2013: Year In Review

Happy holidays and happy new year to everyone! And a heartfelt thank you to all my readers for making 2013 a breakout year for my little blog. Even though I’ve taken a brief hiatus from writing during the past few months, I do plan on writing more in 2014. And one of these days, I will get motivated enough to start another blog on my other passion: music.

It has been a crazy year and a half in which I temporarily moved my family from our house in San Diego to a corporate apartment in San Francisco to another apartment in Orange County and finally back home to San Diego. All the while, I was traveling 4-6 days a week and working 50+ hours a week. In the midst of all this craziness, I was targeted for a multi-year IRS audit which uncovered the fact that I was a victim of ID theft. Whew!

I finally realized that the life of a traveling consultant was not a sustainable lifestyle for my family (nor for my personal well-being). Consulting is great if your personal life is on auto-pilot. Mine no longer was!

So in the midst of all the craziness, I decided to change my career track…again. It has been a hectic few months getting ramped up but things are settling in nicely at Microsoft. I get to work from home and only get on a plane about 2-4 days a month. The work has been really interesting and I get to work with some great and brilliant people!

I have been able to apply everything I learned at Accenture as well as apply my prior experiences in S&M (sales and marketing) to my new role. Microsoft’s Incubation Group operates like a startup within Microsoft. It is a very exciting opportunity to be at the bleeding edge of technology and to work with customers to strategize how to incorporate these newly created tools into their existing IT operations to run their business more effectively. I will definitely be writing more about this on future posts.

In going through all this change, I realized a very important lesson about life+career management: choose your lifestyle first and then choose a job that fits that lifestyle. It’s amazing how much easier and more enjoyable life can be when you have this kind of work/life balance…but more importantly, work/life flexibility.

It may sound obvious to some but I have met many high achievers along the way that keep chipping away at their lifestyle because the job rewards keep getting better and better. I hope to prove them wrong…that you can choose your lifestyle and family and still have a successful and lucrative career! Wish me luck!!

The WordPress helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. Read on if  interested. Thank you for all the insightful comments. I am so happy to see this become a community of like-minded people. I hope to see you back here often…and as always…thanks for visiting!

Here’s an excerpt:

Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 69,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.