Two months ago, I was scared. Scared I wouldn’t be able to keep up the course I was on. Scared my progress would grind to a stop. Scared I wouldn’t be able to deliver on the commitments that I’d made. Scared that I couldn’t cut it on the new level I was playing at.
See, about five months before that, I’d decided to go full time into product and software engineering with very little background in it. It was an incredible opportunity: join one of the best software product teams in the world and learn from, and with, the best. My answer was yes, almost without thinking, when I got the chance.
That was the end of last April. True or not, I believed that to rapidly get to a level where I could really contribute, I’d have to make an almost Faustian bargain: I would have to drop everything else in my life to learn what I needed to in such a short period of time. Social life, hobbies, most everything that I did for fun, gone. Note: there was no explicit deadline looming, but I always feel the clock ticking in my head. One of the curses of my brain. But to me, this deal was a no-brainer.
Pulling it off damn near broke me.
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