“We just don’t have the budget.”

“OK, well, fair enough. I guess there isn’t much that can be done.”

That was the scene back in late 2008 as I walked out steaming from my then-director’s office. I was the lead web designer at Concordia University - though you couldn’t tell from my job title. My work at the university brought in a handful of awards and saved over a hundred thousand dollars in man-hours. Furthermore, I had just installed a code repository system on a local server to better track our code changes. To boot, I was there for close to five years and had just presented my vision for the 2009 update of the main website to the directors. I also helped select and train new employees and regularly presented at web forums where university workers exchanged ideas. Moreover, I aggressively pushed the possibilities of social media and e-mail marketing management. Based on all this, I felt I had proved my worth and that I earned the promotion. But it was not to be. Despite the senior designer position being vacant for close to 4 years - I was refused. This upset me - greatly.

Agencies wanted me and tried to steal me on more than one occasion. I felt I got on with the majority of the web workers at the university, as well as management. I just couldn’t understand why Concordia didn’t want to even try to keep me. Only now do I realize that getting promoted at Concordia was the best thing to never happen to me.

Avoiding tunnel-vision

Work keeps us busy (duh). But what it can also do is to distract us from what truly makes us happy. Not getting the promotion at Concordia made me take a step back and look hard at my career. It made me ask tough questions such as, “what if you did get the promotion, then what?”, “is being a senior web designer what you really want to be?” and “I used to be a mechanical engineer that graduated from McGill - is this as far as I can go?”. Answering these questions raised other questions and led to weeks of doubt and uncertainty. But if I’ve learned anything from that experience, it is this: oftentimes, in the course of our careers, we develop tunnel-vision. Sometimes, all we see is a goal and everything else is pushed to side. We can become obsessed and lose the plot. In times like these, we need to be able to disengage. Re-evalutate. Take stock of what is truly important to us and refocus.

During my period of self-reflection, I discovered a few things about myself:

• I wanted to make my mark


• I wanted to be recognized for my efforts


• I sought environments that not only challenged the status-quo but achieved results in doing so


• But most importantly, I wanted to be trusted with something strategically important

It was only then that I woke up and realized I needed to correct my flightpath. Concordia would never be able to satisfy these motivations - I was just too blind to see it before. I was so hell-bent on grabbing a silly title that I felt I “deserved” I lost sight of what was important to me. In short order, I started my MBA and left Concordia to work at Bell Web.

New Year’s resolutions

Now, what does this all have to do with the New Year’s resolutions? Well it’s simple. Every year people make resolutions like, “get a new job”, or “get a raise”, or “win this or that award”, etc. While these are decent resolutions, I think we can take this a step further. So if you haven’t yet come up with a resolution, let me suggest this: Resolve to not setting any goals other than to figure out what makes you happy and drop anything that isn’t helping you get there. Rather than resolving to acquire, resolve to be more focused. With every new year comes new promise and new potential - it would be a shame to waste any of it on anything that truly won’t make us happy.

Wishing you all a “happy” new year!