In life I believe there are always inflection points where you know whatever happens next, whatever choice you make, your life will be impacted from that point forward. These moments can happen at a time and don’t need to be proceeded by anything momentous. It can simply be your collective experience that ultimately leads to an inflection with seemingly no direct cause.

I find myself at one of those inflection points. One term for it is mid-life crisis but honestly it makes me sick to think of myself as “mid-life” so let’s stick with inflection point. For whatever reason this year, as you can likely gather from my previous posts, I’ve been super focused on what drives me and what steps I can take to make that drive personally meaningful.

In this context, the idea of work has been an interesting thought experiment. To be clear, I like what I do; I’m not sure I love it but I really do like it. I get to work on challenging problems with talented people and for me, that is exciting. I also have the benefit of a company whose mission I can get behind. People have asked me what my favorite job was and I always default to my job at a restaurant. In that atmosphere, we were a team who was set out to conquer the waves of patrons that were coming to dine. I think what I loved about it so much was the work was a hustle and the people I worked with, for the most part, hustled with me. The wad of cash in my pocket at then end of the night didn’t hurt either.

More recently, I’ve gone through a few transitions in my current role that have me feeling like I’m at one of those inflection points. When I was brought onto my role I was brought on as Principal Technical Program Manager (TPM) and my remit was to lead a couple of younger TPMs on how to effectively deliver an IAM program. External economic downturns led to layoffs at Indeed. Unfortunately, both of my team members were impacted. The loss of my team was hard because I was beginning to know them on a personal level. Despite my role changing I had no appetite for complaining. I was thankful I was still employed. Instead of maintaining focus on large scale programs and coaching other TPMs I was tasked with working directly on the Authentication Services program. I did well in the role and enjoyed getting to learn more deeply about the Authentication space as my background in Identity and Access Management (IAM) had largely centered around Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA).

My success in this role lead to a promotion to Security Manager. I welcome the change in title but didn’t see my role changing much beyond having added people manager responsibilities. I had already been embedded in the team and was working with them to deliver on programs for the better part of a year. The glee around the promotion was short lived though as I learned my boss, friend, and mentor would be leaving his role as Director of IAM. I was in a state a disbelief. This individual gave me the opportunity to get out of professional services and has been instrumental in my success professionally. I’m glad that he did what was best for him and his family but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit disappointed in the timing. Despite his best efforts to make clear the two were unrelated, perception is everything. In addition, I was losing a mentor and a friend who’ve I’ve been working with for the past 5 years.

Unfortunately, I wish I could say that was the end of changes in my role at Indeed but that would be a lie. The week after my boss’s departure it was announced that Indeed would be reorganized to remove artificial barriers that have been complicating delivery to Job Seekers and Employers. This reorganization resulted in 1000 layoffs. The reorganization makes a lot of sense on paper and I’m energized by the collaborative meetings we’ve been having of late. I feel fortunate that I have the opportunity to hopefully step into more of a leadership role in the IAM space and although that may be stressful at first it may lead to personal growth.

Throughout the stress of the above I’ve been better with some routines than others. Working out has been easy to stick with. Everyone at work is still getting a feel for what their new roles look like so taking a lunchtime break to workout is much less disruptive. One thing that I’ve fallen out of practice with but desire to restart is meditation. I’m currently reading the book Wherever you go, there you are. The book is an explanation of what meditation is and is not. It also provides things to try when you are meditating. Reading the book made me feel like I was meditating just to go through the motions and that I needed to take a step back and understand what I was looking to get out of it. During this time I’ve also been reading a Hedonist Manifesto by Michel Onfray and listening to The Four Agreements. All the books are helping me to build a framework for my meaning/purpose of my life and I think similar books will be my priority for the remainder of the year.

I’ve also been working a bit on my Phillies Dashboard. I now have a local script that takes results from an API response, analyzes those results, and displays them as metrics on that page. Over the weekend I added news stories for each player that will update automatically as well. I’m not a huge fan of it though because it doesn’t provide a date and as you can see some of the listed headlines are dated.