I just listened to Tim Ferriss’ 2016 year in review by accident (it automatically started playing after his latest episode since it was the last one I marked to save), and it got me thinking just how fast the time goes. We’re already at the half-way point through 2017. So it’s time for me to take a pause and look back on what’s happened so far this year, and what’s ahead. So, what’s new?
Quite a lot, actually.
The end of 2016 marked the near-beginning point of my primary side-hustle, “Sober Ventures.” It’s become my main source of social media interaction, as I’ve essentially quit all my other personal social platforms. I listen to lots of podcasts, and read lots of books, and the @soberventures page is my main outlet for sharing anything I come across.
The first week of January was when I started in my new position as Item Master Maintenance and Data Integrity Analyst at Baptist. I had been hand-selected for it after working in the business office for a little over a year, and it felt really good to be acknowledged for the work I put into my work, and be offered a new opportunity to develop my skills. Since starting in the position, I’ve been able to meet several other department heads and am now on a committee focused on performance improvement across the entire system, allowing me to learn more about how things work and get done at the higher levels of the corporation.
Taking the skills that I had been learning in Excel VBA, I was able to create a new check-out interface for the Fish Farm, allowing them to now be able to track all sales digitally and maintain employee time-clock and customer rewards all in one Excel file with a centralized easy-to-use user interface.
At Baptist, I was put on another project for backing up the database for downtime issues, and having never learned Access before, but always wanting to, I was given the opportunity to play around with it and see if I could create a viable solution to the issue they needed solved. After about a week or so, I was able to figure out all of the interface tables I needed to pull (thanks to my SQL training I had done online and on Udemy) and then figured out how to create userforms in Access relating to the data and creating reports that the hospitals could pull (thanks to a course on Lynda that I got to take for free because of my library membership).
What this teaches me is a few things:
- I’m lucky to be able to learn so quickly, to take knowledge from other sources and apply it to the problems I’m facing
- There’s so much free information out there in the world. Nearly anything you would ever need in order to learn and grow as a person and a professional is already out there and available if you know how to look
- I still love learning. I never really had much passion about education throughout high school and college, but I think it must have been because I saw no point of it. But now that I’m in an environment where such things are rewarded, I’m hooked on it.
In January, I had set an intention to create what I called the Sober Ventures Summit, where I would interview some of those top entrepreneurs I was following on Instagram and share their stories to help encourage and inspire others to go after the same things. I had set a launch timeframe for March, and in February, I started getting some recordings done. I had to learn some new methods to record since technology wasn’t always the most cooperative or intuitive, but I was able to get 5 recordings done. I’m sure I wouldn’t have done it though if I hadn’t made that public commitment to doing it, though. It just reminds me of how important accountability is as a concept. Even if there’s no real consequence, the idea of not keeping my word drove me to work late and put in extra hours to get it done in time to launch at the end of March.
While I was working on the Summit, another big thing was happening in me and Christine’s life. I was scrolling through Realtor and found a new listing in the area we were hoping to find something in, and everything seemed to hit all of our essentials on our ‘want’ list. We set up an appointment as soon as possible to see it, which ended up meaning at like 8pm on a Tuesday night while the owners were still there. We got to have a quick look around, didn’t get any pictures ourselves, and it was kind of rushed, but it made a good enough impression for us to put in an offer.
It wasn’t the first place we had put in an offer on, and as all the others had fallen through (or we were able to get out of when the deal started turning bad), we were even more diligent with this one. We offered above asking price just to make sure we got in, but we were going to be traveling to California for a Counseling convention for Christine, so we were hoping to be able to keep everything going while we were away.
We always seem to travel in the middle of the home-buying process, as the first place we tried to get was right in the middle of our cruise last September. But at least this time, even though we were 3 time zones away, we were in the States, and could call anytime needed to figure things out.
The California trip was great, though. We flew into San Francisco, and drove down to Carmel-by-the-Sea, one of those places that I had never heard of before, but looked straight out of a postcard. Right on the ocean, but quaint and very small village-like. Great scenery, great food, and a nice place to relax and enjoy the California breeze while walking through town.
Headed up to Santa Cruz for a few nights then on to San Francisco. As most of our travels, we always seem to get some stories out of our stays. San Fran definitely treated us there. The place I had booked on Booking.com, about a 5-minute walk to the convention center, had some flood damage due to a burst pipe in what was to have been our room, so they graciously let us stay at their sister hotel for a discount. Little did we know that the sister hotel was in the middle of the Tenderloin district, a 20-minute walk from the convention center through some of those areas of San Francisco you always hear about in the stereotypes and jokes…
I had planned to meet up with Andrew Warner of Mixergy that first night we got into town, but our change-of-hotel, along with the time frame of Christine getting out of her conference didn’t end up lining up with an ability for me to get to his office in time to go on his run with him. It may have been for the best, because I haven’t run or play soccer in quite a few months, so a 5-mile run through the hills of San Francisco may have left me a little weary and unable to enjoy the rest of our trip.
But after one night of staying at our surprise hotel, we had already made arrangements to move over to the Intercontinental where the conference was taking place and just bite the bullet and stay safe instead. We packed up at 7am and the hotel’s service was exceptional. Usually check-in is around noon, but they had us set up in the room by the time we got there at 8.
The rest of the trip went smoothly, and we got back to Miami somewhat rested from the vacation, but still a little anxious about the home-buying process that we were in the middle of.
After many headaches and hassles along the way, we were able to finalize the purchase and sign all the papers and after another day on the edge of our seats, got the keys on April 26th.
So the past 2 months have seen a lot of painting and fixing up our new home, while the work front has been fairly active as well, taking on more projects and being put on a new performance enhancement initiative at the hospital. On May 13th, a fire broke out and burnt down much of the back of my parent’s house and spread to the deck and porch of the fish farm, so my parents came in town to work on cleaning up after everything, and that process continues to be on-going, but my involvement has been minimized as I focus on my own trajectory in life.
I’ve completed the required hours of education to take my PMP exam to become a Project Management Professional, and have just applied for it, so hopefully that will happen in the next month or 2. After that, my sights will be on getting my Enrolled Agent Certification so I can continue learning about tax law and be able to represent myself and others in front of the IRS.
So yes, lots has been happening over just the past 6 months in my life. We’ll see how the next 6 months progresses, but I am looking at it all with hopeful determination to make it great.