Hard Lessons Learned Series: Stepping Up

In my career, I’ve certainly learned some lessons the hard way. I hope that by sharing some of these stories with my professional network, someone can relate to and maybe even avoid learning some things the hard way.

Today’s installment deals with a painful but valuable lesson I learned very early in my career. One of my first professional jobs was as a technical consultant for an industrial firm in my hometown of Angleton, TX. As a young associate, I had a manager as well as an informal mentor who helped direct my efforts and break projects into manageable chunks that a fresh 20-year old programmer could succeed at.

One particular project I worked on with my mentor Ron Welk was a distributed monitoring implementation where I worked on several independent pieces of the project as a whole. Our system would monitor water quality metrics at wastewater outfall monitoring stations at a nearby petrochemical plant. The system was engaging and exciting for a young programmer: it included programmable logic controllers, water quality instrumentation, water collection mechanisms, dataloggers, and man-machine interfaces.

When it came time for the commissioning of the project, Ron took me under his wing and showed me the process for deploying the components of our software and field-testing the equipment. I followed along and was enjoying seeing all the items I had been working on for months behind a desk get deployed directly to the field.

During the final week of commissioning, Ron came down with the flu. I could tell he was suffering, and we had plenty of work to do on this particular day. Nevertheless, I was somehow completely shocked when he turned to me and asked to completely take the effort over.

“Ben, I’m not doing well and I think I need to call it a day. Can you complete the rest of today’s work on your own?”

As simple as that sounds, I can tell you that somehow in that moment I felt that I was completely unprepared to respond to this call for help. I did not see myself as prepared or qualified to succeed in doing the implementation and testing on my own. "I'm just an associate," I reasoned to myself. I responded with a list of concerns I had to Ron about not being ready or confident to take the rest of the work on by myself. He assured me that I’d been properly trained and could take extra time to do it. After another round of my balking, he then said:

“Ben, you know what, never mind. Go ahead and go home. I’m going to wrap up the rest of this work on my own today.”

It was all too late, but at that exact moment I had my epiphany. I was completely prepared, and it was absolutely the right thing for me to have taken over for my mentor and finished out that work on my own. I had received the proper training and instruction, but I simply lacked the confidence and courage to step out of my comfort zone of being in a trainee role and accept what the moment required of me. I assured Ron that I’d give it a try but I had worn out his patience and he was done with me and dismissed me for the day. Utterly disappointed in myself for letting my friend and mentor down, I left Ron to his work, and I drove home thinking over what had happened. I resolved to myself never to repeat that mistake again.

The good news is that Ron forgave me, and continued to be a valued mentor in my early career. Furthermore, that formative experience early in my career has served as a reminder to me to never be afraid to step up to opportunities in work and life where I am challenged to extend myself outside of my comfort zone. Continually since my early career, I experience days where I am faced with challenges that ask of me: will I do what the day requires, no matter how uncomfortable it may be? My humble experience has been that having an unflinching bias towards action will give you just enough momentum to set you on the right path for tackling the new, unknown, and challenging tasks that life and career put in front of you.

What are the limitations that keep us from answering the call to step outside of the normal routine in our lives and extend and challenge ourselves?