Well, I can’t say that I’m sorry to have seen 2009 go. Personally and professionally, it was one hell of a rough year. On the other hand, it did bring with it some changes that — despite fighting pretty voraciously at first — have ultimately proven to be profoundly valuable. The biggest and most obvious being the beginning of my formal entrepreneurial journey.
The year also saw several other things of note in my life:
- Making a new home in Texas. This is one that I can’t say I ever predicted. Of all the places I ever envisioned myself living, Texas was never once on the list. But the reality is that both my husband and I love it here, which only surprises the people who have never been to Austin.
- My husband has found a professional passion of his own (to be formally announced soon), after spending years merely tolerating work as an evil necessity. This has been magnificent for me to watch, and it’s been a truly great experience for both of us.
- I have started to redefine what type of lifestyle I truly want, and am now setting about how to create a business that supports that. Major lifestyle factors (such as remaining childfree) are baked-in parts of my life already, but other things — like being location independent and spending at least six months per year traveling — are part of my long-term goal, but until recently have not been part of my active, focused plan for our immediate future.
- I have spent the past several months working on redefining my relationship with time. This is a major source of conflict between me and my husband (and always has been), and so as he works to develop a higher sensitivity to and awareness of time, I am doing my part by trying to relax a bit and not be such a time Nazi. Small things like not nagging him when we are running late (and just accepting it), not wearing my watch every day, and eliminating daily use of an alarm clock are all things that I am attempting to help change how uptight I’ve become about time over the past decade.
- I got to attend my first SXSW and met my favorite blogger in person.
- Acknowledging that the satisfaction I used to get out of being a project manager is gone, and that it’s time for a new career. And while I do not doubt that project management will continue to be a part of whatever the my next career is, it no longer fuels and satisfies me the way it used to, so it can’t be the end-all/be-all anymore. More importantly, whatever my new career is going to be, it’s something I haven’t necessarily figured out yet. I’m working with a few different entrepreneurs here in Austin on some different opportunities, some of which have some very interesting potential. And I am optimistic that at least one of them could crack open and provide me the opportunity I am looking for.
- I have a newfound optimism about the economy, the socio-tech landscape and my place in it. I love writing The Entrepreneur Evangelist for WorkingPoint, because it gives me the opportunity to talk about the things I really care about while helping to promote a product that is part of a larger macro-economic shift that I not only believe in, but that I also find really exciting.
- I have recognized that my personal entrepreneurial journey has several more steps to go through. My husband has been strongly focused on trying to make sure we work on our business, while I’ve been busy working in our business. Much as I recognize that a dollars-for-hours trade is still essentially a J-O-B, I have also come to realize that I’m not entirely to a point yet where I can emotionally or psychologically move past that. I am looking for opportunities to do that over time, but for right now, that model is what I know that I know how to do successfully, and it’s my security blanket in an entirely otherwise insecure world. I’m working on it, and I’ve come a long way over this past year, but I’ve got more work to do to make the next few steps that are in front of me.
- Out of sheer financial necessity, I have learned to cook with beans (which is something I never, ever used to do), figure out how to live and eat on an insanely small weekly grocery budget, get creative about comparison shopping and making money stretch farther than I’ve ever previously even tried to manage… and finally come to the conclusion that as much as I hate all of that, I’d rather do that than go back to being someone’s employee.
- I have discovered that blogging for someone else makes it nearly impossible for me to keep up with my blog the way that I want to. So, I will start sharing my Entrepreneur Evangelist posts here as well. However, I do request that if you would like to comment on them that you do so on the original on the WorkingPoint site.
So, while it is most certainly not the year I had envisioned, it’s been a truly transformative one.
Finally, in tribute to the new year, I have changed the name of my blog. While I had enjoyed The Pragmatic Contextualist, to me that had very strong project management connotations. My brief experiment with The Pragmatic Entrepreneur never quite seemed to fit. And so now I have stripped out everything else, and just adopted “The Pragmatist.” We’ll see if that one sticks.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.