I was never trying to give a motivational speech, and I probably will never do it publicly. But after great people like Steve, Oprah, Joan, and Bill, who had given a speech to postgraduates of Stanford and Harvard, I want to try to write my own three stories of my life, no big deal, just three stories. I know I am not a category of persons I have seen, and I try to follow, famous and rich, but I think I can share my motivational speech today starting from the very beginning.
The Big Lost
I was born in Krakow, which was my life’s start. My mom delivers me at 3:20 AM on May 4th. She was the daughter of the farmer, the same as my father. Still, He was brilliant, interested in many things, and wore many hats, including electronics, electrics, and carpenter, but the most he loved to be a farmer like his father. He was truly an amazing man to many people. When I was one and a half years old, my father died at 32 after an accident when a completely drunk government representative crushed him on a motorbike by a car. My father was injured, and a drunken driver escaped the accident. After a few days in the hospital, my dad was out of the hospital to make sure the accident would be clarified as not worth investigating. It was not by accident; at that time in Poland, government representatives were under the law, and after a few days, my father returned back to the hospital but with a different classification health problem to make sure drunk drivers would never be taken to the responsibility of what he did. After about a month, my father died because of that accident, and I lost the only person in the world who could teach me true faith. I remember that many years later on the one work place when I want to quit because too much work and stress and overall overwhelm, and I asked from bigger salary, president of the company told me that nobody is irreplaceable, he wrote even on the email to me the following sentence “cemeteries of this world are fully of irreplaceable people”, I think he was right, after many years later I realised that he got the point and nobody will ever replace my father, so I stop to find a father faith in anyone else to learn from his or her… my mom never found anyone who was even close to her heart as my father was and looking back I think that was very difficult to her and she will never become calm after that big lost, there was a big thing that make my life really hard, I know what does mean be hungry, and I understand what poverty means, I found very early that if I give up and if I do not work hard and smart on the talents I have I will never take myself from the village I grow up, when there were only two entertainments TV and Vodka that ruins many people and families life. Looking back on the connected dots, I think that very young idea and dream to get out of the village influenced my whole life. And that is why I work so hard for my own family and to have a true home I never had, so I built it from scratch.
The Passion of my Life
I was lucky; I found what I loved when I was 7 years old; in elementary school, I answered my teacher’s question, who do you want to become when you grow up? I said, programmer, but I did not know what programmer meant then. After a few years, I got my first PC computer. A perfect friend of mine, Krzysztof, who lives near me, got a high school coding challenge written in Pascal, the first program, so we did that together. I got from him Pascal 7.0 compiler, it was amazing; that time, I read a few PC magazines, and inside one, I found code that in Pascal 7.0 by using Assembler allows creating “programmatically” fire using VGA, the video graphics adapter… I remember we spent a very long evening rewriting from the magazine to his PC computer line by line whole program; it was amazing when we finished… that simple coding experience taught me that there is almost everything possible to write as a computer program, that there is brilliant industry beginning in Poland and it is software industry… From that beginning in 1996, this would be game-changing for my life; I understood that with a PC, I could achieve a world-class expert level in software; it became clear that this small device could turn me into a passion. It will be my pass to a better future. It was, looking back, I spent a lot of time in coding, then I finished high school, finished technical university, and all that place, I used coding skills to get better grades; I chose a master’s thesis subject about neural networks, and after 11 years of work in the software industry I had a proposition to become the Application Solution Architect. My dreams from the very beginning come true. Like Steve said I c, I can now connect the dots looking back, that it was a brilliant decision to work hard the d last 20 years, not drop it, and obtain all necessary education levels and certificates today. I wrote on my nice MacBook Pro those three stories. Still, I think it all was about a risk I took and that I have been taking for many years.
The Career Risk
As you can see from the first two stories, I was in a tough material situation, but something inside me, I think vision and intuition pushed me to take more and more risks, sometimes it was too much, and I could not handle it. You probably are interested what is the career risk story. When I started my career, I worked really hard, too hard, and I do not recommend anyone work 14 hours per day per 7 days a week like I did; after about 2 years, I changed job and moved to my grandma’s home and started working from home in the home office mode like people called it right now, that times it was simply working from home. Still, after about 2 years, I could not see any value in that work, with no development chance and no career opportunities; I spent 8 hours a day working hard remotely, but with the lack of people-to-people conversation, my wife at that time broke a leg. We were together; I was in the early stage of my career, so I did not earn too much money, and with minimal savings, I decided to move to Krakow, where I was born, because I figured out that I would be better placed to develop my career. Looking back, that was the best decision I could ever make; I started to participate in the Krakow .NET Users Group, and I found a job in a Telecommunication company, one of the best work in our country for software engineers; I was surrounded by many engineers, I got many successes here, and this big risk we took with my wife changed everything. I want to end up with the quote that influenced me years ago when I looked into code written by the smartest C# engineers in the country I have ever met; that coding skills blew my mind, in coding it took me about 10 years to make simple and beauty code to write, in the art that coding really the truth is the quote given by Leonardo Da Vinci, that can be true only if you work hard and risk a lot… then you understand that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” so make things and code simple.
One more thing that motivates me: a passion for doing new things. I like to feel and act like an amateur in the Latin “passionate” it is clear to me that it is a really true quote about that from the last The Whole Earth Catalog, and I want to end up really with a modified quote that Steve reminded in his speech at the end… “Be Amateur, Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish…”
Thank you for reading,
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