The heartwarming messages keep coming in. People I haven’t talked to in a while, people I haven’t talked to in a very long while, and another really touching reference on LinkedIn that got me thinking more seriously about what actually matters to me.
This is probably a dangerous direction to go in, but here we are.
Over the past couple of years I’ve done a lot of work with my psychologist, Dr. May, on presenting a more authentic version of myself. Historically, the version of me that most people see has been guided almost entirely by logic. Emotional reactions tend to stay behind closed doors, especially things like anger. Most people I know have never seen me genuinely angry. The few who have usually remember it pretty clearly.
Anyway, that got darker than I intended, so let’s steer this back to the point.
One of the things that has become very clear to me over the past couple of years is that the biggest thing that drives me is helping people. That can mean teaching someone something, building a tool that makes their life easier, solving a problem that someone else is stuck on, or even just doing something small like shovelling the neighbours’ walks after a snowfall.
Sometimes they beat me to it, like today. Thanks Lance. I noticed.
Reading the LinkedIn references from Saad and Carson really brought this into focus. They’re both young guys with a lot of potential, and I had the chance to work with them early in their careers. I like to think I didn’t do any damage. In fact, I might even have helped a little. Seeing them write those notes made me realize how important that part of my work has always been to me.
So that’s the first thing I’ve written down for myself as a non-negotiable.
In whatever I do next, I need to be able to teach, mentor, or help people in some real way. If I can’t do that, something is going to feel off.
The second thing I’ve been thinking about is my vision for how data should work at a company. This is something I’ve talked about before, argued about before, and probably annoyed a few people with before. But I’ve come to realize that I have a pretty clear opinion on it.
I don’t believe that data, analytics, GIS, automation, or any other specialized knowledge should be locked inside one team that claims ownership of it and guards the keys. I believe in having a centre of excellence that can support the organization at different levels. Sometimes that means doing the work directly. Sometimes it means advising. Sometimes it means building systems that let other people do the work themselves without having to ask permission every time.
I enjoy all of those roles. What I don’t enjoy is the idea that knowledge should be locked up so that only one group gets to touch it.
So that’s non-negotiable number two.
In my next role, I need to have at least some influence on the strategic direction of whatever function I’m part of. I don’t need to run the whole thing, but I do need to believe in how it’s being run.
I’m sure my career coach will have some much more structured way of getting to this on Monday. Apparently the theme of that meeting is goals, which sounds suspiciously productive.
On the home front, life continues to look fairly normal, which is probably a good thing.
Last night I took my son to soccer. It was the last technical session of the season. We came home, had dinner, and read for a bit before bed. This week I started reading Lord of the Rings to him. The opening section about the history of Hobbits is incredibly boring, and I’m not interested in hearing arguments to the contrary. We should be getting to the good part soon, which will help both of us.
With my daughter I’m reading a completely different book called Whatever After. It’s about a couple of girls who fall into Wonderland and are trying to find their way back out. Cute story, and a lot shorter than Tolkien, which helps when you’re reading at bedtime.
This morning I walked the kids to school. Both of them chose to walk instead of taking the car, which always makes me happy. Taking the car would be faster, warmer, and easier, but walking means we get a few extra minutes together. Hard to complain about that.
When I got home I shovelled the walk. My neighbour had already done most of it, but I touched it up a bit so it didn’t look like I had completely given up on life.
After that it was back to business.
Chris from CareerMinds sent me an updated version of my resume, and we went back and forth a few times, working in some of the non-negotiables I mentioned above. I’m pretty happy with where it landed. So if anyone happens to be looking for a director of data science or analytics, I now have a very professionally formatted document ready to go.
I’m also still sorting out loose ends from work. The foosball table, I’m told, is still standing over there. The very friendly admin for my team boxed up my other stuff, which I appreciate very much. At some point a delivery service will show up with a pile of things that I forgot I owned, and I’ll have to decide what to do with all of it.
I sent in my response to the severance offer, and they confirmed that they received it and will get back to me. No details to share there. Health coverage is still another thing to figure out, and some of that depends on how the severance discussion goes, so everything is connected to everything else at the moment.
At some point in the middle of all this, I decided to clean the downstairs bathroom.
Not just clean it. Deep clean it.
Sprayed chemicals on everything, scrubbed the shower, cleaned the mirrors, attacked the mineral deposits on the glass door, removed things that are probably better left undescribed, and then vacuumed the entire basement for good measure.
Having this much time off is great for finally getting to the jobs that have been quietly waiting for the past several years.
After that, instead of doing something sensible, I started thinking about a new project.
Not the DotA one. A different one.
I have millions of photos on my hard drives. Literally millions. Old phones, old cameras, old computers, external drives, folders called things like “Backup Final Final 2”. Some of those pictures are garbage. Some of them are things I would never want to lose, like the first ultrasound of my kids, trips to places like Egypt or Ecuador, or pictures of people I might never see again.
Because of that, I never delete anything.
The problem is that everything is scattered everywhere, and finding anything takes forever.
So my new idea is to build a multi-stage system that scans every drive, finds every picture, pulls whatever metadata exists, uses facial recognition to group people together, clusters similar photos, and consolidates everything into one master archive.
Ultimate backup.
Rule of three compliant.
Possibly unnecessary.
Definitely something I want to try building.
Even if a tool like this already exists, I don’t really care. Half the fun for me is in building it myself.
Right now I’m waiting for drywallers to show up to fix a couple of small things from last year’s renovation. Warranty work season, apparently. While they’re here I’ll probably poke at the photo project, clean something else, pick up the kids, make dinner, and pretend this was all part of the plan.
Tomorrow looks like more home repair people, a few kid appointments, and then finally the weekend.
Eight days in.
Feels longer than that.
Not in a bad way.
Just… different.
And if you want to make me cry/happy, write me a nice referral on LinkedIn… please?
Brett Wiens 