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The Wall Street Journal’s online Career Journal  has continued its series of articles called “90 days,” presumably based on Michael Watkins’ bestseller, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels.  Each WSJ column addresses the most critical things to remember in the first days following a major career transition.

There’s lots of terrific cross-pollination here, so if you’re in transition, go ahead and read them all!

• 90 Days: Working Productively As a Telecommuter
• 90 Days: Relocating Overseas? Do Your Homework And Ease Your Way
• 90 Days: Acing Your First Post-College Job
• 90 Days: Working for Yourself Can Have Its Challenges
• 90 Days: Easing Back From Maternity Leave
• 90 Days: Dealing With a PR Crisis Takes Planning and Truth
• 90 Days: Joining a Nonprofit Board Is More Than a Labor of Love

~ For more WSJ “90 Days” articles ~

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Related Post:

The First 90 Days: Strategic Career Transitions

You may already have read “Invisible Mother,” (text below). As best as I can tell it’s been circulating online since at least 2005, via email, message boards, and dozens and dozens of blogs — but it is always credited to a nameless author.

Because she’s invisible. Get it?

I do not like to post things without an artist’s permission, much less without attribution. That’s called “plagiarism,” and is a form of theft.

Nevertheless, the hundreds of postings by hundreds of women all happily conspiring with the invisible author to keep her that way is wonderfully ironic, quite aside from the funny loveliness of the piece itself.
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Don’t bail. The best of the gold’s at the bottom of barrels of crap. - Randy Pausch 

Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  Last September, he was invited to take part in a CMU lecture series called “The Last Lecture,” in which top academics are asked to give a lecture as if it were hypothetically their last chance ever to share their best wisdom with the world.

For the amazing 47-yr old Dr. Pausch, it wasn’t hypothetical.  

At left: Randy Pausch and family

• 10-minute video: reprise (on Oprah)
•  Video of original lecture (75  min) and more about Randy

While I do not love every word written (or philosophy espoused) by Marianne Williamson, I do love these words: 

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

-Marianne Williamson

I’ve always enjoyed Steven Covey and similar gurus for their no-nonsense approach to leadership, productivity and personal effectiveness.

Sometimes though, a little home-spun kitsch and fun are in order as well! I discovered the Sidetracked Home Executives many years before there really was a “web,” and I must say the self-described “slob sisters” seem to be aging well. Sister Pam even has started her own inspirational website, and it is hilarious!

The amazing Fly Lady is not to be missed either. I’ve seen many of her best ideas espoused by the most sophisticated organization experts, and I strongly suspect she has mentored more than a few of them. Don’t miss her “Eleven Commandments”

If Steven Covey and co. are like the Serious Uncles disseminating jewels of advice over glasses of sherry in the drawing room, Pam, Peggy and FlyLady are like the big-boned, wildly-dressed Grandmas in the kitchen who are always good for a cookie and a funny story. We need both kinds of mentors, I think.

10. Just keep trying.
9. Try to determine what is working.
8. Try to determine what is not working.
7. Try to find someone who’s done it.
6. Try to ask for help.
5. Try it again tomorrow.
4. Try it a little differently.
3. Try once more.
2. Try again.
1. Try.

Kind of beautiful, isn’t it?  I saw this on a giant poster in an educational supply store.  It’s also featured in November 2006 issue of The Lorraine Hansberry Library News, and that’s about it.  I gather then that these words are meant for children.  Perhaps adults are too cynical to hear them, or have discovered already that trying isn’t always enough.  Or is it?  At what point in our lives do we lose our limitless potential?  When is it that we can no longer grow up to be the president of the United States? 

Just keep trying.  Find mentors.  Ask for help.  Focus on the positive (what’s already working) while carefully defining any remaining barriers (what’s not working.)  Take a break when you need to and try it again tomorrow.  Instead of giving up entirely, try it just once or twice more, or try it with a slightly different approach. 

The Economist, among others, has been busily debunking the enduring American dream of endless economic opportunity and upward mobility.  That dream is dead, they tell us, and we need a new one.  The realists, these adults among us, are insisting that we read their reports and statistics that show us how limited we truly are by our educations and our socio-economic status.

The reports are true.  The inequities are real, and they are growing.  

But.

No population study can ever define an individual.   This is why, in addition to The Economist, we also have stories.  This is why we have The Lord of the Rings and The Little Engine that Could.  We buy these books for our children but, if we’re honest, we know we need them, too. 

