Category: Personal

As the sun sets on this last day of 2009, I thought I’d take a few minutes to put up an “end of year” post. There’s a lot of “End of Decade” stuff out there on the blogs this week, but for me, it’s hard to think of 1999 / 2000 as 10 years ago. The cataclysm of 9/11 and the yawning gap of the “nuclear winter” of 2002-2004 makes the time before that seem like another age, almost something that happened to another person.

When I think of pivotal moments in the last 10 years, the first one that comes to mind is the one that set in motion much of what came afterwards. And it happened here:

In the spring of 2004, I sat on a bench looking up at the oculus of the Pantheon in Rome and decided that I was not going to accept what had happened to my life — which at the time involved living in a crappy (yet cheap) apartment in a remote corner of SF, working a low-wage survival job with no heath insurance. It sucked. It was what I needed to do to keep a roof over my head during the bad times, but it was not going to define the rest of my life.

Sitting in a masterpiece of Roman architecture, I decided I would go back to school for the MBA I should have gotten much sooner and get my career back on track. And despite having no money and a less-than-stellar math GMAT score, I did. And then while in grad school, I decided I wanted to work for a big brand — I was tired of working for companies that nobody had ever heard of before. And despite a gaping hole in my work history, I did.

Looking back now, I don’t know if it was pure luck, or hard work, or just persistence that got me through. It seems like a small miracle, especially considering much of that happened during two recessions. Probably a little of all. But however it happened, here I am.

A lot has changed over these past 10 years; mostly for the better but not all. Some family members have passed on. Some friends have moved onto diverging paths and grown distant. More pounds and grey hairs. But on balance, despite the really bad years in the middle, this decade ends with pretty much everything in my life, finally, heading in what feels like the right direction.

2010 should be quite a year. At work, I’m looking at some new challenges that will force me to get out of my comfort zone, learn, and hopefully grow. That was a theme for 2008 as well (although I didn’t know exactly how much so when last New Year rolled around, I never expected to get promoted so soon for one thing). Outside of work, I have much less free time than I used to but I hope to keep working on my photography. Who knows, it might actually get decent one of these days. 🙂

So as 2010 dawns, that’s where things are for me. I know 2009 has been a crappy year for a lot of people so my main wish is that we all have a better 2010.