#41 | Partnerships & Collaborations

My childhood was interesting. I felt like a middle-class family living in a low-income neighborhood. I believe this is mainly because my parents were on-again, off-again separated. Both worked and made decent money, but they were both separate single-income households due to not being together and living single through most of my childhood. They could not combine finances as is typically required for modern family households.

Because of this, the neighborhood I grew up in was not ideal. Gang violence and murders around my elementary school in my early years there. Teen relationship drama and more murders on my street in my late elementary school years. Watching fights constantly during and after school in middle school, where the loser ended up in the hospital. Entering high school and realized a lot of my best friends from elementary school were gone due to early-teen pregnancies, juvie, or being dead. Then, I experienced race wars and walkouts and guns and knives on the high school campus. Going to college and finding out other schools were so afraid to go to your hood for sporting events that they would prefer to forfeit games. Talking to my new colleague peers about how I wasn't sure I would make it through high school in a literal sense and being told they completely understood because high school was so embarrassing and anxiety-inducing that they figuratively didn't think they would survive. Then, going home during every college break to find out yet another old classmate was no longer with us, sometimes due to "stepping on the wrong shoes" at a house party or sometimes being part of a deal gone wrong. While texting my new friends from the porch at night, hearing gunshots pop off. To top it all off, going back a decade after high school graduation and seeing the cartels take over the old stomping grounds with open carry and public-space domestic abuse.

My saving grace was that my parents made decent money and provided stable households despite shifting ones, allowing me to be level-headed enough to pick my friends carefully and to stay off the radar while still succeeding.

I made it out. But nothing happens in a vacuum, and there were a lot of people throughout that helped. Many I wouldn't even remember anymore, some I remember vividly. I aim to pay it forward as often as I can.

This background has been a guiding force in my philanthropic desires. Immediately after graduating from college and having a steady income, I started donating to the local family shelter monthly for a decade. Immediately before the pandemic, I started volunteering at Junior Achievement. Helping other kids make it out has always been a big passion of mine.

However, that changed a few years ago when I was tired of my corporate job's endless meetings and political infighting. I was inches from quitting and using what I had learned and gained leadership skills to try to land a high-level position at a nonprofit. I was a weekend away from turning in my notice when my wife sat me down to talk through this significant life decision.

She brought reality to the decision. Nonprofits are bogged down with bureaucracy and sometimes have low effectiveness at translating donated dollars into truly effective altruism. While at work, the number of people within the domain I managed had nearly tripled to around 80 people. So my wife said if I wanted to pay it forward and help people, I had a large audience between my org and all of our counterparts and collaborators that I could help, especially in the technology industry where tech bro culture runs rampant and many people become overlooked.

That convo changed my course. I stayed at work and focused exclusively on helping my people. The funny side effect is that the more energy I put into empowering my people, the better they did. The better they did, the better I looked as a leader. The better I looked, the more influence I gained across areas outside my domain. The more influence I gained, the more I could focus on empowering a larger group of people. And the cycle continued.

I want to use that same energy and apply it to non-work endeavors, dusting off the PCB and rebuilding it in Confluence. I'm also figuring out how to increase my outreach with Discord, Patreon, and Substack. Helping kids make it out has stayed on the radar, but the radar just expanded to helping anyone achieve their goals, regardless of their age or background.

During this new era, I started talking with an artist friend who works in the entertainment industry. He has a budding YouTube channel and is trying to figure out how to expand it. He discussed his hectic life involving career, family, and personal projects. It seemed like burnout was real, and being overwhelmed was an understatement. He sounded like all of us, and I recalled the first few posts of this blog. I started giving him some insights I've discovered throughout the years and pointed him towards the blog, hoping it would hit close to him and help him. I also told him I was working with people at work to grow their careers. At one point, he asked me when I had decided I wanted to be a mentor.

That triggered some thoughts; something didn't sit quite right.

So I started to think about it. Why didn't it sit right?

Then it hit me. Some people I mentored at work started at the same level and at the same time as I did. And they are today at the same level as me. Some of the people I have mentored outside of work have been my seniors and accomplished more in life, but I happened to be more of a master at a specific aspect of their lives. Others were my juniors in the traditional sense, but while helping them grow as individuals, they gave me as much back as I gave them. They helped me refine my message. Through careful thought, I had to articulate my thoughts in a way that others could receive. It forced me to be introspective enough to pull out what worked and didn't work for me. Then forced me to be observant and empathetic enough to realize what worked for me won't work for everyone and to listen and understand other's perspectives to ensure what I was putting out was not tone deaf, was not from a position of privilege or lack of understanding, and would be heard.

I haven't been a mentor to anyone.

Instead, I have been a partner and collaborator with all these great people, young and old. They have given me as much as I have given them. Paying it forward, helping others out, and my philanthropic desires come full circle. Again, nothing happens in a vacuum, and we are all interconnected.

#40 | The Return

It's been a while since I last published a blog post, but I'm excited to announce that I'm back and ready to start writing again.

When I started this blog, I aimed to experiment with what it would take to maintain a regular publishing schedule. I set a goal of publishing a new blog entry every week for a year. I wanted to build a routine that would allow me to generate high-quality content regularly. Whether or not the content remained high-quality is up for debate, but I was able to establish a system that kept me on track for the most part, with only a minor break during that first year.

After a year of publishing weekly blog posts, I ran out of topics to discuss. Or, more accurately, I had put all my focus on generating the content and zero focus on promoting the blog, so the organic traffic needed more. Without any interaction from an audience, I was speaking into the void with no feedback cycle. Then the pandemic hit, and with it came a lot of craziness.

Life hit hard, shattering my routine and my motivation.

My personal life has changed since I last wrote a blog post. My role at my day job has continued to expand, and I've had more and more opportunities to take on leadership positions. My last entry was January 2020 at which point I was a Senior Manager managing around 20 or so Engineers. Four years later, my employer has stayed the same, but I've received two promotions to Executive Director and manage anywhere from 60-80 people depending on the re-org of the week. The growth rate has forced a high level of increase in professional maturity, leadership techniques and skills, and even personal maturity.

In my personal life, things have also been in flux, with a mix of successes and failures. My wife's oldest has both gone to university and graduated. My oldest has moved with her mother a state away. Our youngest is now eight years old but has been diagnosed with being on the autism spectrum along with having ADHD (highly functional, but it explains all of his quirks). We obtained passports for our kids (which are about to expire as underaged passports only last five years!) and have made three international trips as a family, two being to my wife's home country in Latin America.

To round things out, I have become more proactive in this blog and the PCB. I have rebuilt the old Trello tracking system into a Confluence system. I have worked with a few others to establish their unique system based on the PCB concepts and then watched them achieve amazing results.

As a result, I have a new set of topics to discuss. So here we go.

I'm excited to see where this blog can go in the future. I want to continue to share my knowledge with others, but I'd also like to find ways to incorporate more community and critical thinking into the blog.

Stay tuned for future updates and new blog posts. I look forward to reconnecting with my audience and continuing this experimental journey.