Earlier this year I released my first native OSX app called Dripps which was a simple image uploading service using the Dropbox API.
This was a personal project and experiment to see the inside of Xcode and get my feet wet with Cocoa, Appkit, CoreFoundation, and Foundation. It was an incredible learning experienced and took an incredible amount of time – honestly more time than I had hoped it would take and the financial return was paltry (but that’s ok, money wasn’t the intent).
It made me solidify my belief that although I can do programming and have built a career off of it historically, it’s not something that I need to be doing full-time now and in the future – there are people, like my partners at 8BIT, who are much more naturally gifted and simply better at programming than I am.
This “coming to terms” with my own talents and gifts is a humbling process but one that is necessary for personal growth – you see, the longer that we hold onto things based on pride or position or historical precedence the more closed we become to new opportunities, new experiences, and higher personal and professional performance.
So when I got a notice in my inbox that I need to renew the domain name it was a very easy decision to sunset the project (in January), move on to bigger and better things, and relieve myself of the pressure to keep things updated that I’m not incredibly passionate about, and provide more value in the areas that I’m exceptional.
This is all about focus and doing that which you were made to do. It takes time and you won’t find your niche or strengths quickly, but you can as you walk through your experiences, qualify them wisely, get counsel from good friends, and decide to make the tough decisions.
Perhaps you have a few outstanding projects that you need to relieve yourself of, sunset, and move on from so that you can open yourself up to even bigger and better things.
I’ve kind of accepted the fact that there will always be someone better at something than I am…but while it humbles me constantly I don’t let it discourage me. I will always try my hardest to keep kicking ass, taking names, and learning every day.
Well said. I agree 100%. Nothing wrong with change. There is always something else to attack and accomplish.
John, curious about your input on this:
When is it time to delegate and leave things to others – and when is it time to beef up your own knowledge base in order to accomplish something? This is something I struggle with. When do I go a different path and when do I take on the education process of furthering myself on the current path?
Any plans to open source the code now? Would love to continue using it and hopefully improving on it.
this might be a good idea. i’ll have to look into it.
That would be really awesome. Please keep us all posted.