Major Lesson Number One

It has been 2 months since I left the corporate world.

For the first 8 weeks, I was just humming along, building out all of the things on my roadmap, and then it hit me. My first major lesson from leaving the corporate world just flashed into my mind. I am sad to say, it is a bit… should I say… beaten to death. However, it is still a lesson that is valuable and I think is hard for people to realize while they are still in process of learning it.

Lesson:

The skills you pick up today will be crucial to your career down the road, regardless of whether or not you feel these skills will be useful. (So make sure you put yourself in a position where you are constantly learning new things.)

What you might have just said to yourself: “obviously”, but hear my out.

When you move from one corporate job to another, you typically make incremental moves in the same, or similar verticals. Your skills just sort of grow naturally. I believe that because of these incremental steps, you never fully realize your progress. You are always just that much better than yesterday - never being able to see the 10,000 foot view.

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I used to sell BMW’s. I was already an artist part time, but that was my day job. Eventually, I got into product management, and after a few years down that road, I decided to abandon ship and start working for myself. Sure, I may have been able to make the move from sales to art, but the way I would have approached things would have been completely differently.
I am currently writing this in google docs, before I started working in tech, I didn’t much use it. I write specs for myself, for work to be done… by me. I take these projects and I use agile to manage them. I run sprints. I have OKRs (sort of). Yes, my paintings are expressive - but the systems that I picked up over my career are tools that are too valuable to throw away. Why wouldn’t I product manage my art career?

But, here is the kicker.

Like most artists today, my life is full of 3 letters. N-F-T. I might be painting artists with too broad of a stroke when I say this (ha) but I think that my ability to truly understand the technology behind NFT’s and crypto gives me some sort of edge. When I hear that generative art - created by algorithms - has a growing audience, I don’t speak about how art comes from the soul and machines can never make it but rather I set up a Python environment and see what kind of art my soul can make with data and algorithms. I dive into web 3.0 - as an artist - knowing that the tech behind this will really determine what is possible in the future, and how art might change. I make calculated, data driven, very abstract, paintings, but I read about data scientists creating abstract work, and I get inspired.

I never actually thought that these skills would be so useful, that the people I met along the way, and their generous wisdom, would be so relevant. I knew that to be a better product manager I needed to master certain technical skills, but I would have never believed that those might transfer over to art creation itself.

Learn everyday. I went from selling BMW’s to modelling giant data sets and building revenue generating software. I did not actually consider what those skills might be useful for - I was just adding them into my quiver for later. Adding them because I read in a book somewhere that learning new skills is a good idea. Glad I read that book.