2018: 99 Travel Days & Lessons Learned

99 days on the road for work, meeting with clients, and learning this past year. 99 may sound like a lot to some, but many of you traveled much more. Some of my colleagues at Cornerstone Advisors certainly did. As the sun sets on 2018, 4 personal lessons I took away from the travels....

1. Practicing Gratitude: It's been a blessing to work with a smart group of colleagues, a growing group of clients, and to grow a practice. All those years at tech firms and buying tech as a banker helped as we grew our independent fintech work this year into 3 of the largest 4 fintech providers and several ambitious growth leaders in lending and digital. I'm grateful for the 22 different colleagues I worked with directly traveling on client projects over the past year and the other 70 who supported it. Exciting times. I'm grateful for our firm's partners in recognizing where impact could be made and continuing to push.
2. Here's to Your Health! I learned painfully that it's impossible to serve either my family or my clients well without a good night's sleep. While exercise has been a priority for years, sleep was taken totally for granted. The "work hard, play hard" mantra sounds good, but it ran out of fuel. Especially out on the road where flights, weather, hotels, and schedules often show no mercy. We all have a need to get well and, if we can, stay well. Me too. Ouch. Much better now, but lesson learned.
3. Work Smarter, Not Just Harder: My Mom was a career nurse and mental health association volunteer who started and finished college as a single mother raising five kids. After a long career and fairly short retirement, we lost her 12 years ago. My stepdad built a community business working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Thankfully, at age 84, my family still has him in our life. I'm forever grateful for both of them and what they sacrificed. As it turns out, their work ethic has been a tough standard for me to follow. Finding the right balance has been tricky. I learned over the past year or so that every extra hour of work to get a job done is an hour not with family, friends, volunteering, or any number of other pursuits. I took more personal time with my wife and kids this year than ever before. I'm truly grateful for family and that time was tremendously rewarding. We are big fans of "We Will" commitments at Cornerstone, so I WILL use systems in 2019 to work smarter through (yes, I promise, Eric Weikart) logging all forecasts and time!
4. Getting Grounded Locally As Well As Nationally: Given that our work is nationwide, I appreciated involvement in national gigs like The Financial Brand Forum and AFT and contributing to the likes of American Banker, GonzoBanker, and my colleague Ron Shevlin's Insight Vault. (On gratitude, big shout out to Ron, who always brings valuable research and provocative content to the table.) In 2018, I also felt a need to connect more locally after decades of work mainly elsewhere. Thanks to inspirations from others like Scott Mills, Kim Borges, and Charley Smith and what they are doing in their local communities, I reached out to establish relationships with Indy's Second Helpings, Techpoint, and Tech Talks. We'll see where it all goes.

Still learning. I would love to hear your thoughts and your own takeaways from 2018. Safe travels, -Sam