Come for the Ride…

Whether you go nuts for New Years or could care less about New York starting every year by dropping the ball, the one thing you can’t avoid as a blog reader is to see multiple blogs doing their year in review or predictions for next year around this time.

After a month of holiday cheer and a week of laziness, many feel the need to sum up the last 365 days even though it’s really just another spin of the Earth in the cosmos. So rather than fight it, why should we be different and disappoint?

With everything that’s happened (and still happening), I would have to say 2007 has been a banner year for me. Even though this blog has only been up for a few months and the development on the service website has been slower than I liked, I’ve learned a lot this year just from changing my attitude and learning to go after it; whatever it may be.

Starting from the small things, I think I finally got over my distaste for the phone. My speech has always been something I was over conscious about; thanks to all my friends and their negative taunting throughout grade school and college. (You know, we didn’t all learn English as our first language!) Anyway, I finally decided to take my own advice of “whether you think you can or can’t (speak w/o mumbling), you’re right!” …so I’ve been trying to use the phone more even though I haven’t put a dent into my 4000+ rollover minutes yet.

Career wise, I think this was the year that I’ve matured and learned how to multi-task in ways I didn’t think was possible for me. I’ve always enjoyed managing vs. doing the grunt work and it was nice to finally to be able to reach this point in my professional career and know that I can actually manage a team without losing more hair. The art of dishing the work to everyone else is one I don’t understand why more people don’t try to master. In all seriousness… I do still take on a lot of the tasks myself but it’s definitely a great feeling when you teach and see others advance in their career while getting work done.

Networking has also played a big role for me in 2007 and it’s one thing that I highly recommend everyone especially startup entrepreneurs to go out and do. (The key is to do it in person, not hiding behind a computer.) I’ve been living in Atlanta for about 2 and a half years and for the longest time I thought I had to go get an MBA at Emory or Ga. Tech to access those alumni networks. Of course, this also nudged me to look at housing in Silicon Valley to better reach that pool of talents. However as it turned out, I was able to meet people in all three networks without taking classes or moving to the west coast.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), Facebook and Craigslist provided most of the networking opportunities for me to meet people from all over and learn about local events that I could attend to meet like minded people. Having participated in the Startup Weekend also showed me and the Skribit co-founders that Atlanta wasn’t dry of talent; we just didn’t have a clear way to network and find each other. From there, a number of opportunities have opened up and my network of contacts who have different strengths have definitely exploded. Granted, there were still some duds in the mix and I have met people this past year who just didn’t know how to network or follow up… but practice makes perfect and like dating, you just have to get yourself out there.

Along with the good, I’ve made conscious decisions to ditch some of the bad. For me, improvements aren’t just made by adding smarter and more positive people to your life, it’s also about shedding the ones that drain you emotionally or otherwise. Had Michael Vick shed the fat in his circle, he may not be in jail right now… or maybe he masterminded the whole doggy daycare gone bad thing; who knows? In any case, there were people I’ve met down here in my first year that have become unstable and it definitely did me a lot of good to distance myself from them. If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see where our different paths take us in a couple of years.

So what’s in store for 2008? Well, with a broader understanding of my industry and real people to talk to when I need support; I actually feel like 2008 will be fabulous, instead of it being just another year.

Hopefully with hard work, everything will work out as planned!

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