Where to Begin…

Seven organizations… nearly thirty years of challenges and learning… what a journey it has been.

In mid-2016, I had an idea to start a blog, “The First 25…”, which I envisioned as a set of reflections to commemorate the first twenty-five years of my professional life.

I began creating an outline, starting from my first work in Windows 3.1 tax software development at Price Waterhouse in 1992, jotting down concepts, anecdotes, and learnings that I had accumulated.  I intended for it to be both a means to share my experiences as well as a mechanism to facilitate introspection and growth.  I started writing the first set of articles, ran out of time, lost interest, and put the concept on the shelf for five years… until I recently felt like maybe it was time to revisit the idea.

It’s an odd truth that we learn to value experience only once we actually have it… and how relative that all becomes over the passage of time.  In my early days as a developer, I remember looking at job postings in the newspaper, seeing ads for candidates with “15 years of experience” and thinking that you both had to be a dinosaur and some form of fully enlightened professional by the time you reached that point in your career.  Fifteen years is a REALLY long time, after all, right?  That had to be all you’d need to learn everything there was to learn and have it down to the point you were almost on autopilot with anything the business world could throw at you.  In retrospect, perhaps that logic makes a degree of sense when you are 21 years old and 15 years represents almost 75% of your lifetime…

In any case, looking back, there have been many lessons and experiences that helped me become the person I am today.  From the fear and inexperience of my first days managing projects, to the many late nights pounding away at a keyboard, trying to get that next piece of code working… the setbacks, the struggles, and quite often the painful mistakes that taught me the value of “how not to” do things.

My hope is to use this blog to share some of those experiences, thoughts on leadership, strategy, technology, and other topics as and when they arise…

A career is really nothing more than a collection of experiences and what we ultimately do with them to become better leaders and professionals… Hopefully the ideas will be worth reading, feedback is welcome and appreciated.  I’m still on the journey, seeking that enlightenment I thought I’d have when I got to “15 years”… albeit today, I know I’ll never get there and just want to keep learning and improving to have as much of a positive impact as I can on the teams with whom I work and the organization(s) to which I belong.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and/or anything else that may follow.  All the best in your professional endeavors…

-CJG 08/11/2021