Lessons learned from 20 years of business experience

Because I am a nerd and curious about systems, processes, and experiences, I just listed out all of the jobs I've ever had a made a list of the things that worked well and didn't work well (lessons learned) for all of them, dating back to my first job as a lawn-mower on Guemes Island at age 13 and leading up to my most recent experiences as a Program Manager at Microsoft.  The lessons are listed in chronological order of occurrence and some repeat (for better or worse...).  I'm happy there's more good than bad!!!

The things that worked well (stuff to keep doing and looking for!!):

1. Good cash
2. Quick and fast
3. Use others equipment
4. Nice summer job
5. By the water
6. Marketing
7. Branding
8. Get looped in via friends (Andrew)
9. Customer service, solutions focus
10. Time to do my own thing
11. Networking with and learning from other smart people
12. Designing a product from scratch
13. Working with Garth
14. Brainstorming
15. Guerilla marketing
16. Crowdsourcing
17. Believing in your ideas
18. Leveraging existing technologies
19. Cool coding techniques
20. Seeing senior engineers
21. Leveraging existing technology
22. Reverse engineering
23. Giving people tools so they can continue to solve their own problems
24. Taking money from customers
25. Learning a ton of new stuff
26. Getting big corporate (enterprise) experience
27. Managing teams and politics
28. Using and implementing others’ technologies
29. Customizing stuff to fit users’ needs
30. Customer service
31. A business orientation
32. Project and program management
33. Networking
34. Learning a new business
35. Seeing opportunities
36. Microsoft experience
37. SharePoint experience
38. Meeting tech people more senior than me
39. Collab and web tech
40. Delivering SharePoint tech
41. Documenting things
42. Making cash
43. Forming LLC
44. Finding CPA and Bookkeeper
45. Leveraging existing relationships
46. Working with SharePoint as a solution platform
47. Leveraging FDA, compliance background
48. Project management
49. Relationship management
50. Creativity
51. Meeting people
52. Being a leader
53. Being creative
54. Learning Agile/Scrum
55. Leveraging SharePoint
56. Team leadership, managing teams, software dev
57. Learning about LINQ, jQuery, for example
58. Understanding software dev custom app dev process
59. Coding by myself
60. Building a product
61. Using recently learned technologies and latest technologies
62. Buying new technologies and environments
63. Focus
64. Ability to dev
65. Ability to focus on problem
66. Devving for the customer
67. Learning to dev in production
68. Partnering with other devs to get things done
69. Being more technical
70. Delivery of extremely complex solution and workflows
71. Mixing of technical and leadership skills
72. Customer relationship management
73. Managing up
74. Being clear with and partnering with managers
75. Playing with new technology
76. Partnering with sales team
77. Writing SOWs
78. Innovation
79. Partnering with key people
80. Creativity
81. Reaching out to the market
82. Partnering with sales
83. Branding
84. Making sure a very important project succeed
85. Making key relationships with key suppliers
86. Getting a job that fit really well fast
87. Leveraging my existing network
88. Leveraging my existing skills

The things that didn't work so well (things I need to fix, avoid, or be aware of):

1. Don’t piss off the boss
2. Don’t be overly cocky
3. It’s just a job
4. People are weird
5. Get paid and do your own thing
6. Business model
7. Networking with true professionals
8. Being a kid and inexperienced
9. Being overly cocky
10. Managing the project
11. Making sure there was money and a market
12. Overwhelmed by code
13. Didn’t work well with others, no team concept
14. Getting raises
15. Negotiating for salaries
16. Managing up
17. Some relationships
18. Reading politics
19. Personal relationships
20. Managing up
21. Politics
22. Peers, partnering
23. Politics
24. Non-technical people
25. Being to specific, clear
26. Boss person
27. Consulting
28. Professionalism
29. Maintenance of relationship
30. Personal relationships
31. Being overly ambitious and too abstract
32. Politics
33. Consulting
34. Customer relationship management
35. Launching
36. Partnering
37. Sharing
38. No team
39. No success criteria or project management
40. No partners
41. Too technical
42. Pigeon-holing
43. Craziness at Microsoft and with small vendors
44. Deciding to do the work as a manager
45. Internal politics
46. Poor incentives
47. Focus on the wrong things
48. Technology too “green”
49. Choosing the right partners
50. Managing big politics
51. Leveraging project into program, dealing with larger contexts
52. Context of contract and position
53. A new manager