Man, 2017. What a year that was for my career, right? Feels like a lifetime ago, but the lessons stuck with me. I remember kicking off that year feeling pretty lost, honestly. Like a fish just kinda swimming in circles, no real direction. The job I was in at the time? It was alright, paid the bills, but it certainly wasn’t sparking any joy, you know what I mean? Every morning felt like dragging my feet to get outta bed. I’d just roll out, chug some coffee, and stare at that screen, doing the same old thing, day in and day out.
I started 2017 just coasting, trying to convince myself it was fine. But deep down, it was eating at me. I’d look at other folks, friends, seeing them excited about their work, pushing forward, and I just felt stuck. Like I was treading water. My brain was just buzzing with “what if”s and “there’s gotta be more”s. It got to a point where I just couldn’t ignore that gut feeling anymore. Something had to give. I was desperate for a change, truly. I wanted to feel like I was actually building something, making some kind of progress, not just showing up.
So, I pulled out my old laptop, dusted it off, and started just… looking. At what? Hell if I knew. But I figured, if I didn’t even start poking around, nothing would ever change. I spent evenings scrolling through job boards, reading articles, just trying to figure out what other paths even existed. It was overwhelming, man. So many options, so many things I could do, but what did I want to do? That was the kicker. I wasn’t even sure about that.
Then I stumbled onto something. It wasn’t a job listing, not exactly. It was more like a community, a bunch of people talking about building their own stuff online. Small projects, side gigs. I saw folks just putting ideas out there, testing them, learning as they went. And a light bulb kinda flickered in my head. Maybe I didn’t need to jump into a whole new big job right away. Maybe I just needed to start building something myself.
I started small. Really small. I remembered I always liked messing around with pictures, making them look cool. So I decided I’d try to learn some proper photo editing skills. I downloaded some free software first, just to get a feel for it. Watched a ton of YouTube tutorials, probably annoyed my girlfriend with all the clicking and muttering late at night. My first attempts were rough, believe me. Like, seriously amateur hour. But I kept at it. I was so bad at first, my fingers felt clumsy on the keyboard, my eyes hurt from staring at pixels. But the thing was, for the first time in ages, I wasn’t just doing what I was told. I was exploring. I was learning a new skill, piece by piece.
After a few weeks, I felt a little more confident. Enough to actually reach out. I put a message out there, on a local community forum, offering to touch up photos for people, just for cheap, or even for free at first, just to get some practice. I figured, what’s the worst that could happen? A few folks actually took me up on it. My first “clients” were friends of friends, people needing profile pictures sharpened or old family photos restored a bit. Each time, I’d get feedback, and it helped me learn. I fumbled through explaining my process, managing expectations. It was nerve-wracking every single time.
I even tried building a super basic webpage to showcase my work. I used one of those drag-and-drop builders, literally zero coding involved. It looked clunky, I won’t lie. But it was mine. I put up the pictures I’d edited, wrote a few lines about what I could do. Every little step, every piece of progress, no matter how tiny, felt like a huge win. It wasn’t about the money at that point; it was about the momentum. It was about proving to myself that I could actually do something different.
By the end of 2017, I wasn’t rich, I wasn’t famous, but I had something much better. I had a direction. I had a side hustle that was actually generating a bit of income, and more importantly, generating some excitement in me. I was still at the old job, sure, but my evenings weren’t just wasted anymore. I was building, learning, creating. It wasn’t the “success” I thought I wanted at the beginning of the year, but it was a path. And it felt good. It felt like I was finally swimming in a direction, not just drifting.
