--- title: "2020 The best year of my career" description: "I created a pretty personal video about how I experienced 2020. It strangely became the best year of my career. Make sure to stick around to the end for a surprising turn of events for 2021." date: "2021-01-05T10:00:10.000Z" url: "https://timbenniks.dev/videos/tim/058-bhffzm6n3tw" youtube_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhFfzM6n3Tw" playlist: "tim" image: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bhFfzM6n3Tw/maxresdefault.jpg" tags: ["cms", "content-ops", "product-strategy", "devrel", "career"] --- # 2020 The best year of my career I created a pretty personal video about how I experienced 2020. It strangely became the best year of my career. Make sure to stick around to the end for a surprising turn of events for 2021. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhFfzM6n3Tw ## Transcript all righty damn i am back after a hiatus of a couple of weeks and i wanted to talk to you my lovely audience about my 2020 and of course it was a really shitty year it was basically a dumpster fire for everybody so let's not dwell on that too much because you know there's a whole bunch of year overviews that say the same thing about 2020. however for me there's one extra thing because it's kind of strange 2020 was so bad but at the same time it was the best year of my career and so i was able to utilize the bad parts of 2020 to accelerate the things that i was doing already starting 2019 moving up to now 2021 right having to stay home working from home using your webcam microphones things like that carry creating content speaking at virtual conferences all of that i've been doing that and i just leveled that up and things just started to happen this was the year where i refocused the perception you guys have of me okay let's let's let's unpack that a little basically for the last 15 years i've been working as a developer a tech director a delivery manager stuff like that jobs like that at tech agencies right i work with global ecommerce i work for huge brands and build their website and i was always in the trenches working hard gritting it out and then going from the next project to the next to the next and i took a lot of pride in that but i never shared anything that i learned and that was just that was tim that's how i was known and now in 2020 i decided okay i'm just gonna change this whole thing around and get do more creative stuff right so what i did is all the stuff i've learned over the years i decided to just project that onto you guys into the community i did like conference talks i made videos i did blog posts and so that perception of what you guys had of me of this just the tech guy now became more the speaker the content creator the dude who knows how video works not really but i'm trying you know things like that my perception has been changed towards giving back to the community and you know what's the best part there was so much to learn that the community gave back to me that oh man my year exploded my brain has been exploded i learned so much from the community i don't even understand why i didn't do that before right so basically that rebrand created new opportunities for me in my career because now i was known by the partners that we have through my work let's say headless cms systems dam systems search systems whatever there's like these startups right and i now know them and i made videos about them because i loved what they do and then they started offering me jobs like don't you want to create content for us because you already know agencies you know enterprise systems you know development wouldn't it be cool if you helped us talk to our developers in the community or i could become a content creator for others i could help with a whole bunch of things so i basically created new career paths and i'm just going down those like rabbit holes and finding out what's there right so 2020 was actually really hard but i still leveled up my personal stuff and everybody knows why it was hard and the addition for me personally is that my wife has a higher risk factor for corona she's a she's not super healthy and so it's it's paramount that she does not get corona because then that's not good so we decided to really stick to the rules in france be really strict and we stayed home from end of february and then we saw around this everybody in paris just going out doesn't you know they didn't really take care of the rules they didn't they didn't care at all and we were just sticking to them so we didn't actually get to do stuff and the one or two times we went out it was to bring her to the hospital right that's a very depressing approach to everything and then you have people around you catching the virus like bad stuff was around luckily however we are now here as you can see i'm in an old farm in the countryside we're staying with friends because they own like a hotel with different little apartments and they said just come and visit us for the second lockdown so you're not in the city right um and even though that was pretty good now that we're here we're really happy we're in the countryside i actually still burned out a little this is not a full-blown burnout but if i had continued the way i was working i would definitely burn right because i looked at a bunch of numbers i won't share them too much in this video that's not this video but i found that i did like an average of 60 hours a week in my normal day job then i made a youtube video every week i spoke at 20 conferences i did a bunch of blog posts no on and on lots of things and that's like 14 15 hour days every day weekends and and then came christmas time right come christmas time i actually burned like i got sick for two weeks not corona by the way but i just my body let go i had a week off and then i was sick and then it did turn into two weeks and now i'm slowly getting back and even thinking about making this video gave me a headache so that's not really the best sign so i'm gonna take it easy for a bit and then balance more for next year right 20 21 even though there's still the pandemic there are still political unrest there's still complicated things for us my family me and my wife and my little doggo it's gonna get better right because we are now in the french countryside but we're gonna move here permanently right we will find our dream home and we will renovate it so we can work from home have like a really nice youtube studio and my wife gets a really nice atelier where she can do her company and we really want to just get away from all the craziness of paris and it's better for my wife's health it's warmer here there's less air pollution there's more space there's more calm and i will only work remotely that's a decision we made i'm not going to go to an office anymore and there it is i will also have a new job and this is not the official announcement of that new job it's just something i've worked towards during the year and there has been a whole bunch of things that made me decide to go in another direction than what i'm doing now i will talk about that later in another video to actually highlight what i'm doing and why i'm moving on moving on but i just wanted to say that this year was it was a challenge i leveled it up i rebranded myself i found new career paths and i found an amazing thing to do with people that really want me to do that it's like a match made in heaven so um that announcement will come a bit later but i just wanted to share with this with you now because that best year of my career mounted into this thing that i will be doing from next month on anyways um that was a pretty long monologue with uncle tim i want to thank you for watching and i will see you soon i guess cheers