Firstly thanks again to all of those who have purchased a copy of my self titled book "Self-Motivation: Anyone Can Do It, If I did it" which is still available within outlets such as Amazon Foyles Thriftbooks Better World Books Waterstones Will also have 10 signed copies available which you can get in touch with me for. But I'm announcing that a new book is currently in the works, which will take some time to write.
My eagerly anticipated release of my book is now available. "Self-Motivation: Anyone can do IT, if i did IT" - is a book which is based from my experiences from when i first started out wanting to pursue a career within the IT industry. Cannot believe that within its first day it was actually top 10 within the best sellers list in the Computer Scientist Biographies category. Never really had an expectation for the book other than to just get my story out there to help and hopefully inspire others. The book can be purchased online in both Paperback and Kindle in the available online stores Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Motivation-Anyone-can-Dujon-Walsham/dp/1913179192/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_1 Waterstones - https://www.waterstones.com/book/self-motivation-anyone-can-do-it-if-i-did-it/dujon-walsham/9781913179199
So the Self Motivation IT-Based biography of myself is almost finished and ready to be published to the public soon. Quite excited to see this book to hit all of the major online platforms where the book can be purchased in the following formats; Hardback E-Book Kindle The name of the book will be called Self Motivation: Anyone can do IT if i did IT Hoping that everyone will notice the it being written as "IT" being information technology of course. Reason for me doing the book of this format is because though i could have done various technology books on various sectors (which i may still do) we never really get to see or know the person behind all of the technical abilities which someone displays so it's a great way of introducing the person to the industry so you can see what they are about, how they came into the IT Industry and is able to get to the point where they are in a position to share content, to create content, to even create this book which everyone (hoping) will read. Will announce and share the link of the book as soon as it is published.
The Self-Motivation book is now completed and is underway of being processed to be released soon! I'm very excited about this project. This book will be a detailed look on my jounrery of coming into the IT industry from when I was 18. Alot of challenges and obstacles will all be detailed. The aim of the book overall so that people can understand more my story and also to share knowledge and experiences so that everybody can learn from my greatest successes down to my mistakes. When I first started you learn along the way through trial and error. There is never really a book, guide or anything on how to advance and build on your career from a young age. So I'm wanting to contribute so that not just only 18 year olds but for anybody to see the Self-Motivation I had to make it where I am today. The story overall shows the building of myself to how I got to the brand now known as "Walsham Solutions". From job role experiences, exams, career development and personal obstacles to overcome all detailed which all contributes to the overall picture and story. My motivation for the writing it? I look back alot on everything I've done and I feel it's a story worth sharing. Worth telling. So that anybody wanting to build on anything, start up anything can see or have an idea on what to expect and face along the way. My objective is that it can hopefully inspire, help someone find their Self-Motivation within them to accomplish whatever their goal is in their career. Or to accomplish building an actual career. When writing this book, I never had a motive or intention of trying to write a best seller, or anything driven towards selling a million copies. This is more about giving back in terms of the knowledge and wisdom I've learned along the way. So as long as it has been able to inspire someone then my mission is accomplished. Hence why I've decided to have the book Self-Published. I really enjoyed writing this entire book I got to relieve some great and not so great stories but it all made me to what I am today. Will be announcing the name of the book soon!
