One way ticket
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Your past things are not your things anymore when you want to come back after pivoting.
Some software developers who are becoming managers, and then they are trying to get back to coding. Construction workers who go into hospitality and come back to do odd jobs in their off-hours, living expenses keep going up. Ridesharing drivers who are trying to get back to the management jobs they left. Medical specialists who are trying to return after management. We all think we can go back to the world we left. You know what this article is about, right? When you decide, get it right because you’re not going to be able to go back. The road is just one-way.
It looks to me like time travel. You think you can do it. But if you did, you could never get back to where you came from. While planet Earth moving at over 1,500 kilometers per hour, the solar system at almost 100,000 kilometers per hour, and the galaxy by a factor of 10 of that, you can’t get back to where you came from. If you don’t consider time as a spatial dimension,
if you don’t travel in multidimensional space-time, Science Fiction time travel is simply culturally accepted nonsense.
What does space-time resemble in the work or professional journey of all those who initiate a pivot in their work experience — elasticity, adaptability, empathy? No doubt these are all necessary virtues, but don’t they seem too general to you? Sorry, but they sound to me like those who start a company to make the world a better place.
You start a company to make it to yourself. If it´s not for your stakeholders then, it will fall apart like a house of cards.
First, you’ll have to know that the job you leave is still in motion, and when you want to come back to it, it won’t be where you left it. Developers no longer write the code 10 years ago because 99% of it is all in libraries and in all programming languages, which you have at the push of a button. The process goes at Agile speed, not the old individual reflection. Its functions ceased to be unique to become collective, communication, deployment in containers, DevOps requiring much less individual but collective effort than before, and a whole process that sometimes exceeds the galaxy's speed.
Of course, if you have developed Machine Learning tools of the Monte Carlo type, you could go to Las Vegas to try your luck. Yes, some professions do not go at this speed. Still, those could be the most dangerous because they are the easiest to imitate, occupy by low qualification and automation.
And secondly Education. Do you think that there is already enough Education? That there is already enough knowledge in all subjects, or will it be more necessary than ever? If you are still on this question, I will have to tell you that you missed a whole century. Because as early as 1899, Charles H. Duell, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Commissioner himself, asked Congress to close the office as there were no more things left to invent.
I heard it in a podcast this morning, “I would like to go back to my hometown because it pulls me so much, but it is impossible for me because I can’t find any of my own.” My thing? I’m sorry. What is your thing? Do you own some exclusive specialty area auctioned at Christie’s as an NFT? I don’t know anything like that yet, “my thing”. Today no one doubts that knowledge is exponential. You need to exercise in any activity, some more than others, but any action is exponential. Training, willingness to learn, and only one direction, forward. Can you change? Not only do I say yes, but more, do it! What is left behind you can turn into fun and creative skill.
With the energy and value of “learning of a lifetime” towards knowledge.
Wanting to take it back with professional goals is called nostalgia. And that won’t be the world you’ll be glad to be back in.
Thanks so much for reading
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