Adam Gonnerman

 Late 2012 was a season of massive change. My wife and I had decided to move our family back to her native Brazil, with her and the kids going ahead while I stayed behind for another year to fund their transition and pay down our US debts. In the middle of this life upheaval, I made what seemed like either the worst or best decision possible: I decided to pursue my PMP certification. Conde Nast, my employer at the time, generously paid for my PMP training. I spent several intensive days in a classroom with a coworker and about twenty other aspiring project managers, absorbing the fundamentals. The instructor was solid, the materials comprehensive, and I left feeling oriented to the challenge ahead. What I didn't fully grasp was that the training was just the beginning. For the next two and a half months, I studied with an intensity I'd never matched before or since. My routine became monastic in its discipline. I'd come home from work, decompress over dinner, then dive into...

Not every career advancement is the result of a deliberate plan. Sometimes the right environment finds you at the right moment, and what you do with that opportunity determines everything that follows. After working at Zepinvest, a small New York City startup, I had developed a working foundation in content curation, content management, basic HTML, and the practical realities of keeping a web presence running. It was hands-on, scrappy work, and it prepared me well for what came next. My following role was as a web producer at Condé Nast, a considerably larger stage with considerably higher expectations. I did not know it at the time, but that position would become one of the most formative experiences of my professional life. In my early days as a web producer I sat in conference rooms where conversations about projects, products, and timelines felt like a foreign language. People moved through discussions with a fluency I did not yet have, and I spent more than a few meetings simply...