The start of the journey and the right motivation
In recent weeks, I've been working on establishing a stronger online presence and building my personal brand. That, of course, came with its own set of challenges — many of which could fill another blog post. But in short, I knew I needed a personal website to summarize who I am, my experiences, and my achievements worth noting.
Since I also wanted to get back into more hands-on coding for future roles, I decided to build it almost from scratch using Next.js — a framework I'm currently most comfortable with. Over a few weeks, I kept adding features like internationalization (i18n) just for the experience, while iterating on design. I probably redesigned the site three times as I expanded both my vision and my skills. I chose to write primarily in English and used an LLM to help translate content into Polish.
At the same time, reality hit: I needed to start looking for a job. To increase my chances, I realized I had to be more present both on LinkedIn and on the web. There's plenty of debate about whether to build your own blog or use platforms like Medium, but I opted to implement the blog functionality myself for the added learning.
Forgetting why I started this side-quest in the first place
On October 10th, 2024 — World Mental Health Day and, funnily enough, World Porridge Day (and I planned to celebrate both!) — I decided to speed up implementation so I could release my first post. It was going to be about my experiences with mental health and what it means to me. But there were a few issues. My Polish translation wasn't ready and was hidden behind a feature flag, and I hadn't even started implementing the blog functionality. I wasn't even sure how I wanted to do it!
Still, I decided the blog post was going live that day. As I kept working, the pressure built. My Polish translation improved, but my anxiety rose with the scope of work I'd taken on. After a full day's work, I was feeling drained by 8 PM, but I kept pushing — until I realized I was doing exactly the opposite of what I wanted to write about: sacrificing mental health for a self-imposed deadline. I didn't focus on learnings either as I was chasing the deadline. What was even worse I didn't have time to celebrate World Porridge Day properly!
"It's a journey, and it's up to me to make it an enjoyable one"
It was an internal voice saying, "We decided to do it today, so we have to do it today." - it was my Inner Executioner1. I stopped and looked at the work I'd done — 8 hours of my day job, then straight into side hustling — and realized I was proud. I had done a tremendous amount of work!
That moment hit me hard. In fast-paced environments, I'd often felt this way — unable to appreciate my own hard work because I was always chasing the next big thing, always feeling behind. It was a killer of joy and motivation. I'd frequently abandoned side projects because I was so focused on project progress, ignoring the skills and personal growth I was gaining each day. This feeling wasn't only limited to my personal projects but also to my day job! I would love to say that the companies I worked with were to blame, but that wouldn't be factually correct. That was true for some of them, of course, but for others, it was just shifting responsibility for the workload onto the outside world. The reality was that I could have been in control of my own time and expectations.
That mindset had shifted for me over time, but old habits die hard. And they snuck up on me at the most ironic moment: World Mental Health Day. I ended that day feeling happy and accomplished. I completed the blog functionality three days later and finished writing the post five days after that, aiming to release it a week after World Mental Health Day. This time, I gave myself a reasonable timeline to iterate without feeling overwhelmed or stressed.2
It's a journey, and it's up to me to make it an enjoyable one.