What if I don’t blow

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn — Alvin Toffler

If you are close enough, one of the things I must have ranted about around you is that all the money I have made in my life as a graphic designer is not up to a tithe of what I have made building websites (in fact it’s not up to a tithe of what I made in 2019 alone building websites). Before you get your hopes too high, the little above half a million I made last year went into NYSC, accommodation, a new laptop, a new phone and of course, man must chop.

So, after looking at the balance sheets at the end of the year, I realized as a business, going fully into web development is the way. What this means is that I no longer offer graphic design as a service but I still do it for personal use and personal use only.

Moving on, I am giving up on a startup I started working on some time last year (ORJA). Yeah, this is the second time I will be giving up on a brand just like that (if you look up to me in some sort of way, I am sorry to disappoint you, hopefully, I will share details with you in the future)

By now, you are wondering: why I am giving up so much just to be a developer: you probably even thought I was the maddest developer you have ever met (me laughs in Japenese abi I should cry ni). The bitter truth is this I am way behind (like way way behind), I know PHP, jQuery and all those of things that can be used to build a website: but you can barely get a high paying project with these technologies except your clients are from freelancing websites. These days you need to know Laravel, React, git, netlify, gatsby, npm and all these shiny new technologies because that’s what people are paying for.

I have tried learning these technologies but I don’t seem to be able to pick them up especially that Laravel, it’s more like being in a state where you feel you can’t grow beyond where you are: plus managing the business sides of things, communicating with clients, personal development, aaarrrggh: sometimes I just want to cry.

I should not lie sha: I “shook” my mouth into a lot of things that last year(2019) that were not technical so there were times I didn’t even code for months. Those things however, provided me with the opportunity to learn leadership, execution, planning and so on; thereby not making them a total waste of time.

All this epistle is that I am going fulltime on this coding thing so if it takes 2years for me to respond a message on WhatsApp don’t blame me: I am busy working to ensure that I can also afford a vacation to the Bahamas sometime in 2021, I am cutting off all distractions and focusing fully on coding, running a business and my self-development, I shall not shook my mouth into anything that is not my concern and probably will not be as available to people as I was last year.

I will probably make a lot of enemies this year than I have in my whole life but at the end 2020, I will look back and I would be a badass developer closing year with more than 10times my earnings in 2019.

What if after all these I still don’t blow? Here is what I have come to understand about wealth: I am not fighting to be the richest in the world but I don’t mind being a billionaire(in dollars, pls), I am not fighting to be the maddest developer in the world but it matters a whole lot to me to be able to build systems that help solve problems and yeah, coding is my hustle for the time being but I look forward to the time I will make money in my sleep.

Footnotes: It’s not that I am a total olodo in coding: I learnt React over the course of 2–3months last year, I now play with git, I have deployed a couple of sites on netlify, I am now picking up gatsby and Laravel(built a little something for myself already: check it out here). I, however, feel like I need to be way better than I am presently thereby the need for this drastic decision.

PS: I do not know if this will motivate anybody, I, however, needed a place to dump this where I can look back and track when I took this decision.

With love,

Aremu Oluwagbamila(SMOG)

This article was made awesome due to edits by Rex (my virtual assistant between January 5 -17, 2019)