It’s really hard, guys, for me to reflect on June and to write a proper review, because June was really, really tough and challenging for me. I had to handle an enormous amount of work, traveled for audits, and did a full-time remote job not related to audits or business travel.
At the same time, it was the most amazing and beautiful weather on the farm—sunny, perfect June weather—and I missed it all because I was traveling the entire month.
I spent three weeks straight on the road, auditing one of those famously world-renowned companies at their head office. The only thing that kept me going through that enormous auditing load was knowing how rare and special that opportunity was.
But again… June was unbelievably hard. I traveled three weeks in a row, and I didn’t stay in hotels over the weekends. I flew back home just for one night and then headed to the next location. Most of these were in Michigan and Cleveland, and I had to drive from site to site—sometimes three or four hours in a car. And for my second job in the same company, I was behind on everything. On all projects. It was an awful feeling, and I realized there was no way to fix it.
The tricky part is that in Michigan there are basically no rental cars available. Apparently, it’s not cost-efficient because of heavy taxes and liability insurance, so rental companies just don’t have cars. Funny, right? Michigan, the automotive state, and you can’t rent a car.
Uber and Lyft weren’t much help either. If you needed to go more than 30 minutes, drivers would just decline or cancel, and I ended up waiting for hours or being late to meetings. At one point, I had a driver who was clearly under the influence, and I was so desperate after waiting two hours that I just took the ride, swearing I’d never go to Michigan again without a car arranged by my work.
So that’s basically my horrible month. But it also made me realize that I can’t keep up this work schedule anymore. I have to change something. And just to explain the challenge in my decision-making process: it’s really easy to quit and find another job when you have a low salary, no promotion opportunities, or when you’re unhappy with clients, work essence, or don’t see where to grow. But when you have ALL of that—ten times more than you can handle—and any new job you find will probably have less of everything, but you’ll have your freedom and won’t be working 10–12 hours a day, always late like the Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland… that’s a very different decision.
So I chose the Alice pathway and started to research how deep the rabbit hole was and how long I would be falling… gravity forces and all that.
The interesting part of that time was that my mom was actually on vacation visiting our hometown in Siberia. She was sending me a lot of pictures of the town of my childhood, which hadn’t changed a bit.
Meanwhile, I was also watching the farm animals on the CCTV camera all the time.
It felt like I was in three places at once: on a business trip, at home on my farm, and in the place of my childhood—all at the same time for an entire month. With the overload of work and travel, it added a dream-like sense to the month, where it was hard to understand where you were in the morning.
I was playing a lot of online chess, in parallel trying to solve the puzzle in my mind of how to keep that incredible opportunity—working with top management of some of the greatest companies in the world, seeing behind the curtains of their work, and adding value to their business in a way that impacts all their global sites; experiencing their cybersecurity systems and passing that experience, the most brilliant gems of it, further to other companies through consulting, public speaking, and teaching—while at the same time not spending so much time away from home.
And I finally found the solution.
I managed to built the house for goslings in those two days I was at home, it was mostly the decompression time and trying to do something with the immediate result to feel better.
At the last day of June I visited the Monticello which also give me that historical vibe when people didn't had that much help from tech and computers under fingerprints but had to make decisions that would impact the entire nations.
