This was an odd weekend, to put it mildly. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday trying to distract myself by playing games and building LEGO and strolling the neighborhood with my daughter. But I felt unmoored. Adrift in the unknown. On one hand, I suddenly had unlimited time and no boundaries. On the other hand, there was an almost deafening sound of the seconds ticking down until my last paycheck. These waves of uncertainty and anxiety kept crashing against the solid rocks of undistracted time with my family and the peels of joyous laughter which grew out of that foundation.
Schools were out here today to celebrate the start of the Lunar New Year, and with that, the King Tides have returned to the Bay Area beaches. So we took that opportunity to plan a short road trip to the tide pools in Pacifica to see what we could see. Before we left, though, I wanted to send a note to my now-former manager at Google. Enough time had passed where I thought I could put what I needed into words. I sat down at this very keyboard and just started to vent. After about ten minutes of typing, I took a deep breath, glanced over what I had written, and deleted it all. And started again. This happened two more times. With each version, I got closer to what I really wanted to say: thank you.
See, when I started at Google in 2020, I was a Senior Content Strategist. But soon after my start date, my role, and the role of many others, transitioned to more of a project management one, shepherding the creation and revision of a number product-specific Google Help Center article (for me, it was App Ads and some of the video ad products) under the new moniker of Senior Content Project Lead. This was not the position I applied for. But I was going to learn it on the job. Luckily, not long after the job description changed, so did my manager. And I say “luckily” very advisedly.
Project management was not something high on my list of talents. And early on, it showed. But I was open about my concerns and needs with my new manager, Derek, and we immediately put together a plan where I could discover and build the skills I thought I was deficient in so that I could meet the new needs of the position and the evolving expectations of our stakeholders. I definitely was not done learning when my tenure unexpectedly ended on Friday, but thanks to Derek’s guidance, I felt like I was headed in the right direction.
I included a lot of those ideas in my email to Derek, moments before we were going to hit the road to Pacifica. In what felt like just a handful of seconds after I hit “send” on my email to him, my phone rang. It was Derek. We talked for a while, sharing our surprise and lamenting what Google has lost, but then Derek made an offer which is not surprising if you know him, but definitely not what I had expected: a continuing, ongoing career dialogue, for as long as I wanted.
But why am I telling you all this alongside that earlier digression about the tide pools? Well, one reason is I wanted to share my gratitude for Derek publicly. The other reason is a thought I had while navigating the rocks around the tide pools today. We were traipsing carefully on rarely exposed surfaces, some slippery, some pointy, and all fresh from a recently residing tide. As I watched my wife help my daughter plot her way across pool after pool, I realized that’s basically a large part of what great managers do. Like my wife for my daughter, Derek was there to take the trip with me. And even as we were coming up with the direction and destination for me to head toward, he was by my side, holding me up when I needed, letting me choose my own places to find my footing as we forged ahead. Together. Sometimes, there was the unexpected wave or a shakier-than-expected step, but we paused, reassessed, and moved forward, always keeping in mind where we thought we wanted to go, and whether that was still the right place to end up.
It all seems too convenient to come up with a career journey analogy blog post after taking some time in nature. But isn’t that the point of these posts in the first place? I live my life, I think about the day’s events, and then I try to squeeze some nugget of wisdom or a new idea out of them for myself. And maybe for you? In any case, I want to, again, say thank you, Derek. As I mentioned in my email earlier today, I was a better Googler and a better collaborator thanks to his efforts. And I’ll use all that I learned from you every day moving forward.
Halfway There
23 January 2023
Navigating rocky terrain.
This was an odd weekend, to put it mildly. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday trying to distract myself by playing games and building LEGO and strolling the neighborhood with my daughter. But I felt unmoored. Adrift in the unknown. On one hand, I suddenly had unlimited time and no boundaries. On the other hand, there was an almost deafening sound of the seconds ticking down until my last paycheck. These waves of uncertainty and anxiety kept crashing against the solid rocks of undistracted time with my family and the peels of joyous laughter which grew out of that foundation.
Schools were out here today to celebrate the start of the Lunar New Year, and with that, the King Tides have returned to the Bay Area beaches. So we took that opportunity to plan a short road trip to the tide pools in Pacifica to see what we could see. Before we left, though, I wanted to send a note to my now-former manager at Google. Enough time had passed where I thought I could put what I needed into words. I sat down at this very keyboard and just started to vent. After about ten minutes of typing, I took a deep breath, glanced over what I had written, and deleted it all. And started again. This happened two more times. With each version, I got closer to what I really wanted to say: thank you.
See, when I started at Google in 2020, I was a Senior Content Strategist. But soon after my start date, my role, and the role of many others, transitioned to more of a project management one, shepherding the creation and revision of a number product-specific Google Help Center article (for me, it was App Ads and some of the video ad products) under the new moniker of Senior Content Project Lead. This was not the position I applied for. But I was going to learn it on the job. Luckily, not long after the job description changed, so did my manager. And I say “luckily” very advisedly.
Project management was not something high on my list of talents. And early on, it showed. But I was open about my concerns and needs with my new manager, Derek, and we immediately put together a plan where I could discover and build the skills I thought I was deficient in so that I could meet the new needs of the position and the evolving expectations of our stakeholders. I definitely was not done learning when my tenure unexpectedly ended on Friday, but thanks to Derek’s guidance, I felt like I was headed in the right direction.
I included a lot of those ideas in my email to Derek, moments before we were going to hit the road to Pacifica. In what felt like just a handful of seconds after I hit “send” on my email to him, my phone rang. It was Derek. We talked for a while, sharing our surprise and lamenting what Google has lost, but then Derek made an offer which is not surprising if you know him, but definitely not what I had expected: a continuing, ongoing career dialogue, for as long as I wanted.
But why am I telling you all this alongside that earlier digression about the tide pools? Well, one reason is I wanted to share my gratitude for Derek publicly. The other reason is a thought I had while navigating the rocks around the tide pools today. We were traipsing carefully on rarely exposed surfaces, some slippery, some pointy, and all fresh from a recently residing tide. As I watched my wife help my daughter plot her way across pool after pool, I realized that’s basically a large part of what great managers do. Like my wife for my daughter, Derek was there to take the trip with me. And even as we were coming up with the direction and destination for me to head toward, he was by my side, holding me up when I needed, letting me choose my own places to find my footing as we forged ahead. Together. Sometimes, there was the unexpected wave or a shakier-than-expected step, but we paused, reassessed, and moved forward, always keeping in mind where we thought we wanted to go, and whether that was still the right place to end up.
It all seems too convenient to come up with a career journey analogy blog post after taking some time in nature. But isn’t that the point of these posts in the first place? I live my life, I think about the day’s events, and then I try to squeeze some nugget of wisdom or a new idea out of them for myself. And maybe for you? In any case, I want to, again, say thank you, Derek. As I mentioned in my email earlier today, I was a better Googler and a better collaborator thanks to his efforts. And I’ll use all that I learned from you every day moving forward.
See you tomorrow?