1 year of solo work!

it's the recap episode!!

Hello friends,

Yesterday marked the 1-year-anniversary of my solo work adventure! This felt like a good moment to recap the year and share a bit of reflection on the newsletter, but I gotta admit: Writing this post has been a real challenge!

I feel like I can either be honest with my experience, and the words come out touchy-feely and kinda self-absorbed and maybe boring too; or I can make the words better, less cringey, more entertaining, but also less honest. Or I could say nothing publicly at all and reserve these words for my own personal records, which I was tempted to do!

Alas, we’re gonna go with honesty here, despite its shortcomings. If this is a slog to read, you can always click away to something else, like the making of this rabbit pendant! But if you read the whole thing, thank you so much and I hope you get something out of it!

Without further ado, a reflection on 1 year 🎊

♡ vrk

---

Recall: The plan as of July 2023

Why did I quit my job to work-but-not-work again?

Succinctly, I wanted to give myself 12-24 months to make anything I wanted to make, without worrying about making money.

From my personal website:

I fell in love with computers because I love making things. In my 13+ years as a professional software engineer, I have been making things, but they've been things that other people have dreamed up. I want to build my own things again. It's why I got into this field in the first place!

So, I quit my job and starting July 2023, I'm giving myself about 12-24 months of runway to try the following:

• Practice creating my own things again. It's fine if I'm bad at it. I'll just keep practicing.

• See how it feels to center my creative self for a bit.

• Figure out if I want to be a founder of a company or organization.

What do I think of this plan now?

Looking back, I think this framing was the #1 reason why this year went so well for me.

Plenty of people dream of quitting their job and not having to work, but the details of the dream is so different person-to-person. Some people want to quit their job to travel the world; others want to go to culinary school; and others want to relax, eat snacks, watch TV…

All of these are equally fine dreams, but I think it’s important to know for yourself, honestly, what your spirit is yearning for. If you are daydreaming about quitting your job, what is the need that is unmet, that you want to meet by “quitting your job”?

So while I was still employed, I tried to understand:

• a) what I think I wanted (I didn’t have to be 100% sure; a hypothesis was fine)

• b) why I couldn’t get what I wanted while working my job, and

• c) how I could get what I wanted by taking time off

In other words, I chose to do a lot of soul-searching while employed, rather than going the route of quitting my job to soul-search. I did that so I could spend my job-free time doing what I wanted to do, rather than burn through my savings to figure out what I wanted to do.

(By no means am I saying that this is the “right” approach! Sometimes it’s not an option, and there are plenty of people who quit their job with no plan and that works wonders for them. But I knew that for me, having no-job-and-no-plan-whatsoever would be so anxiety-inducing that I’d likely to jump into a job again or rush toward something suboptimal just to quell the discomfort, and ultimately end up back at square one.)

After a ton of reflection, journaling, conversations with myself, conversations with others, and working with an outstanding exec coach, I figured out what my spirit was yearning for: I wanted to make things. I wanted to make my own things, things that were unequivocally mine, without constraints.

When I knew what I wanted, the plan became straightforward: I would give myself an entire year to make whatever I felt like making. That’s it!

I hadn’t pre-planned any of the projects I ended up making — I didn’t intend to make Pouch, or Mini Printer Pal, or Receipt Printer RPG, or anything else — I just tried to listen to what I wanted to make most in the moment and followed that instinct, with some timeboxing and self-imposed deadlines to keep me focused enough to finish the things I started. I couldn’t be happier with how I spent my time!

---

What I did for 12 months

I could answer this more literally or more thematically, and I think I’ll do both!

What I did more literally:

• July 2023: Wrote Mini Printer Pal (learned Electron, did some bluetooth hacking with printers). Redesigned personal website and started Substack. Lots and lots of coffee chats.

• August: Retro on Mini Printer Pal - I want to improve my design skills. Created a design curriculum for myself. Worked on design exercises. Made some hasty zines.

• September: Design studies have been tough!! And/but also, realized I didn’t just want to generically improve my design skills; I wanted to make an indie magazine for stationery, but I was scared to try. Decided I should go for it and learn as I go. Started working on a prototype for Pouch. Took me the entire month to lay out 1 article (lol). Started attending my first drawing class.

• October: Made the “Pouch Preview” issue, 20 pages long, which meant designing 8 articles and a cover. Also made Dogs of Fate (raspberry pi project) and co-hosted Receipt Printer Meetup.

• November: Took a break from Pouch to write & code Receipt Printer RPG. Made Christine Botts.

• December: Mostly drew, studied design, and did holiday stuff! Bought the Silhouette Portrait 4.

• January 2024: Pouch preorders live! Created zine store. Finished Toaster zine.

• February: Created Pouch Instagram. Started trying to market Pouch. Reached out to potential contributors to Pouch. Interviewed Nikki. Started second drawing class. Accepted into Stationery Fest as an exhibitor and workshop host.

• March: Added 30 pages to Pouch (layout gallery, stationery store recs, interview, some other things) and redid the cover — Pouch Issue 1 is finished!

• April: Started taking business classes. Designed new business cards. Designed and launched pouchmagazine.com. Migrated zine store from Gumroad to Payhip. Tabled at Milwaukee Zine Fair.

• May: Fulfilled all Pouch preorders, but blocked on Mixam’s production for launching Pouch. Did some deep dives on printers, color profiles, and print quality. Wrote a software tool to generate mailing labels (just using it myself for now). Created promo material for printer workshop at Stationery Fest.

• June: Pouch Issue 1 officially launches! Sent free copies to contributors and early readers. Stationery Fest workshops sold out in ~20 minutes! Wrote prototype of software for laying out photos for home printing (not shipped yet). Started writing a zine on home printing photos & cutting stickers.

What I did more generally:

I followed my intuition a bit more than usual.

I got more comfortable managing how I spend my time.

I started making things I’ve long-wanted to make.

I leveled up my drawing and design skills, and I inadvertently learned more about business than I thought I would.

I reshaped my community.

I learned a lot about myself.

I’ll elaborate on this last one!

In past work environments, I felt like I had to fit myself into a narrow, easily explainable box. Either I’m a logical-loves-math-no-frills “real” engineer type, OR I’m a code-is-boring-I-like-drawing artsy type, and there’s no in-between. Or if I do have elements of both, it’s zero-sum, i.e. I must be a less-good engineer if I have any sort of artistic inclination and vice versa. It’s a convenient worldview that also happens to make company organization a lot simpler.

Now I realize that I don’t fit neatly in either box, and instead I have multiple parts to myself that all need to be fulfilled to some degree (and I suspect this is true for most people).

Roughly speaking, I see myself comprised of the following parts:

• Me, the inventor (particularly loves to build tools and solve problems; loves programming)

• Me, the artist (particularly loves to create experiences and share emotion; loves drawing and colors and illustration)

• Me, the storyteller 

• Me, the teacher

(I recognize that I’m trading 1 box for 4 of them, but imperfect labels are, again, convenient!)

For my entire career, I almost exclusively focused on honing my craft as a programmer. I don't regret this; I love coding and I love engineering, and the Inventor side of myself is so pleased to have this superpower to build technology easily.

However, not one of these parts can be fulfilled by solely honing my craft as a programmer, so it makes sense that I’ve felt bored and unfulfilled in my most recent software engineering jobs. It’s pretty easy to find an outlet for storytelling and teaching in anything that I do, but I had not been providing an outlet for the Inventor or the Artist… and that has been incredibly stifling.

When I embarked on this year off, I thought The Inventor side of myself was the most urgent to address. I expected to spend most of my year building tools!

As it turned out, it was The Artist side that most needed my attention. For years, I didn’t even acknowledge that this side existed — I think in large part because of how much I love building tools, I bought into the idea that, “well I love making practical things, so I must not love making art — sure I doodle here and there now and again but that’s all dumb nonsense (I mean when I do it, not when other real artists do it)”

But when I asked myself honestly, what do I want to make? I drew, I made zines, I wrote a story-slash-game, I made Pouch. (And I still made a few tools.)

After a year of this, I am feeling at much more creative peace, and I’ll keep trying to honor all parts of myself as I head into Year 2 of independent work.

---

What’s been hard?

I’ve mostly focused on the positives of my journey so far, because this experience has been by-and-large very very positive! But the difficult moments are there, and I want to acknowledge those too.

