Week one review

They say the hardest thing in life is starting, I can honestly say I’ve put off writing its first-week review a few times.

To make this easy for myself I’m just going to list off what’s happened in the last week if there’s anything of real interest I will expand upon that in the weekly review, or I will write a separate blog.

Here goes

I’ve made it to the gym every day except Saturday, this was due to the British and Irish Lions starting their tour of New Zealand, this is a very interesting topic, but not interesting for this blog, if you want to know more about my feeling for the Lions, buy me a pint and we can talk.

I’ve set myself a challenge of reading as many books as possible in this time off, this first week I’m reading a book by the author Anthony Beevor called Ardennes 1944, this was brought for me as a Christmas present by my parents, once I finish this I will review it and I’ll review everything that I read. I have put out a request from Friends, Family and any fouls I know for book recommendations, there is a blog on my current reading list.

I had come across General Assembly a few times whilst researching tech start-ups  but had never really paid attention to the subjects they were covering, on the escape the city course two of the tribe members Beth and Emily both worked for General Assembly,  a friend from my CrossFit box also mentioned them recently and they were starting to appear in my Facebook feed,  I noticed that they did an introduction course on product management,  I wasn’t really sure what this was so decided this would be the best course to go on to see what general assembly is all about.

I can honestly say I was very impressed Chris Edmonds who took the introduction course and with General Assembly, I will write a blog on this and I hope to attend the remaining 5 introduction course they provide, oh wait I forgot the best bit, all the introduction course are free.

One of the main tasks over the coming weeks is to get myself on a tech startup accelerator or incubator, but the simple quest of which one or ones do I apply for, it turns out the UK government have a list of accelerators and incubators that you can download in Excel, happy days.

Well lets not get to ahead of ourselves, there are over 600 accelerators and incubators on this spreadsheet and the government hasn’t been that good at really work out what all of these do, the column marked "sector" for example had the answer of "N/A", which to me means not applicable, so what does that mean? That they do everything or the civil servant wasn’t sure??? Oh well after 6 hours of colour coding this spreadsheet I’m down to about 10 that I’m going to contact over the coming weeks.

As part of applying for an accelerator, I need to have a CV.  My CV is set up for my last life and all the recruitment agents in that world. I spoke to a friend who is a recruitment agent who looks after a different industry, I said I want my CV to explain that I had been in Oil & Gas engineering and that is where my skills are from and to explain that these skills were transferable. The good news is he came back to me, and I’m a very happy man, the CV was spot on, he understood my engineering skill and through the CV could see how there were transferable.