One thing: internal satisfaction. External success, too! The biggest one recently was releasing a course on MySQL at https://planetscale.com/mysql-for-developers. It was painful to push that over the finish line, but giving up on it would have been a huge disservice.
Aaron, thank you for this course! I started watching it about a week ago, and I love your teaching style.
I've been using relational databases for years, but my conceptual understanding was never that strong. I hadn't touched MySQL in particular for several years. Your course not only got me back up to speed, but I learned a lot of things I'd never known before.
I love how you organize your lessons, how you make sure to answer the right questions at the right times, and how you prioritize helping the learner build a strong mental model.
I hope you make more content like this in the future.
Gah, this is so encouraging. Thank you for taking the time to say so! I put _so_ much into that and I'm glad to hear it's been helpful for you. Organizing the content was actually a really big struggle for me, so this is particularly meaningful.
A lot of my day job work is self directed because our managers expect a lot out of us but also leave us alone to do the work (amazing right?) but message received.
Let's take one not related to software at all! I turned a shed into an office over the course of many months: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1333866090573811723. I wanted to give up and burn it down at some points, but I powered through and ended up with the perfect shedquarters!
I created a course teaching college students financial accounting that's made over 100k in the 5 or 6 years it's been live (http://acct229.com). That was a freakin grind that I thought about quitting a lot.
That interview led to another piece called "Publishing your work increases your luck" at https://github.com/readme/guides/publishing-your-work. I gave a talk on that article at GitHub Universe. That article led to... this article. And here we are!
Each of these things have 1) felt awesome to release and 2) directly increased my luck, my bank account, or led to the next thing.
Thank you so so much for listing these examples. I am the exact target audience for your financial accounting videos. Immediately bookmarked and shared with a few of my close friends. Appreciate you for finishing these projects -- they definitely will come in valuable for people like me :)
