Private Victory

When I quit Microsoft 2.5 years ago, I set several personal goals for myself professionally. I rather boldly told some co-workers what my goals were, afterwards regretting having verbalized them, in case they didn't happen and I was left with egg on my face.

They were:

• To get the MVP award from Microsoft
• To start speaking publicly
• To deliver SharePoint training
• To publish a book (with the hopes that it was specifically with the publisher Wrox, who, in my opinion, produces the best technical books for what I do.)

In the last two years, God has graciously propelled my career to places I never would have anticipated and given me all kinds of favor that I am undeserving of. The MVP award is not something you can apply for, but is something for which you must be chosen. For me to say I wanted to be an MVP was an act of faith because I couldn't achieve it for myself, only put myself in a position to be noticed. I've started speaking at roughly one event a month, usually to a crowd of 30 or 40 folks. I teach classes regularly at an IT training center affiliated with Washington University here in St. Louis.

The last big goal of mine was to get a book published by Wrox. Did I have any idea how to get a hold of people at Wrox? Absolutely not! But a colleague of mine told me about some other SharePoint folks I knew who were putting together a book and he gave my name to them. When I got a box full of the published version of these books in the mail today, it was a personal goal and dream of mine fulfilled. Although I think the whole new industry of self-publishing is awesome, there's still something neat about knowing I could walk into a Barnes and Noble store and see my book on the shelf.

I didn't write the whole thing myself, but I did author about 150 pages of it. It turned out to be a much more grueling process than I ever imagined. Although I love teaching and presenting in front of people, I discovered that when you're talking, you can talk around ideas, i.e. if you need to circle back to a particular topic, you can do it quite easily. In a technical book, on the other hand, you need to lay out your ideas in a sequential and logical order, which isn't always the easiest if A is related to B and C, and D is related to B and E, and C uses F and G. In addition, I worked with a rather over-zealous editor who got really worked up over things such as whether I should use the term "Site Collection", "site collection", or "site-collection", or whether file names should be in all caps or not, etc. I think I spent more time editing each chapter than I did actually writing each one. (Of course, even with that, as I sat down to skim through the book last night I began to notice things that I still wish I had changed.) Although I do get paid something for my efforts, my guess is it amounts to about 2 cents an hour at the end of the day. Additionally, the book felt like a college term paper; at any given time, such as when you're relaxing in front of the TV after a long day of work, or out with friends on a Saturday night, you have this nagging feeling that you have this big project that you could and should be working on.

That all being said, the process of writing was quite enjoyable. I got a degree in art history, not computer science, and in some ways I've often thought I'm not as technically savvy as many of my more brilliant co-workers. Writing this book is one of those things that makes me feel good, because it's a somewhat right-brained activity that many of my left-brained (i.e. verbally- and grammatically-challenged) co-workers probably wouldn't excel at, and I know I can do. (This project has also made me abundantly grateful for a mother who corrected my punctuation and grammar when I was in elementary school!) The biggest stress of writing the book was trying to do it while holding down a full time job. If my job was just to write, I think I'd do it again in a heartbeat. For now, I'm content to let my name stand on the cover of a book with 6 other fine folks.