Everything Counts: The Career Lessons I Didn’t Know I Was Preparing For
Most people only see the chapter you’re in now not the chapters that shaped you. When I look back on my career, it’s clear that every role, every environment, every success, and every setback was preparing me for work I didn’t yet know I would do. None of it felt linear at the time. In fact, much of it felt like survival: learning to communicate, manage pressure, navigate rejection, build trust, and understand what makes people move toward a decision. When I reflect on the path it makes sense. Everything counted, even the parts I didn’t understand then.
Before I ever thought about building a company, I spent years learning how to understand people. Not through frameworks or leadership books but through real conversations, long days, missed quotas, surprise wins, and hundreds of tiny moments where someone decided to trust me or decided not to. That’s where the foundation was built, not in the title or the compensation plan, but in the quiet lessons that only become obvious years later.
The Early Days: Learning How to Show Up
My career began in door-to-door sales, walking neighborhoods in Chicago selling windows and siding. There’s no environment that exposes your weaknesses or builds resilience faster. You learn how to talk to strangers, how to handle rejection, and how to find composure when conditions are anything but comfortable (Chicago weather all year around is a doozy). Every conversation teaches you something, even if it’s simply how to maintain your presence.
Door-to-door didn’t just teach me sales. It taught me something more valuable: how to show up. How to knock on the next door even when the last ten didn’t go your way. How to stay grounded when your confidence takes a hit. How to keep going when there’s no guarantee anything is going to work. Those lessons don’t expire. They follow you everywhere.
A Decade at CDW: Developing the Craft
When I joined CDW, I entered a different kind of classroom. This wasn’t survival anymore, it was refinement. CDW is where I learned professionalism, process, and the discipline of building trust with customers who expect excellence. It was ten years of repetition, complexity, and evolution. I learned how to:
Manage large accounts
Communicate with senior leaders
Build long-term relationships
Understand technology deeply enough to guide decision-making
More than that, I learned how to operate inside a high-performance environment. Teams mattered. Culture mattered. Showing up prepared mattered. That decade gave me a foundation of structure and skill. A toolkit I didn't fully appreciate until I left.
Around this time, I also started teaching group fitness classes in the evenings and weekends. At the time, it felt like a side passion but looking back, it was the first real pull toward the health industry. It was the earliest sign that my path would eventually intersect with wellness long before I knew how.
Gartner: Getting My Masters Degree in Corporate America
When I transitioned to Gartner in January 2021, I entered a world where strategy, research, and executive-level storytelling mattered even more. Working with consulting services is different from selling technology. You’re not selling a product. You’re selling clarity. You’re selling perspective. You’re helping leaders navigate uncertainty and make decisions that shape entire organizations.
At Gartner, I learned how to articulate insights, how to simplify complexity, and how to speak in the language of the C-suite. I became sharper in the way I frame ideas, more intentional in the way I communicate, and more disciplined in how I prepare for every conversation.
Those four years were also my introduction to remote work. A lifestyle that forced me to recreate structure, community, and separation on my own terms. Without an office, you learn quickly how much environment impacts your mindset. That realization would later shape how I think about the role of physical spaces in human performance.
The Lessons That Stayed With Me
When you string together fourteen years of experience, the lessons become clearer. They weren't obvious in the moment, but now they form a throughline that shaped the person I am today. Among them:
People don’t buy products. They buy belief.
Preparation is what allows you to remain calm when the unexpected happens.
Authenticity builds trust faster than any strategy.
Consistency compounds even when progress doesn’t show immediately.
Great communication is not about speaking; it’s about understanding.
Leadership is learned in the quiet moments, not the visible ones.
Each environment taught me something different, but together they created a foundation I rely on every day.
Becoming Who You Didn’t Know You Were Becoming
When you’re early in your career, it’s easy to feel like the work you’re doing is disconnected from the future you want. You don’t yet see how the pressure, the repetition, the uncomfortable conversations, or the long seasons of uncertainty are shaping you but over time, the purpose becomes clearer. The lessons you pick up without noticing become the tools you depend on later.
Everything counts. The hard seasons, the slow seasons, the years where you’re just trying to learn the ropes, and the years where you finally feel like you’re growing. You don’t build a vision on day one. You build yourself and one day, you look back and realize that every chapter prepared you for the next, even the chapters you didn’t understand at the time.
This article isn’t about HUMN or the work I’m doing now. It’s about the truth that experience shapes us long before we know what we’re being shaped for. It’s about honoring the journey that built you, even when you weren’t aware of it and it’s about recognizing that sometimes the path makes sense only when you reflect on how far you’ve come. Everything counts. More than we realize in the moment.
