⚖️ Discomforts of Starting Over a Career

I know I know it has been forever (4 months?) But transitioning an entire career in the world of AI is like, just a little brutal.

Starting over when you’ve reached at least a middle is hard.

Early stages of a career are supposed to make you feel lost, confused and frequently, dumb. But once you’ve spent a few years learning, these feelings become less intense and frequent- as if you’ve earnt comfort as a result of your hard work.

When you go back to building a career from the start, you forego this comfort and fall in the pool of uncomfortable feelings you thought you had left behind. At 23, that discomfort is easier to accept because it is expected. At 30, when you’ve tasted feeling more confident- they make you question your life choices and elicit a very strong desire to run back into your comfort zone.

I went from having answers to a lot of things to not knowing what I am doing at all. From supporting people find their direction to the one needing a lot of support. It hurts your ego and also humbles you down like nothing else.

I noticed that many of my questions to leaders in the product space were coming from a place of restlessness- I wanted to answers now. What everyone kept reminding me was that no matter how much I hustle, some things only come with time. Learning to sit with the discomfort until then is part of the process.

This isn't a discouragement from making the leap. It's an invitation — if you're exploring something new and the discomfort feels unbearable, consider staying with it a little longer. Getting to something good usually means persisting through a stretch of hard. 🙂

I do still want to reach 1000 subscribers, forward this to a colleague who’d find this useful!