So after working for fifteen years in the music industry the realisation that had been marinating really came to fruition. My career was not going to ever look like what I wanted it to in my 20’s. A few really important lessons came from this. Firstly, the projection you have from your 20’s of what that career looks like is a collection of imagery from the consumers lens, which is dressed up and edited to the extreme. Imagine your idea of what your life should look like if all you ever saw was instagram. As the music industry’s output is all media, there’s no shortage of fantasy food. The second lesson is that the creative 'flow’ you get from writing, performing, improvising and learning music that you enjoy or are personally invested in, becomes less and less a part of your daily activities, until in my case, it vanishes completely, along with the motivation to keep the fire burning. There are a bunch more environmental factors about doing what I do that I could go on about, but I would be potentially seen to be discrediting those who continue this path which I would never dream of doing. Our passions are all different, our motivations all contrasting, and some of my friends produce some of the most beautiful music I’ve heard. I would selfishly hate for that to stop! Everyone has their own journey right?
So I’ve been looking at career changes. Something that involves my brain, something that involves creativity, something that doesn’t tie me down to any one location, something that has the potential for growth personally, professionally and in renumeration (lets be honest, we all want to get paid). I talked with a career advisor (who was awesome) and after chatting to a friend who works in chip design, my interest in tech was sparked. I started doing some research. FreeCodeCamp was discovered, and I began working through their HTML and CSS introductory courses. I started the enrolment process for a coding bootcamp, and after getting the jitters about how much money I was dropping ($14k AUS), I did some more research. I’m a disciplined self learner (this blog is partly to hold myself accountable) and an old high-school friend who I discovered works for a mobile gaming company advised going down that path at least for the first six months before deciding to drop cash on training. So, the journey begins. The plan is to hit this hard for six months before making a decision about whether it’s for me, but the more I dabble, and the more I think about it, the more excited I get. The parallels between music and programming are well-documented and it makes a lot of sense to me. So, armed with FreeCodeCamp and Visual Studio, I’m going to chip away and document my journey here. I’ll continue my music work and schedule writing time in the diary so it doesn’t slip away, and who knows, without having to lean on it as the bread winner of my future, perhaps the passion will return..
I’m going to start a twitter account entirely for this journey which can be found here.