My good friend, Justin, turned me onto a new podcast. It’s the Tim Ferris show. Of course, I know Tim’s famous book , the 4 hour workweek, because it helped to push me into business. Let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to pick a random hobby, become excellent at it and get paid for it… then go on vacation for a few months =) That’s my dream, but I got sidetracked in launching a business… Anyway, I digress 🙂 Tim happened to be interviewing Mike Rowe (Dirty Jobs Mike Rowe), and I’ve been listening to it for nearly 2 hours, thoroughly entertained while I sit in Excel hell for my day job.
Listening to this interview, I came away with so many random takeaways, but the one I really wanted to capture before I forgot is finding your own story. Like everything, I’m putting this into my own words, so if you listen to this interview, you might not hear what I heard, but stick with me anyway. Everyone has a dream, we can’t always put words to it, sometimes we only know it from the dream residue we can feel in the back of our brain when we wake up, but just can’t quite remember what we were dreaming about, but we all have a dream. Those dreams will often drive us on wild adventures or into the depths of despair. Regardless, those dreams build our story… and at the end of the day, that story is what makes us interesting, it makes us vulnerable, it makes us real.
Those of you that know me well, know parts of my story. The story I remember about myself the most is during college… I was going to be an engineer, I was going to build space shuttles and design awesome things!!! This dream drove me through high school (I was a nerd, so missing out on high school parties and popularity contests wasn’t for me anyway). I finally finished my 2nd year of school and I went to this job fair on campus. I got hired by this engineering company… but not to be an engineer, to be a computer guy. They had this homegrown system that their engineering department depended on. They wanted me to come in, learn it, and then make it better. All the while, I’m thinking in my head, this is my stepping stone to engineering. So I did my internship, I learned the tool, got good at it… then there is all this hype about Y2K, and systems only storing the year in 2 digits, and we could be going back to the stone age if we didn’t fix it… (you probably remember the hysteria). So my first job, ships me over to the IT group to be a part of this thing called SAP. It’s some big German piece of software, but it happens to have something similar to what I’ve been doing for the engineering group. It was called Variant Configuration, and I needed to learn this and then convert everything we had to work on this new system. So I work my ass off for months learning this system on my own. Making humongous mistakes along the way, and making a name for myself. All the while, I’m still thinking I’ll be an engineer. I just need to finish this project, and they’ll give me a job doing what I went to school for.
Finally, the day comes. They give me my shot. The only catch is that I have to do both jobs. I can do engineering, as long as I keep the SAP machine running smoothly too. I am so excited… I finally got what I wanted. It took me about 2 years, and lot of hard work. I spent 6 months (maybe not even that long) doing a few engineering projects. One of the projects was even pretty interesting compared to what most of the group was doing. By the end of 6 months, I sprinted back to the software stuff as fast as I could.
Looking back, everyone told me, it’s not all it’s cracked up to me. “It’s not exciting”, “it’s tedious”, “you won’t like it”. But being the stubborn fellow I am, I wouldn’t believe them. I had to live it for myself. It was then, that I finally realized that software, programming, business “engineering” was really what I was good at. It wasn’t until I listened to Mike Rowe and Tim Ferris talk that I realized, this is just one small part of my story… and my story is what made me who I am…
What’s your story?
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike