Just over two years ago, I blogged about taking a leap of faith and turning down two great jobs because they didn’t involve doing something I was truly passionate about. It was a gamble, but even after two months I could tell it was going to pay off. Sure enough, two years later, I found myself with a wealth of new experience and knowledge which I’d had a ton of fun acquiring, plus a healthy boost to my CV and set of friends and connections within the industry.

Then the stars aligned again, and I found myself with another life-changing dilemma: take an even more awesome job than the one I was in, or quit IT altogether and face an indefinite period of zero income. Pretty obvious what to do, right? I quit.

If that sounds crazy, it’s because it probably was – definitely another leap into the unknown. But I’ll try to explain my decision. I’ve had a number of life-changing decisions to make over the years, and I’m gradually learning to trust my gut instincts in those moments, because they’re generally right. I think they work out well because they’re usually based on my need to keep doing things I love doing (or to put it another way, my pathetic lack of tolerance for things I don’t enjoy), rather than concerns about money and other tedious “real world” distractions.

But wait, I hear you ask – didn’t I just say I decided not to pursue an even more awesome job than the one I loved doing for the last two years? How could my instincts guide me away from that? There are two parts to the answer.

Firstly, I had a bit of luck recently which combined with existing savings and investments meant that I could afford not to work for a while. Secondly, I’ve had an itch for a long time to play more music, and it just wouldn’t go away. In fact it kept growing and growing, until (20 years later than would have been ideal) I identified it as a basic need that I’m stuck with for good. When I say “play more music”, I don’t mean the kind where you go off and play along with CDs in your bedroom every now and again, or join an amateur orchestra. That’s enough for some people, and I totally respect that – but for some reason (false pride, perhaps) I could never bear to think of myself as a hobbyist musician. For better or worse, I only ever enjoy playing music when I’m playing to the best of my ability, and experiencing real progress.

Unfortunately, in music as with many things in life, progress requires hard grind – the standard blood, sweat and tears formula. Jazz musicians call it “shedding” which is short for “woodshedding”, because the idea is you lock yourself in a woodshed for 6 months and practice non-stop. If a 15 year career in IT has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t develop your musicianship quickly alongside a full-time job outside music. So I quit. Or at least, I’m taking sabbatical. To be honest I have no idea what will happen. Maybe I’ll go back to IT full-time, maybe part-time, maybe never. Right now I’m just focusing on studying, practising, playing with other people … whatever I can do to improve.

I decided that I’m most interested in developing my non-classical skills, especially jazz but also various types of folk, pop, Indian, and whatever else takes my fancy. I’ve played (Western) classical music my whole life and had some of the most incredible experiences from it, but now I want to explore what can be done on the cello outside that – cello is such a versatile instrument and there’s a whole new sound world which is a mostly untrodden path at this point.

That’s all I have time for now, but I’ll blog again soon about the amazing experiences I’ve already had around the USA in the last two months – I have a whole ton of photos, audio and video, so watch this space!

• My team is amazing. Really – full of uber-smart, motivated, helpful guys supported by great management, great interface to the business, and very slick, well-oiled processes.
• This was a huge sideways move, so the learning curve has been a similar experience to last year when I started triathlons and had to learn to freestyle without drowning. I love learning new things, definitely feel like I am over the hardest part now, and am trying to contribute to the team effort with as close as I can get to the breakneck speed the other guys do.
• When you really love something, it sucks you in – sometimes too much. Last night I was up until 3am   I need to follow the advice Michael Meeks gave me when I asked him for tips on how to deal with being a full-time home-working geek:
  

  Sure – get up at the same time every day; and quit work roughly 9 hours later without fail.

  Then you stay sane

• It’s a more solitary lifestyle than my previous role, so I need to make more effort to get out and socialize in the evenings. Actually this could be a good thing because I used to occasionally use “work is quite social” as an excuse for not going out if I was tired.

For the last 3.5 years I’ve been working as a Solutions Architect for Novell, a job which has:

• trusted me with working from home, even before I’d proved myself,
• introduced me to some great colleagues and new friends (Novell is full of highly motivated and talented people),
• pushed me outside my comfort zone many times (and in case it’s not obvious, that is a very good thing), including forcing me to confront and completely overcome my phobia of public speaking,
• taught me a whole range of technical and “soft” skills,
• given me the opportunity to work on projects with some of the finest minds in the industry and stay at the cutting edge of technology,
• given me the opportunity to meet, learn from, and help countless client customers and partners, both existing and prospective,
• rewarded me for innovation (I co-filed two patents),
• taught me how to understand, and where possible sidestep people politics (although politics are inevitable in any large corporation, Novell is relatively free of it and even the CxOs at the top are very down-to-earth, approachable people)
• and probably many other things I missed.

Despite all that, a while ago I started feeling that I needed a fresh challenge. And the feeling wouldn’t go away – in fact it kept growing. I started thinking about what to do, and as often happens when you open your mind to possibilities, a very promising new opportunity presented itself to me out of the blue, in the form of a job at another company.

So we come back to the crazy thing. I interviewed for this job, found out that it was certainly challenging role, and had phenomenal opportunities for career growth and networking, got an offer, and after much stress and agonizing, turned it down.

Two weeks later, almost exactly the same thing happened with another company.

Especially in today’s economy, what the hell was I doing turning down two great job offers? Well, I was taking a gamble based on the possibility of being offered something new at Novell which sounded more exciting than either of those.

Let’s back up again, this time much further. When I was about 8, I first discovered computers and quickly realised that they presented a whole new world where you could invent all kinds of wonderful new creations and you were pretty much limited only by your imagination. Well, this was quite a long time ago, so admittedly having only 1 kilobyte of memory and a cassette tape recorder which only worked once every 10 times for storing your programs on was a bit of a limit too, but hopefully you get the point. I realised that I liked making stuff.

This passion has stayed with me my whole life – it sort of went into hibernation for two amazing years at music college, although even then you could argue I was making stuff (i.e. music). And it’s why I turned down both those two jobs – even though they were great, they didn’t present immediate chances to create, and my instinct was telling me that’s what I needed.

So the great news I received earlier today is that the gamble paid off, and I have been formally offered a job as a Software Engineer Consultant, joining an extremely talented team based mainly in Santa Cruz in California. This is getting scarily close to being a dream job! I remember years ago voluntarily pulling 100 hour weeks at guideguide despite terrible pay, simply because I loved it so much – and I think this will give me the same kind of rush

For those wondering whether I’ll be relocating to California: for now, I’ll still be officially working from home here in London, but I’m crossing fingers for a business trip across the pond to meet the new team soon I hear it’s a beautiful stretch of coastline, and would be triathlon training heaven …