December 31, 2020

Year in Review: 2020

I continue to be amazed by how much I accomplish personally and professionally each year.

Some highs:

  • Participated in a leadership workshop “The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team.”
  • Learned a great deal by living the growth mindset and staying active in multiple diverse projects in a growing company (Lirio).
  • Led getting-to-know-you 1:1s with 64 of my Lirio colleagues (i.e., 89% of the company).
  • Was chosen to be a culture ambassador at Lirio. I even wrote some of verbiage for our “Go Further Together” company principle.
  • Played through (or am still playing) sixteen co-op games with Gillie and our friends, Zach and Paula — Balderdash, Castle Crashers, Left 4 Dead 2, Overcooked! 2, Stardew Valley, Tabletopia, Factorio, Ultimate Chicken Horse, Payday 2, Borderlands 2, Dying Light, Don’t Starve Together, Sea of Thieves, Move or Die, Killing Floor 2, Satisfactory.
  • Started learning Danish.
  • Upgraded my computer so I can play better games with friends.
  • Bought a road bike and an indoor trainer I can use with it.
  • Read 24 books! (See below for details.)

Some lows:

  • Gillie asking me to take her to the ER. It turned out okay, but I’ve never had to do that before; plus, going to the ER during a pandemic is an added layer of stress for everyone.
  • Getting furloughed from my RPM proofreader job. They do want me to return, but the fitness industry went into a tailspin this year. Also, not being able to safely teach group fitness is a low. Gold’s Gym was more than happy to invite me back to teach once they were allowed to reopen, but that seems ill-advised at this point.
  • Having to advance some discussions about leaving the United States.
  • On a related note, experiencing on a local and national scale what I call a “crisis of accountability.”
  • Being ghosted by two friends I thought I was close with.
  • Losing momentum on my scale modeling hobby (likely because I’m investing time into learning Danish).
  • Although I didn’t intend to make any money or get famous, I really gave making YouTube videos for my scale model building a good try. I did the math on time spent and found I was pouring way more time into making the videos than making models.
  • The local scale modeling group has been a bust. The people aren’t rude, but they’re not very inviting or friendly. The current members seem more interested in shows/competitions and the history of the thing the model represents (e.g., this particular plane helped win this specific battle in WWII France). I don’t want to compete, and don’t care much for glorifying the military industrial complexes of the world. I like the craft, artistry, and mimicry in general.

What I’m grateful for in 2020 (in no particular order):

  • Friendship. Some friends have moved around, other events have shifted to virtual-only, and I’ve made some new friends at work. For example, Gillie and I went from seeing Zach and Paula once a month for lunch, to spending about eight hours each week playing video games together and staying involved with what’s going on in each of our lives.
  • Feeling more comfortable in my role at Lirio. It also helped to hear from my boss after hitting my one-year anniversary, “You are absolutely the right person for this role.” Having spent a year listening to and reading books by Agile thought leaders, I’m getting better at separating signal from noise.
  • Being employed at a company that needs what I have to offer, having a stable job, a safe place to live, and reliable transportation. So many people this year have lost many or all of those things.
  • Gillie and I navigating the COVID-19 pandemic relatively unharmed; neither of us had it or had friends or immediate family who had it.
  • Gillie’s restored health.
  • Getting involved with cycling. Although using an indoor trainer isn’t quite the same an RPM class, I believe doing actual cycling will make me a better indoor cycling instructor when I return to teaching.
  • On a related note, having a forcing function to let me take a break from RPM. I was getting burned out and not feeling part of the group fitness community in that regard.
  • My new computer is orders of magnitude better than my seven-year-old laptop.
  • Although I only did basic stuff with it, I was pleased that I made time to play around with VSCode and learn Python for my book club.
  • How much Danish I’ve been able to learn in four months. I’m not so great with understanding spoken Danish yet, but if I read the subtitles for shows or Danish newspaper headlines, I can comprehend about 50% or so.
  • Taking a break from the local Unitarian Universalist church. Having twice been on their board, I realized the church was consuming more of my energy than it was feeding me.

