Take Stock + Envision your Future

(Photo Credit @lndtxphoto)

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Join the waitlist here: Digital Orchards Fellowship

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Last week, I posted a blog discussing the Top 5 Things You should do to Now to Pivot Into the Tech Industry. It’s been a pretty popular post, so I thought I’d expand upon each of these topics and offer some additional advice. 

1. Define it: Why are you pivoting?

   • There’s a reason (maybe many reasons) that you’re considering this switch, and you should be clear on what these are. 

   • It helps you identify your motivations for the move, how to avoid similar pitfalls in your new job/career, and gives you the confidence to explain the decision to others too. 

   • It’s also really important to have this solidified so you don’t have regrets later on. We all spend time looking back at choices we’ve made - it’s natural to revisit decisions. The hope is that you review the decision and know that you’d make it again, even if it was hard or went in a direction you weren’t expecting. Building your trust in your decision-making muscles will help you in so many other parts of your life and career. 

   • Unsure? Check out the top 2 questions to ask yourself about whether to stay or go by visiting my post on job-hopping successfully. 

2. Write it down & consider these questions

   • Start by writing down where you see yourself in your current career, and where you envision yourself after a successful career transition into tech. 

   • Looking back: Why are you leaving your current role/company? Did it get boring or frustrating? Lack of growth opportunities? Company culture mismatch? Distrust in management? Burnout due to overwork & no one above you seems to care? Need to increase your salary? Try to name the reason(s) and be specific - don’t just leave because you have a vague sense of meh. 

   • Looking forward: Why does tech excite you? What part(s) of the industry make you curious to learn more? What impact do you hope to have in tech? What kind of role will you be in after this pivot? What kind of company did you end up at? Close your eyes - what does it feel like to be in that new role? Sitting at your new desk, meeting new colleagues, tackling new projects? 

   • It’s ok to dream here! This exercise will help you to define why you’re making this move, which will help keep you motivated along the journey. 

3. Get creative to stay inspired with your pivot

   • Now that you’ve put words to the page that help you see what you want, we need to keep you motivated to actually take the next step. 

   • Easy: create a Pivot Post-It for your desk at home. You could also have one at your desk in the office with nothing but a date on it. (No one needs to know it’s your target departure date but you!)

   • Medium: Add a daily or weekly invite to your calendar. Take a minute to close your eyes, and visualize yourself in your new role. Breathe it in. Live it! 

   • Worth your time: Create a career pivot vision board. I know, I know - I used to think these were kind of silly. But there is plenty of research now on the power of visualization in achieving your goals. You could have a paper one or a digital one, something very simple or with tons of images. The important thing is that (a) you spend the time creating something that will inspire and motivate you, and (b) you look at it regularly & often. 

This is the part of your tech career pivot that should bring you energy, which will help sustain you through the next parts of the journey. 

Pivoting into a new career can be hard, depending on how far the move that you’re making is and how much support you have in making the move.

If you’d like some help with charting out your pivot into tech and you’d like to work with a small cohort of peers making this shift, please consider joining the Digital Orchards Fellowship waitlist: digitalorchards.com/fellowship

Mobile gaming, 1984, and David vs Goliath

(Photo credit @jamesponddotco)

I have a confession: gaming is probably the one area of tech that I pay the least attention to. I have this sense that if I start playing, I may *never* stop - so it’s easier to just avoid it entirely. That said, you would have to be living under a rather large rock to have not heard about the “epic” battle between Apple and Epic Games. 

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#techtopic

The global mobile gaming industry is set to hit $76.7billion this year (up 12% from last year and 10% from the year before). There are 1.36billion users who play mobile games, and mobile games account for 33% of all app downloads, 74% of consumer spend and 10% of all time spent in-app. 

What do all these stats tell us? This fight between Epic Games and Apple/Google is a war of control over who receives the dollars: those who create the content vs those who own the access portal for getting to the content to consumers. And it’s a big chunk of change they are fighting over if 74% of mobile consumer spend is on gaming -- and Apple/Google get a 30% cut of all those transactions. The 30% helps A/G build the rails and maintain some semblance of order & rules to help consumers have better, safer experiences with apps. It makes sense for A/G to charge a % fee to Epic and any other app-maker who would like to appear in their app portals -- the big questions are whether 30% is too high and whether charging that much is stifling competition/business growth for app-makers.  

This is a very uncomfortable place for the Apple brand and its employees -- Apple is known for its legendary 1984 ad which pitted them as the ‘David’ to IBM’s Goliath. Epic smartly poked at that recently, placing themselves as the ‘David’ to Apple’s Goliath in a parody ad. 

And now Apple seems to be forced to decide between being the upstart who “thinks differently” and the trusted “keeper of privacy” -- two brand identities which are unlikely to co-exist for too much longer.

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#neverforget

I was living in New York City in the fall of 2001. I was at my desk in midtown, right across from Grand Central, when the first plane hit the towers. It was an awful day. Working at a company that helped laid-off workers find new jobs, we had multiple clients who became stranded when all transport stopped and were unable to call anyone as phone lines were overloaded. That day, AOL IM became a lifeline to connect with friends & family as it was one of the few communication tools that kept working. That day was a defining moment for so many, and in a similar way to the pandemic now, it helped accelerate the evolution of tech communication tools and the bifurcation of our society. I have hope that new tools & approaches are coming to help us mend this rift. I appreciated this article on the topic of how primitive our communication tools were in 2001: Pagers, Pay Phones, and Dialup: How We Communicated on 9/11

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Take Ownership of your Future Self

(Photo credit @garidy)

1. Take ownership of your Future Self

   • The article above asks you to recognize that the person you are today is not who you were five years ago, and is also not who you will be in five years. So you should recognize that, and start thinking now about who you want to become.

   • I loved this concept as it reminded me of a similar concept in the Atomic Habits book: Decide who you want to be. Then, in order to become the type of person you want to be, prove your new identity to yourself via small wins. 

   • Example from the AH book: 

     • Want to be taken seriously at work?

       • Identity: become the type of person who is always on time.

       • Small win: Schedule meetings with an additional 15–minute gap between them so that you can go from meeting to meeting and always show up early.

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