I did a quick retrospective on my life since high school recently. I’ve been bothered for a while with the feeling I’m not where I wanted to be at ahem somewhere close to age 40. I have a few friends who are very successful financially, and occupy some positions in their work with a lot more responsibility than I’ve earned in my own job. The days that I start down the road of comparing my career to theirs don’t end well for me.

I spent several years with a lot of anger towards myself about how I screwed around for too many years, not working a career job, just teaching band and colorguard, and generally not building a base for financial success. What I’ve come to realize now is that those 10 or so years were my first career. A career of teaching, working with teams, learning how to lead, learning how to plan and organize. A pretty successful career at that - the groups I was lucky enough to have worked with won national championships at different levels, and did very well against their competitors. I had the fortune of having great managers in those jobs, although they weren’t called that. But they were people who taught me how to work and how to be motivate others, and those are lessons well learned.

It’s nothing more than a shift in perspective for me but this had been an important change recently. Learning how to look back with an honest eye at my past. I enjoy my second career now, just like I did my first. And I should spend more time looking back and remembering the lessons I learned in those years. People are people, in every industry, teamwork is the same everywhere, and time is only wasted when the lessons learned aren’t applied the next time around.