Move the mountain
December 12, 2017, 1:20 a.m. - It was officially LAUNCH DAY (night?) and I was already more than halfway through a pot of coffee I brewed after work (the day before?). The team was dialed in to our daily stand-up phone line, ready to execute our smoke testing plan. I charged myself with testing a syndication feature and various troublesome sections of the site in Chrome, Firefox, and...IE11 (ew). I also had a class earlier that evening and final papers were due that week (hip, hip, hooray...)
We were an all-star team with inexplicable chemistry and we spent years together working on a completely redesigned website for our client - it had a brand new, responsive information architecture and a slick visual design, new content, and a custom web content management system. Tonight was THE night we had worked so hard for...
It was time to officially "move the mountain".
---
That year, my "mountains" included not only launching that website and finishing my classes, but also trying to understand my role in my divorce and and figuring out what I wanted my life to be like - where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, and how I was going to get there.
Last year, I started a new project as the PM, graduated with my MBA, started a new job, and ventured into the dating scene. I was afraid my PM skills weren't up to snuff, that May 20 was never arriving, that my new job would be scary and difficult, and that no man would want to date a 29-year-old divorcée. My PM skills improved and I learned new ones, I marched across that stage in my tartan hood, I smiled my way through every hard day at my new job, and dating was a success!
But, "moving the mountain" isn't possible on just self-introspection and keeping on alone. The team launched the website. I had a therapist help me process my divorce over the course of a year. I had amazing PM mentors who taught me and believed in me. I had classmates who gathered online to check homework with me for hours. I found a guru at my new job to teach me about the Hive. I had my friends and family to guide me in my dating adventures (and so much more!).
We moved the mountain.
---
December 12, 2017, 4:00 a.m. - I finally went to bed. And then I went to work a few hours later and sat next to my colleague, like usual. I don't remember the rest of that week, except that by the end of it, I didn't want to see or smell coffee for a good while and I shelved my imitation k-cup machine. Sometimes, I still can't believe we launched that sucker and I have to go to the website to double-check.
Or that this is my life - that I was "there" and now I am "here".
I don't have a clear picture of what my mountains look like this year, but, I honestly believe that I... that we...can do anything, make it through anything... with the love, support, and encouragement from our families, our friends, our teammates, our "neighbors" - the all-star team - by our sides.
Wishing my all-star team a New Year that is healthy, lively, and full of mountain moving. You can count on me to be by your side.
with love,
KB
We were an all-star team with inexplicable chemistry and we spent years together working on a completely redesigned website for our client - it had a brand new, responsive information architecture and a slick visual design, new content, and a custom web content management system. Tonight was THE night we had worked so hard for...
It was time to officially "move the mountain".
---
My colleague and I who were both on the all-star team used to say that to each other - I don't remember when this started or how exactly, but it was said when you were facing what felt like an insurmountable challenge as a means of encouragement to keep on keeping on. We probably said this, oh, 100 times over the course of the project about many things - from developing migration scripts, to writing what felt like 1,000 requirements and subsequent test cases, to trying to explain to the client for the nth time why AWS was really fine and Azure was not going to solve their problem.
Last year, I started a new project as the PM, graduated with my MBA, started a new job, and ventured into the dating scene. I was afraid my PM skills weren't up to snuff, that May 20 was never arriving, that my new job would be scary and difficult, and that no man would want to date a 29-year-old divorcée. My PM skills improved and I learned new ones, I marched across that stage in my tartan hood, I smiled my way through every hard day at my new job, and dating was a success!
But, "moving the mountain" isn't possible on just self-introspection and keeping on alone. The team launched the website. I had a therapist help me process my divorce over the course of a year. I had amazing PM mentors who taught me and believed in me. I had classmates who gathered online to check homework with me for hours. I found a guru at my new job to teach me about the Hive. I had my friends and family to guide me in my dating adventures (and so much more!).
We moved the mountain.
---
December 12, 2017, 4:00 a.m. - I finally went to bed. And then I went to work a few hours later and sat next to my colleague, like usual. I don't remember the rest of that week, except that by the end of it, I didn't want to see or smell coffee for a good while and I shelved my imitation k-cup machine. Sometimes, I still can't believe we launched that sucker and I have to go to the website to double-check.
Or that this is my life - that I was "there" and now I am "here".
I don't have a clear picture of what my mountains look like this year, but, I honestly believe that I... that we...can do anything, make it through anything... with the love, support, and encouragement from our families, our friends, our teammates, our "neighbors" - the all-star team - by our sides.
Wishing my all-star team a New Year that is healthy, lively, and full of mountain moving. You can count on me to be by your side.
with love,
KB
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