RWDevCon Inspiration Talk – Starting Over by Ellen Shapiro

Lesson 3: Change Does Not Mean You Failed

The third lesson may not apply to everyone, but for those of us who it does apply to it is a big one: Change is not an admission of failure.

I have always been terrified of failure. I was a go-getter. I was a grade-grubber. I was a goody-two-shoes. Forty other synonyms for complete nerd.

Attribution: flickr.com

A grade of ‘B’ in school meant that I was slacking. The couple of times I got a ‘C’ it was as if the world had fallen apart, broken until that got pushed back up to at least an ‘A-’.

I’ve always been raised with the idea that if I tried hard enough, I could make anything happen.

Part of why I was so terrified of starting over was the implicit acknowledgement that what I had been trying before just wasn’t working no matter how hard I tried. I thought that it was admitting that I failed.

It took the benefit of hindsight to realize that it wasn’t an admission of failure. It was simply an admission that what I had been trying before wasn’t for me.

When I released myself from the expectation that I had to succeed at every single thing that I tried, starting over with a different thing became far, far easier.

Lesson 4: You Never Know What Transfers

The fourth lesson I learned is: You never know what transfers.

As an example, when I worked in a television industry I’ve worked with a lot of big personalities. People who wanted things the way they wanted them and wanted them that way yesterday. From working with these people I learned the absolutely critical nature of expectation setting.

For the demanding people that I worked for,

• if you told them something was going to happen to make them happy and then it did not happen, they were furious.
• If you told them the incremental steps that were going to happen and you did not over commit, they were always happy because they were informed about the progress of what was happening. They could follow that progress.

I haven’t dealt with anybody in tech nearly as nuts as some of the folks that I worked with in the entertainment industry. Anybody here who’s had to work with a client is probably nodding in recognition right now because that technique that I learned to cope working for total Looney Tunes proved really, really useful in simply dealing with businesses who need to make decisions based on the schedule that you give them.

You will find that when you start over you have skills that transfer over in complete unexpected ways. The things that you learned that you think are very specific to your industry, especially when it comes to dealing with people, can help you out immensely.

Lesson 5: You Can Learn Anything

Finally, this leads into the most important thing that I learned: You can learn anything as long as you know how to learn.

One of the things that always terrified me about starting over was the idea that I would be throwing away everything that I had learned about the thing that I had already been doing.

• How did knowing how to tune a guitar apply to ordering film?
• How did knowing how to find a three-foot technocrane the day before our shoot transfer to building a UI pop over controller replacement?

What I realized was that in all of my attempted careers, I’d actually learned how to research things.

Research champion!

I learned how to word Google searches very precisely so that it would always give me back exactly what I was looking for. Whether it was:

• How to play a given song on the guitar
• How to install a firmware update for a particular Windows machine
• The exact wording of a very, very long UIGestureRecognizerDelegate method

When I started programming I was already miles ahead of other people in my classes because I could coax useful information out of the Apple and Android docs, Stack Overflow, and other online resources way more efficiently.

The power of learning has become newly clear with Swift.

We have all had to start over again. To come from a very traditionally object oriented language to a more functional one; to learn an entire new syntax, one that sometimes requires us to tie our pinkies to our ring fingers to keep from typing semicolons.

It’s been hard, but if you’ve learned how to learn, and not just how to do one specific thing, you can do this, and we will. I, for one, am so, so excited to be learning this new language.

Starting Over Is Exciting

In conclusion, I really hope that I have inspired you all:

• To challenge your passion
• To realize that you know so much more than you think you do
• To remember you can learn even more than you already know

The next time you wonder, “How the heck did I wind up here,” I hope you can remember not to see change as failure and instead to make lemons into lemonade.

The fact of the matter is that while starting over can be terrifying, it’s also the most exciting thing in the world.