In 2022, I made the decision to apply for an Information Technology (IT) Team Lead position at the educational institution where I worked – if I got it, it meant I would work as part of the IT department, rather than Continuing Education. This was a difficult choice to make as someone with a strong sense of loyalty – I’d been with Continuing Education for more than a decade – I was used to the team and was quite comfortable. By even considering joining IT, I was revealing a significant change in mindset. You see, while in Continuing Education, though I had worked on IT-related matters, the role also had me spending a good chunk of my time working on social media, marketing, and advertising. And on the side, I even took time to work on university courses related to law. I was exploring a future where perhaps IT wasn’t going to remain the core of my career – this had a lot to do with my experience working as developer, which lead to me disliking development – unless it was on my own terms. And so for me to get the point where I even considered working in IT and actually applying – you can imagine, I had realized something about myself, an inescapable truth. At my core, I was built to help people solve technical problems. That’s what I needed to do, that was my calling.
I got the job, and four years later, and I can easily confirm that this was the right move for both my personal and professional development. The educational institution environment provided a wide variety of users that I would get to interact with and a much wider variety of problems to solve – it really kept things interesting. I learned so much more than I would have learned while working in my previous role. That said, I can say that the workload was immediately pretty intense compared to Continuing Education. No matter how hard I worked to try and help everyone, there was just too much demand on the department as a whole. As a perfectionist, this is something I had to adjust to – I had a very hard time at the beginning. Eventually, I remembered a clip from the Simpsons that perfectly represented how it felt:
The goggles truly did nothing in the face of a such a massive wave. I just had to adjust to the newfound reality of my job – no matter what, someone was going to be upset that I didn’t resolve their problem faster. It was impossible for everyone to be happy – that was just the reality of my new role.
And as life goes, I would go on to face a combination of challenges on both personal and professional fronts. Lately, I’ve been trying to be especially conscious of the little positive moments throughout the day. For example, I bike to work fairly often these days – and I’m so appreciative that I can still do so despite dealing with back problems. Cycling can truly be a relaxing, liberating experience, and when you bike to work in the early hours on summer days, there’s less traffic, the air is still cool – there’s something so refreshing about that – it’s a wonderful way to start the day.
I’ve also begun eating my lunches in the park, on a hill with a view towards the Montreal skyline. I make sure to appreciate that not everyone has such a view so readily available and close to their place of work. And beyond that, it reminds me of my father and how much he always wanted to be close to Montreal. With the sun shining down on me, with that view, I can’t help but be thankful for what I am experiencing, as simple as it may be in the grand scheme of things.
This was a big change from what I did for months before – I would instead sit alone in a dark room, no windows, eating lunch by myself – even though the weather was great outside. Why? Talk about absurd. It’s a matter of perspective – if I regularly put myself in a dark room, I shouldn’t be surprised when the world seems like it’s darker overall. There has to be accountability.
What this all naturally leads to is the following quote from John Dunsworth, seen in the last episode of season 12 of Trailer Park Boys, after the end credits. John unfortunately passed away after filming had wrapped, making this especially poignant.
You know what the best currency is? And I just thought about this yesterday. The best currency – the most valuable of all – is gratitude.
What I found myself feeling more and more was exactly that: gratitude. In a certain sense, I just needed to leave the dark room behind, vacant. It was this habit of always focusing on the positive moments throughout the day that ultimately helped me feel better and thus forge a stronger path forward. The best currency, indeed, John.
John touches on something else in the video, if you watched all of it. There’s this bit:
[W]hen you’re dead, you’re dead. But you’re not quite so dead if you contribute something.
You might be fooled into thinking this is John acting as Jim Lahey, legendary drunk, and on some level, he was – but the core of his message is incredibly personal and rooted in his own wisdom. My personal mission in life has always been to, in my own way, contribute something – through my posts, through my videos, I am working to improve people’s lives one tiny bit at a time, and in my way, have an impact on the world. I always said that if a given blog post, for example, helped one person – it was worth writing.
I remember seeing a video where John introduces viewers to one of his hobbies – put simply, John liked to take stones, sand, cement, and to use it to build the shoreline on his property. Take a look:
When I saw this video a long time ago, I thought it was an odd little hobby, but I always love it when people are passionate about something – I support them completely – even if it doesn’t completely make sense to me. Looking back today, I believe John was doing this precisely for the sake of the ritual – the repeated act of contributing something, rather than the measure of its impact on the world. This hobby of his has kept him fit and has clearly brought him peace, joy, and a sense of accomplishment.
So that’s the thing – for me, the act of helping people with IT problems, that’s my ritual. Whether at work, or at home, I spend hours trying to solve specific problems – and it’s not always easy, or quick. I often find myself going down a rabbit hole for a potential solution, only to realize that it was a dead end. But as my favorite high school math teacher always said: “that’s ok, you found another way that doesn’t work. That’s still progress.” It’s more the deliberate action of working towards a solution that matters to me – whether I help one person, or a thousand, it’s worthwhile. And since I keep publishing content, I won’t be quite so dead when I’m gone – my content will continue to help people.