Tinnitus

It was close to 11 am on a Thursday of late June when I suddenly noticed a ringing noise in both of my ears. At first, I didnā€™t pay much attention to it and the day went by almost normally. The night came and it was still there but I managed to fall asleep normally and the next Friday I continued my life as if almost nothing had occurred. The noise was still there and its volume didnā€™t interrupt me from living my life.

On Saturday, at around 4 pm I remember sitting down on the sofa to watch a TV show when I realized the ringing was significantly higher in volume than it was just a few hours before. In a matter of seconds, that awful noise was the only thing I could pay attention to, and everything elseā€”the sound that living life makesā€”went to the background and became the ā€œeverything elseā€ I have to focus on to be able to hear it.

Iā€™m no stranger to anxiety episodes and I learned to tolerate them and live with them (or rather, in spite of them) early in my life but that Saturday afternoon, after realizing that noise was not going away, the anxiety attack that was triggered by that sudden loss of control was the worst episode I have experienced in my entire life. At least thatā€™s what I thought at that time. Little I could imagine it was actually a mild one compared to the ones I was yet to experience a few days afterward.

Saturday night was horrible but I managed to control my mind and set myself the short goal of going through the night as best as I could. I told myself that the next day was going to be better and that if it wasnā€™t, I would visit the ER to get my ears examined to get it ā€œfixedā€.

Sunday came and it didnā€™t get better so I went to the ER and I was attended by an ENT (Ear, Nose, Throat) doctor who ran some tests and quickly concluded that there was nothing wrong with my ears and that I had a case of tinnitus of unknown cause. There was no medication for it and there was no way of making it go away either. In short, she told me that there is no cure for tinnitus and my only option was to adapt to it.

In the back of my mind, I was fearing I was going to be told they didnā€™t know the cause and that there wasnā€™t a short path to recovery in consequence. As obsessive as ever, I already knew an awful lot of things there was know about this condition thanks to the prior research I made where I concluded I was going to die of it more or less. Googling symptoms is never a good idea if you canā€™t prevent your mind from wandering to dark places.

Sunday afternoon I started spiraling down with so many anxiety episodes I lost count of them. The constant ringing became so loud that it was getting hard to hear anything else to the point I couldnā€™t concentrate. I could only think of that noise and it became the unintended center of my universe.

The night came and I tried to sleep hoping for the best the next day but I must have slept 2 hours in total in the 12 hours I tried to fall asleep. It was torture.

For two weeks I went to many doctors: my main physician, one dentist, one traumatologist, one physiotherapist, three ENT doctors that contradicted themselves about their diagnoses, and two psychiatrists. I was desperate for answers trying to find again that precious silence I always took for granted.

Those weeks went by and I only have a blurry memory of them since sleep was nearly impossible. The anxiety produced panic attacks, involuntary tension on my back and neck that caused sometimes both of my arms to go completely numb, I started fearing the night and I was afraid of staying in my apartment because it was overly silent making the noise in my ears even more noticeable, and the worst of all by far, I started contemplating harming myself, to put it in nice words.

So how am I doing now you may wonder? 

Itā€™s almost the beginning of October when Iā€™m writing this and the noise is still there. The volume came down from a 9/10 to maybe 3 or 2 in the best days. Sometimes it can go up to that 9 and come back down to lower volumes a few seconds later. Thatā€™s in fact how I know the previous volume so objectively and I can be sure it actually got better.

My mind is also in a better place. I am learning to live with it and I sometimes let myself think it will never go away so that I can make peace with that potential reality. I am almost back to normal thanks to being able to sleep again, something Iā€™m very grateful for.

This entire ordeal has put things into perspective for sure as it clearly showed me an alternative reality for two weeks where I lost control of my mind and things I thought to be important became insignificant really really fast.

It also made me understand how depression works and how it affects the mind. Contemplating my own death and the irrationality of that ā€œsolutionā€ for a person that only a few days before was perfectly happy and ready to live the good life, made me see why some people opt for that option despite seeming irrational from the perspective of a healthy person.

