Hey {{first name | there}}. There's no notification or error log for the day the industry leaves you behind.

In today’s career notes:

When I started in tech, it took 3 years before I got a good job.

When I tried building a business, the first one failed! 

My second, EverythingDevOps, took 3 years of nights and weekends before it hit $1,000/month in October 2024.

You're not a beginner. In fact, most engineers that read this newsletter have 3-15 years of experience. 

Why am I saying this? Well, you already know consistency works. You're living the payoff.

But we forget that the basics still matter at every stage.

Because in life, you're either growing or dying.

It’s easy to get comfortable. Heck, you should get comfortable; life is hard. 

But on a serious note, you can’t get comfortable. And let's not blame AI here, it's just how life is. 

If you aren't actively trying to improve yourself, you and your skills are quietly going stale. 

And nobody sends you a notification when it happens. 

There's no error log for irrelevance. 

You just wake up one day and realize that the industry left you behind.

You've probably seen it. Someone spends eight, ten years at a big company. Great title, great pay, great Slack status. 

Then the layoffs hit, and suddenly they're back on the job market for the first time in a decade, and the market they left doesn't exist anymore.

They're not bad at their job. 

They just got comfortable inside a system that did a lot of the thinking for them. 

The company handled the tooling decisions, the process decisions, the "what's actually happening in the industry right now" decisions. 

Take that structure away and a lot of very smart, very experienced people are suddenly lost.

That's the risk of comfort. Not that you get lazy. 

The engineers who stay valuable aren't the ones who never rest. 

They're the ones who treat comfort as a checkpoint, not a destination.

You can’t figure out everything yourself. Heck, AI is here. But the thing is that real lived context can’t be replaced by AI (not yet though 😅).

Remember how much faster you learn when a more senior engineer guides you? 

The same rule applies to everything.

It’s the same rule I applied after 3 years of struggling at the beginning of my career. 

But sadly I forgot it when I started my 2nd business, only to remember 3 years later. 

With this experience over the past 10 years, I believe: 

So why do it all on your own?

Pick one thing you want in the next year. It doesn't have to be your career — it could be fitness.

Don't figure it out alone. Go to LinkedIn or Instagram, find someone who's done it, and reach out.

One rule: pick someone who did it recently. They have the freshest context to share.

Stay sharp. Stay visible.

Divine Odazie
CEO, EverythingDevOps