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- Apr 14, 2020
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Hello everyone,
So I just finished Unscripted , and damn it was inspiring. Thank you @MJ DeMarco for writing it, you've touched another life. I downloaded the ebook on Tuesday evening and finished it yesterday. I don't think I've ever read a book this quickly before. Out of all the incredibly useful information in the book, one thing revealed to my one of my big flaws. I'm too polygamous. But first, let me give some backstory.
All throughout middle school, high school, and college, I was a F*cking videogame addict. I did good in school, mostly making A's and B's, but almost every waking moment outside of school was consumed with playing videogames with friends. After school, weekends, summers, spring break and winter vacations, almost all of my childhood was filled with gaming. I had a close group of friends and dated in high school and college, and because my parents always echoed at me "Just do good in school and you'll get a good job", I never really worried or realized how I was just wasting away my life. It wasn't until my senior year of college that I had my most impactful FTE event.
I don't want to go into detail about what happened. But it's one of those events that shakes you in the core. You can barely eat, you cry yourself to sleep, you lie on the floor for hours out of distress and depression. On top of that, the event made me really reflect on how I had literally just wasted almost my entire teenage life manipulating pixels on a F*cking screen, which of course made everything worse. But after about two months, I turned shit around real quick. Quit video games cold turkey, started reading every day, starting taking the language I wanted to learn seriously, taking my friends and family more seriously, started lifting, and started putting in extra time into learning skills for my field.
A semester later and I found myself graduating, being thrust out into the real world. I was torn between immediately searching for a job, or going to the country of the language I was learning to immerse myself and study more intensely. Of course all the people in my life just repeated the same SCRIPTED cliches at me. "You'll have time for that later." "It would look bad on your resume if you had a gap." "Get experience first." Despite all the pressure, I said f*ck it and left America for 9 months. Best decision I ever made in my life; I made a lot of lifelong friends and had unforgettable experiences.
In January of this year I found myself back in America thinking I should "settle down" and "get real" and get a 9-to-5. Thankfully because I got my a$$ in high-gear my senior year, I was able to find a job in my field. Let me tell you, this job should be every college graduates dream. An upper middle class salary, nice management that doesn't expect you to work overtime, four weeks of a vacation a year starting, etc. But the thing is, I absolutely hate it. I hate that some corporation owns about half of my waking life 5 out of 7 days a week (now I know we call it temporal prostitution). I hate imagining myself doing this grind day in and day out every year for the rest of my life. I just want to own my time and my life back.
Now, I've always had business ideas, usually related to software since I'm a programmer. But like every other programmer, I'll start a project, work on it here and there, and then abandon it for the next shiny idea I have. This has literally been going on for years now. After reading Unscripted , that's stopping today. After giving it some thought, the business I've chosen to focus on is going to make software to help people learn languages. No more polygamy, I'm married to this project for a minimum of 4 months. It's an idea that's been floating around my head for awhile, as there's similar software out there today, but it's rather old and people complain about it all the time. I'm going to make something better with the goal that it would bring value not just to adult learners, but to the high school and college classrooms too. I've already started working on a prototype and have a meeting next week to pitch the idea to someone at a school district who's in charge of acquiring educational products.
My gut and my experience tell me this will be something that people want (I also intend to use it myself), but I have reservations that it might be too niche. I guess in the end the market will decide, but regardless I'm finally going to finish a project that an employer didn't pay me to do and put it on the line for everyone to judge.
If anyone relates to any part of my story or has some thoughts, I'd be happy to hear from you. Thank you for reading my intro and good luck to everyone!
So I just finished Unscripted , and damn it was inspiring. Thank you @MJ DeMarco for writing it, you've touched another life. I downloaded the ebook on Tuesday evening and finished it yesterday. I don't think I've ever read a book this quickly before. Out of all the incredibly useful information in the book, one thing revealed to my one of my big flaws. I'm too polygamous. But first, let me give some backstory.
All throughout middle school, high school, and college, I was a F*cking videogame addict. I did good in school, mostly making A's and B's, but almost every waking moment outside of school was consumed with playing videogames with friends. After school, weekends, summers, spring break and winter vacations, almost all of my childhood was filled with gaming. I had a close group of friends and dated in high school and college, and because my parents always echoed at me "Just do good in school and you'll get a good job", I never really worried or realized how I was just wasting away my life. It wasn't until my senior year of college that I had my most impactful FTE event.
I don't want to go into detail about what happened. But it's one of those events that shakes you in the core. You can barely eat, you cry yourself to sleep, you lie on the floor for hours out of distress and depression. On top of that, the event made me really reflect on how I had literally just wasted almost my entire teenage life manipulating pixels on a F*cking screen, which of course made everything worse. But after about two months, I turned shit around real quick. Quit video games cold turkey, started reading every day, starting taking the language I wanted to learn seriously, taking my friends and family more seriously, started lifting, and started putting in extra time into learning skills for my field.
A semester later and I found myself graduating, being thrust out into the real world. I was torn between immediately searching for a job, or going to the country of the language I was learning to immerse myself and study more intensely. Of course all the people in my life just repeated the same SCRIPTED cliches at me. "You'll have time for that later." "It would look bad on your resume if you had a gap." "Get experience first." Despite all the pressure, I said f*ck it and left America for 9 months. Best decision I ever made in my life; I made a lot of lifelong friends and had unforgettable experiences.
In January of this year I found myself back in America thinking I should "settle down" and "get real" and get a 9-to-5. Thankfully because I got my a$$ in high-gear my senior year, I was able to find a job in my field. Let me tell you, this job should be every college graduates dream. An upper middle class salary, nice management that doesn't expect you to work overtime, four weeks of a vacation a year starting, etc. But the thing is, I absolutely hate it. I hate that some corporation owns about half of my waking life 5 out of 7 days a week (now I know we call it temporal prostitution). I hate imagining myself doing this grind day in and day out every year for the rest of my life. I just want to own my time and my life back.
Now, I've always had business ideas, usually related to software since I'm a programmer. But like every other programmer, I'll start a project, work on it here and there, and then abandon it for the next shiny idea I have. This has literally been going on for years now. After reading Unscripted , that's stopping today. After giving it some thought, the business I've chosen to focus on is going to make software to help people learn languages. No more polygamy, I'm married to this project for a minimum of 4 months. It's an idea that's been floating around my head for awhile, as there's similar software out there today, but it's rather old and people complain about it all the time. I'm going to make something better with the goal that it would bring value not just to adult learners, but to the high school and college classrooms too. I've already started working on a prototype and have a meeting next week to pitch the idea to someone at a school district who's in charge of acquiring educational products.
My gut and my experience tell me this will be something that people want (I also intend to use it myself), but I have reservations that it might be too niche. I guess in the end the market will decide, but regardless I'm finally going to finish a project that an employer didn't pay me to do and put it on the line for everyone to judge.
If anyone relates to any part of my story or has some thoughts, I'd be happy to hear from you. Thank you for reading my intro and good luck to everyone!
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