Hey, this is the daily Overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today, let's talk about embracing the uncertainty!
So last month was my 20 year anniversary coming to the UK.
So I came to the UK...I graduated, I got my degree in History on the 15th May 1998 and
on the 19th , I flew out here to join my newborn baby and my wife, and to get a job as quick
as I could!
And I got a job, I talked about this before, in a factory - we called it the dairy but
there were no cows, it was a factory, they made yogurt and I got the first job I could
get which was to work there, and basically work at the end of a conveyor belt picking
up pots of yogurt as it came off the conveyor belt, pack it into boxes, when the boxes were
full you send the box down and just do that for 8 hours a night.
And I was doing that from 10pm until 6am, so it was a 10pm to 6pm shift and at the end
of that I would go home and I would stop at the newsagent because it was open at 6am,
and get all the newspapers that had job ads in them!
Then I would go home and do all the CV's for them.
So I didn't have email, most of them didn't have email addresses in them back then in
'98 so it was printing off the cv's, printing off a copy of the cover letter, putting the
stamp on it, sending it out and spending money on stamps which I didn't really have and doing
the cv's.
And I can remember, it was really dark times, in fact, two months I worked at the dairy
and I had two job interviews...I had three job interviews.
One of them I finally got.
But one of them was a night manager of a blockbuster video in Oxford which I didn't get, I can't
tell you how devastated I was because I didn't get that job!
And another one was a ticket collector on the trains, so you know "tickets please!"
that was what I nearly got, and somehow I got into IT.
I got that job in Canary Wharf where I worse a suit that I got from a charity shop for
8 pounds and felt like the biggest fraud of my life, but went down there and did that.
But, this was a really dark time.
I can remember having this fight about...I had to buy a printer so I could print out
the cv's and we had this argument about how we can't afford to buy a printer.
I said "but I need to be able to look for a job.
If I can't do cv's, we can't look for a job" and it was like "yeah, but we can't afford
it, we don't make enough money to eat, we've got all this other stuff.
We're maxed out on the credit cards, we have lot's of debt", and it was a really dark time.
And the hard bit about all of it was the uncertainty, right.
Because after the fact I can tell this story "all those tough times!" all this kind of
stuff, but at the time it was not knowing whether or not , filling out those cv's every
day, sending them off, I'd do at least 10 cv's a day.
I kept doing it and a lot of the time I felt like maybe I'm just wasting my time.
Maybe this is not gonna work out.
It was the uncertainty of it all that helped me out.
If somebody could say "just keep doing what you're doing, you're definitely 100% gonna
get a job" then that would've been something, but nobody could say that because it just
wasn't true.
I just had to keep trying, it was really hard.
And a lot of times when we do things, it's the uncertainty that makes it hard.
It's that we don't know whether or not it's gonna work out.
It's the same with the app market.
A lot of times people will ask me "Eric, can you have a look at my app idea and tell me
if it would work and I'd say "dude, if I knew if your app idea would work, then I would
have a lot more app ideas that work".
I have some that work, some that don't, but it's the uncertainty of it all.
I do know if you don't do anything, there's a 100 percent chance that it won't work.
So it's the same with everything.
It's the same with going for a job, the same with doing anything making money from it,
we don't get that kind of certainty, and that's what makes life hard.
It's always easy after the fact, it's always easy to tell the story.
I can look back fondly at those horrible times with a screaming baby and we're fighting and
arguing all the time because we didn't have enough money, and I'm thinking "I have to
move on", and I felt, I honestly can remember feeling like I was gonna be at that dairy,
because you see people who are there for their entire lives and they were retiring there,
they start there as a kid and they retired there.
And I was 25 years old, I had my degree, but that wasn't getting me anywhere and I remember
thinking "this is gonna be it, I can see these older guys and that's gonna be me in 10 years
or 20 years.
I'm gonna be this guy working at the dairy".
But no, I was still doing the cv's every day and kept doing that and luckily it worked.
Luckily I did get the job and I kept trying, kept battering, like you say, battering at
the walls until they gave in.
And a lot of you guys out there are in the same situation.
you're putting an app on the app market and it's not working yet, and you're wondering
whether or not you're wasting your time.
Whether or not it's worth doing.
And I wish I could tell you that if you keep doing what you're doing, it's gonna work,
but I can't.
I can just tell you that if you don't do anything, nothings gonna work.
If what you're doing is not working, change it and try something different.
I can tell you things that we've done in the past that have worked, I can tell you things
that...and there's lots of good practices out there but it's tough to say this, but
a lot of the times we have to embrace the uncertainty of it all.
I put apps out there all the time, or looking for new clients all the time or taking on
more costs that I could think, hopefully we get that new client in and everything like
that.
And there's always the uncertainty, there's always the risk that we take and that's what
helps us grow and that's what helps us do better.
So anyway, just recounting those old stories, thinking about it, 20 years ago today I was
still in the dairy!
I had no idea where my life was gonna go!
And I guess I still don't but anyway, that's it for today, I'll talk to you guys tomorrow!