A motivational letter.

I came to Parque de Merendas das Mestrinhas, an early southern European autumn, cedar trees all around, calm, only me and my dog. Earlier I was wrestling lists of my quantifiable achievements and my happy past employers. I was molding, excluding, and forging its points with the hope the result would convince a person I’ve never met I’m a good fit for a role. But foremost I was dulled.

Then I remembered an article I read lately. "Applicants send out thousands of AI-crafted résumés, and businesses use AI to sift through them," reports Annie Lowrey in an article for the Atlantic. "What Bumble and Hinge did to the dating market, contemporary human-resources practices have done to the job market."

Bored and unmotivated when dating or when writing a motivational letter is time wasted, isn’t it, I need nature. I need to reconnect with what’s real. I’m going to the forest, I thought.

When I sat under the cedar trees and listened to airy hills,

when I observed a yellow sunlight pushing through branches and smelled a blue-green smell of cedar,

when I stared at a wish-to-be green grass, and my eyes followed a squirrel,

I decided.

It’s unnatural convincing a person I’ve never met that I’m the perfect fit. I don’t know the role; I don’t know the person. Instead, I started to write a better list: what I've learned, what intrigued me, and what stayed with me. Maybe it’ll reveal what I should offer my time to.

When I was preparing to study electronics engineering, I got a job in a small business in central Poland that specializes in fixing medical and scientific equipment. My future boss didn't care about what I've learned so far. I know, that's counterintuitive. He didn't care about my grades, nor did he grill me about an AND logic gate. On my trial day, he put on a bench, with a multimeter and soldering station, an old hearing testing device. It behaves oddly; it is in the workshop for two weeks, and the fault could take too much time to find, thus the business may lose money on it, he said. He then left the workshop. The stress blended everything I learned into one sticky glob, too sticky to pull anything from it. How could I impress those technicians getting into the core of the problem, the post-Soviet era electronics could exhibit, every day, over many years?

It was then when I learned the value of intuition; a "scent" of a fault was what guided me to fix the device. The boss recognized my strength. His experience taught him that, in contrast to what schools used to teach at that time, faulty electronic devices live their own lives. He knew that a knowledge-intuition blend makes his business successful.

Twenty years and many other jobs later, between one COVID-caused lockdown and another, I was on the phone with a German software company. I detailed how I taught myself to program; I followed my curiosity, studied design patterns, and built my own mobile apps. "Welcome to the team," I read the message the next day. However, soon in my new job I moaned, What am I doing here? I'm not good enough. The engineers in my team programmed longer than an idea of a smartphone in my pocket. "You'll figure this out," a senior developer on the team told me. He let me write the first line of code for a greenfield project. Every day I was curious; I was writing code and translating the product owner's requirements into features. After more than 100k lines of code - of which mine was about 85% - and two years, the app, Reva App, was ready for sale on the app store.

Later that year, I got another job as a mobile developer. I found myself on a first step of a corporate ladder, animated by a Portuguese tech company, YLD. But the more I was pulled into the industry, the more I was disillusioned with it. Most VCs expect exponential growth; the social media platforms carry out data colonialism; hardware and software manufacturers, data analysis companies, and brokerage firms track, discriminate, and influence, perhaps inspired by George Orwell, the behavior of societies. The technology, without these destructive business models, can be useful. Forget about it, though, the people is what matters. The focus on empathy, community, and, most importantly, on what's strong, not what is wrong, in us is the only way to progress without annihilating ourselves.

When I used to work as a fine furniture designer/maker, I was inspired by works of shokunin, the Japanese master woodworkers. I used to make, with care for the smallest detail, aesthetically pleasant objects that will last for generations. When I worked as a rock climbing photographer, I was chasing climbers in Catalonia. I used to ascend forty meters to take pictures. The climbers were expanding their comfort zone, fighting constrains their own minds set. It is the people that made my work interesting, inspiring, and fun.

When I'm writing this, still sitting under cedar trees, I remember a forest I used to visit as a young adult to unwind. One of the biggest forests within a city's border in Europe, the Las(forest) Lagiewnicki in Poland. I do not live there for many years, however, because I found my home in central Portugal. Here, I reconnect with nature. I explore, with a childish curiosity, the breathtaking nature in this creased and bumpy landscape like an old paper sheet. The landscape I used to dream about while living in the post-Soviet flatland, browsing mountain bicycle magazines. I understood here that trees do not happily grow in grids 1.5 m, that what Dr. Miyawaki used to teach I can find in scarce places. Every time, I'm amazed how different microclimates the native trees, randomly growing, provide. Here, too, I came across a book, "The Hidden Life of Trees," by Peter Wohlleben. It is about how trees communicate with each other; it is my primer to grasp how to work, like a forest, not a factory, to build ecosystems, not empires.