Seasons

I think I’m in between seasons. Expanding the idea of who I am and figuring out who I want to be. I really enjoyed this essay by Stella Garber about career transitions. Felt very timely. I liked her framework for understanding what next to do in her career, and I thought to answer the questions for myself.

What’s important to me

The most important thing to me right now is Princess. She’s become my center, the source of a lot of my growth as a person. Being in this relationship has motivated me to care about myself, family, and friends in a different way than before. When I focus on Princess, I focus on all those other things by default.

Work is also very important to me. Always has been. It gives me purpose, excitement and fulfillment, but I’m at an inflection point. For the longest time I’ve not had to worry about income, but now that the Stripe payouts have come to an end, I need to be very intentional about how much I earn.

And so, money is now important to me. I have a long-term target, but it’s a bit far-fetched and almost impossible to plan for. So I need in-between milestones to get there, starting from higher yearly income. I suspect what eventually happens will come down to serendipity, but I want to align myself in a direction.

What am I optimising for

First, I need to earn more. Spending more time outside of Lagos means I’ll need more non-naira income to support myself. I like not working for money and want to keep it that way, but it’ll take some money-focused work to get there.

Second, I want to continue to do meaningful work. This is something I’ve taken for granted over the past 8 years. Now that I’m reflecting on things, I see how lucky I’ve been and want to continue to do work that matters to people I care about.

Finally, I want to continue to have time for myself. I really truly want to be able to control how I spend my hours. Luckily, I’ve been able to do this to a healthy degree for much of my career and I don’t want that to change.

What are my options

Here’s what I think I’m good at:

1. I can design and build a software product from scratch
2. I can build and manage teams of people to make anything
3. I have a great network of technologists and creatives

Which lends to the following options:

1. Consult for startups: This gives me the most control of my time. I think it can earn me more income in the short-term but I’m not so confident it gets me towards my long-term money goal. It also requires me to get better at sales or at least working my network.
2. Get a big-tech job: This is my best path to consistent higher income, particularly if I can align it with something I care about. But I’m not so sure what it does to my time. The UK also doesn’t pay so well for tech jobs, so I need a US job to make the best out of this option.
3. Build my own startup: I could do this easily but it doesn’t get me towards earning more in the short term. It’s also the worst of the lot in that it’ll suck up all my time. I’ve seen what startups do to people and I’m not very interested.

How can I try things out

A great piece of advice I got from a friend recently was to review what I do and work towards what I want by eliminating the things that don’t get me there.

Paystack is meaningful work but can’t afford to pay me in forex and takes a lot of my time. I can’t earn anything from wuruwuru, but it is also very meaningful. As long as I can raise the money to run it, it doesn’t take much of my time. Finally, consulting as Helloworld has the most potential to earn me more money, but I need to be very selective about what gigs I take on.

I’m taking a 6-month sabbatical in July, and it’s a great opportunity to re-evaluate my options. But to some degree, I think I already know what to do next.