Presentation by Allan Woodstrom at the Minneapolis Digital Summit on August 19, 2022.
PDF Link: How Any Marketer Can Derive Value from Digital Data Like a Pro
Day 7 in Quarantine
It’s been seven days since I hid in a room from the rest of the my family hoping no one else would succumb to the virus that’s been plaguing our world for over two years. Days one and two, I mostly slept. Days three and four, I enjoyed watching TV and ordering food delivery. Days five and six, I created this web site.
By day, I am a digital analytics director for a fortune 100 retailer in the Minneapolis, Minnesota area. As someone who has participated in a few mentorship programs over the years and someone with a good sized team, I am often asked about what it takes to get a promotion.
The answer is never simple. It’s usually a combination of hard work, servitude, leadership, technical skills and mostly being at the right place at the right time with people who trust you.
Looking back at my own career, I started my post college career in 2005. A couple of years before the housing bubble burst in 2008 and the economy went into a recession. 2008 wasn’t a particularly good time to be looking for work or a promotion. If you were working, it was a hustle. It was a grind. Sleeping five to six hours a night was good if you could get it. Being the first in the office and the last one out was badge of honor, though it didn’t matter much, as you could reached anytime via your cell phone and there wasn’t much that was off limits at the time. Your laptop was with you at all times, even on vacation.
That grind was not good for people. Not sleeping was just one part of it. We also ate incredibly poorly. Everything was made to be super convenient and ready to satisfy cravings. But most of the time, the ultra-processed, sugar-packed food left us looking for something else about an hour later. Getting exercise was also laughable too.
Though the office had treadmills, who had time for that, amongst the hundreds of emails coming in a day? God forbid you run into some whom you hadn’t responded to their email.
These habits were engrained in my generation for the better part of 15 years, until the pandemic struck us down. The consequences of our grinders mentality were not good. For many high achievers, including myself, we still wear the scars from this time in our life when we thought we were invincible. Depression, anxiety, high blood pressure, cancer, chronic fatigue and more, are some the things I know many people still deal with today. The pandemic for the most part just ramped those things up.
I put this site together, in part because I was bored, in part because I had a week to myself, in part because I enjoy the challenge of wiping up a website, but mostly I have a sincere hope that it might help someone. That it might help someone find a resource that’s helpful for their situation, whether that be feeling stuck in their career, stuck financially or not feeling well just stuck in the general rat race we call life.
If you read this far, I love ya. I’m here for ya, cheering you on. You can do whatever you set your mind to. God bless.