Is there a top? For me there isn't one, not if I believe there are no limits to how far you can go. Especially with me being in the IT industry where everything moves at a rapid pace and you have to ensure that you stay on top of the latest technologies, strategies, practices and movements as these technology roadmaps damn near resemble the A-Z. Private cloud (system centre) is really a discipline which I practice and you can never really be the master of anything, a master always continues to learn and build on what they already know with really no time be comfortable at just one position. The only person that can really define what they say is "the top" is really you, however you should never take your position for granted at the same time too as you always have to keep up with the times. This was a main driver for why I did as many exams and courses that I possibly could, but each one had a strategic reason and was applicable to what I was doing as opposed to building a portfolio of exams or courses which could me somewhat meaningless or not utilized at all. Share the wealth Even more powerful (almost wrote powershell 😁) is the pass the game along to others so that they can also achieve to the same levels or even surpass which If you are recognized as a "master" or "guru" as such then think of what others could gain from your experience, of course those that actually want to learn from your experience. The contributions which we provide strengthen the community as a whole, and we’ve all come across obstacles which are tricky to overcome, or just haven’t seen them before. As established as we are have to go back to the same point that we don’t know everything. I had built up a wealth of knowledge and solutions over the years in this Industry and as long as you are driven to do so there is no better practice you can do than sharing your wealth (of knowledge) What does your view look like? How are you seeing yourself and what is your view like in terms of how you stack up in terms of relevance, importance and sustainability? To reiterate you should never take your position for granted, which was such a driver for me taking as many industry courses and exams that I could to ensure I stayed on top of what was going on. But now I've reached a point where instead of my energy would be put towards studying for an exam, I've now put towards various solutions and custom developments which allows me to do show and display everything in terms of growth, awareness and also sharing across the board of my peers.
What is Technical Artillery Very same as having enough ammunition in a firearm of choice. In this case the firearm is of course the skill sets and the ammunition will be the attributes within them that we have. So if we look at some of the skill sets which we have, especially in my space where I specialize in the System Centre space so let's take two of them being SCCM and SCOM. So both of them would be the skill sets which are the technical weapons so for the actual artillery it would be what we can do with them. Both technologies are very big and different from each other, so our knowledgeable artillery is quite important as the more varied we are with it then the more you can accomplish with those skill sets. Plan of Attack Projects can sometimes be the same or can have a very completely different custom/bespoke requirement. They may all utilize the exact same technologies, but the requirements that could make them a lot more complex, your artillery being what you can actually do with them will make all the difference. Everybody has come across requirements in which our specialized areas are not able to fulfilled them by default, but that doesn't necessarily mean they cannot be done....at least this is how my approach is. So our plan of attack is to analyse what we can do and capable of inputting with our current skill sets as well as understanding what has to be done to complete a solution. These can give us opportunities to strengthen our attributes and acquire new skills in the process which can only make our artillery a lot stronger. A very important attribute that we need to understand is that it's not what you know (not just about) but it's how you go about it. As much pressure as there is on us as there is to know everything it's simply not possible, we have our respective areas and we should be always striving to gain more knowledge within them but we simply cannot know everything in anything. A question which has normally been asked in an interview is "How would go about tackling this solution" or "How would you implement this technology that you haven't seen before", there is no correct answer in this scenario but there is certainly an incorrect answer or approach of trying to bluff or wing your way through it. This question is asked because they want to hear how you would handle the task at hand, your planning skills etc initiative is what they expect to see. You will never always be handed a task which you know how to do on the fly because not every requirement is as simple as that Ammo Repository Custom work we have done before is always nice to hold onto especially if you face tasks which face similarities. Where I stand on this is though I have a repository of various developments I never like to use them. I may look for a refresh but I would never use the exact same development. My reason being is more creativity related as I like to re-create something fresh, something which the solution fits the business requirement rather than the business requirement fitting the solution. Sometimes developments we carry may not necessarily fulfill the exact requirement, I tend to create things which have more of a scalable template structure where they can be customized for however I want it to be done. Course the scenario which I've described might not always be applicable in my skill set has some things will be perfect fitting exactly but still does serve a purpose to have something more fresher.
