So youre interested in our subbrand Growth Quarters?
Thisarticlewas originally published on.cultby Sky Houdeib.
.cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers.
A click, a swoosh.
Then a click and a swoosh again.
Then a thud and its silent for a moment.
Its 2:00 am and I hear this sound coming from my patio.
I only moved in that week and wasnt familiar with the houses particular noises.
This sound was odd.
So I went to investigate.
What I found stirred a change in me.
In 2017 I decided to learn code with no tech background or relevant experiences.
Id never attempted to code before, and was approaching my forties.
Yet within the span of ten months, I was working as a front-end developer for a startup.
Sounds like a miraculous transformation but it wasnt.
It was the culmination of a long journey.
It required changes in my attitude and lifestyle, with constant work towards the next step.
Mostcareer-change storiesbegin once a decision is made and the hard work begins.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Its usually the montage part of the story.
Lets start from the beginning.
What motivates us to embark on a career change?
And one step further what pushes us towards any great change?
When you made those decisions you didnt know much about the older you.
You couldnt have known how your experiences would have shaped you and how your priorities were going to change.
This was the first spark of encouragement towards a new life.
Teaching English in Spain
I was teaching English in Spain and it was something I enjoyed.
But I wanted to build a career that was more fulfilling and I wanted more financial stability.
The classroom was what I loved about the job.
I knew I had to look somewhere else to reach what I felt was my potential.
Health
Around that time, my Dad a life-long smoker was diagnosed with lung cancer.
In a few short and very hard months, his health deteriorated and he passed away.
I was a smoker at that time, too.
Of course, I knew it was bad for my health.
After my father passed, I could no longer turn a blind eye.
It was time to start taking care of my health.
Drive
The final piece of this puzzle was my drive.
Id become intimidated by new challenges.
Something had changed because big challenges and risk-taking were nothing new to me.
In my early twenties, I relocated from Lebanon to the UK.
At 25 I dropped a career in the restaurant business and went to university.
By my late twenties, I had relocated again this time to Spain.
Learning a new language and building a life from scratch once again.
So I wasnt new to the difficulties of a big challenge.
I knew the hard work it required and I knew that it could be done.
But life throws at you experiences that change you, sometimes in subtle ways that arent always noticeable.
And its not just life, its also our own actions, routines, and habits.
Its easy in the end to find yourself putting limitations on your own abilities and objectives.
Limitations that come from nothing but your own mind.
Becoming aware of all this is very important.
And it is the first step to changing things.
Its also the kind of moment where the people closest to you might have a great impact.
My partner, Elena, who is also my closest friend, was in endless conversations with me.
These were vital in reflecting, building motivation, and deciding to move forward.
We followed its instructions and created our first HTML and CSS Hello World.
This seemed to be like a very interesting career option to pursue.
But how did the search lead me there to begin with?
In pop culture, people seem to always be searching for stuff.
Searching for love, searching for themselves, searching for a way out.
And I dislike the idea of the search.
It gives the impression that whatever it is we are seeking is already out there waiting to be discovered.
And all we have to do is find it.
I can hardly find myself in the neighborhood where I live.
Thats not how I view the world.
I prefer to exchange the word search with create.
Create a way out.
Thats what makes sense to me.
What we want isnt already out there.
But its something we can build, piece by piece.
One step at a time.
Its something we create, not find.
I knew I had to address the constant nagging voice in my head.
The one who knew I shouldnt be smoking.
Every day where I continued to smoke was another day that left me feeling like a failure.
It was a barrier.
And a self-imposed one.
Thats all it took.
But that great barrier was worth only two weeks of fighting.
And I couldnt have invested those two weeks in anything better.
And it makes you think, why did I trap myself in a self-made prison for so long?
I started working out regularly.
I went swimming to fight my smoking urges.
Im not a statuesque fitness freak.
Im not on a strict broccoli diet.
Nor is my BMI something to make documentaries about.
Im talking about a move towards a healthier lifestyle in general.
This includes a healthier diet and regular exercise.
But Im still eating my pizza.
Its hard to overestimate the impact of these changes.
Taking care of my body meant that I felt better and healthier than I have for years.
And once those healthier routines became established it was easy to persist.
This gave me a boost of physical energy.
But it also put me in a better frame of mind.
It gave me a boost of confidence.
I had faced battles I previously felt were difficult.
So I was more open to facing new bigger challenges.
This was the right base to be able to build on.
But what did I want to do?
I spent plenty of time investigating possibilities within teaching.
At one time I was close to packing up and going back to university again to specialize.
But none of the options I explored spoke to me or got me excited.
I started little courses here and there.
Experimented with this and that.
This is the unglamorous part of the story of a career change.
You dont get there suddenly.
It takes a load of other attempts that dont lead anywhere.
The noise at 2:00am
I looked out into the patio.
It was a brightly moon-lit evening.
The patio was empty.
There was that sound again.
It wasnt coming from the patio at all.
That was just the echo.
It was coming from the other side of the house.
And thats when it clicked.
Over on that side, down the hill, there was a skate park.
It was someone skateboarding!
Skateboarding in the dead of night.
In the freezing winter cold.
Falling and getting up.
I went back to bed and sat there listening to the unknown skater practicing their moves.
And I realized that this was exactly the missing ingredient for me.
It reminded me of when as a teen I picked up the guitar for the first time.
And you look at the mountain of stuff youll have to do before you become any good at this.
Its intimidating and scary.
But you take it one step at a time.
And you learn something new every day.
And you work hard and push yourself.
And you become consumed with wanting to understand everything about guitars and guitar playing.
And thats what I wanted.
I didnt want simply a career move towards something better.
I wanted a challenge that seems insurmountable.
Something that makes me want to work as hard as my skater friend at 2:00 a.m.
I knew in my heart that it wasnt the time for half measures.
It wasnt too late to start learning something completely new from scratch.
It was the right time!
Coding
Right at that same time Elena was on her own quest.
She was exploring improving her career options.
She was also passionately thinking about why there were so few women in STEM careers.
Those two intersected as she started to explore software engineering.
I quickly got excited when I watched and listened to her talk about code.
It was an area I had always admired and found intriguing.
Though I thought it was something inaccessible by someone like me.
We started looking for more information on how realistic it is to learn to code and what options exist.
It became clear this was a viable career choice.
And that programming is as exciting as it is challenging.
We decided topursue a careerchange full steam ahead.
And I knew I was ready to take on this challenge and work just as hard.
I hope you find this story useful.
I think we have a tendency to reduce our journeys to bite-sized stories that only highlight the best parts.
Those moments paint a skewed picture.
I dont want to sound cliche but nothing comes suddenly, nothing comes easy without consistent hard work.
That hard work goes beyond minimum requirements for a career change.
Story by.cult
.cult by Honeypot is a Berlin-based community platform for developers.
