Adversity by definition is a difficult situation or condition misfortune or tragedy. When that time comes; how do you handle it?

If replication breaks causing the business to not get the data they need in a timely fashion and you are the lone conductor driving the train down the tracks and everyone is standing at your desk, how do you handle it? I

f your backups failed from the previous night and for some reason your notification of failure didn’t reach you and you had no knowledge of the situation until days later, how do you handle it?

Someone calls and said they can’t access their systems and you find out something is causing tempdb to fill up, how do you handle it?

Better yet, you find out that a certification you were working toward had been retired (MCM), how do you handle it?

Response

I can only speak for myself and no one else, I fell into the same category a lot of people across the nation did of working toward the MCM certification goal. I mean let’s face it, last I checked a very small percentage obtained this goal and being the competitive person I am I wanted to reach that goal. Not for anyone else but for myself and the standards I set for my own self.

At first I was upset and like so many others not so much toward the retiring of the program but how it was delivered by Microsoft. I purposefully waited to construct a blog post as I didn’t want to let emotions get in the way of potential views toward the topic.

Adversity has now hit for a lot of people, for me in particular I choose not to dwell on it but wait to see what will be offered next by Microsoft, restructure my goals, and move forward. I am a bit biased but I get to work with some of the best technology day in and day out and am in constantly learning mode. Some of the things that we can control are the way we handle adversity when it rears its ugly head, the attitude to how we conduct ourselves through the adversity, and the character building we can learn from it.

Am I happy about the retirement, no I wasn’t. At the end of the day though I do have a lot to be thankful for and looking back on my studying, lab testing, hours of working toward the certification it allowed me to push myself to learn a lot more than what I did the previous day and the day before that. I’m eager to see where the next chapter leads in the stepping stone of my learning.

Adversity – how will you handle it? Each of us are different; doesn’t make one person better than the next by how we handle it, but I do encourage others to push through adversity when it comes. You’ll be a stronger person in doing so.