Building My Own Way Out

I'm anxiously sipping coffee on a Monday morning last October. Having expected to hear back from a prospective employer on Friday, they're late. I compulsively check my emails and before I can register what the email says, I feel my stomach sink and my chest cave in. "We regret to inform you..."

When my brain finally caught up, I was shocked. The signals throughout the process were positive, even to my critical self.

The interviewers feedback was dark green.

I see something special in Max, let's move forward.

When an interview goes well, I tend to enjoy myself. I want to pause and emphasize, I've really enjoyed speaking with you.

Three pieces of feedback from three different interviewers. How could I have been rejected from this job?

"This decision was not made lightly. Ultimately, our hiring team often has to make difficult decisions between high-calibre individuals such as yourself."

While I sense the intention was to soften the blow, it did no such thing. I was sad, angry, and dejected.

I switched from sales to software engineering at 30. Landed my first job on the last day of my honeymoon. I "did it." But it was still the beginning.

I learned the fundamentals of programming over the next few years. When ChatGPT came out in December 2022, it changed everything. I started building my own things in my free time, fully inspired by Naval Ravikant's expose on how to get rich. AI offered a massive unlock on this path.

The thing is, I wasn't shipping. My standards (perfectionism?) were too high, and AI wasn't yet good enough to bridge the gap between my skills and my expectation. While I built in the shadows, I chased higher-paying software jobs. Google, Microsoft, a slew of other companies. I made it to final rounds. They all ended in rejection. 5-8+ hours of interviews plus dozens of hours of prep time, all to be met with "we went in another direction" and no meaningful feedback.

After several years of seeking large raises, I started to see the grass is not always greener. The empty feeling of rejection motivated me to pause and evaluate my professional life more thoughtfully. Looking at things with new eyes, I saw my situation was actually a great one. My current job rocks. I do work that directly impacts people. I have autonomy, I'm constantly challenged, my peers are bright and pleasant, and I have control over my time. Work feeds my energy AND it gives me 1-2 hours a day to work on my own thing. That is indescribably valuable.

The money lacked some, but the harder to measure things like balance, autonomy, and meaning are strong. Another job will at best match those intangibles and provide a raise that I'll eventually get used to. I choose to practice gratitude for what I have rather than reaching for more.

Not to mention all this while, AI has been getting better and better, providing more leverage to do my day job and my creative side work and meeting my high standards.

I put tremendous effort into the interview process and finished with pride and confidence. They still went another direction. That's when I realized: effort preparing for and completing interviews is misdirected. I can put that effort into my own work, commit to a long time horizon, and guarantee the success I'm looking for without needing to be approved by a hiring committee.

James Clear's weekly newsletter once asked: where in your life will speeding up benefit you? Where in your life will slowing down benefit you? I was rushing through building things and not looking around at the bigger picture. That fast paced anxiety isn't sustainable, and it doesn't lend itself to wise decisions.

So I slowed down. And when I did, I noticed something. I'd been building apps and not shipping them to real users. That's not a recipe for entrepreneurship. A real business builds a product, ships it to the world, markets to find new users, gathers their feedback, and grows the user base. Building in silence is not how you do that.

So I defined a full skill stack: build, ship, market, gather feedback, grow. I know how to build. I don't know how to do the rest. I need to learn these things if I want to grow beyond a hobbyist. That's what I'm doing this year.

The quality of one's life is a trailing indicator of the quality of their past decisions. Today, my quality of life is excellent. This gives me confidence in the decisions I made years ago. I like to think I've gotten wiser over the years and today's decisions will also yield fruit in the future.

It'll take commitment, persistence, hard work, and choosing to show up over and over and over again. Over time I intend to create full ownership over my work, time, and energy, and I intend to write about it here. I'm building my own way out.