Objective #1: PMP

Lets dive into my short-term objectives one by one and talk about WHY they made the list and HOW they will support my core principle.

 

If you'll remember from the Plan - 

The first objective on my short term to-do list was obtaining my PMP certification.

For those who aren't familiar with what a PMP is - 

PMP stands for Project Management Professional. It is the most widely accepted credential for Project Managers (PMs) and obtaining the certification is a clear signal that a person has developed the core competencies required to be a successful PM. 

There are a handful of requirements that must be met before a person can even SIT for the exam 

(with a bachelors degree I'll need to be able to show 36 months of project management experience and am required to complete 35 hours of formal project management training)

and after satisfying those criteria I can sign up for the 180 question and nearly four hour exam to test my knowledge and (if I pass) receive the certificate. And then even after receiving the PMP - there is an ongoing requirement to complete a certain amount of professional development activities to maintain the certification.

It's a lot.

So why is this Objective #1?

Because my company offered a free PMP training class.

This was something I had gotten myself into prior to starting to really think about this renewed commitment to growth. I joined this class before I had identified a core principle. I joined this class for no other reason than the fact that it was available to me. 

That's it.  

Kind of a let down right? You're probably thinking "He's spent all this time talking about a plan and his principles - and he's just out here winging it"

But to use my friend Dan's favorite quote - "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in awhile."

The PMP skills and competencies are relevant - stakeholder engagement, risk registers, change management, etc...

But to be totally honest that's really not the point.  

All of the knowledge and skill in the universe is wasted if I don't have permission to use it.

I'm given a lot of freedom in my current role. I never feel afraid to speak my mind or question a manager's decision - but at the end of the day my job is to execute whatever plan my managers choose, whether I agree or not.

This is a key part of the firefighting trap -  and the PMP certification is strong first step to getting out of it.

The capabilities I have and am learning will give me the skills to escape - but it's the credential that will provide the opportunity. 

So how is it going so far?

The cohort started back in late June - with the primary objective being to read, analyze, and review the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) in anticipation of being able to take the exam some time in Q3 2025.

That timeline is not holding up.

For no fault of anyone - the cohort has had a difficult time meeting regularly and making progress. As of our last meeting we were only about halfway through the PMBOK and I suspect we won't regain a pace that will allow us to take the exam before the end of the year.

In spite of that - I've been doing plenty of my own self-studying to prepare. 

• I've read through the PMBOK in its entirety, and while there are areas where I could use some review/clarity I feel relatively comfortable with the content.
  
  
• I've been using a handful of different tools to practice for the exam. PMI and LinkedIn both offer great resources for exam prep - and I've been using an AI education app called Sizzle to study some of the concepts that are more foreign to me

I've been trying to commit at least 2 hours a week to preparing - and while I can't claim to hit that benchmark every week I feel confident that when it comes time to take the exam, I will be ready. 

On its own the PMP won't teach me how to stop fighting fires

But it might give me the standing to actually implement what I know and what I'm learning.

If you've navigated similar credential gaps or have any tips on preparing for a big exam - I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading,

 

CHG 

 

 

 

Reading Reflections: January Catch-Up

 I'd like to have my Sunday posts be a reflection on whichever book I've read the previous week - but seeing as I'm starting this practice with a massive backlog of books I'd like to talk about I figure I'll reflect on the books I've read this year month by month until I'm caught up. 

 

Once I'm caught up I'll put a bit more depth into these reflections; but until then it's the lightning round.

 

Starting with January.

 

The Goal - Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Wow. What a way to start the year. If I remember correctly - towards the end of last year I was giving some sober consideration to pursuing an MBA. The Goal is at the top of pretty much every MBA reading list - and there's really no doubt as to why.

My dad was an operations manager for most of my formative years - so a lot of the lessons this book teaches weren't entirely new to me but this was my first time being exposed to a more academic examination of the theory of constraints

This book has absolutely changed the way I see and approach process challenges at work AND in my personal life. 

This one is a must read. 

10/10 

A Call To Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power - Jimmy Carter 

I had this book on my shelf for some time and was inspired to read it after President Carter's passing at the end of 2024.

Carter's compassion for women worldwide is important and relevant - but there are times in the book where it feels he prioritizes a defense for religion over a defense of humans. This weakens his message.

His premise that violence against women is often predicated on false interpretations of religious texts is one that I want to believe is true - but I did not feel that his evidence is strong enough to definitively make that assessment.

Despite this frustrating hollowness - the book is worth reading.

7/10 

A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

Picking up this book - I expected I'd get through 5 or 10 pages and be so overwhelmed by it I would have to abandon it.

I have never been so wrong. 

Hawking breaks down the complex mysteries of the universe with a seemingly unending supply of wit and charisma that take what could have been a college textbook and turn it into a narrative nonfiction. I found that once I had made it through the first few pages I couldn't put the damn thing down.

