Goals in Focus, Paths Amiss: The Year of Choices in the 2023 Abyss
Why you can't score if you have a goal?
If I had to summarize the lessons of 2023 in just one word, that would be growth.
This year has been challenging for the IT industry. For us, it started with a 30% revenue drop and ended with a client leaving. As of today, I’m winding down operations and continuing solo.
But I had no idea I’d end up in this position. In January 2023, when I felt the first budget cut, I thought this is it! It’s time to work on my long-term goal of becoming a creator.
The extra hours I got because of budget cuts seemed to support this. But the goal itself wasn’t enough. I lacked a clear direction in which I was going to achieve this, so I failed.
This newsletter breaks down every quarter of 2023. Why I failed from quarter to quarter, and what I learned from it.
There are numerous ways to become a creator.
You may be committed to this goal and have the time and energy, but your work acts as a force vector equilibrium if you lack direction.
I went in different directions in Q1, Q2, and Q4 (i).
Q1
So, after the budget cut, I felt excited–what a weird thing to say.
I was super committed. I devoted my first waking hours to writing blog posts on testing, React, and Electron. I had a routine in these topics, and writing felt easy. But as much as I liked this extra time and being productive, after a couple of weeks, it was clear:
This is not sustainable. I felt a gradual drop in motivation and finances.
Lesson learned: I've realized that building things is one of my biggest passions. Not only does it inspire me to write, but it also fuels my motivation to create even more. While writing is also a source of energy for me, it's a byproduct of everything I'm working on and experiencing as a software engineer.
I had to look for clients, so I dusted off my old Upwork profile and sent a couple of proposals.
Most of them were winning. I quickly made $3k extra from completing several projects and creating a browser extension. Doing only a little project work gave me enough topics and motivation for the next couple of months.
So, I started writing about making money on the side as a software developer instead of sticking with my topics on testing, React, and Electron.
Q2
The Make Money on Upwork thing was getting traction, but I was quickly reminded why I left this platform. It was commoditizing software development.
My blog posts won the proposals I sent on Upwork, so I was thinking, how can I help people use their software development knowledge and a little writing to decommoditize themselves? So, I started writing about these ideas.
I also launched a free course helping developers to get into blogging. Everything was in green: following, read time, subscriptions, but I still wasn’t making any money.
This is when I made a big mistake.
Lesson learned: considering how to monetize any aspect of my work was a mistake. At the end of the day, I continue to write technical posts and newsletters free of charge. These pieces are the product of my passion for technology and writing, and I do not expect any compensation in return. The act of creating them is its own reward.
I was deep in some Twitter circles promoting making money from writing. I thought, this is it! Here are these lovely people who will hand me the super secret formula that shows me Exactly how to monetize all this stuff.
So, I subscribed to a bunch of email lists.
I followed, engaged, retweeted.
I started writing on Medium daily.
Heck, I almost bought a $1k course from a guy who writes emails like this:
It was the top of the Dunning-Kruger curve and the time for hard lessons. This was when I moved your email to ConvertKit, and at some point, I asked, what the hell am I getting you into?
I got stuck.
I wasn’t building.
I was writing about the same things: the plateaus, the challenges, the lists. It felt like I was creating content out of nothing, and now I'm about to encourage others to make a living by writing about making a living through writing.
Eventually, I got tired of repeating myself and quit.
Q3
This was the best part of the year. Or maybe the past 10 years.
It almost felt like a reward for completely wrecking my plan of becoming a creator and didn’t accomplish anything.
But deep down, I know I made the right choice. Instead of checking my notifications, engaging, and keeping my streak going, we enjoyed our time in Croatia, Serbia, Poland, and Sweden while traveling.
Q3 was a reward for saying no to the algorithm and saying yes to life.
Lesson learned: I will never forget how I felt in Q3 and try to replicate it yearly. It added a unique dimension to this year that cannot be replaced.
Q4
When we got home, the lack of direction was clear. But I still had my agency running, and I felt I’d be missing out if I didn’t try to scale it. I gave myself a deadline until the end of the year.
This was the third direction I wandered into.
I made a better website, started searching for leads, wrote some sales material, did cold outreach for the first time, and even got results.
However, the scaling issues slowly started to appear.
Instead of writing blog posts for my developer blog, I wrote them for my agency blog. I also needed a company LinkedIn profile to share this stuff.
It started to feel like I was building up an alternate reality.
Lesson learned: I can do marketing, cold outreach, write a sales proposition, and land projects, but I prefer building stuff. And even if I pretend I don’t and go the other way, it’s like holding my breath underwater before coming up for fresh air, a new tech, or a project, and then not shutting up about it for weeks on my blog.
Finally, last week, another client let me know he’s scaling down, which ultimately decided the future of my agency and the end of Q4.
Conclusion and 2024
Becoming a creator was a pretty dumb goal.
It had a bunch of questions hanging. It hasn’t had any wide or depth. Louie Bacaj was writing about this in The M&Ms Newsletter:
I also had plenty of direction: write for developers, write for freelancers, write for everyone who wants to make money from writing, and build an agency.
It ultimately led me to fail this year’s and my Two Year Plan.
But it helped me reinforce some previous learning:
Don’t shop when you’re hungry – I was presented with the empty window of 20 hours I could spend on creating content and monetizing it. Everything I wrote looked like a spectacular idea. When you have less time to write, you do some subconscious cleanup and care more about how you’re spending it.
Making money is a side effect of being helpful and not the reward for it. There’s no immediate reward for being helpful. It’s your choice.
Travel – just go someplace you haven’t been, a culture you don’t know, and it’ll blow your mind.
Keep it simple – there are plenty of ways, even software solutions, to overengineer your life, writing, daily routines, and fun. Use First Principle thinking. I’m a software engineer, and I love helping other developers people. During my university years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours on OpenSuse forums assisting people to use Linux. It energized me like working with tech, building, and writing about it. You can find simple sources of energy like this.
Finally, I’d like to thank you for sticking with this newsletter in 2023 and for supporting and engaging with my content. It means a lot and gives me immense motivation to write these.
Have a wonderful year!
– Akos
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Great takeaways! After connecting with you in the later half of last year, I have always learned from your writings. Cheers for 2024!