After my speed run through the books that I lost track of, it seems like an appropriate time to mention The Intern. I have started to recognize burst periods of personal growth and development in my life. Kind of like miniature internal Renaissances. Clearly, a major one was when my father passed away, but The Intern brought about huge changes for me in my career and personal life. So I am going to reflect on that for this post.
My boss was looking to give me additional responsibilities because he felt like one of my next steps would be to go into management. Since I was involved in so many different projects, he thought that it would be a good idea for the new Engineering Intern to work with me. He would effectively be the manager from an official standpoint, but he pretty much made me the unofficial manager. I am not sure if that was ever communicated to The Intern, but that is what ended up happening.
I went to work trying to come up with all of these project ideas and things to do to keep The Intern from getting bored. My goal was just to have an internship that she would enjoy and feel like she learned a lot from. Looking back, I definitely did not do a great job leading her internship. I should have given her more autonomy. It wasn’t even intentional, I just would feel guilty giving her a project with no direction and felt like I needed to be available to help. But she is absolutely the most capable worker I have met throughout all of my time at work (though she would love to disagree). Anyway, I digress.
There is one night that really changed the dynamic of our relationship from a pseudo-manager/ intern to more of a friendship/ coworker situation. We were sitting up at my upstairs desk talking about work things and then all of a sudden, I just dove down the rabbit hole of philosophical thoughts/ my beliefs of the universe. I think we chatted for hours. The Intern didn’t necessarily hold the same beliefs, but she liked thinking and following along with my logic and poking at the ideas, and even challenged them. It was great that she did because it would cause me to think deeper too. She was the first person aside from my wife that I was able to talk about the crazy ideas that were starting to come to me, and I didn’t realize how much I actually needed that kind of person to share with these kinds of ideas.
The most important skill I learned from The Intern is about writing down my thoughts. She had this philosophy of writing her random most unfiltered thoughts down on a piece of paper throughout the day. She did so because it would allow for her to let go of the thoughts in her brain once she wrote them down. Occasionally, I would stop by her desk and ask if I could read them. They would say the most profound things. It was literally equivalent to some sacred wisdom that people worship and study. I think she helped me recognize the connection we all unknowingly have to the other side, our own consciousness which makes us unique. Many of the posts I put in my thoughts section were probably directly related to discussions with her.
Seeing her writings in action made me want to start writing myself. Even this blog is an extension of that drive. So I started writing down my thoughts with a book called This is Day One. It was a book that The Intern recommended to me, and that started its own domino effect of learning wisdom through others that continues to this day.
I am so thankful to The Intern for everything that she taught me and continues to teach me to this day, and being able to start blogging about the things that I have written and stored in my phone is bringing on a new level of motivation that exists thanks to her!
