Facing change

I love this blog and I always will; it’s some of my best work. For a long time I thought I’d start writing here again. I actually reorganized my whole life to give myself time to write. I shifted from full time work to independent consulting and coaching so I wouldn’t have to worry about employer approval of my work. As a bonus, I now live in Cairo, a city with a thousand inspirations to write.

It turns out that I still want to write, but not here. This blog is the story of me facing a particular situation; the transition from entry-level development work into jobs with real responsibility. When you stop being a serf and start being able to shape things, you need to think very hard about your impact. This blog is where I did that thinking. It’s me, growing up, as a development professional. It’s where I identified what I believe to be true about good development work.

I’m still thinking. But when I face a challenge now, I know what to do. I don’t have answers, but I know how to attack a problem. My outrage has been (mostly) transfigured into motivation. I don’t need to think through the kinds of problems I used to, because I have done that thinking and it’s part of me now.

I’m still writing. Just not here.

Here at Blood and Milk, I figured out what I know. My next step is how to apply it: This World Needs Brave. I’m thinking now about how to be a decent person in a broken world. How to be brave enough to make things better. If I have figured out that you can’t run a decent health project without buy-in from nurses, how do I go about using that knowledge in my work? When do I speak up? And how? It’s a mixture of coaching and career advice and me trying to learn from the many, many mistakes I’ve made. It’s about finding my brave and helping other people find theirs.

I won’t be taking down Blood and Milk. People still find it useful, and I’m happy to pay the hosting fees. But if you have liked Blood and Milk, you might like this new thing, too. Please take a look.

I’ll finish with a quote from the new blog:

“Our systems are too damaged to function without exceptional people. So it’s time to become exceptional. To do jobs that matter, to do them better, to leverage our time and our money and our willingness to make a lot of fucking noise in an attempt to force this broken world to turn out just a little bit better.”