If you ever come into my home office to look at some code or a demonstration of a new software update, there are a few things you will notice before I turn on my monitor.

The first will probably be the disparity between my wife’s luxurious office chair and my own plywood perch. We bought her chair about five years ago while she was getting her degree, and I bought my own about 10 years ago when I was single and poor. Considering that I am in my chair 16 hours a day and that I cannot remember the last time she sat in her chair, it borders on the absurd.

The next thing you will notice will probably be the most innovative thing I have ever come up with, and I am honestly proud of it. As most of you know, I’m a smoker. As I sit at my desk for the previously mentioned 16 hours a day, the ashtray tends to fill up. My solution? Put an ashtray on top of a empty Dominick’s Honey Roasted Peanuts container. When the ashtray gets full, I just flip it over and dump it into the container. It has no doubt saved me countless hours of time walking back and forth to a proper garbage can.

The next thing you will notice (and probably the last thing, because after you see it your skin will crawl and you will shove your hands in your pockets and you will begin to think you have walked into the den of a maniacal but somewhat groomed hobo) is my keyboard. To say that it has a “seasoned” appearance is an understatement.

Almost 10 years ago, my parents were at a loss to what to get me for my 24th birthday. I had been out of college and working for a while, and I had purchased everything I needed. Grasping at straws, they bought me a white Compaq computer. And though I have purchased many computers since then, the keyboard I received with that Compaq is still the one I use today.

I can’t seem to get rid of it. I know that there have been some advances in keyboards over the years (key response time, key action, ergonomics, function keys, etc), but I don’t care about any of them. I know this keyboard, and as odd as it sounds, it knows me. After the hundreds of thousands of lines of code, the scores of angry emails (and the scores of subsequent retractions), the mindless instant messenger conversations, the soul-searching inventories, and the morally questionable Google searches, it is safe to say that it has seen more about how I think and what I care about than any other person or thing on this mortal plane.

The reason I mention it is that I decided to clean it tonight. Not a thorough cleaning with a mini-vacuum or can of compressed air, mind you, but a flip-it-upside-down-and-shake-it cleaning. I’ll spare you the details of the horror that was deposited upon my desk, but I can say that I know where a lot of my receding hairline ended up, and that I could have covered a Olympic ski slope in the ash that shook loose.

My intent in cleaning it was to clear up the action on the left CTRL key (which has been a little sticky for the last few years), but that didn’t happen. Instead, the keyboard changed. It sounds different. It looks different. It feels different. Some keys that worked fine are now sticky, and some keys that were sticky now work fine. The keyboard had quirks, but I knew what they were and had adapted to them. Over the years, I had become efficient at exploiting those oddities to my advantage. The impact on my productivity is already being felt as I write this.

Did I really just write eight paragraphs about my beloved keyboard? Did I really just take up your precious time that you spent reading it? Has this blog really become that pointless? Well, yes and no.

You see, I made another decision this week about a long overdue housekeeping matter (in addition to the keyboard). After a lot of self-reflection and consultations with people I trust, I’ve decided to seek out a therapist. I’m not going to get into the juicy (or bizarre or mundane) details that led to this conclusion, but it has become clear to me that the left CTRL key in my brain has become, well, sticky.

As with any decision like this, I am feeling a certain amount of trepidation. I know that my brain has quirks, and I know that I have adapted my life to both the good and bad ones. The same obsessive qualities that drive me to check the ashtrays four times before I leave the house are also responsible for my drive to work extra hours on testing a new feature until I am sure it works correctly. I fear that this attempt to clear out the years of built up filth and self decay will instead only shift that detritus to other areas that were working fine prior to any attempt at improvement.

My solace is that, just like the keyboard, I am sure that my brain will be with me for years to come and I will have plenty of opportunities to shift things back to what has become my current definition of normal.

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.