An Agile approach to personal success
Leaving a stable career may have looked courageous from an outside perspective, however, for me it was simply the next step in reaching my goals. Each step did take some courage but it really became a habit after constantly setting goals for myself. This was not a spur of the moment decision and wasn’t even really the original goal. The original goal was just to be a better version of me, to keep challenging myself and improving professionally and personally. It took years to reach the goals that led me to commit to leaving.
Having small goals and making adjustments
Ten years into my software development career I learned about agile. Agile is a project management methodology to build a product or service in an iterative, incremental fashion. Instead of knowing all the answers up front, you just start building it in small steps, gather some feedback and then work on the next increment. Performing these actions on your team or yourself is what the software industry calls “being agile” or “having the agile mindset.” This is an important practice that I put into personal practice to achieve my goals.
Agile doesn’t require courage, or perfect skills, it just requires a goal and a willingness to try. I applied agile to my personal and professional life, setting goals for myself and reflecting regularly to give myself feedback on setting the next goal. My ultimate goal is to know myself and be that person more often. It is a goal that has brought me so much joy even though when said out loud it sounds wishy-washy, lofty and yet something that should be obvious.
Patience, kindness and getting to know yourself
Along the way of achieving so many small goals, who I am became clearer to me. My career is computer programming and I had always wanted to be paid to program computers, ever since my father brought home the first family computer when I was 8 years old. Who I am, however, is not a computer programmer. That is simply an activity that I do, it is a means to an end.
Discovering who I am became the practice of reflecting regularly on things that brought me joy and finding the characteristics, the underlying reason why those things I did brought me joy. My love for programming comes from having problems to solve that engage so many skills, from communication with clients, to planning and organizing my code, to using logic in interesting ways. There’s always learning, always ways to stay engaged in programming, new technologies, new languages and evolving techniques. I also love making an impact in a positive way in people’s lives. These are core to who I am, with or without programming.
Being honest with who I really am makes me feel happy and confident. This realization took a while to build and required lots of patience, reflecting, meditation and journaling. When one of my goals “failed” or the self-imposed deadline slipped, I would reflect on why, what about myself may have caused this, and appreciate what I did manage to achieve. The practices of gratitude and self-forgiveness were important skills that developed during these times of reflection as well.
The path to independence
It was along this journey that I realised I am very capable of achieving my goals if it is inline with who I am trying to be. I was not ready to leave my job as long as the learning goals were related to who I wanted to become. Over time it became harder to find new goals that would help me grow in the direction I wanted, even when I explored new roles in the same company. Eventually, it began to ring around in my thoughts that another company would not provide the challenges that I was looking for either, so the logical conclusion was independence.
So having the habit of setting small goals, I worked backwards. To start my own business I needed some financial security to buy myself time to try. I started setting money aside specifically so I could take a couple years off from being employed. At the same time, I also worked on skills that would be useful to my future business ideas. Once my financial goals and skill maturity were acceptable within reach, I took the final step and left to follow my dreams.