In the most macabre way, I think this experience caused me to become a better and more empathetic person even. I saw firsthand how can one lose control of his life so fast and so unpredictably that I can no longer unsee that. It has made me contemplate mortality at the age of 34 and reevaluate my values and what I consider important in my life.

I consider myself lucky after all. It is, of course, not ideal that I had to go through all that shit to learn what I learned but it is our choice how we see the experiences we get to live and I chose to be the optimist in this case.

I donā€™t know if I will get my silence back. Right now, I will just focus that Iā€™m better and be grateful for having survived one of the most dramatic experiences of my life so far.

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It doesn’t have to be new

When thinking of a startup idea you don’t need to be inventing something entirely new or innovative to be successful. In fact, most of the things we use today as consumers were not invented by the companies that sell them but by someone else. Those companies succeeding with these products what they did right was to iterate on existing ideas and they ended up creating what we consider today as innovation.

Sometimes the market is big enough that there’s room for several products competing for your attention with little distinction between them. In the case of Toky, this is true as well but we did manage to find small differentiators that make us more appealing to certain people or companies than our competitors’ products.

How many CRM software can you name? Or email service providers, or blogging platforms, or calendar software? In these categories, you have clear winners like Salesforce, or GSuite, or WordPress, or Google Calendar and yet there are hundreds of competitors here having enough success to keep the lights on despite competing with the likes of Google or Salesforce.

When your intention is not to create a billion-dollar company or if you are not in a hurry to figure out how to get there, maybe you can start small, remain profitable, and keep things sustainable for as long as needed, and for that, you really don’t need to create something completely new or revolutionary. You just need time to let luck find you working.

Playing to your strengths

Your superpower is work that you enjoy doing that doesn’t feel like work to you and that other people struggle to get it done. This is where you can thrive and really separate yourself from the rest.

I noticed there are a few things that come naturally to me that I always enjoyed doing and that I was fortunate to be able to monetizeā€”programming for example. It started out as a hobby and it naturally progressed as a career that brought me so many great opportunities I’m very thankful for.

Programming is my strength and I love doing it, but as I grew older I started to hear more and more that programmers are “just builders” and that I should evolve towards being an architect since those are the ones leading the builders and indicating to them what to do.

This analogy sounded rational and it also matched what I was seeing in the market: programmers get hired in bunches for specific tasks while managers and PMs (Program or Product Managers) were more critical, called the shots, stayed longer, and also made more money than the programmers.

So naturally, I wanted to move upwards in the industry and I started contemplating the idea of acquiring those managerial skills that are so glamorous. I started reading about what a PM does, what knowledge should be acquired to do that job, and how to progress from being a “simple programmer” to being a PM. The only problem was that the more I read about it the more I disliked it.

To me, it sounded like a bunch of meetings, unnecessary presentations, office politics, and a lot of document-writing no one actually cared to read.

I tried going with it anyway, read more about the job and I saw that a background in programming could make a PM better at their job but I couldn’t get over the realization that I would be quitting programming in order to become a great PM.

Contemplating the idea of giving up the skills to create software, all those years of writing code, learning to deploy it, DevOps, Networking, SysAdmin, all those things that out of necessity most programmers learn, was just too much for me.

I didn’t foresee the job of a manager as something I would have enjoyed doing for years. I don’t like being mediocre at the things I do so I planned to be a PM for at least 10 years but having worked with several of them before I just knew I couldn’t do it.

There are two schools of thought about competency levels: improve your weaknesses and play to your strengths. I chose the latter.

I have weaknesses that I need to correct in order to become better at the things I consider to be my strengths. I’m working on those, but for the foreseeable future, I will no longer become average at a lot of things in detriment of being great at a few things.

This post is not a rant against PMs by any means. I think their job is extremely important for the success of a project. I had great experiences working with them and I learned to respect and admire a few that I got the chance to meet outside of strictly work environments. This post is about my personal realization that I would have made a bad PM considering the things I enjoy are not aligned with what they do day-to-day in order to succeed in their jobs.