It is unlikely that I'll be getting any calls from Cambridge to lecture on cosmology -  but I finished this book knowing significantly more about the universe than I had before.

If you're a nerd (like me) - this is a must read.
If you're not - you might still enjoy this one.

9/10 

Neuromancer - William Gibson 

This one had been on my list for a long time - I had started it probably 5 or 6 times and never made it past the first chapter.

This book is dense. 

The story burns slow and Gibson deliberately leaves gaps that had me re-reading the page trying to understand what I'd missed.

All that considered - this was a fantastic read. The impact that this story has had on science fiction (and science fact) is obvious. 

I don't know if I'd call this one a must read - there is undoubtedly a very particular audience that is likely to enjoy it.

If you like dense sci-fi you've probably already read this one, if you don't there's an adaptation coming to Apple TV in the near future.

8/10 

The Core Principle

Learn to stop fighting fires and start building houses that won't burn - and develop the skills to teach others how to do the same. 

I mentioned this core driving principle in last week's post. What I didn't do is bother going into any particular detail about what that means - or why I've chosen it as my core principle. This week I wanted to take an opportunity to expand.

At some point - I fell in love with crisis. 

 

Perhaps it was in my high school stage crew days - the adrenaline rush of having a few dark seconds to transform a set or having to track down a missing cast member moments before they're intended to go on stage.

Or it could have been during college - doing sports broadcasts out of an ambulance that had been gutted and turned into a TV studio. There's certainly a thrill in jumping out of the back of the truck and sprinting 100 yards to fix a bad connection on a camera.

Maybe it was in the midst of wet socks and long days as a winemaker. 

Or the satisfaction of helping a banking customer through a moment of financial panic.

 

All I know is that when I arrived at my first role with NASA SBIR/STTR - I was already addicted to putting myself in the middle of a tempest - and I had never considered that this was a mistake.

"Problem Solving" was one of the key skills I've used to market myself when seeking employment the past decade. If your back is against the wall - you can trust that Carl will come through to save the day. This is a reputation that I'm deeply proud of and I do not regret building.

Much of my success in my current role has come as a result of my willingness to dive into a mess and get my hands dirty. These skills have allowed me to build strong relationships with other high-performers and have allowed me to stand out as a key contributor. 

But if I'm the guy you call to absorb chaos and produce stability - that means my value is dependent on the continued arrival of chaos! 

As I've gone through my third year with the SBIR program and seen many of the same crises appear - I've come to the painful realization: 

I've never solved a problem - I've just been helping the team survive them. 

Which is certainly a valuable contribution in the moment but often times allows the problem to continue to grow unchecked. If I keep bailing out the boat fast enough no one will ever bother to plug the hole letting the water in.

 

This is not sustainable.   

• It sets a ceiling on my career growth - my team can't put me into a strategic role when they need me for a tactical one.
  
  
• My willingness for late nights and missed meals lessens every time I find myself fighting the same old fires.
   
• I have become a bottleneck for my organization. I'm usually pretty good at staying on top of things - but the longer this goes on the bigger my incoming pipeline gets - and I can only do so much. The opportunity for me to be responsible for a critical failure increases.
   
• I can see the forest - but my time is spent stuck on the trees. I have a front row seat on every crisis and have ideas on how we can prevent them. But before I get a chance to share those ideas I'm whisked along into the next crisis.
   
• My continued success is dependent on continued chaos. 

 

So how do I break the addiction?

It's one thing for me to become aware of the problem with my addiction to firefighting.

It's another to find a way out.

 

To reuse the metaphor from above - how can I stop bailing out the boat without letting the boat sink. This is why learning to 'build better houses' is so important to my growth.

 

The only way that I can stop spending all my time fighting fires is to create an environment where the fires never start. If I can't create that environment - then I need to at least make it so that others can address fires before they start burning out of control.

That means:

• Getting better at documenting my work. Much of what I do is dependent on tacit knowledge or personal relationships that were built on years of trust. I can't easily hand those things to others - but I can document the fires that I encounter and how I put them out.
   
• Learning to design and execute better processes. In a complex environment that means learning to embrace uncertainty. It means allowing and accepting failure and leveraging lessons learned to improve. It means giving up some control in pursuit of emergence.
   
• Analyzing decisions and outcomes independently from one another. A good decision can have a bad outcome. A good outcome can come as the result of a bad decision. The outcome alone is not enough to support the necessary feedback loop.

I can't do it alone.

If I learn to escape this trap and someone else just falls in to replace me, nothing actually changes. The trap is just a symptom of a larger disease that infects most workplaces.

People like me work long hours to keep everything running smoothly - while most people never realize how close the whole organization comes to collapse every other day. We become shock absorbers that allow a broken system to keep running.

So it's not enough for me to just fix my own perspective and solve this locally. I want to help fix the whole chain.

• I want to help my organization (and others) develop resilience.
   
• I want to multiply the impact of the lessons I've learned. One voice is a zealot. Many voices are a crusade.
  