Progress is DIFFICULT and I am impatient

Sigh, because I neglected my artistic side for so long, I am SO MUCH WEAKER at illustration, design, etc than I want to be. I’ve made progress in the last year, but I want to be BETTER! NOW! Progress can feel soooo slooowwww sometimes.

I struggle to enjoy the process on a deadline (and there’s usually a deadline)

Related to the first point: A lot of my projects this year have been design- and illustration-heavy, and I’m still a beginner at both subjects. My process for making stuff can often be… tumultuous…..… especially if I’m working against a deadline or trying to get something ready for an event.

More often than I’d like to admit, my creative process looks like this:

UGH this looks bad
UGH this looks bad
UGH this looks bad
UGH this looks bad
UGH this…. ok this is maybe barely acceptable
UGHH I don’t have enough time!!!
UGHHH ok fine we’re going with barely acceptable

This is definitely something I want to work on going into year 2!!

Working alone means doing ALL the things yourself, with no redundancy

For the most part, I’ve really enjoyed working alone, especially with my desire for creative freedom. But working alone does mean it’s hard to take breaks and it’s easy to fall behind. Like last week, I had a bad cold and had some other things going on. There’s no one else to pack orders or post on Instagram or answer emails or do any of the other work I need to do when I’m sick — it just piles up!

This is the right call for me now, but this is also on my mind as I think about the next year.

---

Some learnings

Here are a few things I learned this year. This is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the big ones!

Quitting your job doesn’t give you infinite time, and making whatever you want still means you need to prioritize, compromise, and not-make a lot.

When I used to fantasize about quitting my job, I think I was equating that to having infinite time. Like, “if I didn’t have a job, I COULD DO ANYTHING” — When in reality, you do get a lot more time back, but that’s very different than having no time constraints whatsoever.

There’s still so much that I want to do, yet so few hours in a day! I’ve had to prioritize and say “no” or “not now” to so many things in order to have enough time to bring just a few projects to completion.

Spending my time on desirable difficulties

I didn’t quit my job because I needed a break — I haven’t really given myself a break! — I quit because I needed to change how I was spending my time.

Working for myself, I get to spend my time working on the exact problems I want to work on and facing desirable difficulties I wish to face. This is what makes my time feel well-spent.

Even though working for myself has been an easy means of achieving this, I don’t think it’s the only way. If I end up traditionally employed again, I will certainly strive to find a workplace where I can work on the problems I want to solve and acquire skills I want to have.

Creating what, why, and for whom?

In the tech field, I have been taught to create via tight feedback loops: Make a quick prototype, give it to people, get feedback, iterate on feedback, repeat.

And it’s not that I think that that’s wrong per se, but I remember now that you can also just… make something according to your own vision. People might like it or hate it or not care at all. It’s fine to just make something you think is neat and leave it at that.

When I get the impulse to create something, I’ve stopped defaulting to the “tight feedback loop” approach. Instead I ask myself, What am I making, why I am making this, and for whom? And I decide the approach from there.

It feels impossible until it’s not!

Twelve months ago, when Pouch was just a daydream of mine, it felt impossible. In hindsight, of course it was doable; I just needed to learn and struggle and acquire new skills and not give up along the way. What else feels impossible now, that’s actually doable if you give yourself the chance?

---

Final thoughts

These last 12 months have been the best months of my career, and possibly the most fulfilling months of my life. I was so unsure of what extended time off without a job would look and feel like, and one year later I can say that it went better than I could have ever hoped.

I’m one year into this journey, and I’m giving myself another year of runway to continue exploring.

What do I plan to do in the next 12 months? This time I have specific projects in mind. I want to build software tools that are helpful to the stationery- and paper-loving community I love so much. I want to publish Pouch Issue #2 (and maybe Issue #3, but we’ll see!). And if all goes well, I think I want to see what it would look like to start my own business. Can I make the math make sense? Can I make the life happiness part make sense too?

More generally, I want to continue to listen to my needs, and try my best to meet them. I also want to continue to challenge my notion of impossible and see how far I can get! And I’ll continue to update you all on how everything goes.

That’s it for now, and if you read this whole thing, you are my hero!! Cheers to Year 2!!