Ninety days: what to build, and what to ignore
For anybody starting out, or starting again.
Ignore: a follower count. A personal brand before you have a body of work to brand. Certificates that certify attendance. Learning a fifth tool when you cannot yet do anything finished with the first. Advice from people whose only visible output is advice.
Build: three finished things. Finished is the operative word - a small complete piece beats an ambitious unfinished one every time, because completion is itself the rare signal.
One of the three should be for a real person with a real problem, even unpaid, even small. It changes the work in ways you cannot fake, and it gives you the only sentence that matters in an interview: here is what happened when somebody actually used it.
Ninety days is enough for three small finished things. It is not enough for a portfolio of grand ones, and attempting the second is how most people end the ninety days with nothing.
If you are at that stage: what would the first of the three be?
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