriend was struggling to find her feet again and we needed to get back up, things like a car and a place of our own and everything we had sold and given away the year before like the furniture and cutlery, all of that, we would need again. So I put my head down and started to take a lot more freelancing jobs, A LOT! So much so that by the end of that year, I had bought us two cars in cash, nothing fancy, an almost-new Fiat 500 for her and an old Mitsubishi Pajero for me. Not only that, but we had also scraped together enough money for a deposit on a house we were buying and even had a little bit put aside for furniture. All, within 12 months from being just about flat broke and having nothing!
I had just taught myself programming and managed to actually be good enough at it to do work for other people, something I had no clue how to do 18 months prior to that. And now I was making an actual income from this new thing. I had unknowingly started a business.
2020
It’s 2020, by now, I have been programming for about 2 and a half years, this online freelancing thing was actually working and I was already making about the same I made at my corporate job I had left in 2017 from my newfound direction, with a much better lifestyle. I could work when I want and set my own schedule. This was great! That being said, coding-wise, I was still doing fairly basic stuff within my comfort zone and hadn’t really pushed myself of late.
In December 2018 my girlfriend had gotten a job in Cape Town, so she was away for the entire 2019. We had also gotten engaged around Christmas and gotten married in October, 2019, but at the beginning of 2020, the company she was working for decided to close her department and essentially, made her role redundant. She had to come home, and again, we were back to one income. Only, by now I had bought myself another car, this time a fancy V8 with an installment, and we had taken a second mortgage on the house to start renovations, so our overhead had about doubled. I started to stress a bit. Were we just about to loose everything we had spent the last 2 years building up?
API’s
In programming, there are these things called “API’s”. I had started to get quite a few requests for API work over the last year or so, but stayed away from this foreign concept of gibberish.
If programming was like an Afrikaans guy learning to write Chinese, API’s we’re like an Afrikaans guy learning to code in Chinese. It was a whole other level of complex. But shit, the pressure was on! I now had to increase my income, and do it fast. So I stuck my head into it and for about 6 months, I found it really, really difficult! It often took me two weeks to build something that now takes me two days.
The point is, this foreign thing called API’s that I had been avoiding for about a year and that was initially very difficult to wrap my head around, just saved my ass. Within a year, I had more than doubled my income. I made so much money that I bought an Audi R8, and not the baby V8, but the V10!
So shy the personal history lesson..?
I guess, real-life examples have a way of getting a point across that is very difficult to do by just talking about things theoretically. Sometimes we get into really uncomfortable positions and it puts us in pressure situations that force us to do and in turn, learn new things. Without this pressure, we would simply stay in our comfort zones, we’d never learn anything new, we’d stagnate. And if you’re reading this article, chances are that you’re not one of those people who likes the status quo. You are someone that wants to grow!
I saw this program the other day about lobsters, and I just had to google it to make sure I had it right. Lobster shells, or their exoskeletons, don’t grow. Up until the age of 7 years where they weigh about 1 pound, lobsters go through a process called ‘molting’ about 25 times. Molting is the process where a lobster goes into hiding, say under a rock, absorbs excess water and cracks its own shell which has become tight and restrictive, and crawls out of it. They then feed themselves voraciously to harden up their new, bigger, but still soft exoskeleton, after which they come back out into the wild. Without this continuous molting, lobsters will always remain the size of a shrimp.
A good metaphor if I’ve ever heard of one. Go out. Get uncomfortable. Learn new things. Embrace the Unknown! And to quote Jim’s dad – “Embarrass yourself! It builds character”.