  
• I enjoy this type of work - and I can imagine building a career around these ideas.

I'd love to hear from people if they find themselves in a similar pattern in their life/work. 

Do you find yourself constantly solving the same problems over and over?

Have you figured out how to escape - or are you still in the trap?

CHG
 

My 100 Book Challenge

Why the challenge?

When I was a kid - I loved reading. 

I read a lot of the standard kids/YA fiction (Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, Alex Rider, etc.) - but I was also never afraid to check out a book from the library that was a bit beyond my reading level. I have some fractured memories of checking out a college level robotics book when I was about 8 years old. I don't expect I gleaned much from that particular volume but the intent was there.

 

In the time since then my relationship with reading had waned.

• 10 year old me read dozens of books a year
  
  
• 15 year old me read maybe a dozen books a year (and most of those were required for an english class)
  
  
• Between 20 and 30 years old I probably only read about a dozen books total.

Despite this - in the back of my mind I've always continued to imagine that reading is a part of my core identity.

 

So entering 2025 I decided I'd set a resolution to read more - and not just more, but a LOT more. In my arrogance I decided that my goal was to read 100 books in 2025. 

Crazy right? Like - totally out of touch with reality. But to quote Zava - "Dream big, and you may never wake up"

I didn't set any hard rules or regulations. They could be books I've read before, they could be fiction or non-fiction, they don't have to be a certain length to qualify.

The only real limitation I set was that my 2 year old daughter's books don't count. If I was counting each time I've read the Little Golden Books "I am Elphaba" and "I am Galinda" - I think I'd be just shy of 1 million books read this year.

The Plan

Last time I did this in 2022 - I didn't really start with much of a plan. 

At the time my intent was: 

• Quit a job that I knew wasn't working for me.
• Start taking Google's Data Analytics certificate
• Follow that certificate with another course/certificate and then another, and then another, and so on.
• Post about it a bunch on LinkedIn 
• Find a job before I ran out of money.

In hindsight it's a bit of a miracle that everything turned out so well.

My lack of a good plan was saved by a strong network (thanks Alina) and an extremely patient and generous wife (thanks Tiff).

---

This time around I'm determined to be more intentional in my planning and execution, especially because the stakes are much different.
 

I'm not unemployed or desperately job hunting. I'm not struggling in my role or feeling like failure is imminent. I've just been stuck with a deeply unsettling feeling that I don't know where I'm going or what I should be doing to help me get there. The next 6 months feel settled - but I'm worried about where I'll be in 10 years.

So I decided I'd try to address those feelings. 

It started earlier this year when I asked ChatGPT to run me through a series of questions to help me determine my professional strengths and weaknesses - and then offer constructive guidance on how to leverage my strengths and minimize/eliminate my weaknesses.

That line of questioning produced this result:

You’ve become essential because of the fires, not in spite of them. That means your value is anchored in reactivity, not design. You’re known as someone who absorbs chaos and produces stability — but not as someone who prevents chaos through structural foresight. 

So here’s the prescription — direct and unsentimental:

A. Reposition yourself.

B. Build reputational gravity outside your current lane.

C. Act before invited.

Following up on this I asked ChatGPT to direct me towards resources that would help me exercise these muscles and give me ideas on how to create tools to actually start executing.

Week 193 (Picking the blog back up again)

It's been a long while since I've made a blog post. 185 weeks to be exact. 

In that time the investments in my career development I documented here took root - 

I was hired by a company called REI Systems as a Management Analyst supporting the NASA SBIR/STTR program. In that role I supported a NASA civil servant our of Ames Research Center named Rich Pisarski. 

After a year there - the contract moved to a company called BryceTech and I moved with it. During this time I continued to support Rich; but expanded my role to lead and support a wide range of other program operations as well. 

After a year at BryceTech - an opportunity opened up back at REI Systems to serve as a Business Analyst on the "NASA PETs Team" - which was developing an application called ProSAMs for the SBIR/STTR program. I was hired for this role in February of 2024 and have been there ever since. 

Life is very very different now than it was in 2022 when I made my last post here. 

• I have a 2 year old daughter now. 
• My wife 'retired' from full time work to be a stay at home mom. 
• Our house has continually tried to bankrupt us with flooding basements, roof leaks, and endless renovations. 
• Generative AI has come screaming into every professional (and personal) conversation and introduced the suggestion of a paradigm shift in just about every industry. 
• There was an election that has resulted in more "in these unprecendented times" sorts of conversations (especially for those of us working with the government). 
• Prices have steadily risen on pretty much anything and everything. 

So it has become apparent to me (once again) that continued growth is necessary just to survive - and talking about growth on LinkedIn and through this forum in 2022 was a contributor to my success. So it stands to reason I should keep talking about it now. With the help of Claude I've created a pretty detailed professional growth plan - and reigniting my voice was a part of that plan. 

I look forward to sharing the rest of it. 

CHG

Week 8 The Job Hunt