I honestly wasn’t going to do a 2009 retrospective. Really, I wasn’t. I tend to sit in my own head a few times during the year: the week before January 1st, the week before March 29th, and the week before July 1st. This year was no different. The downside to this reflection is that it tends to be almost always negative - I think almost exclusively about what wasn’t done right and what still needs to be done that I am dreading.

Then today, I read this blog post from my friend Keidra about risk and failure. In it, she expresses a desire to have more of a willingness to take risks and to accept failures as learning opportunities. She also speaks of the internalization of the emotion of failure, and how it can cascade from simple regret into shame and paralysis. Overall, it was a very thought provoking and personal piece.

Given my reflective and self deprecating mindset, it struck a particularly loud chord with me. 2009 has been a learning year (a rebuilding year, as the Cubs and Bears put it), and most of that learning has been as a direct result of risk and failure of one sort or another.

Attached to each of these lessons is some measure of shame, be it of the “I can’t believe that I didn’t know that” or the “I can’t believe I did that” nature. I once heard that shame can’t survive sunlight, and the easiest way to get past it is to tell on yourself to others. With that sentiment in mind, here are my top lessons of 2009.

1. Create a personal relationship with clients. If you are a person that they have to either pay to talk to or have to talk to when something is wrong, there will always be a negative connotation to your interaction with them.
2. Check your ego at the door. You may call yourself the president of the company, but the client doesn’t care if you are smarter in your field than they are. That’s why they are paying you in the first place. If a client complains about something you have done, the issue is always with you.
3. Don’t be afraid to say no to a client, so long as that isn’t the full answer. If you are going to tell a client that they are asking for a service you don’t yet provide, make sure you can tell them who does provide it, and then check up with them later to see how its working out.
4. Use contractors. Heavily. Running a business doesn’t mean doing all of the work, even for a small start-up company. The more tasks you can give to contractors, the more time you have available to work on more strategic items. At the same time, remember that the learning curve will always be steep with a new contractor.
5. Don’t forget that everything has a price, even services that are offered for free. If there is something that you can pay someone to do on a set time line, then chances are you should just pay them, rather than relying on free with an unknown time line.
6. Surrender the fantasy that your life will ever be easy. It may get better or worse at times, but even when it is at its best it still requires a level of effort beyond what you initially expect.
7. If you are drinking an entire 12-cup pot of coffee each morning between 9am and noon and you are having health problems, chances are the two are related.
8. If you want people to allow you to change so that you can be happy, you have to allow for changes in others that are for the same reason.
9. Stop gap solutions are fine, so long as they are just that and there is a plan for replacing them. The good may be the enemy of the best, but expediency often rules the day.
10. Reputation and integrity are everything, which means that investment clients can cost you more than the time and money spent on them.

I know, I know. Those are all pretty obvious points. Some are even things that a child would learn in some sort of school when they are four years old. I will most likely expand on all ten of these items for individual posts later, but to do that here would be a novella.

Like I said, 2009 has been a learning year.