If you have followed my previous post for weekly log than you would have realised that I am feeling the urgency to go out and find work. One of the blockers was not knowing what is definition of ready. I was trying to search for a mentor but haven’t been successful yet. No one has replied to my paid mentor gig on Upwork.

While I was waiting for Upwork and response from my UX colleague things took an unexpected turn last Sunday. I was having Dinner with my friends from Neighbourhood. He works in Adobe, he told me that he has a UX designer in his team and he can help me in setting up the call with him. I liked the proposition and said yes to it. I spoke with UX Designer yesterday i.e. Oct 16. Here is how the conversation went:

1. Introduced myself - My software development background.
2. My decision to learn UX.
3. My specific question on definition of readiness.

The advice I got from him was to build Portfolio and work on real projects. Some more valuable advice’s I got:

1. I can tap on to my front end development skills to build modular,responsive web prototypes.
2. Focus more on Web while building portfolio.
3. Use Pinterest to get influence by design
4. Create UX Scrap Book
5. Indian Market - Most of the designers are looked as they can do both UX and Visual Design. So its important to focus on Visual Design. The idea is not to learn Visual Design but take inspiration. [Time to steal like a pro].
6. Sweet Spot of UX Design and Programming - According to him I can hit a sweet spot of UX Design and front end programming. Specifically modern web. There is a big gap which exists, currently designers cant code much. The advice I got is to hit this sweet spot.
7. Variety in Portfolio - Have variety of apps in Portfolio.

I felt it was a great discussion, because he understood where I am coming from and advice based on that. I believe its time to revise the plan. Here is what I could think of plan going to be.

This looks great to me, but the question is why I am doing this in middle of the month. I already created a monthly plan and due to some reasons I want to abandon my monthly plan and pursue this. Well this is not the direction I want to head. So when I created this post I titled it as time to run? Clearly not, this is not the time to run. I just noticed that my mind played a trick creating another picture, which was definitely linked with my fears.

One of the foundations for my new life is that it needs to be lived creatively, paying attention to things that matter i.e. health, body, family. The moment I don’t pay attention to these it creates some more problems and creates a backlog which gets piled up. The cost of paying that backlog is high, I have done that many a times. My life was a loop, getting fat -> loose weight. You see how much time I have wasted going through these loops. The reason behind that is, when some one else controls your life you will make compromises. Now I can see with clarity why these compromises are bad. If you have one and only life to live will you make better decisions or keep going in a loop of rut? The challenge I am personally facing is unknown. Unknown can drive you crazy or motivated as well. This is where I should trust my belief that “easy choices hard life,hard choices easy life”. Well I guess this resolves my frustration of last couple of days, where fear crept in and tried to change my plan.

The lesson learnt is : Do not let fear, influence change your plan of action. I did a full one day planning to better live October. And I am on the way to achieve at least 70-80 % of my goals. Whatever I failed I need to find better ways to improve on that. So I still have October, one of the goals was to make this blog up and running. So here I am rocking.

P.S. - The sticky that came in between will be a part of month planning for November which I will be doing at the end of month, until then don’t get distracted and keep focus on monthly goals. Its good that I am able to identify priorities but its time to be Indistractable.

That’s the title of latest book from Nir Eyal.