Other thoughts that didn’t fit well into the other categories:

  • For the major purchases I’ve made this year, all of them went to small businesses in California, Georgia, and Tennessee.
  • I made a concerted effort to spend as little money at Amazon as I could.
  • Since March, I’ve worn a face mask when around other people, have not been indoors with anyone but my wife without a mask, have not dined in at a restaurant, and have not participated in any gathering except the outdoor drive-in holiday party for work (where everyone had to wear masks). It’s been somewhere between disappointing and infuriating to see how others in my community have “spent my tokens” and decided that science-backed guidance is for “other people.” We have to be lucky every time we go out around others; COVID has to be lucky once.

Things I want to focus on in 2021:

  • Doing more cycling… doing group rides in Knoxville, maybe attempt a century ride, riding with coworkers. When the weather warms up, I look forward to commuting to work by bike.
  • Getting a better idea for what’s next in my career. My “career lattice” is less certain, and I don’t think I want to play the Agile certification game (i.e., getting certs or becoming a trainer).
  • Growing my Danish fluency. One goal is to be able to comprehend most written Danish. A second goal is to be able to watch (or rewatch) a Danish program on Netflix with no captions or subtitles and understand what’s being said. A third goal is to work on conversational Danish with native speakers.
  • Visit Denmark with Gillie. Even with a different government administration and some form of end in sight for COVID-19, we want to learn more about what it would take to live and work outside the US. The more we’ve learned about Danish culture, the more attractive it becomes.
  • Have more time to work on scale modeling. I’m not sure where this energy and time will come from given there are so many other things I do that enrich my life. I don’t want to give up on this hobby just yet.
  • Get around to those important-but-not-urgent life things for me and my family (e.g., living will, advanced directive).

Details

Community service

  • Served as clerk on a Board of Trustees for a local Unitarian Universalist church
  • Played piano for two memorial services
  • Picked up litter around my apartment complex on a weekly basis; did the same near my office Monday through Friday

Group fitness

  • Taught approximately 20 classes throughout the year (COVID-19 made attending the gym too risky)
  • Launched one RPM release (85) at Knoxville area Gold’s Gyms (again, impacted by COVID-19)
  • Copy-edited one RPM release (87) of choreography and instructor materials for Les Mills International (was furloughed because of COVID-19)

Pleasure reading

  • Spellbound: Book II of the Grimnoir Chronicles by Larry Correia
  • Building and Detailing Model Aircraft by Pat Hawkey
  • Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling by Philip Pullman
  • How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
  • Circe by Madeline Miller
  • Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined by Stephen Fry
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind by Yuval Harari
  • Heroes: Myths and Monsters, Quests and Adventures by Stephen Fry
  • Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
  • The Last Tribe by Brad Manuel
  • Still Life by Louise Penny
  • A Better Man by Louise Penny
  • Bicycling Magazine’s New Cyclist Handbook: Ride with Confidence and Avoid Common Pitfalls by Ben Hewitt
  • All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny
  • A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

Hobbies

  • Played couch co-op games with Gillie: Unravel Two, A Way Out
  • Finished my Lindberg 1:72 battle-damaged F-4 Phantom scale model
  • Started a Revell 1:32 F-4G Phantom II scale model; still need to apply decals, weathering, and all the bits that go underneath the aircraft

Professional development

I wrote 52 weekly summary posts of articles relevant to my career; although I didn’t sum them up, my estimate is that I’ve shared over 700 articles, books, or videos.

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work and Flow

The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

Radical Candor

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) 4.5 Distilled

Do Better Work

The Art of Business Value

A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms, Second Edition: Level Up Your Core Programming Skills

Agile for Non-Software Teams

Blog posts

Personal accomplishments

  • Made a permanent choice to be childfree.
  • Invested in finding ways to incorporate fitness into my life, given I didn’t want to risk returning to the gym but also realized that just taking walks every day wasn’t sufficient.
  • Got more comfortable with accepting that I need to let some activities and relationships go when they take more energy than I get in return.