Hello World
“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” — Confucius.
Through this blog, I want to tell you what I’m doing to achieve my goals and prove that I’ll get them thanks to values as meaningful to me as discipline, hard work or patience.Hi, I’m Juan. I was born in the south of Spain, and when I was going to start the university period, I moved to Madrid, trying to find better educational and professional opportunities. A year ago, when I was finishing my bachelor’s study, two engineering degrees, I started thinking seriously about what could be the next step in my career. I knew if I wanted to get the correct answer, the first thing I had to do was to set my goals.
When you set goals, you take control of your life’s direction.
The first step was thinking about where I would like to be in 10 years, and then weighing up how I could get there, acknowledging factors and barriers that could appear on the way (economic, emotional, labor, linguistic, familial, geographic, cultural, geopolitical, etc.).
One question that made me meditate on all these things at that time was the one I read in the book “Tools of the Titans” written by Tim Ferriss.
“If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?” Peter Thiel.
After all of this arduous analysis, which perhaps I’ll explain in the following posts, I decided on the three main pillars where I would move all my life around. These decisions took many months of reflection, but months later, and looking at it from the perspective, I think I made the right decision.
- Switch my career into the IT field.
- Convert a van.
- Move to Switzerland.
Although it may not seem like it, these three radical changes have a high interconnection between them. I’ll write more extensively about it in the following posts; in the remainder of this one, I will answer some questions that will clarify a little bit of these points.
Why do you want to convert a van if your objective is to work in a tech company in Switzerland?
Time and adaptability. The van’s conversion, which has almost finished, gave me a period to improve essential skills to have the capability to go ahead to next steps; some of them are:
- English, a critical factor that I keep improving because I still don’t feel as comfortable as I’d like with it. And obviously, I know it’s imperative to get it.
- Tech tools, I was trying to learn about many things in the field, but the tools I spent the most time on were Python and SQL.
- Develop a surfboard patent for one of my final projects at the university and volunteer in an organization.
- Know how the pandemic was going to develop further and take it into account to make decisions.
- Have the possibility to spend time improving my handmade skills and the use of many tools like welders, miter saw, hand grinder, insulation systems, electrical and electronic systems, ways to treat materials such as wood, steel, aluminum, and a great many others. And of course, to perform all these tasks with a great friend who has helped me more than anyone could imagine.
In addition, a van gives me a place to live with the capability to go where ever I want, avoiding giving capital importance to other considerations that might bother me along the way. Some of those could be the cost of renting a room, how much time I have to spend looking for a free house, or all the possible problems arising from these types of deals.
In short, to have the ability to control my life and not let external factors serve as an excuse for not trying to achieve my goals.
Questions like (Why Switzerland? Why to switch to IT? How are you going to live in a van?) will be answered in future posts.
How I’m going.
The van is done; it took us (me and my friend) almost 5 months (Oct, Nov, Dec, March, and April) to convert it from trash to something apparently livable, as you can see in the photos attached. Before I dive into it in other posts, I can advance that the van has a gas kitchen, water tanks, extendable bed, solar panels, a bike garage, etc.
Regarding the professional world, and after know about the experience of other people trying to enter the labor market of Switzerland, I decided the best thing to do, also cause my career switch, the right choice could be to do a Bootcamp about Data Science there. It would quench my thirst for knowledge about these topics and give me the possibility to work with companies there. So, the challenge now is to pass their interviews; to be able to achieve that, I’m training my English and my technical skills, from Python interview questions to how to solve efficiently mental math skills.
But if I fail in this path explained above, I will find alternatives depending on what caused the failure. And the work done won’t have been a waste of time because it could seem like training for international interviews. That knowledge learned I’ll apply no matter what.
Overall, it’s working great for me.
Are you making excuses to don’t achieve your goals? I hope the answer is “no” and you can tell me what those are and how you are getting them.
See you!