Quick biography!
If the point of a journey is an interesting destination, regardless of the consistency of the path to get there, then i’m probably not so wrong with the way i’m leading this life.
After all, who cares that the forks in the road are accidental, when you keep liking where the road is heading!
For instance, if my mother hadn’t prevented my 17-year-old self to subscribe to a theatre school (“get a bachelor’s first!”), i wouldn’t have had to agree on going to a computer science university, where i progressively got to discover the interests of Web sciences, a passion which is still going on today!
If i then hadn’t had to live on my own, i wouldn’t have started my working life in a small hotel as a receptionnist while a managerial mess was going on, and i wouldn’t have had to suddenly become the reception manager, taking the management over whereas i hadn’t worked anywhere before, learning all the management basis the hard way (which is the most efficient way to learn them, obviously!)
If, right after i got my degree, i had investigated more about my first employer, i would have easily found out that their communication was one gigantic pile of bullshit, and i would never have moved to Paris to work with them, discovering a surprising and deep passion for big world-sized cities, which will probably never ever leave me.
If that same first employer, having a hard time finding clients (and, while i ignored it, being on the verge of crumbling), had had another choice than giving me an development assignment in another web agency, i wouldn’t have discovered Clever Age from the inside, and i probably wouldn’t have found out that there were web agencies with values; and i certainly wouldn’t have gotten hired while knowing exactly what i was walking into.
Also, if my first project manager at Clever Age hadn’t injured his back and hadn’t had to stay in bed for weeks, i wouldn’t have had to take the project over, and to make it out quite nicely, suddenly becoming one of Clever Age’s project managers. And it would have taken me more time to convince the Clever-deciders to let me manage other Clever-projects!
If, during the Paris Web 2010 conferences, i hadn’t unexpectedly ran into a friend i had as a teenager, i wouldn’t have tried to keep in touch with him this time, and i wouldn’t have learned that he was starting his own conference initiative for the South of France. I then probably wouldn’t have gotten to volunteer for the organization of what became “Sud Web 2011″ in Nismes, and then now for the future Sud Web 2012 ; i wouldn’t have found out this sheer interest of mine for web conferences, which lead me to talk at Paris Web and Front Row (Krakow) in October 2011.
All of this wouldn’t have gotten me to meet the right people to be given the opportunity to talk at the Paris Web conferences and Front Row conferences in october !
Finally, if i hadn’t studied a year in the US by mistake (i filled in the wrong paper!), i wouldn’t have had to discover and study that culture, and i couldn’t have talked with Clever Age about opening something up for them in New York (queen of cities! top of the world!), project which should get real in 2013.
So many accidental forks which make me feel safe as of how nothing’s wrong with being an impostor, as long as you do it with honesty, perseverance, and endless perfectionnism! 