Every decision we make in life ultimately leads us to where we end up on any given day. I made a decision on New Year’s Eve on December 31st, 2016 that I didn’t realize would have such an impact on me personally and professionally. I first learned about Makeover Monday in 2016, a few months before TC16, when I hopped on Twitter so I could follow the action from the conference since I wasn’t able to attend.
I went to the website and downloaded a dataset, played with it a bit, made some visualization and then deleted it. At that point, I didn’t have a Tableau Public account and wasn’t interested in sharing my work. The first dataset I grabbed and actually shared was “What Lawmakers Spoke About After the Orlando Mass Shooting” on October 27th (the data set was from July). On October 31st I did my first “during the week” viz on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. I did 3 more vizzes in 2016 and during that time I found out I was losing my job, so I had some choices to make. I was in management, but still doing some hands-on things with Tableau in the process. I made the choice to pivot back to being a developer and leaving the management side behind.
For 20 years, I’d prided myself on being a tool-agnostic BI/Analytics professional but I had fallen in love with Tableau and decided to see if I could find a job utilizing Tableau. I was successful in finding that job and I had the month of December off between my lay-off and the start of my new Tableau Developer job. During that time, I was still playing with Tableau a bit, and I decided to attempt to do every Makeover Monday in 2017. Unbeknownst to me, this was a life-changing choice.
I started my new job, and it turned out that there wasn’t as much work as they said there would be, so I had a lot of time to work on my own things, like Makeover Monday. Each Monday, I’d start my day doing the weekly challenge, and I started publishing them to Twitter and talking to the community. I started getting and acting on the feedback I was getting. I was looking at other’s vizzes and reverse engineering. I was learning at an extremely accelerated rate. I started to reach out privately to community members if I couldn’t figure out what they had done, the first being Pooja Gandhi, who taught me about transparent images and layering them. It was during that period where I entered my first IronViz feeder and I reached out to the community and found 4 people to act as my sounding board. We shared group messages and really honed my entry and I was really proud of that entry and I experienced first hand how kind and helpful the community was, and I was hooked.
After 6 months in that job, I needed a change as it just wasn’t a great fit. I had built a small portfolio on Tableau Public and I used it in my job search and go a job as the Tableau lead/Evangelist where I was pushing the community inside the bank to be better and I was driving the learning and adoption. At the same time as that switch, I volunteered to co-lead the Cleveland Tableau User Group.
I continued to do Makeover Monday every week and was encouraging others to do the same because of what I was experiencing and seeing in regards to my skills and knowledge as well as my experience with the community. I attended TC17 and attended the Makeover Monday Live session and got to meet all my new friends, and meet Andy and Eva, and thank them in person. I finished 2017 having completed all the weekly challenges and I was amazed to look back at my Tableau Public Profile as see the growth! I followed Andy Kriebel’s advice and refused to delete vizzes because it truly showed my growth.
New Year’s Day 2018 a dataset was published and I guess out of habit I started downloading it and working on it. I didn’t say it out loud, but I decided to keep going and keep participating in Makeover Monday. I started doing some other things too, like Viz for Social Good and Data for a Cause. I started to give others feedback and started to host Makeover Monday live sessions at work. In the middle of 2018, I was honored with the title of Tableau Ambassador. I was asked to participate in the MakeoverMonday book, which was an amazing honor and one of my proudest achievements to that point. I attended TC 2018 and again attended the MakeoverMonday live session, which was even bigger than the year before. During Adam Grant’s keynote saw my name on the screen as he was talking about the community and who the community saw as the most helpful people. To cap the year off, I was asked to help with the technical editing of Visual Analytics Using Tableau by Alexander Loth. I was floored by the end of 2018… how did I get here?!?
At the start of 2019, now having completed 2 full years of Makeover Monday challenges, I decided to keep going. In August, something I never dream of happened and I accepted a job to go to work for Tableau. Shortly after that, I was asked if I’d be willing to be included in the Viz Gallery at TC, and I was asked if they could use my Escape Room in eLearning, and I was asked to participate in IronViz as a Sous Vizzer… again… how did I get here?!?
So now I sit at the end of 2019 at a job I am 100% in love with, on a team of amazing individuals, at a company that I’m 100% behind in regards to mission and purpose. I’ve renewed my Qualified Associate certification at a near-perfect score and I’ve now completed 3 full years of Makeover Monday challenges and the writing of this, I now have nearly 230 visualizations in my Tableau Public portfolio.
Who knew what one decision that I made in 2017 would shape my path in such a profound way? Not me… no way.
All I know is that I’m over-the-moon excited about what 2020 has in store for me. I have no idea what is in store but I’m going to continue to be involved in the community and push others to get involved.