A Stage of Development - Main Update January 2016

Recently, I’ve been wondering about New Year’s resolutions and why they’re so popular, to realize that it signals hope for change and provides a logical deadline of one year to accomplish your goals. Resolutions have never really worked for me because the Gregorian calendar timeline isn’t particularly motivational. However, insofar that each day of each week in life has its own mini-resolution, things have indeed undergone change and progression.

Speaking of all these plane pictures, I was on a recent flight in which it was nighttime and we were descending. As the plane dipped and turned, the pinpoint stars spun as if we were soaring through the cosmos, the sound of silence gracing peace to the anchorless motion. It was incapturable on camera.

In the past six months since I started this blog, one of the defining arcs has been that I have become more acclimated to my job, a point of focus in my life and a source of satisfaction at this step of success.

After new job training in the summer, my first project had all the ingredients of a great transition project to a post-college full-time job: it was locally-based with a small team, and was quite short. Still, in that period, I was surprised by two things related to change. One was how surprisingly challenging it was to manage change and how unfamiliar I was with it due to an apparently very stable past few years. The second insight was that despite an extraordinarily new environment, my internal self and preferences remained very consistent, even though one thinks they will adapt with the surroundings. Really, these two realizations funnel into one insight which is that I overestimated my ability to adjust, and in that process, I discovered myself a little more by noticing the parts of me that remained impervious to environmental shifts against the parts of me that did change.

After the first, my second project was in Boston, which was another good stepping stone in the sense that I have several good friends who moved to Boston post-college and their proximity helped me feel less displaced. Compounded by the fact that the burden of the travel logistics each week was fairly low, this was a good opportunity to acclimate to the travel aspects of my travel-heavy job. I leave out the several ways in which this period of time was not optimal, because the point is that I continued adjusting.

As an aside, Boston is interesting in that many things operate like a big city but it has a smaller city feel. It’s well-developed with good food options and an easy transportation system. The speed of the assembly line at popular lunch places is in my mind ranked one-two with the speediest cities in the country, based on anecdotal observation. On the flip side, the city isn’t full of steel and glass and the streets aren’t all packed and dirty, so one could conceivably describe parts of Boston as “quaint” if that isn't offensive to the Boston sensibilities.

Following the Boston project, I helped with internal work in an industry that I hadn't worked in before. This turned out to be a great way to take a temperature of how much I liked that industry, which is really the whole point of the first few years of consulting. There are lots of other points, but a big point is exploration.

Now, I’m on my third project, quite far across the country. As I become increasingly familiar with my projects and my company, my brain will continue to release more space to process new questions and new information, the themes of which will inevitably trickle into the next main update I’m sure.

In other random news, I rolled over most of my vacation days from last year because I still don’t really understand how to use them. The concept of self-selected breaks is foreign after a lifetime of schooling. Also I’m the kind of person who rarely spends my loyalty points from any brand anywhere, because if I spend them, it has to be darn worth the irrecoverable points. It's slightly irrational, but still, the same concept applies.

These are the tough issues that we contend with in the adjustment to adulthood. Onwards and upwards to the next six months.