I have been asked a few times as to how I have been able to obtain new skills, technologies and experience in such quick speeds and also with deep knowledge at the same time. And the answer is .....I really have no idea! well to be fair I've got a little bit but it's quite difficult to explain as when you’re driven enough you don't really notice exactly the work you put in and whilst it may seem quick to the outside looking in, it really feels like a slow grind to make it where you want to be. Technical Wizardry This is really a big element in how I'm able to pick up and learn a lot of new things. To breakdown the meaning, it just comes to the art of creativity. And just wanting to do certain things. For example, in projects, solutions or any kind of technical or business objective you may be expected to design something which may not be remotely possible and can come across many stumbling blocks. Mostly it tends to be technologies in which others would specialise in or even some that little to no one knows at all. This can be seen as just using initiative to try and understand it more, but this is where the creativity kicks in. In my cases it normally leads down the path of developer/devOps type of stumbling blocks, everything from PowerShell/VBScript/SQL/XML/C#/C+ Basically I'm saying the quickest way to pick up new things is to have objectives or yourself try to think of something you want to perform that sounds ridiculous or farfetched. One of the examples I can give was how I picked up more on PowerShell. I thought I would come up with the idea of writing a script which would be able to the following 1. Open a web page 2. Connect to my private media server 3. Download my music 4. Organize it by Artist, Album, Year, Genre, Compilation 5. Grab all of the Album Art and map to them just a little something to expand the mind. Hell I even had a script which could count how many items were in the fridge. Another element that comes with Technical Wizardry is that EVERY and ANY type of requirement can be done. Whether it can be done out of the box or not and that's really the core drive of the creative side and developing of skills on a broader scale Next part will focus more on the artillery of the technical skillset which will be coming vert soon
“Self Motivation” is always going to be the key slogan from me, but now we turn into a new chapter of blogs with this starting with my other favorite slogan "work smarter not harder" This to me represents making smarter choices towards achieving goals as oppose to working harder on tasks which may provide little to no benefit, and even worse actually knowing it will be a path to nowhere but we do it anyway because we feel we have either no choice in the matter, we know of no other option out there. So this is an introductoryblog of the assessing how hard do we work and how smart should we work. What is " The Balance" A lot of every subject is always defined by you need a balance of this and that, too much of anything is bad, too little of anything is bad and it's always a balance. Never excess or otherwise just balance. But the question I pose is how does someone define balance when there is no baseline defined to determine whether you need more of or less of something? We will apply it to this scenario of working smarter instead of harder. First we will (including my Self in this as sometimes I really need to take my own advice) need to assess what exactly it is you are trying to achieve and how you are going about it. Because working hard is a great attitude to have, but the payoff only comes if you are seeing progress from this and not a treadmill effect. How Hard Using me as an example when I first started out in IT, I wanted to reach to a consultant or Architect level. Now how to do this wasn't exactly always clear besides working your way up. Now in this case I was in 1st line support as I think most would normally start at. I took on massive workloads, tasks which wouldn't necessarily be applicable to me and getting my hands on anything I could in order to showcase my skills and to what I was made of. And this should be something everyone should adopt in terms of this attitude and self-motivation, but what I found was that because everyone's position was somewhat cemented, the likelihood of being promoted or obtaining a higher position would not be realistic at all and my job would more than likely not change at all. So with a focus to achieve what you want what are you to do here? Do you allow your job role and managers to dictate to how high you can go or want to go? Or do you start to analyze your situation and change your approach going forward. As of course I was working hard to show initiative, but you can see that working hard can have a drawback if you are not getting where you want to be. How Smart So now I understand the situation I'm in I realized that with the experience that I have attained I had grown a lot more technically and I still could rise up.....just not at the organization I was working for. And I had developed a motion of completing a minimum of 3 exams a year which showcased my skill set even more alongside the experience I had gained, so I worked hard in building a portfolio which would not only benefit myself but also able to use it elsewhere. So I decided to put this in motion and test myself by going to interviews which required someone a lot more senior than the positions I had, and there were some very very brutal technical interviews...And then it really started to pay off because I was really performing on them and then job offers of opportunities much much bigger than what I had (salary was also but wasn’t the main focus) Working Hard on Being Smart Put as much effort in working hard towards making a smarter decision rather than working hard at something just for the sake of it. Some situations can be beyond control where all you can do is work hard whether voluntarily or mandatory, but it's always possible to get what you want when you are able to apply both working smarter as well as working hard. My mother once told me that she has known and seen people work really hard, everyday and then they get nowhere and its extremely unfair to those individuals. And then some can just have one smart idea and with enough dedication to it can just totally exceed past everybody that's still working hard trying to get to where they want. The point of this blog is really for those who work really hard and know they work really hard to take your power back. Apply your hard working ethic towards your goal with a different approach, and see the results materialize from a smarter strategy in place. This is not to be confused with the "easy way out" as some say where something like a "get rich quick scheme" comes into play, but i'll leave the "easy option" or "easy way out" to your own interpretation.
