How The Pandemic Helped Me Find My Purpose.

Anyone who hear or sees the words NCOV, Covid, Pandemic, Quarantine they are reminded of how the world stopped and took a turn on 2020, making it the plot twist of the century. No one was spared from this unfortunate phenomena. Men, Women, Children of all ages lost their jobs overnight, lost some of their families and more people suffered as the day goes by.

I can only remember that time when the news broke out. I was a Producer for a local TV show when our admin sent us a message that we’d be starting to wear masks going to work. At first, I thought that this is just going to be a thing for a week or two. Then it got worse, people are starting to shift to a work from home set up then before I knew it, companies started to lay off some people. Companies are drowning. Businesses whether big or small are closing down. People are being quarantined. Extroverts are itching to go out or look for something to suffice their urge to go out. Introverts are enjoying their time. That simple thing that I thought that would only last for a week became a normal thing for the next months.

Then, in the midst of a crisis, our government gunned our network down. I was laid off right off the bat. I felt miserable, useless and hopeless. For almost 6 years in the media industry I never thought that I would end my media career like this. For the next four months after I was abruptly laid off I was jobless. I have no source of funds to support my day-trading. My assets are beginning to be liquidated and I said to myself, I’d take any job and learn from it along the way.

The Answered Prayer

One evening on the 2nd week of September, A VA company called me and said that they got my resume somewhere else for a social media manager. Out of desperation I immediately said yes and jumped in on a meeting for my initial interview. I felt so lucky that day that they immediately hired me and even let me start that night.

My first day as a VA went well, Social Media Management is closer to home since it’s still media. Plus the fact that I have at least 5 years of Wordpress experience and Content production, I easily adjusted on this new journey. the demise and hopelessness that I felt for almost 4 months made me hustle my way through and after two weeks I got promoted to senior position as a Digital Media Head; spearheading the companies overall media production and management. And after a few months, I found myself handling their wordpress, and bootstrapping. There I found my purpose as a developer. I started to love the job I never looked for; that for everyday, I made sure that I upskill and learn.

And here I am developing blockchain projects, websites and even doing consultancy gigs for big tech companies locally and internationally. And if anyone from the broadcast media industry called me back for a job, I would gladly decline. I already found myself. I already found my purpose. And it may sound wrong, but I’m thankful for this pandemic, without this, I can never be that Senior Developer that I have dreamed of.

Learning Curves

With this experience there’s a lot of learning curves that I always kept in mind to date and carried along the way. And these are some of them

1. Learn As Needed — We all know that no man can learn everything. But as the saying goes “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” we are sure that it is better to know than to master a skill. Same goes on coding, I always make sure that whenever I take a project I have checked all of the parameters such as “Will I learn something”, “Does it openly make me grow in this industry?” and “How does this project affect my integrity and credibility as a professional”. If the project is an app development go learn the programming languages needed on the go. Then if the next project is different from the first one, unlearn those skills and learn the skills needed. By the time you get another app development project in the future, it’s much closer to home.
2. Let Things Fall Into Place — There’s no need for you to rush things. Let your clients know how fast you can develop or produce an output and give them realistic timelines by gauging your own capabilities. I know that anything that was done right way ahead of a given timeline deserve a praise but doing otherwise may also take a big chunk away from your credibility.
3. If it works, don’t fix it. — I know that there’s a lot of people who are taking advantage of their clients ignorance so they could charge them more. There’s no need of this if you want to earn more. All you need to do is straight up tell them that their project is working fine and needs no fixing, you may lose on not getting extra fees from the project but you can earn a big win on credibility and professionalism that would make you land a bigger project soon.