2012-2018 • Trial and error
It's hard for everybody, the only thing you have to do is sit and play your guitar.
—Jean-Yves Casala
During this period I tried to be and to do too many things.
While I gave my best in everything I did, I switched too many times to be a good coworker and teammate.
I taught teenagers mathematics in high school which I really
enjoyed. Then I went back to college to specialize in statistics and
data science for one year. Then I worked on the R package CLR (Curve
Linear Regression via Dimension Reduction) at EDF. Then I quit. Then I
did some python in a startup. Then I quit.
If we had been colleagues at that time, you could have said that I was a cool guy and a hard worker but also that I left to work on something totally different.
Then I realized my teenage dream of being a musician. I wanted to play guitar for people, I wanted people to be happy listening to me. I don't know if you've ever thought about that before, but the fastest way to get an audience is to go out and play in the street. So, I started playing in the street and then in the subway.
The best moments to play in the subway are early in the morning when people go to work and late at night when people go to parties. It was hard, but I really enjoyed the contact I had with people.
When you play with your heart, people give you ten times more back.
Once, it was the evening, it was cold, and a couple of musicians stopped to listen to me. They were in love. I thought: I'll give you the best interpretation ever. I played. They listened to me. They hugged each other. They kissed. They both gave me money. And they asked me: can we play something for you? They played for me. It was a special moment.
If you want to listen to what I was playing at the time, there are still 3 songs available on Soundcloud (Tony Martin).
What did I learn?
Working hard is not enough, you have to have a goal.
Who do you want to be? I wish I had an answer to this question earlier in my life. Because when you don't have the answer, you're probably making the wrong decisions. And you're definitely not optimizing your decisions for the things that matter to you.
Each time you quit, you tell the world: you can't count on me. Each time you quit, you decrease your trust capital. I used to be a quitter. I wish I wasn't but I was. I hope what I'm doing now shows you that you can count on me.