Art of Growing Old

I’ve gone a while without truly sitting down to reflect. I’m a large supporter of the value found in introspection and I’ll be the first to advocate its importance - yet, somehow I still let myself go for long periods of time without doing it. I’m up nice and early on a Saturday and now I don’t really have an excuse not to take the time.

A lot has changed for me in the past couple of months or so. Two months ago I sat down and drafted a few goals that I promised myself I would make happen:

• Begin to truly define my career path
• Get into shape
• Strengthen my faith
• Strengthen my leadership skills

The past two months have been a journey of doing exactly that.

Defining my Career Path

I’m an avid supporter of Neumont (the university from which I graduated) and I began advocating to strengthen the relationship between my company and the school when I first started here. That’s not the only thing I’m constantly advocating for. Let me digress a little bit…

It’s funny. A lot of people know that I work with computers but not too many people actually know what it is that I do, ha ha. I specialize in software architecture, requirements gathering and analysis, information modeling, and software project management; just in case you were wondering ;).

Anyway, starting in August I began using the methodologies that I’ve seen work in all of my previous projects. I began shaping my career path and getting a good feel for where I stood within the company. I’ll tell you this much, I’ve been loving every minute of it since then.

It’s stressful at times, I won’t lie about that. One of my greatest weaknesses is that I have the tendency to make my projects my life. When you’re that adamant about the success of something, you’re bound to be ripping your hair out at some point. I began realizing that I really need something else to do with myself besides going home and working…

Getting into Shape

A little over a month ago, my roommate and I decided that we were going to get into shape. This wasn’t one of those “let’s go to the gym every once in a while” type of decisions. We showed up at a gym the next day and purchased monthly memberships and training sessions with a personal trainer. He promised us great results and assured us that we could expect to lose 8-10 lbs and 3-4% body fat every month for the next 3-4 months. I thought he was full of crap but decided that anything was better than nothing at this point.

We started with the diet. This has NOT been an easy feat, by any means. It was not your average cut in food consumption. It’s been brutal! We try our best to stick to it. We may deviate every once in a while, but we’ve been pretty good about it so far. Then there’s the workout…We’re at the gym an average of an hour and a half each day…six days a week. I went from going to the gym about twice a week for about 30 minutes each visit to THIS.

Four weeks later and our trainer was right. We’ve dropped a very significant amount of weight, we’re looking and feeling healthy, and well on our way to hit our goals by the holiday season.

Strengthening my Faith

My original goal was to strengthen my leadership skills. While I was still set on doing that, I realized that this was something I couldn’t do without first strengthening my faith. You see, my faith plays a key role in every single thing that I do - even though I may forget this fact every once in a while.

I began doing a lot of reading, the result of which can be found in one of my previous entries. I’ve read the book Blue Like Jazz at least twice now and I just cannot get enough of it. As I promised in that previous entry, I will be continuing a series of entries that explains everything more in detail.

Strengthening my faith isn’t something that comes easily for me (for anyone, really). This book addressed so many of my problems, complaints, and questions but I have to truly internalize it all before I can expect to move forward. I have changed a great deal in the past two months but I know I could be a lot farther along.

Strengthening my Leadership Skills

Like all of my other goals, this is one that I will be perpetually seeking to perfect. I’ve spent countless hours buried in reading. From re-reading Leadership and Self-Deception to re-assimilating every project-management book that I can my hands on, this is something that’s been a big priority for me.

I’ve always been pretty confident in my ability to manage a group of people and get a job done. In fact, I’ve rarely ever doubted that I could do so. Lately, however, I’ve been focusing on the process more than I have the end result. I’ve been focusing more on ensuring that I’m “out of the box,” if you will.

I’ve been busy, there’s certainly no denying that, and I’d like to think that I’ve changed a lot in the past few months. I’ve grown both intellectually and spirituality and I think I’ve matured a lot as well. I hope all is well with each of you.

Love to All,
Josh