Last few years, I was in this place where I felt like I was doing everything right and everything was going fine for me in my career.
I’ve got a great job – I worked at one of the largest tech companies in the country. I was working with smart people, making an impact and delivering business results. I was also getting a hang of public speaking, and had spoken internationally multiple times a year. My writing had reached and helped tens of thousands of people in the tech industry.
And then I thought, is that it? Is that all I could be doing? How come I didn’t feel like I was learning and growing then?
But then I realised, I wasn’t challenging myself enough. I was only doing things that I was proficient in. I applied to speak at events that I knew I’d be selected for. I wrote for publications that would accept my content. I understood what they were looking for, and wrote just that.
So in 2020, I decided to take a slightly different approach and intentionally start doing things that I knew I’d fail.
And here is the result. My fail list of 2020.
- I launched an online Career Development Program for Women in Tech and had zero signups.
- I applied to speak at a few major events like TedX and didn’t hear anything back.
- More than ten of my medium articles were rejected by popular publications.
- I failed to reach more audience using a different mean than writing. (My YouTube channel looks very sad.)
- I stopped writing in my Gratitude Journal after a week.
- I didn’t learn any new professional skill.
- I didn’t do sketchnotes of my books.
- I have more than five projects that I started, but didn’t finish.
- I read less than 5 books properly this year.
- Out of 9 goals that I set for myself in 2020, I achieved 2, failed 4, and deferred 3.
And you know what, I am ok. In fact, I am more than ok. It shows that there are more things I can do and learn and be better at.
Here is to a new year and to never giving up.
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Top comments (1)
This was a great post. Thanks for being so transparent about your "failures". Honestly, I don't think they were failures because you tried things. The only real failure is just not trying at all. I read a lot of books each year (because I'm a member at O'Reilly online learning and there are over 40,000 books available), but often feel like I don't accomplish as much as I want to. Sometimes there are so many technical, programming, project management things to learn that it seems like I really don't learn anything. I was able to create my Work Accomplishment Tracker but when I first released it no one tried it either. Since I submitted here for the #doHackathon many more have taken a look at it. It can be difficult to put a lot of energy into creating a project and then not having someone try it.
I've changed my measurement though so that I only look at a project by how much I learn and that has really helped. thanks again for sharing this great article.