A job I had been helping with for the past few months reached a stopping point.
From here I will help on another project. Nothing has started yet, so who knows how it will go — but compared with recent work, where I clung on through things I had never done before, what comes next is work I have experience with and am relatively good at.
It looks like this project will run for a while, and it seems like a good direction for deepening my specialty too.
Lately the results have not been what I hoped for, and a hard stretch kept going. Still, I clearly picked up a new and important skill set, and I think it was a major milestone in my working life. I also met many wonderful people.
But because the hard stretch lasted so long, my mindset drifted in a not-so-good direction.
What now — if this keeps up, will I just collapse by the roadside?
Then again, I think the reason I have somehow managed to live okay so far is that I have been thoroughly pessimistic.
But in a bad stretch, that creates a bad chain.
One big factor that swung my mood, I think, was caring too much about other people's evaluations and opinions.
After going independent, the environment is up to you — for better and for worse. Other people's evaluations still matter as a metric, but I realized again that if you let other people's eyes restrict your thinking, things get even worse.
I have to change my mindset.
And now I get to deepen my specialty through new work again — I am genuinely looking forward to it.
I went independent without a solid specialty, so this opportunity is more than I could have asked for. I will take my time, keep a long time horizon, and build skills in the right direction.
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