This has always helped during the very beginning of my career. Here is the background and formula of how I adopted this way of thinking Early Days When I had first started the Just IT course at that time I was still getting pocket money (you know that's a very long time ago lol) which was enough to make it through as I had made myself sandwiches to take with me. This carried on until I had been offered a work experience/placement shortly after. Whatever I did have I used to go to McDonald's and get just a small fries but I always remembered looking at the insane queues there filled with people in suits. This intrigued me because I wanted to know what it would be like for someone like me in one of those suits and being able to get a MC Donald’s meal during a working lunch break. The idea and visualisation might seem small or corny, but those times I was hungry to get on so any glimpse of a professional life look like a dream within reach to me. Even more when I would see the same professionals in suits eating in restaurants during a lunch break and the lifestyle visual of it just gave me that more of a boost. So with the small fries and sandwiches I had allowed me.to just hang in there and dream that much more. Matter of fact I'm lying as this can go even further back to when in the Lewisham college days before I even got to the point of private course. Normally use to hit king roosters for a two piece and fries and that alone was something for me, so I can really see the timelines and how it eventually evolved into what I am today. First Hand Experience of This When I had started my first job I finally got to live out this dream, well half and half because the first role I had was at Monsoons Head Office and we got to where our own clothes which can be more relaxed I guess 😀 as you could imagine what an 18 year old would have ate back then, yep I had every fast food meal possible, a lot more indestructible back then lol But then it really changed when I had the ultimate of motivations when I had got my next role which was working for IQPC and at the time were based in Sloane Square in Chelsea. At the time this was my first time even touching soil at Chelsea and being the reputation it has for being very expensive down there (and it was) the opportunity was much bigger of a motivation for me. Now my lunch times took the next level turn, I ate in every single restaurant in Chelsea and I'm talking from the bottom of Sloane Square through to the top of Kings Road, up to Fulham Road, and even from South Kensington to Gloucester Road Station There are restaurants in Kings Road that don't even exist anymore and I ate in those places too 😀 For me I use a lot of brain power, especially when at that time I was doing about 3-4 exams a year plus taking on some complex workloads in order to prove my technical abilities. So this in turn gave me the appetite of a construction worker 😀, but the time away from the office from work allowed me to reset my batteries and allow myself to think big about what the next move should be? How are we doing right now? And where's the food should have been here 15 minutes ago J How Should you Lunch This is what I normally do and built this up over the years which really helps the mind body and soul to keep yourself upbeat and motivated Leave the Office There are lot of people that bring food back into the office, which I can understand if there is high priority or heavy workloads, but in order to mentally break you need to escape from the place which is challenging you so you can get that overall peace. Fresh air, hustle and bustle and normality outside the office is what you need. The mind literally needs to roam and run free and that's difficult to do when you in a building which when desperate enough you will get disturbed whilst on break as well as fighting the urge to work through it. Pick a spot and stay there.....for a while I normally have a spot where I go to regular for the sake of variety menu wise but also for familiarity you need somewhere not exactly a duplicate of the office but a visual of familiarity that is not the office. This can change as well as having multiple spots you can chill at Feed the brain You can take this mean a multitude of things but I normally mean this as to feed the brain dependent on how hard you have worked or how much brain power you have utilised. Speaking for me I earlier I mentioned I eat like a construction worker and that's related to my working style as I do normally multitask various technologies across System Centre, Development and DevOps type duties so altogether it works up an appetite. My history has had me eat this way also from the fascinations of when I first started out so have normally kept to this tradition. How do I lunch now still to this day the exact same way 😀 I'm not saying or suggesting that I'm spending or encouraging to spend about £25 on lunch a day because that would be too much, but at your own discretion of how much you spend is entirely up to you but this is more the foundation of building a world (for 1 hour) that doesn't involve pressures, duties or anything involved with the office. This is the formula I built over the years and still keep it up……..
