What a long, strange trip it's been

About six years ago, I quit a job I'd been at for eight years. I needed something new, it was time to expand my horizons. I created this blog to practice my writing and to share with anyone interested the stories of my experiences. I wrote a bit about this and that, but then got busy with new jobs and life and stuff and things. It's been more than a few years since I even logged into my own site.

I'm giving writing another try now, and I am excited to share some of the lessons and tech that I've dealt with since my last writing. I've worked with several great companies and branched out into platforms and techs that I'd never even dreamed of using. It's been a wild ride with a lot of opportunities to work on things that were way, way outside of my existing expertise.

Through all the teams, and products and techs I've worked with, one of the most powerful lessons I've learned is to be careful with the labels that you apply to yourself and be ever mindful of how you're subconsciously affected by the labels other put on you.

As humans, we use labels and tags to classify and group things. They make it easier for our minds to anticipate how those labelled things act and interact, how they should be used, what they should be used for. It is a powerful tool for our minds to plan and anticipate, especially in the absence of other specific, detailed information.

We have titles and descriptions that try to define our roles in our jobs and relationships: husband, father, software developer. We have cultural and social titles that try to define how we relate to each other socially. Our minds label and tag instinctively and automatically: job title, relationship and family status, political and religious affiliations, core personality traits, and so on.

Labels and tags and titles, oh my! It isn't difficult to get wrapped up in the labels applied to you, from others, and from yourself. Easy sometimes to get locked into a mindset of "this is how I am labelled, so this is how I should act".

But here's the thing: no one, but you, can define who you are. And who you are today is not who you have to be tomorrow. Every day is a chance to reinvent yourself as the kind of person you want to be. Every day is an opportunity to start making a change - and it's never too late to start.

It's never too late to start.