2022: Relentless

I have a tradition, that at the end of every year, I come up with a single word as the theme for the upcoming year. The process is not very easy to describe, the word just seems to appear within weeks sometimes days of the new year. In 2020 the word was REDEMPTION. Sure enough, I righted a few wrongs personally and professionally, even more interesting, the pandemic forced the world to look inward and think about that theme as well. 2021 was IGNITE, it was time to wake-up and set the foundation for great things to come. As part of that, I ended up landing a new job with the Greatest Company on Earth, began training for future athletic events and improving my nutrition.

Here we are at the dawn of 2022, not surprising, the word for this year is RELENTLESS. Its quite possible that the book ‘RELENTLESS by Tim Grover, Trainer of Champions, subconsciously planted that seed in my head. One of the quotes from the book is: “Being relentless means demanding more of yourself than anyone else could ever demand of you, knowing that every time you stop, you can still do more. You must do more.“

To me, being relentless is going deep in a specific technology through reading, trial and error and collaborating with teammates. Then, climbing out of the depth and learning the related technologies that surround the one I just went deep on. The validation of the relentless long hours, frustrations and triumphs is being able to confidently troubleshoot, explain and apply the technology to make the world better.

Life is never perfect, there are always peaks and valleys, but never ALL peaks and never ALL valleys. One of the peaks I am experiencing is the impact of working for Microsoft. I have never been more excited to wake up and go to work on Monday because of the exciting work we are doing. From the work on Climate Change to the ever expanding feature set of Azure to the fact that Microsoft Teams was one of the backbones that kept the world running during an unprecedented Pandemic, I feel that I am truly contributing to ‘empower every person on the planet to achieve more’.

And what motivates me to achieve that mission? If a person is empowered to do more with our technology in less time than they spent doing it yesterday, that means they can have more time to do the things they love, today, such as climb Mount Kilimanjaro (that’s a story for a future post).

Welcome to 2022! Be relentless!!!