Near the beginning of the year, I decided that I needed to switch gears in my career. I made a very dedicated push towards becoming a full-time Ruby developer, leaving my comfortable position as a J2EE web content management and identity management specialist. My leisure time was consumed with sharpening my Ruby skills and learning new technologies. I made Rails Pub Nite a monthly ritual and networked like crazy on just about every networking site I could. I followed a number of job site feeds and sent out many cover letters and resumes.

Finally, my break came from a very unlikely source: Facebook. I posted to a Ruby on Rails group on Facebook to advertise my skills and experience and offer my services. This was seen by the Systems Manager at the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, who asked me to send her my resume. I did so gladly and not too long after that I was asked in for an interview.

The project they needed me to work on was definitely very appealing, if a bit ambitious. They wanted to replace the monolithic pile of .NET that was currently doing an incredibly bad job of managing their records and processes and replace that with something leaner, meaner, and more attuned to their needs developed in-house using Ruby on Rails. This was my chance to gain experience working on a large Rails project from the ground up and to do so for a technologically progressive organization providing a valuable service to so many people all over the world.

That project is still on-going, and I recently accepted a permanent position with the Society. We hope to launch an initial release of the project early in the new year and I’m definitely bracing myself for a challenging job in 2010.

The professional networking I did then paid off in other ways as well. I previously wrote about how I helped a very good friend of mine land a job at PostRank. He moved to Kitchener/Waterloo while I moved back to North York, yet another of the changes that 2009 brought.

Finding myself back in Toronto after two years living in Mississauga, I quickly got to work making new friends and reconnecting with old. I’ve started participating in some Meetup groups related to my various interests, as well as events with #GenYTO and the Freshbooks crew. In just a few months, I’ve met some awesome Torontonians (I couldn’t possibly link to you all!).

So, at the end of 2009, I find myself in a new place — well, new in the sense that I haven’t been here in a couple of years — with a new job and new friends.

I am looking forward to 2010 with much excitement.

You can’t fix yourself.  You have to rebuild.

Take stock of who you are, where you are, and what has changed about your life and yourself.  And then do the things that will make you happier, make you smarter and better and stronger, and do them because you want to.  No one who is trying to fix a loss, or a heartache, is going to move on – if you do this, you are defining yourself by your tragedy.

This is such an important point that I felt I needed to echo it and add a bit of my own experience to it.

I’ve made the mistake of trying to “fix” myself. I’ve continued making that mistake for very many years. Jon explains that we can’t fix ourselves because we are simply so complex that it’s like trying to patch the foundation of a building. I’ve discovered that there’s an even more sinister factor at work when we try to fix ourselves.

To dedicate effort to fixing ourselves, we must first think that we are broken.

It’s sinister because in our well-intentioned attempts to improve the things we do not like about ourselves, we are subconsciously reinforcing the belief that our current state is unacceptable, that we are not good enough right now. Nothing could be worse for self-esteem.

If you are truly “broken” you will heal with time, just as your body does. If you feel that the requisite time has passed but you are still deeply injured, I would suggest seeking professional help to put yourself firmly on the path to recovery (again, just as with our bodies). But if you assume you are broken, I challenge you to question that assumption.

My attempts at self-improvement had always started from the position that I am currently not acceptable and that I must fix myself to become good enough. But then I noticed situations in which I thought a lot worse of myself than others thought of me and it caused me to question the way I think about myself. I realized that contrary to what I believed then, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with me. I am acceptable as I am now.

The lesson I have learned about trying to “fix” ourselves, then, is this:

Start from the position of accepting yourself for what you currently are, then figure out how to do even better. Do not “fix”, improve!