Three Thousand Dollars and Four Years

Ten years ago was the lowest point of my career.

I was thinking about leaving architecture, but I was stuck in a lukewarm state. I told myself I should probably stay where I was, at least until I got my license.

One day my wife came home and said, “There’s a UX bootcamp intro session tonight. Want to go?”

I wasn’t interested. She went anyway.

The bootcamp cost $3,000. I didn’t want to pay for it. So instead, I waited four more years before I finally switched careers.

Back then, $3,000 for two months felt far too expensive. What I didn’t understand was that four years of my life were far more costly.

The people who graduated from those early bootcamps entered the tech industry at its fastest growth. Getting in was easier, and the rewards were high. By the time my own desire was finally strong enough, the field had already started to get crowded. Getting a job was much harder. Then the pandemic hit the job market, too.

I pushed through anyway. I scheduled countless virtual coffee chats to ask for advice and prepare for interviews. Eventually, I landed my first full-time UX job. I was already over thirty. The senior designers on my team were at least five years younger than me.

There were many times I wished I had switched years earlier. But life doesn’t work that way. At least I learned two lessons.

The first: when you pay for something, also count the value of the time it saves you. Money can be earned again. Time cannot.

The second: when you haven’t reached a certain level of awareness or desire, an opportunity can appear in front of you again and again, and you won’t act on it. It’s as if you can’t see it at all.

When you do have the awareness and the desire, you go looking for opportunities, even when they seem impossible to find.