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I used to create a comic strip years ago. I had deadlines to meet. A number of strips to create each week. It became tiring, not fun. I eventually stopped. Doing something to a deadline is work. Creativity should be fun. These mini articles, blog entries, brain dumps, or whatever you want to call them are written for me. If anyone else reads them or finds even one of them remotely useful, then great, but essentially I write them for me. There is no schedule I follow, I just write them and submit. The software organises them and releases them one a day. When there are gaps it’s because the softare has caught up with the backlog. Maybe there was nothing I wanted to write about for a bit. And That’s ok. Schedules are for work and I write for fun.

One of the most powerful things that I learned early on in my career is that of having a safety net. Also known as a war chest, rainy day savings, or emergency fund. Essentially a pot of liquid assets or money safely stored somewhere that will enable you to survive hard times such as unemployment or a health problem.

Ideally this fund should last you at least 6 months. A year is better, two or more years even better.

This safety net doesn’t just allow you to weather the unforeseen, it also has the added bonus of giving you a better work-life balance and even boosts your confidence. You see, if you lose your job you know that you are able to survive for a period of time without it. The larger the safety net the longer you can be without income. This has the knock-on effect of not making you desperate for work in-between jobs. You are not so desperate for work that you have to take whatever is being offered. You don’t have to work for awful bosses, you can pick and choose who you work for and when. If you don’t get a job, so what? The worse case scenario is you return to your couch and binge watch Netflix for a while or catch up on your reading. It’s not the end of the world because you have your safety net.

They say that retirement is wasted on the old. Plus we are never guaranteed to make retirement. You might get hit by a bus tomorrow so why put everything off until the end of your lifespan? Why not have mini-retirements throughout your life? That’s the beauty of the safety net as it allows you to do this. As it grows it allows you to be out of work for several years and still maintain your lifestyle. Why not take a long holiday? Three months, six? How about a year off? Gaps in your resume don’t matter these days as they can easily be explained away. I took time off to travel and explore the world as a reward to myself for all the hard work I put in this past year or so. That’s the beauty of the safety net.

When discussing ways of learning and thinking outside the box I like to use the analogy of bypassing a padlock.

When looking at a padlock most people – without the key or combination – will probably think of using a bolt-cutter or picking. With the former, most TV shows and movies depict thieves with bolt cutters easily cutting through a padlock, and with the latter most PI or spy movies will show some deft lock picking taking mere seconds. Both will work if you know what you are doing, but how else could you bypass a padlock?

There’s a saying that goes something along the lines of: “There’s a difference between wisdom and knowledge retention”. You can read many books and master many areas of study such as biology, chemistry, geology, physics, psychology, etc, but it’s how you use that knowledge that counts. How you combine areas of expertise looking for overlaps and interactions that others may not have considered.

Take the simple padlock for instance. What if we applied chemistry? We have acids that could eat through part of the mechanism, oils for lubrication, maybe use liquid nitrogen to super-cool the metal rendering it susceptible to damage under impact. How about physics? We have opposing forces, kinetic energy, levering, or heavy impact.

The point is the more you learn the larger the data your mind has to tap when “thinking outside the box”. Just watch any episode of McGyver (the original or remake). The more you learn and the more you train your brain to think this way, the more the everyday looks different to you.

There’s always more than one way to approach a problem, but the solutions that your brain can come up with will rely on the data it has available to mine.

Early in my professional career I found myself in a constant battle with outsourcing. As soon as I got wind that my role was to be outsourced I would start looking around for the next opportunity and master the skills required quickly. I would then have a period of both starting my new role while handing over the last one.

This kept happening so I would “up” my game. I moved from being a manual tester to test automation learning various tools and programming languages along the way. Yet outsourcing kept pace. I next moved from test automation to performance testing. I not only had outsourcing to contend with but now I was competing with automation frameworks that were replacing the need for actual testers.

I kept this up for many years specialising in specific frameworks, tools, and having a broad range of test skills. I even stepped into security testing becoming a penetration tester but then I found myself up against pentesters who had certified in India for a fraction of the cost and that could undertake the work remotely for less than the cost of living here. So I switched again from freelance to employee switching to domain expertise. Now I found myself up against AI.

AI and ML is offering companies a faster, cheaper way to detect bugs and identify UI/UX issues, and to offer improvements based on real-time analysis of how users are using the software or service under test.

It can be disheartening when you see your profession slowly being reduced to a computer program, but such is the nature of the industry, and I’ve enjoyed the journey and everything I learned along the way. You have to keep learning and evolving in order to stay in the game or face being made obsolete.

I’ve endured three decades of working as a professional for CEOs, MDs, boards, and entrepreneurs. I’ve been shouted at, threatened, and generally treated badly as if they owned you just because they are paying you a consultancy fee. It’s been high stress, anxiety-ridden, and sometimes depressing work at times. Not always, but sometimes. And it leaves you either hardened or broken, or somewhere inbetween. With multiple mental health issues all combining to make a party in your head. One that you did not want to be invited to.

Therapy helps, CBT gives you tools to cope, but embracing life and realising that not everyone and everything is out to get you or to make your life hard helps too. It’s all about your mindset, with mindfulness, journalling, and just going for a walk. It may take a little time but you’ll get there. Soon you’ll learn how to find your way through and to even embrace the wild rain.