A Year to Remember and Learn

As we approach the end of a very unique year, many people already start saying: “this year didn’t count, is a year to forget”. Despite all the obstacles we all faced throughout this year, this is a year to remember because we all made it work in one way or another. Some people lost more than they gained, but they are still moving forward with the lessons learned. They will be carrying the scars that one day will be shown as a way to describe their resilience throughout a very unique year.

This year I had the opportunity to speak to the EC-Council University Class of 2020 during the virtual graduation ceremony, and one of the things I said was:

“While technology showed the way to keep the world operational, also remember that the core of everything is people. Without people to think and create solutions, technology is meaningless, it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t evolve.”

This year has shown that we need people, and technology was an enabler to keep that interaction happening. Although I’ve been working remotely since 2011, this year, for the first time ever, I didn’t have the opportunity to see my co-workers face to face. We usually have at least two face to face meetings during the a year. During those meetings we laugh, we hug each other, we have fun and we also get some work done. This year it was all via Teams, which helped us to stay connected, but we knew something was missing and that is something to remember and learn. Remember because when this whole thing is over, we can look back and remember how we were able to overcome those days and how grateful we should be that our normal life is back. Traveling, meeting people at conferences, talking face to face and learning with each other with that eye to eye interaction. Yes, it is a year to remember.

In the middle of this crazy year, we built a solid, diverse, and amazing team with people from US, Mexico, India, Russia, Germany, Israel and Brazil. We focused on leveraging each other’s strengths to deliver results as a team. This article has an important message about this and we definitely used this:

“….it’s important to understand the strengths of the individuals on your team. That always will be important. But that’s just the first step. The only way to optimize synergies on a team is to leverage differentiated individual strengths in complementary ways.”

I’ve seen that happened in our team throughout this year, and it was amazing to watch and be part of it. Despite some obstacles, the team evolved and it is in sync like never before. Yes, this is a year to remember.

Is also a year to remember our level of resilience when face major obstacles aside from the pandemic. In September I faced a situation that I wasn’t really ready to live. During a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu tournament in Austin, I had an injury in my foot when I was in the process of taking down my opponent with a Judo throw called Tai Otoshi. The injury was severe and suddenly I learned that I had something called Lisfranc ligament and that ligament was gone. As a result, I had to go through a major surgery to fix my foot. There it goes three months without walking and doing any physical activity. For those that learned my Ready, Set, Achieve book and know my physical journey, probably understand how hard it was to stay completely off from physical activities for so many months. Again, another obstacle in this crazy year. As I was going through this roller coaster of emotions, I started researching more about this injury, read more about how athletes were able to recover and come back better. I decided to create a Podcast to interview athletes, physical therapists, coaches and many other people on this topic. The Overcome Podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast and other platforms. I'm now on Episode 18 and I learned a lot with each person that I interviewed, but more importantly, I used this platform to share these experiences with other people that were also feeling what I felt during rehab. The result was many messages thanking me for start this podcast and for that, I will always be grateful. Yes, this is a year to remember.

This was the year that we created the Azure Security Center in the Field Show, where I had the opportunity to talk to so many great people from our ASC Engineering team. As someone that started working with ASC since it was a prototype codename Rome, it was absolutely fantastic to me to see how this product evolved and the amount of capabilities we talked about throughout the 13 episodes released this year. Yes, this was a year to remember! 

It was a odd, complicated, unique and tough year, but we made it through and now we are more prepared for next year. Let's go after it and make it a great one!