If you’ve been feeling stuck with your AI/ML career, heads up:

I’ve been making lots of cool changes to the AI/ML Career Launchpad, and I've decided to cap new sign-ups so I can give my full attention to the members already inside while we roll out the new experience in September.

So if you've been thinking about this one for a while, now's your window. Doors close Sept. 1st.

The AI/ML Career Launchpad is my group coaching community for people building AI/ML careers who are looking for a structured path and ongoing support.

Inside you get:

Core membership is $39/month. Guided is $129/month and adds weekly live calls with me. If you don’t love it in the first 14 days I’ll give you a full refund. So you might as well check it out. ;)

I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to open up to new sign-ups, so if you’ve been thinking about it, now’s your chance. Learn more here.

I work a demanding full-time job, run a content business with five employees, I'm writing a book, I’m a career coach to hundreds of people, I lift, read, and I still see my friends and spend quality time with my family.

So a question I get all the time is how I make time for everything. That’s what I’m sharing this week: How to realistically achieve an insane amount without burning out.

We’ll cover:

If you keep meaning to do more with your time but the day just disappears before you get to it, this one's for you.

You can read the full blog version here.

If you’re trying to start your career right now, it’s really easy to look at someone who got hired during the Covid boom and think, Well, of course they’re doing well. They got lucky.

And that is true. Kind of.

I started studying machine learning in 2018, and a few years later I absolutely benefited from the insane hiring market during Covid. I’ve had people point out how lucky my timing was, and I don’t disagree with them.

But there’s a piece of that story they usually don’t see: They’re comparing their year two to my year 11.

I came of age during the 2008 financial crisis. At the time I was 17, living on my own, trying to figure out how to pay for college and rent. I couldn’t even get a normal retail or food service job. There were so many unemployed people looking for work that jobs I would normally have been able to get as a teenager were being filled by adults with years of professional experience.

Nobody was exactly lining up to give a 17-year-old high school dropout a well-paid job with benefits.

So I did whatever I could find. I sold knives door to door. I took random odd jobs, some boring and some... questionably legal.

Eventually I worked my way into more “normal” jobs, but normal didn’t mean particularly well-paid. By 23, I was managing a jewelry company, which sounds pretty good on paper, but I still wasn’t making enough money to comfortably support myself. So on weekends, I worked as a personal assistant for a friend to bring in extra cash.

And this went on for years. It wasn’t until I was 28 that I started making what I would have considered “good money.”

So yes, I benefited from the Covid hiring boom. But before that happened, I spent roughly a decade working multiple jobs and just trying to make my life work.

I’m not saying this because I want to compete in the tragedy Olympics. Plenty of people have had it much harder than I have, obviously.

I’m saying it because I think career comparisons get really misleading when you only look at the part of someone’s life where things started going well.

If you’re struggling to break into tech or AI right now, you might be looking at somebody five, ten, or fifteen years into their career and comparing their current situation to yours. You see their title, compensation, or that they bought a house or got hired at the company you want to work for. You don’t necessarily see the ten years before that.

And you definitely shouldn’t assume that because your first few years of your career are difficult, the next ten will look the same. The economy comes in waves; Sometimes companies are hiring basically anyone they can find. Sometimes incredibly qualified people send out hundreds of applications and struggle to get interviews. Neither environment lasts forever, for better or worse.

Of course, you can’t control when the next hiring boom happens. But you can control is what position you’re in when it does.

The skills you’re learning right now still count even if nobody is immediately rewarding you for them. The projects you build still help you learn and grow. The experience you’re getting still counts. You’re building your judgement, skills, and network.

For a while, all of that progress can be pretty hard to see. Then the environment changes, an opportunity shows up, and suddenly all of those years matter a lot more than it seemed like at the time.

I made between roughly $15k and $60k/yr for the first decade of my career. This year I’m on track to make more than $600k. Obviously, I did not get there by increasing my income a nice, predictable 20% every year. There were years where basically nothing happened, years where I went backwards (I made like $12k/yr in grad school when I was 27), and then there were a few years where my life changed very quickly.

So if you’re in a rough part of your career right now, don’t assume you’re behind. You might just be in early in a journey that will surprise you in the end.

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