This part of this series does skip over a couple of years but this will be covered on the next. As this part is pretty important but also a very big foundation building block on how I've been able to elevate my self-motivation in further. One of the albums, matter of fact the album to really influence the self-motivation I have up until this day was the Birdman - Pricele$$ album which dropped in 2009. Why this album? Well let me paint the picture of how it was for me back in 2009. Painting the Picture of where I was I had just turned 21 and at that point in my career I was doing a lot of big projects and was about seven/eight certifications in with my MCSE finally completed. In my opinion I was doing great things especially at that age, salary wise was quite advanced then and bearing in mind this was just when the recession had started. Sometimes if you get to a high plateau at a young age you can get very complacent and not know where to go next thinking you have everything. But then... I had landed a new role which would allow me to advance to bigger levels...more travel was involved but it was definitely worth it after evaluating the opportunity at hand. Now on my daily commute on the train, I finally got to listen to the new birdman album. And the every track allowed me to see a bigger picture of everything I could achieve, made the possibilities limitless and painted a picture that really could be reality. Perception & Motivation gained: The Bigger Picture If you look at even just the front cover of the Album with the Bugatti and the duffle bag. Now I'm not looking at it thinking that's exactly what I want as just a vague materialistic gain or that's the mission, but the motivation for me more displayed a push for not only keeping with the self-motivation I already have but more to set bigger goals. Birdman on this album isn't doing any kind of lyrically wizardry, but that's not what he is trying to be either. This comes across more like a simplistic story teller of how extravagant the life he was living and how he made it happen. So when you combine that with the spirit of a young 21 year old who already felt like he was top of the world, you can see how it made the ambition a lot bigger for me. It's a marker of where I was in my life and career, and just like the album title "priceless" really represented what I was about. Majority of every role I ever took was never to do with how much the salary was, because I knew I would benefit regardless as this was a bonus to me, in reference to my other self-motivation blogs it's more the experience I gain from the roles to further my career which is the real remuneration. A lot of people have different motivations and different perceptions and I can understand a lot of people could see or listen to the same birdman album and get the impression I want to take shortcuts or by any means to attain a lifestyle like this and this would never be a way I would view it. What I saw, heard and envisioned was the bigger picture of what could be achieved. Staying true to my career path and the choices I made eventually the financial benefits would be bigger and bigger, but more importantly this is being obtained by doing something you don't see as work, as a "I have no other choice role". How I prophesized my Goals This is where I prophesized of my own career goals were really taking place. A lot of the things I wanted to get to I made it there so quickly that I didn't even notice. I believe the reason why I was able to do this because I never set any goals necessarily as a hit list, just my thought process backed up with a soundtrack just allowed me to reach further. The attitude wasn’t setting goals with the mentality of “this was what I was going to achieve in a certain amount of time” it was more of “this is what is going to happen” as setting of the expectation of this will be completed by the very least of this time frame. And I sometimes find goals are normally set by people who know they are either unrealistic or a long time to achieve, that can be the beauty of it but without the right motivation behind you it makes them even more out of reach. Two goals I'll give you I had as an example back then was • Complete my MCSE before 25 • Perform an Architect Role in 5 years’ time And both of these I got to before I turned 22. And the secret to doing this was just being focused without trying to actually hit them The role I had during that time was in my opinion the role which really allowed me to excel technically, and the perfect album had to be in the background to compliment this. Oddly enough the role I have now has me do the exact same journey, so whenever I need a nostalgic boost this goes straight into the playlist! Best line I could quote from the album “so we ate the same meal till the 100s had a crease”
