In the daily grind of our work lives, it’s important to have some reflections about how things have gone for us over the past year.

I do this exercise often, to calibrate a few different things.

Number 1, to remind myself about “macro-patience and micro-speed” – two seemingly conflicting concepts, but when married together, are the recipe for extreme productivity.

This means that you will accomplish a lot over a long period of time, if you don’t worry about how much you are accomplishing, but instead, focus on doing as many of “the right things” that you can execute over said period of time.

This reflection calms me a bit, and reminds me that I don’t have to worry about things happening. They will happen when they’re meant to happen, when I/we do the right things.

Number 2, to give me an indicator about the future. We can’t predict the future, but we can use the data from it’s inputs and outputs to give us an indicator of what can be achieved in the future when we repeat certain actions, or recreate a version of actions that have brought us success or failures in the past.

So, as I reflect on what has occurred over the past year, I’m amazed at where Data Driven Design is as a company, and where I am personally in my journey.

A year ago, I was nervous to tell many people about moving to Spain; I almost wanted to keep it private. It was for me.

I knew I needed to communicate it; and to open up, so I started to, but that didn’t change the fact that I was nervous about people’s reactions.

Who does this guy think he is? How can he move to Spain? How is he going to conduct business? Will he really be working? Can I trust him?

Without going into my commentary about all of these hypothetical questions that were literally asked by many people, I’m sure of it, I will say that a lot has changed in one year, for me personally.

I’m no longer nervous about moving to Spain, of course, because I live now in Valencia with my family, and I’m no longer nervous sharing any information about living in Spain while still working in the United States, in fact, so much so that it’s all been documented in the episode of House Hunters International that we filmed, and is embedded in this post.

While watching this episode, which aired originally on April 25, 2019 on HGTV, about 8 months after moving to Spain and just over a year after deciding we were moving (and ironically about exactly one year and 10 days after selling our house in Spring Hill, TN), I feel proud of Kate and myself, especially of our kids Max and Samantha – I feel thankful for the rest of the Data Driven Design team for helping us build a remote workplace culture conducive to providing the best possible client experience, and I feel excited to visit Nashville again this summer for a few weeks.

Please, enjoy the episode, however it makes you feel! And thanks, as always for reaching, watching and listening!