Man, 2019, huh? Everyone was talking about “what to expect” and I remember starting that year with this massive project on my plate. We were all hyped up, you know? Like, this was the thing, the big one that was gonna define our team, maybe even the whole company for a while. I was really looking forward to digging deep into it, putting in all those late nights because I genuinely believed in what we were trying to build.
I dove headfirst into it. I mean, literally, I cleared my calendar for weeks. I was mapping out the architecture, sketching user flows, wrestling with some gnarly legacy code we had to integrate. My daily routine became a blur of coffee, whiteboards, and more coffee. We were chasing this tight deadline, pulling out all the stops. We had daily stand-ups, sometimes even after-hours calls, just trying to keep all the plates spinning. Everyone was buzzing. We could practically taste the launch, the big reveal. We saw the finish line, or at least, we thought we did.
Then the Ground Shifted
And then, just like that, the air went out of the room. It was around springtime, I guess. The market shifted, or maybe it was an internal re-org, who knows the real story behind these things sometimes? All I know is, one Tuesday morning, we got called into a meeting. The boss came in, looking grim, and just laid it out. The whole project, the big one we’d been pouring our lives into? It was getting shelved. Not just paused, but, like, indefinitely. Done. Poof.
You can imagine the silence in that room. It was heavy. All that effort, all those late nights, the dreams we had for it – just gone. It was a real punch to the gut. I felt this weird mix of disappointment, frustration, and just plain exhaustion. What were we supposed to do now? My “expectations” for 2019 just evaporated into thin air. I had literally nothing else lined up for myself at work, because this project was my 2019.
For a few days, I was just kind of floating. Coming to work, doing the minimum, just trying to process it. It felt like a breakup, seriously. All the plans, gone. I started looking at other things, smaller tasks that had been pushed aside. Things no one else really wanted to touch. I figured, hey, gotta do something, right? I started fixing bugs, cleaning up some old databases, just trying to occupy my brain.
- Felt lost after the big project got canned.
- Started picking up small, overlooked tasks.
- Realized these small tasks were actual problems needing solutions.
What happened next was kinda unexpected, though. As I started poking at these smaller, “unimportant” things, I realized they weren’t so unimportant after all. They were actually causing little friction points all over the place. Stuff that everyone just accepted as “the way things are.” I started to dig into them, not with the grand vision of the big project, but with just a simple goal: make this one small thing work a little bit better. Make that other small thing less annoying. It was a completely different way of working. No fanfares, no big announcements, just quietly chipping away at problems.
Finding My Feet Again
I started talking to people from other teams, too. Folks who were indirectly affected by these little annoyances. Asking them what was truly bugging them, what was slowing them down. It wasn’t about building a shiny new product anymore. It was about making existing things run smoother. I ended up building some simple scripts, automating a few manual processes, just little quality-of-life improvements. Nothing glamorous, but suddenly, people were noticing.
They’d come up to me and say, “Hey, that thing you fixed? It saved me an hour this week!” Or, “The report you automated, it actually works now!” It was a different kind of satisfaction than the big project promised. It was immediate, tangible, and deeply appreciated by the people around me. It wasn’t about hitting some grand, abstract goal that might get shelved anyway. It was about solving real, everyday headaches.
By the end of 2019, my “career expectation” had flipped entirely. I went from expecting a big, public win to finding genuine fulfillment in a bunch of small, quiet victories. I learned that sometimes, the most impactful work isn’t the stuff with the loudest fanfare. It’s the stuff that actually makes people’s lives easier, one tiny fix at a time. And frankly, that realization completely changed how I approached my work from then on. It was a rough start to the year, but man, the lessons learned were priceless.
