The poker player has bet well for a few rounds and thinks they have the best hand, all the way up to the river. Now she feels like the one opponent remaining may have been holding onto a straight draw they way overplayed… until it just hit. After a minute of deliberation, she folds the hand. It hurts to lose a big pot she took the time to build, but it was the right call.

The lesson learned isn’t that she shouldn’t have bet all those times. It’s that bad results can still happen, even when you do the right work. Do the right work again. Try to keep doing it better. 

That sales call where you followed up as promised, but the client you thought you had rapport with had nothing but a snarl for your latest proposal. That short story you wrote with the perfect twist ending, that had nothing but rejections from your favorite magazines. That conversation you’ve been meaning to have with a parent for so long, but doesn’t go as well as you’d hoped. You made the right call to make the effort, and the bad result was out of your control.

Make more calls, and keep trying to make them better. Learn the work, not the result.

Next week is my last one full-time at ye olde web agency. It has me a bit emotional because the is the first job I’ve left where I feel like I’ve truly left a mark. I’m proud of my earlier jobs too but in all of them I think I was a cog in a machine. At Makespace I always tried to be me, doing the best I could to help others.

Multiple people have pulled me aside or messaged me privately to say it won’t be the same without me, or they’re not sure how well some such thing will happen without me or even a true plea to stay. For the first time I think I’ve succeeded in doing work that is indispensable. That’s a goal I’ve been striving to reach for at least 10 years.

But that’s also why I have to leave. If I’m ready to do work that’s worthwhile, that people would miss if it was gone, that makes my tiny square of this world ever so slightly better, I have the responsibility to provide it as best as I can.

To accept that responsibility I’m also ready to accept the risks that come with being a craftsmen. It’s scary to be sure, but it’s never felt more right.

At the beginning of 2018, I recommended an episode of Cortex that was all about discussing “yearly themes.” I’ve genuinely been working on this idea in my head all year. The closest I ever really came to making a theme for this year was “the year of flexibility.” I wanted to become more open and experimental in how I worked, how I planned, how I parented, and also literally become more flexible physically.

None of those things really worked out well, though they’re all still on my mind. Such failures have driven me to figuring out exactly what I do want out of the next year or so: a refactor.

If my life had a changelog, I’d say we’re on Alex version 4. V4 is considered by all to be a great leap from previous versions, but it has come with a lot breaking changes. The health API (arguably the most important feature) is inconsistent at best and the source code is very hard to work with when bugs are identified.

Metaphors aside, I’ve identified that coding for a living is exactly what I should be doing but this state of sacrificing everything else so that I can keep chasing that identity has to stop. I need to cleanup my entire approach to living, not just programming. And some big commitments need to be made to really let that happen. It’s going to be a grind, but at this point there’s no avoiding it.

Some not-fun grinds are ahead, but what you can expect a year from now is I’ll still be coding: but with a different aim. I’ll still be parenting: but happier. I’ll still be a big dude: but less big.