Where Greatness Starts

I remember in school learning about great people in history: Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart and the list goes on.  One of the things that fascinated me for a while was just what was it about these individuals that really drove them to do the things they did.  What made them confident in their decisions, gave them the strength to make hard choices and see them through? 

Now that I’m older (I won’t say I’m necessarily more mature), I realize that most likely these great people dealt with the same doubt and concern about their actions as I do with mine.  They were people made great by their actions.  If I want to be more like these people, all I have to do is decide on my course of action the best I can, but most importantly, I have to take action.

In over 16 years of being in the programming industry it sometimes saddens me to see the number of folks that simply don’t care about what they are doing.  They just want to go, do some work, and go home.  While, yes, we all need to make a living and coding is certainly a good way to do that, I’ll risk sounding a little cliché in saying that life is certainly too short to do that.  You may not always be happy at your job as we all have bad days and projects, but you should at least enjoy it for the majority of the time. 

I don’t want to be one of the people who doesn’t care.  I want to do the best job I can at the career I enjoy being in.  This type of attitude can take a lot of effort to maintain, and that’s why events like the Kalamazoo X  conference are so important.  This is a conference where the goal is not to teach you what that next cool coding language is, or what platform you should be basing your next project on.  This event is focused on learning how to better communicate, give you ideas on how to improve you career and how to move forward in the technical job world.

The event is a single track with 30 minutes sessions.  Each time I’ve attended the event I’ve walked away energized.  If you enjoy watching TED talks then you’ll get a ton from this event. 

This year the event is held on Saturday, April 13th.  Registration is now open and the list of sessions have been posted.  You can even watch some videos of last years sessions.

Get registered because getting energized and learning from others is where greatness starts.