10 Years.

Stability is very important to me. I've tried to live my life in such a way that minimizes the opportunity for unrest to infiltrate my surroundings and leave me with more unknowns than I can handle. When I was recruited by my company 10 years ago, I was at an epicenter of career uncertainty. Following the departure from my first design job out of college, I spent a year freelancing with mixed results. Needing to find something more predictable, I applied everywhere I could and took the first offer. I won't go so far as to call that a mistake, having learned a ton and met some decent people, but the culture was all wrong for me. After a somewhat miserable year, I was more than ready to move on. I updated my website with some of my newly learned skills and started blogging a bit.

I've written about the serendipity surrounding my recruitment and I still have to pinch myself at the sheer luck involved. Not only was I rescued from a company with whom I had no future, but I joined an incredible organization with outstanding benefits, great pay, the chance to work remotely, and a team full of people who above all else wanted to get stuff done. No red tape. No bureaucracy. No in-fighting or office politics. Just nice, smart, effective people.

Having these exceptional people around me is like an anchor, keeping everything from going off the rails even when things aren't going according to plan. If you spend enough time somewhere, you get to see all manner of ebbs, flows, changes, pivots, petty issues, and deadly serious crises. Throughout all of it, I've been able to count on the professionals on this team, knowing we were all ultimately pulling in the same direction. Ironically, despite my long tenure here, I have no idea what the future holds. Besides the great people, the one constant here has been the amount of evolution each year brings and 2020 is certainly no different. I've adapted to the changes over the years the best I could, probably ungracefully sometimes. But I always learned something and applied it to whatever came next.

So, having just finished my first day of a new decade, I'm reminded of the value of stability, how lucky I am to have found it, and how excited I am to see where it takes me next.