Someone tagged me, and I’ve lost the email in all the pile up from vacation where I was very, very unwired from work, despite being wired to the world. Actually I’ll make that one my first thing:
Not quit, not stop progressing on something or giving up, but knowing how to take a break, regular breaks. Early in my career I worked lots of extra hours, partially to impress people, partially to learn, and partially because I thought I might miss something and I had time. That’s probably part of being young, but I wish that I’d still learned to take my vacation, enjoy it, and make more time for things outside of work.
My wife taught me this.
Throughout most of my life before 32 or 33 years old, I took jobs as they were offered. I looked for new opportunities, but I worried about the opportunity and almost solely the opportunity (the challenge, the size of the database, etc.).
As a result in interviews I worried, I studied and crammed and tried to be the “perfect employee,” answering their questions, not asking many of my own and giving them no reason to avoid offering me a job.
Looking back I wish I’d interviewed the companies harder. I wished I’d been looking for jobs before I needed them, been more discriminating, talked to more people in the company, and really pushed them to match my needs as much as I tried to match theirs.
I learned this when I took a job to move to CO that really wrecked a good portion of my life and I quit. I slept in my office a half dozen times the first year, had bad management, and while I learned a lot, I think I could have done better. I’ve done this well for the last 8 or 9 years.
Some of this requires that you succeed in your own life and career, but I think that along the way you should be looking for ways go give back to the community.
Early in my career I was never that interested in participating in user groups, and I often let people stumble more to figure out their own solutions instead of speaking up and giving them more of a helping hand. Over the years, I’ve learned I should have done more to help others along the way, and give back as I could.
This is more of a business item, but I wish I’d learned earlier to focus on what I wanted to succeed in and play my game instead of trying so hard to please others. Not sure I’ve completely learned to do this, but I wish I’d have had someone to teach me this early on.
Thanks to Andy Warren for this one.
I have no idea who’s been tagged, so I’ll just leave this off here.
Nobody bats 1.000, or one thousand. Not in baseball and not in any aspect of life. You might be able to get good hits for a short period of time, maybe a game, a week, a year, but if you keep working at what you’re doing, you are going to make some mistakes, make some wrong or bad choices, or fail. Hopefully it’s not a catastrophic failure, but you will fail.
I was thinking about this while reading Andy Warren’s Investing In Yourself post. We’ve debated about this and I tend to agree with Andy. YOU have to own your training decisions and you have to take responsibility for advancing your career. Your employer may help, but ultimately it’s your responsibility.
He talked about some of the failed technologies in SQL Server like English Query or Notification Services. If you’re bet your career on those are you in trouble? I’d hope not, and I’d like to think that you learned other things along the way and you can switch.
I started programming macros for Lotus 1-2-3 a long time ago, I dropped that for Clipper and moved to FoxPro. Each time I’d made an investment in a technology that got dropped. I moved to SQL Server and I’ve done well there as a generalist, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the best thing for everyone.
If you pick XML now, or SSRS, or SSAS, you are choosing to compartmentalize yourself a bit if you specialize. That’s good and bad as niches tend to pay better, but have fewer job choices. Depending on your situation in life and what you enjoy, that can be good or bad. The important thing is that you are learning and doing something you enjoy.
And along the way remember that your chosen specialty can get dropped by Microsoft. That’s no different than things that have happened in other professions throughout history. Think about what blacksmiths went through 100 or so years ago.
You won’t always pick the right technology to learn, but that’s OK. There are still jobs out there in C and COBOL, there are still people writing in FoxPro. You might not want those jobs, but that’s your choice and you get to make that. It doesn’t mean that your investment was lost. Plenty of people in the world make investment decisions every day and they have to re-make them on a regular basis.
Don’t worry about what’s out of your control, and the decision to keep a technology around is up to some vendor, not you. Do what makes you happy and continue to invest in yourself. You won’t go wrong.
