Thursday, April 29, 2010

Find your own ocean

This is an inspiring tale of a kid, Clay Marzo, who has autism and struggles to deal with life as it's usually led - on land. But when he's in the ocean he thrives.

We give up too quick trying to find our oceans. Places where, like this kid, we feel free to create things, help people, and still enjoy ourselves.

When I was in college I found out that doing chemical engineering and working at a chemical plant wasn't my ocean, and I worked my ass off to find some new things. That led me to working at Accenture, which was also not my ocean. I didn't enjoy the lifestyle of being constantly away from home. So I kept looking.

It wasn't overnight. It took me years of working at night, learning how to do software development and experimenting with weird things. 10 years ago, I tried to apply to Thoughtworks. They had this computer science problem to solve to get an interview. It was something that was pretty tough for me at the time, but I thought it would be a great learning experience. I thought I'd impress them if I ran the solution to the problem off of a server in my home and they can access it over the web. That might have been cool, but I'm not so sure I did a very good job writing code for that thing because they didn't call me in for an interview.

Who cares. I kept looking.

I've also gotten my fair share of "no thank you"s after dozens and dozens of interviews at other software companies. Once I didn't get the job because I didn't have "Weblogic" experience, even though I had experience with every other Java app server on the planet. The guy just couldn't get past the keyword "Weblogic" :) Very frustrating. But.

Who cares. I kept looking.

Today I'm in an environment where I thrive. I get to find new problems every day if I want and solve them. I can write code or do marketing. There's no end to stuff I get to create. It's not always perfect, but there wasn't a lot of magic finding this. It took a bunch of work, persistence and experimentation. And faith that one day all my work would lead me to an ocean.

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