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3 Lessons I Learned in 2019
2019 was a year of tremendous growth and change for me both personally and professionally. Often, whether we like it or not, this brings hard lessons to us that we need to learn.
I faced many tough issues this year: I fired a client for the first time in many years; I had a failed business partnership, and I resigned a long-standing adjunct position of 15 years. Each of these situations taught me a lesson.
As we head into 2020 — what I’ve dubbed, The Year of Clarity — maybe those lessons will help you as well.
First: ‘Nice’ and ‘good’ are not the same thing.
This tops my list of very hard lessons that I needed to learn. ‘Nice’ is often a camouflage used by people to deflect doing or saying the hard things. I see this in my students as well. Forget to turn something in? Sleep too late and can’t get to our 9AM Saturday class? They send a ‘nice’ email apologizing, but they really don’t mean it and never intend to make up the work.
Similarly, some colleagues are ‘nice’ in meetings and will agree with everything but never actually do the work they said they would. Then, when pressed, they make you the bad guy with excuses such as ‘I’m busy’ (aren’t we all?), or ‘I didn’t feel well’ — leaving you to apologize, then they make another promise and still never own up to…
