The Next Build

Project management has been on my radar since February 2025.

I got my ass handed to me at work, and I decided I needed something concrete to focus on getting better at.

I don’t have a college degree, but I do have strengths I knew I could build on. I love leading meetings where I’m creating order. I love clarifying details so everyone knows where we’re going. I love working across different teams toward a shared goal.

I also know where I’m weaker.

Creating polished documentation, artifacts, and visuals does not come as naturally to me. I can produce detailed meeting notes all day, but turning the status of a project into something visual and easy to understand takes more deliberate effort.

That self-awareness is part of what led me to project management.

It felt like a discipline where I could put structure around the things I already did well, while getting much better at the tangible things that didn’t come naturally.

So in March 2025, I joined PMI and started preparing for the CAPM exam.

And I genuinely enjoyed it.

Over the next several months, I made it through about 60% of the material before I eventually just…stopped.

I wasn’t very consistent with the prep, and around that same time I moved into a different role that I thought would be more strategic and less tactical. Project management started slipping out of focus.

Then something kind of hilarious happened.

That new role ended up giving me hands-on experience leading work that functioned a lot like projects, even if it wasn’t set up like textbook project management.

There wasn’t always formal governance or dedicated resources, but the work still had outcomes to deliver, people to coordinate, dependencies to manage, and priorities that kept shifting. Everyone was trying to move in the same direction while still juggling their regular jobs.

I joined while the train was already moving, and in some places the tracks were still being laid.

Talk about OJT. 🤣

For the last several months, I’ve been learning by doing. Sometimes that means getting something right. Sometimes it means failing, adjusting, and trying again the next day.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I realized that project management had quietly become a much more logical path than it was the first time I studied it.

This week, that realization finally clicked.

I was on my way to the gym around 6 AM feeling completely lost about my career. I did my usual full-body warmup, went over to the squat rack, did one warm-up set, and then basically decided:

Fuck it.

I’m going for project management.

It’s not completely new to me. I’m already doing project-management work in my current role, even if it isn’t happening inside a formal project structure. I have experience that can keep feeding into it. I already know I enjoy learning about it.

And every day I spend searching for some entirely different answer is another day I’m not getting better at something that already makes sense.

It doesn’t have to be my ultimate life mission.

It just needs to be the thing I’m choosing to get really good at next.

So this morning, I rejoined PMI, repurchased the CAPM prep material, and started again.

This time feels completely different.

For one thing, I’m not seeing all of the material for the first time, which is always nice.

But the biggest difference is the tools I have now.

I used AI to make studying fun.

Instead of just working through lessons and answering a couple of knowledge-check questions at the end, I built a whole learning workflow around the places where I struggle most.

Nick suggested that I work on explaining things back in my own words.

I hate it.

Which means I need to do it more!

So now I work through the material, talk through the concepts, answer open-ended questions, explain them in different ways, find the places where my understanding gets fuzzy, and keep working until the gaps are clearer.

Painful?

Absolutely.

Useful?

Also absolutely.

Then I take the material from those study sessions and feed it into Claude Code, which I used to build a study app that lets me keep practicing everything I’ve already covered.

Multiple choice questions. Fill-in-the-blanks. Glossary terms. Scoring.

I basically gamified CAPM prep. 💛

And because I love building systems, creating the whole thing was fun as shit.

That might be the biggest difference this time around.

I’ve always said I’m bad at tests.

Now I’m building a system that makes it really difficult for me to walk into that exam unprepared.

My goal is to be CAPM certified by November 15.

I don’t know what my ultimate path looks like after that.

And I’m okay with that.

For the last few days, I’ve had plenty of anxiety about not knowing where I’ll be a year from now, let alone five years from now.

But I don’t actually need to solve all of that today.

I know what I can control.

I can learn this.

I can get better at it.

I can use the work in front of me to keep building experience.

I can earn the certification.

And then I can see what opens from there.

For a few hours today, I wasn’t asking myself what I’m going to do next with my life.

I was learning.

Building.

Testing myself.

Making something.

And having fun doing it.

There’s a calm in that.

Not because I suddenly know where the road ends.

Because I finally know what I’m working on next.

Yesterday I wrote about being at a crossroads.

I have a few areas of my life right now where I genuinely don’t know what happens next. Career is one of them. There are things I know I want more of, things I know I want less of, and a lot of details in between that I’m still trying to work out.

My instinct is to try to solve it all immediately.

What’s the plan?
What happens next?
What if this doesn’t work?
What’s the backup plan for the backup plan?

Useful questions, sometimes.

Absolutely exhausting questions when you spend all day asking them on repeat.

I caught myself doing that today. I kept mentally jumping ahead, trying to figure out what my life might look like weeks or months from now, as though thinking hard enough could somehow remove all of the uncertainty before I have to experience it.

It can’t.

There are things I can do. I can make plans. I can learn. I can apply for opportunities. I can have conversations I need to have. I can work on skills that will give me more options later.

But eventually I run out of things I can actually do today.

And then I’m just borrowing problems from a future that hasn’t happened yet.

I don’t want to do that.

I’m trying to learn how to work toward something better without treating the present moment like a waiting room.

There’s a temptation when you’re unhappy with part of your life to think, I’ll feel better once this changes.

Once I get the job.
Once I make the decision.
Once I know what happens.
Once I get to the other side of whatever this is.

But I don’t want to lose months of my actual life waiting for everything to resolve.

Today still counts.

There was an excellent push-day workout. There was coffee. There were conversations. There was something new to learn. There was this page to come back to and write on.

None of those things solve the crossroads.

They just remind me that my life is still happening while I stand in the middle of it.

Maybe that’s part of The Next Build too.

Not just figuring out where I’m going.

Learning how to be here while I figure it out.

I’ve never been a writer. I used to journal when I was a teenager. I used to want to write songs, but I was never naturally good at it. However, there’s something peaceful about grabbing some coffee, opening a blank page, and writing down what’s happening, what I’m learning along the way, and what might come next. That’s what I envision for this blog.

I’m currently at a crossroads. I’ve spent about a year and a half figuring out what I want from my career, while also discovering the parts I love and working with some great people along the way. I’m married to a man I respect and admire, and lately we’ve both been trying to figure out what comes next. Everything we’ve done has been done together. We’ve worked at more than a few of the same places, our routines are intertwined, our schedules are aligned, and I need something that is mine. Somewhere I can just go and be my chaotic, silly self. Not to take away from what I have with him, but to add something of my own.

I have no idea where this is going, but to anyone reading this, I’m glad you’re here. If you’re standing at your own crossroads, grab a chair and your drink of choice. I don’t know exactly where this road goes yet, but I’m glad to have your company.

Welcome to The Next Build.