On Milestones and Breadcrumbs

I’m finally back from Utah - half good, half bad. While it lacks the speed and diversity (and coffee and beer) of my home town, there’s something really appealing about being there as well - perhaps it’s just the change of pace and the flood of productivity we get whem I am there.

The trip was extremely useful to us as a company as well as to us as a team - and it gave me new insight into life in general. Some of the major decisions we made were that we were turning our focus to the xposted.com system we’ve been building. This is a significant milestone. It was not an easy decision considering the time, money, and traction we were getting with our socialconference efforts. I wasn’t comfortable with the decision from the start - perhaps it was me holding on to the thing I had focused so hard on and not wanting to let it go that easily. It’s hard to face down what seem to be facts though - you have to know when to cut your losses.

At the end of that trip, I faced a personal milestone as well. It’s something I always expected to happen but still found myself unprepared in many ways. Of course I am not going to share just what this is, the details really don’t matter, but the insights are useful in not just business, but also life.

So what did I learn? I learned that milestones are really important things in our lives. We often look back and remember those key moments where things impacted our thinking about the world. They are not always postive, but that does nothing to dilute their value. We need them to set a pace, to understand that the world is changing around us.

It’s often the case, unfortunately, that we look forward to milestones, as opposed to backwards. Caught up in the thick of day to day activities, it’s hard to sometimes see just what we’ve accomplished, or more importantly, just how far we’ve come. If you’re like me, you probably pat yourself on the back far fewer times than you should. As Duane likes to say, “celebrate the mini milestones.” Indeed.

Beyond that, though, there’s something much more important. It’s the part that blurs into one big mess. It’s the stuff that keeps you from seeing the milestone in the first place. Those are the breadcrumbs. Walking down the road, that is life, it’s easy to squash those little crumbs into oblivion - forever ruining their usefulness. It’s only until we are aware that even those small steps are really powerful cues to our success and failure.

As scientists, engineers, doctors, lawyer, and professionals at large - we’re trained to retrace our tracks and to look at things within a context with a high degree of scrutiny. Does it surprise you that a detective sees a room so different than we do?

I suppose the point is really this. Don’t take for granted who you are and what you do - they’re all you have to fall back on.