The Success of Failure: How to Survive the Big Year Challenge

In 2013 I decided to have a Big Year. If this sounds familiar, it could be due to the similarly named movie starring Steve Martin and Jack Black. Beyond the movie, it’s a term used in birding, being a personal challenge among birders to see how many species of birds they can identify within a single calendar year.

It’s more complex than that, but in its simplest form, it is pure ambition.

There’s a lot of professional parallels that can be drawn to this, especially for myself in 2013. To distill it into more colloquial terms: I decided to go big or go home. Little did I know I would end up going home.

The Beginning

To understand why 2013 was a Big Year, let’s give some background. We’re going to travel back in time for a moment, to the mid 90’s. Up until college, I had lived a pretty sheltered education life in private Lutheran schools. (Normally I wouldn’t bring religion into this, but since it’s a part of the plot, it’s necessary for where we’re going.) 

Growing up conservative, and in Lutheran schools, it wasn’t until I went to college that I was given something I hadn’t been given before. Choice. Suddenly, this young adult at 18, I was given the solemn duty of overseeing my own destination. In my infinite wisdom, I chose to be a teacher for the Lutheran church. At the time, I thought it was the right one, and believed it would make me happy. One little snag, one of the rules for getting there, was remaining in the Lutheran Church.

As many of you can attest, young adults are rarely rebellious, and they always do everything their parents want. Obviously, I am the exception to that rule…I decided the church wasn’t for me entering my Junior year, and I was released from membership. This left me alone, floating along in a world I’d never really been a part of before. I’d entered the labyrinth of life, wholly unprepared.

The “College” Years

Leaving the church ultimately left me uncertain for several years, especially since my identity to that point had been personally tied up in the church, along with that of my family. Being in my early 20’s, I was still considered to be my parent’s financial dependent in the eyes of higher education. While I attempted to return to school multiple times, financially, it wasn’t viable as I wasn’t considered independent. I had no choice, I had to work, I had to put a roof over my head. It was this defining decision, not unlike the game of Life, where you are given two choices at the start: Formal education, or real-life experience?

For a while, I made only $800 a month. It was a struggle, not always knowing if I could afford a meal, or rent, but I learned quickly that $800 can feel like a fortune when you have a warm bed and a hot meal. It was this street-wise education that developed my motivation to move beyond the pay-check to pay-check struggle. It was up to me to learn necessary skills that would give me forward motion, and stability.

It began in retail, a grocery store, I slowly worked my way up to management and learned how to manage their financial and pricing office. It was the finance knowledge that propelled me forward from one financial position to another, until I graduated from “school”, and found myself at my first real job. The year was 2006. In my mind I was behind all my college counterparts; they were already teachers in their own classrooms. I was just getting started.

The Big Year

I know, I know…. I’m taking a long time getting to my Big Year. Believe me, all of this is necessary knowledge. You need to know there was a lot that happened leading up to 2013. After all my hard work and moving my way up from different job to different job, and then securing a position at a Fortune 500 company, I was invested.

It was at this company where I found my love of data and started working in Excel and looking for root cause in my analyses. It was through sheer determination of will that I found myself a charter member of the first analytics department at my company, and a star was born (that’s me, by the way). Soon, they offered me the chance to take the Green Belt in Six Sigma.

If I was in love with data before, I was obsessed after Six Sigma. There was something beautiful about the visualization of data; I was enamored with histograms, box plots, and control charts. Then, I found Tableau Software and converted my companies reports from Cognos to Tableau. It felt like I had come home, though no home I had ever known, and I decided that it was time to consider my Big Year.

The Icarus Effect 

The side effect of ambition and the lifelong desire to pursue knowledge, is the idea of “more”. Once you realize there are infinite amounts of information to absorb it’s hard to keep standing still. It wasn’t enough to find the world of analytics, I had to tell others about it.

In my Big Year, that’s when it began, I had found my love of data and analytics at my company, but I knew I needed to share my story, and the difference analytics made to me, personally.

Soon after this, I was chosen to speak at Tableau’s 2013 Customer Conference in Washington D.C., and a customer spotlight of my use case as well. I was thrust into this whole new world, a much more public one than I had ever been in before. It was in this space that I realized data goes beyond binary bits and bytes, that there’s a human connection. There were others like me, the “non-traditional” students, the self-starters, where the knowledge of analytics changed their lives. It was a sudden passion to connect others for whom this had happened, and I started a community.

It was in that moment, where I felt I was finally landing somewhere soft, I was laid off, permanently. A month shy of 8 years at the Fortune 500. I was devastated.

The Realization

It had been a while, but I felt thrust back to the mid-90’s and my separation from my church. The sudden sense of not being tethered again, and unsure of where I stood. It left me questioning my choices leading up to my job loss. My personal identity was intricately tangled with my professional development, and I wasn’t sure how to separate them. Everything I had learned about analytics I related directly back to the company I considered home for 8 years. Somehow, with the loss of my job, I equated it to the rejection of myself. I believed that I had somehow failed their expectations.

Every social construct we interact with has a set of rules, and we either agree to abide by those rules, or simply, not. Our careers are social constructs of our companies choosing, and ultimately our acceptance of their rules. For 8 years, I accepted the rules of my employer, and then I suddenly was forced to think outside of that world I was comfortable in.

However, it left me with a sense of purpose I wasn’t expecting. Regardless, I needed to keep moving forward with what I was passionate about, the human connection behind data, damn the consequences. At the time, it was sub-consciously done, but I can recognize it now. Unlike college, though, when I was released from membership, I was better prepared this time. This really was my Big Year.

The Conclusion

Instead of accepting the ultimate ruling of unemployment, something was just beginning for me, and I was right. In less than 2 weeks I had a position at a fantastic company that opened new opportunities to connect. In an ironic twist of fate, I met my new employer at the 2013 conference I spoke at for my old employer. While I didn’t stay there long, it helped springboard me to the place I am now, a much better place, thousands of miles away in the city of Seattle.

That was 5 years ago, and while that doesn’t equate to the length of time I was at my old employer, in Big Year length of time, it’s decades. Since then, I recognize myself, who I am and my ability to contribute and lead.

When I think of what I want others to get out of my story, it’s essentially this:

1.     The only comparison you should make for success is to earlier versions of yourself. You are living your life the best way you know how, and you’ll figure it out the best way only you know how. Expect to stumble. While some are incredibly privileged to have had formal education, some are incredibly privileged to have not had one either.

2.     There’s no wrong way to get to where you want to be if you keep moving. Do not give up, I repeat, do not give up. While there will be moments where you’re making only $800 a month, there will be moments where you are making more than that, and it’s not always measured in dollars.

3.     There will be multiple Big Years. The thing about the birding Big Year, is you don’t have to stop at one. You can keep having more of them. Was 2013 my only Big Year? No! This year might be a Big Year too, it’s about recognizing it, though, and making sure you’re taking advantage of the opportunities that are offered you. You are responsible for that, no one else.

I’ll leave you with this. Where others will see only failure, you will see an opportunity to have your own Big Year, so what’s stopping you? Only yourself.