Countdown & Commitment

During my daily session of blog post reading, two posts stood out for me as very relevant to my current situation. The first The magic of the countdown by Seth Godin and the second Focus, intensity, hard work, and inevitability by Rohan Rajiv.

These last few days feel like a countdown towards a new beginning in my professional journey, despite the fact that I have been working on Revit Content on and off for the last 10 years and on RFA for more than 1 year. It feels that way as these two projects are going to turn from side projects into my full time work and sole source of income (besides the one or other freelance project).

Seth writes about countdown:

But what really matters is this: There’s a commitment.

When we get to zero, we’re actually going to do this.

The commitment has to happen before the countdown can.

When I read this part, I realised that I’ve built up this commitment over quite some time and that I’m ready for the Focus x Intensity x Hard Work to start, which Rohan defines as follow…

Focus is the continuous, iterative, process of keeping the main thing the main thing. Intensity is being 100% engaged while doing it. And, Hard Work requires no further introduction.

While my current countdown is towards the beginning of my new full time journey, building my business, there was a countdown towards making and communicating the decision of taking this step (which was the commitment).

The entire process of getting ready and finally doing it, took almost a year, including the final hand over and transition out of my CTO role.

While my full focus during the last few days has still been to do my very best work as iOS & Ruby Developer for the NYC startup, the mornings and evenings are dedicated to working through the status quo of my own products and breaking down the first project in order to fully focus on execution from Monday next week.