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Working - Learning - Working

Recent years were intense, I would not say that nothing was learned, but it was unstructured and not deep enough. There were new frameworks, programming languages, paradigms but it was all circling around existing job like some sort of echo chamber. Whenever an idea came to my mind it was clear it’s a reflection of a daily job or just an optimisation of existing product.

From time to time a great vision appeared in front of me. After investigation it was clear — many more people are already doing the same. It felt as if I am trying to catch a train but it would move faster after I got closer.

Vicious cycle

Burnout — spending too much time with technology and less time doing actual life (my interpretation). Sometimes it feels logical that more time invested in job like activities — work & work — results in more information or knowledge which can be used as a leverage later on (to improve life). But in practice after you burn time at work and later want to monetise using what you’ve learned there is no energy left. Furthermore it is quite difficult to learn something very new by repeating what you do everyday, for instance selling more if you are sales person or programming more if you are software engineer.

Something different

Newest approach to dealing with echo chamber was to do something very different from my work.

I was fascinated with robotics for quite a while and even started a new project earlier this year, but soon enough realised that everything I know is not enough, execution of it stagnated and some thought reconciliation had to happen. I felt like chasing that runaway train again.

After going through usual depression cycle some clear issues were identified, first I need a wider circle of people to be able to execute the ideas, then deepen my understanding in other spheres, potentially something fresh like artificial intelligence, bio-engineering, nanotechnology, robotics. Expanding knowledge to other spheres would allow to see naturally arising challenges which could be converted into business opportunities by cross pollinating previous expertise with the new one. Furthermore widening the circle of people would give more brain power to check and later execute those ideas.

The education

I had a chance to visit my hometown recently and nostalgia brought me back to the times I was a student. University is a great place to expand your knowledge and meet new people, I thought, and immediately applied for a course, distance learning though. Hopefully it will make me smarter and will expose me to other smart people.

By the time I got back home I decided that it will be not enough and something else ought to be learned, my course will have a slow pace and only couple of subjects have to be learned every semester. There was some exposure to Udacity recently, I knew they offer nano degrees, and after checking online I found couple of matches for myself — Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Each of those is advertised it could be completed in 6 months, just the right amount of time, so I randomly chose AI, applied and got accepted.

Next

I am looking forward to prove myself that mixing experiences leads to better future. Hopefully exchanging that time I spent doing overtime into studying will prove to be better and will not cause more burnouts.

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