This trip to San Francisco and Silicon Valley is very much a homecoming for me. It comes almost 10 years to the day after I left to return home and be with my girlfriend, who is now my wife.
I moved down here for both good and not so good reasons. The invitation to come work here was in many ways a crowning achievement for me, at the tender age of 26, and recognition of much of the work that I had put in to develop both my technical and my people skills. At the time, I was going from strength to strength.
Four and a bit months later, I returned home to Quebec City for both good and not so good reasons. At the time, I thought I was going from strength to another new strength. It sure didn’t turn out that way. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the new professional reality I was promised was a house of cards, and my personal reality was to begin a long, difficult, and quite painful spiral downward, ending in a rather hard crash.
The first two-thirds of the past ten years essentially saw me picking myself only to be promptly knocked back down. My entire identity was called into question and in the end, I was forced to rebuild myself from the ground up. In the process, I confronted numerous demons. These were intimately related to my sense of who I was and how I related to those around me, as well as my sense of urgency in my career and my personal life. I learned much about myself and about life in general, and I have largely put what I then learned to good use in my everyday life with those I work with and those I love.
That hard work was essentially complete 2 years ago. However until just this past month, one major piece of the puzzle remained outstanding. Rightly or wrongly, depending on who you ask, there was in my mind an outstanding question in my career regarding my ability to manage employees, and in my mind it had not been validated. Until that time, it would continue to act like a ball and chain, hindering my on the job confidence in particular and my overall happiness in general.
I would not describe myself as someone whose identity is tied up in his career — I am just as happy studying and learning new things at school, or doing any number of other activities. Nonetheless, I firmly believe that one should be able to expect a minimum of things in place to work “right”. Obviously, this is a very subjective element, hence my earlier reference to “rightly or wrongly”.
In any event, that gap in my professional skill set is now in the process of being filled in—quite nicely I might add. And “that”, “they” can never take away from me. From here on in, I will now be able to answer that one job interview question that has forever intimidated me – do you have any management experience? – in the affirmative. In many ways, I have attained a new career plateau, and can now imagine new challenges in life without the spectre of intimidation or feeling of unworthiness. Where my career will take me, nobody knows. But what I do know is that it will largely be of my own choosing, in a way that it hasn’t been for the longest time. Simply put, I feel that I am once again going from strength to strength. And that I why I am so happy these days.
‘nuff said.