Attack The Day

Are you wasting time or valuing it?

I have to admit, I have been very bored these last 3 years. So much so that my wife told me to either get a hobby outside of tech or get a job. There’s not much that I like doing outside of technology, so I got a job. Yeah you read that right, I got a job. And let me explain you why.

It took my entire 20’s to get to where I am now. What I would call successful. It took 100 hour weeks, no sleep, boat loads of coffee and the kind of stress women go through during labour- needless to say, it was hard work. But I got there. And when I got there, it took about another 4 years to get Techrich corporation up and functioning fully without me having to fly in and out of Hong Kong and Singapore. But that left me with freedom, lots of time, and boy, there was 24 hours of it- every day. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was constantly checking in with my staff to hopefully give me some work that they couldn’t do. And my personal assistant sent me reports every night with all check marks- it was annoying.

My own company didn’t need me. What was I doing with my time then? Watching cat videos on youtube (don’t judge, I was bored and my wife got me hooked on these damn cats). But I was wasting away. I have two kids and my wife refused to uproot them from the family and life here in Canada to go vacationing around the globe.

One day, I watched a Tony Robbins motivational video by chance on youtube, and it got me thinking: time was something so precious. I burned through my 20’s to make this company and now, I was just sitting here? I can’t just sit here and do nothing. So I got to learning. Online courses for subjects I didn’t know or wasn’t an expert in. I looked into blockchain tech and started to play around with Kubernetes. I started to stop wasting time. There were 1000 things in the world I didn’t know, this was no time to fold my hands and be complacent with my life right now.

I set the example to my kids, I wanted them to value time not waste it. I decided after 3 years of doing nothing but learning that I needed something more. So I applied for jobs, and yeah that sounds weird. But there’s only so much experience online courses and certifications can give you, I needed real life experience. I needed to get back in the field and test, and hone my new skills and learn some new ones.

I got the opportunity to teach as a part time instructor at BCIT and I took it. It was a win win situation, I got to hone my training and teaching skills, as well as my speaking skills while teaching the next generation of IT professionals Python and VMWare- I hadn’t used VMWare daily, but boy it came flooding back into my mind when I was developing and teaching 6.7. What an amazing experience! I feel like I’m in Tech again.

Never stop learning. Never stop working. Attack the day, get the job done. Go for it. Don’t sit back and waste away your time. That life is yours so you can live, not tick it away. You can watch those cat videos when you’re dead, but right now, you have things to do, subjects to learn, books to read, skills to develop. The world is rapidly changing and you need to be up to date.

I make my time mean something. I’m glad that I learned different skills and got certified in different things during those 3 years, and I’m truly blessed to have a company that makes me able to proudly announce that I’m a CEO/IT Director, but now is not the time to slow down, it’s time to keep pushing forward.

I urge you to keep a journal and write down every thing you did today and see how many ‘dead zone’ time slots you had where you did nothing. You could read during that lunch break, walk, meditate. You could take an online course after the kids are in bed, did you? You could make plans for a side business at 10pm when you watched TV for 2 hours instead.

You can do so much more.

So what did you do with your time today? Keep a journal of your day and see how much time you ‘wasted’ and how much time was ‘valued’.

Cheers,
A.Yasir

Areeb Soo Yasir

Business and technology have always gone hand in hand for me, and now I've built nearly 20 years of expertise. A few notable achievements: -> Tier III-Designed & deployed multiple mission critical datacenter environments in Canada, US, Hong Kong, Singapore & China. -> Software Engineering: Created a Linux OS from scratch, including a custom kernel to maintain millions of dollars in client infrastructure, deploy and report as needed. Created the “Windows Geeks” and “Password Pros” Windows Password Reset software recommended by Microsoft. -> Business Negotiations: Conducted intensive negotiations with branches of the Peoples Republic of China and the various state-run Telecom operations including China Telecom and China Unicom for access to their trillion dollar backbone infrastructure. We were the first western company to have such network access where other IT companies such as Vodafone and Google failed. -> Cloud Infrastructure Creation: Created the first proprietary “Clustered Cloud Architecture” that rivals competing Google, IBM, Microsoft & Alibaba alternatives. I'd love to chat #IT or #Linux or even #Business, so don't hesitate to connect. Cheers!

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