I can just barely remember getting the idea to start writing a blog. It was part of a new organizational change that was going on with the company I worked for at the time. They were embarking on a new thought leadership initiative and I thought I could add value through writing. I was a twenty eight year old full of ego and confidence setting out to do something on a whim. Five years ago, I was still flying high with writing and had hit 1,000 total posts in that time.
I’m now at nearly 1,500 posts 10 years in. My average post rate is down to maybe 50 a week but I like to think the quality of each of those posts has gone up. I can remember previously having flights where I’d knock out 10 or 15 two paragraph posts that I’d schedule up over the next two weeks. Those posts would be based on a topic that I found interesting, but I would rarely delve further into the idea. Now, I think I at least scratch the surface a bit more. While the quantity may be down, hopefully the quality has gone up.
I’ve been out of college for 16 years now and I’ve worked for three different companies in that time (two of them for 15 of those years). In that time, I have clearly changed as a person, a writer, a coworker, a manager, and a subject matter expert. I have come to better understand this world of corporate real estate that we operate in. Of all the areas impacting business operations, it truly has the most opportunity to be captured, but it’s also the most fundamentally broken in most organizations.
Writing here for the past decade has provided a tremendous personal value. I feel more confident in my ability to express my thoughts, whether verbally or in writing, in various forums. My ability to articulate concepts in a way that others can follow has also improved. But mainly, writing has kept me curious and thoughtful about the things happening around me. Forcing myself to put words down means that I need to constantly find topics that are worth writing on and thinking about those topics.
While I never expect this blog to take off, I do appreciate the many people who have reached out on topics or shared their own experiences with me over the past decade. Hopefully, plenty of others get value from what I write. Hopefully, I’m helping to move corporate real estate ideas and innovation, even if in just the smallest of ways, in positive directions.
At the end of the day, I’ve grown from the things I write here so it has all been worthwhile. But I would not be here without those around. So thank you to everyone reading this, and even to those that will never see this!