The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind--Albert Einstein
Let me explain. Virtual conferences aren’t all bad. You don’t need to disrupt your life as dramatically, many are free or low cost, and I don’t care what anyone says you can network if you are thoughtful about how. Following the Esri User Conference earlier this week I received dozens of messages.
Many fellow attendees in the chat box alongside presentations would respond to something and want to have a follow-up discussion. As a self-proclaimed autodidact geospatial analyst my career was usually the talking point.
Although I have many years of being employed, I have had many more of being self-employed. You may have heard me state quite emphatically that I am indeed unemployable. This is true.
This wasn’t always the case. There was a time when I was more often than not hired right during the interview. Colleagues would find out where I was working and say, “Wow, I wondered who they hired” after they too had been interviewed. I had more work than I could handle but I managed. Until I started asking questions. I became unable to do status quo and deliver “good enough” or “this is what the client paid for” work. I also grew tired of all of the travel and endless meetings that in all honesty--could have been an email. Even my independent work was problematic. I thought you simply worked with every client that reached out. Some of them were assholes and I just thought that was part and parcel. I silently suffered, worked on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and missed a Steve Tyler concert. The irony with the Steve Tyler performance (part of a Qualtrics Conference) was that after hitting send on an ironclad deadline I was informed by automatic reply that the recipients would be out of the office for the next several days. I had a client once (if you are reading this I still adore you but let’s be honest, you always listened to the guys on the team over me) that paid me to leave a conference in Washington, DC to travel to NYC at 3:30 a.m. in the morning for an in-person meeting with his client. When I tried to interject an alternate perspective in another meeting I was jovially but firmly accused of “heckling” and there ended my contributions to the team culture. This one stung because I absolutely enjoyed the team--their culture, mission, and sense of humor. So I stopped spending the bulk of my days traveling, writing, analyzing, and speaking at private client collaborative meetings. Seth Godin puts it quite succinctly below. Its only 3 minutes so hit play and I will wait.
This is the bit of potential value to the inquisitive types wanting a career not only in geospatial intelligence but data analytics, or writing.
I already went for a run, had a healthy smoothie, wrote a blog (ahem), removed abandoned envs from my terminal (Conda-Forge friends), and created a timeline for what I need to deliver to my editor for our next meeting. I am writing a book, Python for Geospatial Data Analysis : Theory, Tools, and Practice for Location Intelligence Comments are closed.
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