Looking back at 2012 I feel like I’ve written less than I planned to, and in some ways done less than I had planned, yet it was a year of tremendous growth for me and not a lost year by any measure. Less travel has been good, if hard to pass up so many great events. Some quick personal highlights for me:

• In March I delivered – barely, but delivered – a huge project that I had been working on for 9 months where the rules changed every single day. It was a tremendous learning experience and I think helped me integrate some lessons from my time on the PASS Board and working with Don Gabor on my networking skills.
• In May I went to the 2nd annual and perhaps last US SQLRally. It was good to see a team take the template that Jack Corbett and Kendal Van Dyke and I tried to build in year one and run with it.
• In July I spent a week on vacation in DC, doing what I saw a lot of fathers doing, teaching kids about being American while having fun.
• September was the sixth annual SQLSaturday here in Orlando, 7 tracks of goodness, and time to reflect that all I had to do on this one was build the schedule, the rest of the team handled the rest of the work. Six!
• November was the PASS Summit, a great event with just not enough time to talk to all the people I wanted to talk to, and the networking dinner that Steve Jones and I coordinate with more than 200 people talking shop and life.

And of course work on The Mentoring Experiment. It’s been slow by design and by choice,because the lessons I need to learn are,for now at least, complex. Still not sure of the final destination, but it has been and is worthwhile.

I also look back at the decision to leave the PASS Board at the end of 2011 and see that it was a good decision. Hard to know when you make a decision, good to look back and see that it was. That’s not a knock on PASS then or now, it was just time for a change.

Later this week – next year! – I’ll make a list of some great topics I plan to write about and my guestimated travel plan, and a few of the goals I’d like to accomplish for Q1.

I wish all of you a great New Years Eve and look forward to spending time with you in 2013.