And if we are not only honest but decent, we will not be content with lying to our children about things we don’t believe any more ourselves.  And what we are telling our children is this:  no set of aggregate numbers can ever describe a single person.  No statistical level of improbability ever stopped a hobbit.

So just keep trying. 

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Related posts:
Chapter Two-ing
Success!! 
Hanging in (and blonder, too)

 ”Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
- Søren Kierkegaard

We shamelessly put the kids to work last weekend and “put up” more than half a winter’s worth of heating wood in one day   (3+ cords)  The log splitter doesn’t make wood nearly so pretty as an axe does, nor even as fast, but you can run it all day long – a thing you can’t do with a set of axe-wielding arms. 

Summer rhythm never seems to set in around here until summer is half-way through.  To tell you the truth, I still don’t know how to do it all very well, with kids and work — what there is of it — and Everything Else never quite fitting into whatever time we’ve allotted for it. 

Here, surely, is part of the solution, though.  Living, green things.  This is part of our whiskey barrel garden (hic) which we fenced off and built on what used to be the end of our driveway.  

It is wonderfully peaceful to get up in the morning when it is still cool and stand over the cucumbers or beans with a hose.  Everything smells good in the morning, too.

Later in the day, when Everything Else gets to be too much, I can slip out the back door without telling anyone to dump some stuff into the compost bin, lean into the barrels to pluck a few weeds, see how the volunteer tomatoes are doing, or rifle through the foliage to see if it’s time to pick the beans again. 

It’s not highly-productive time, it’s Being Time.  And I’ve (almost) learned that I can’t live without it.

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Related posts:
Chapter two-ing 
In defense of thoughts

And do you know what?  It fits much better when you do.  Everything settles into place, some lovely draping (which I never knew was part of the design) happens, and there is NO gaping. 

I’m sure there’s a profound metaphor in here someplace…

Today I went and got my hair done.  You know, that thing I swore I’d never do, ten years ago?  When I decided to be the only woman left in my city with undyed hair?

Well, Forget THAT!  

So anyway, for the rest of the day I get to go around smelling beautifully of coconut and bananas, with accents of ammonia, which is just one of those little ways I remind myself I’m special.

Much sweeter, though, is the support of my friends.  Which also, by the way, costs a  heck of a lot less than my hair appointment did.   :)

Emily brought me a gorgeous present today and also paid me a most wonderful compliment about my employability (which she called “advice”).  My own husband spent a fair amount of time yesterday ignoring his other important email so he could answer mine instead.  (He said, re the toad people, that he’s got my back.  And I said he can have other sides of me too if he wants, just for that!)

And then this lovely note (which I use with permission) arrived from one of those serendipitous people who appear in one’s life sometimes and make more difference than they know:

Dear Almost,

I read your posting on turning down the IT job – and decided to offer a private reply/encouragement.

The choices one is faced with as a working/would-be-working mom are so tough!  Through my 20+ years of parenting, I have – in turn – been at home (multiple times), started a business (multiple times), been an independent contractor (multiple times), been a part-time employee (multiple times) and worked full-time (multiple times).  Navigating through each step involved hard decisions, trying to take into account where I was, where my spouse was and where our kids were at that particular stage and doing the best I could by everyone.  Some choices I would repeat, others not – but that’s the benefit of hindsight.

It sounds like you followed your instincts and made the best choice – so hopefully you can move past the toads and vinegar faced ladies (and any second guessing of your own) and look ahead to the next opportunity.  It can be so tempting to sell ourselves short just to get everybody off our back – but not worth it in the longer haul, as we have so much to contribute!

Hang in there!

I will, and thanks to all y’all. 

———-

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How (not) to interview for a job (the story begins)
Confusion Cookies (the story continues)
Nope (the story concludes)

We have a wonderful used-book store in our city, which until recently was within walking distance of our house.  One of our favorite pastimes was to rummage through the “free bins” parked outside the store. 

We found many treasures in it:  a whole entire set of encyclopedias, for instance, missing only “volume 11.”  Thousands of Martha Stewart magazines, back when she even still dared put her face on every cover.  Tattered books in Italian, or about calculus, with which to impress one’s older brother.  And once, an ancient copy of Atlantic Monthly, in which I found an essay by Marilynne Robinson about courage and the petty coercion of society that conspires against it.  It was gorgeous.

It drove me crazy to misplace it, which I inevitably did, almost immediately.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, in a fit of extravagance, I ordered several books from Amazon.com (to get the “free shipping,” of course) and among them I chose one by Marilynne Robinson called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.  I’d seen the list of contents and knew my essay wasn’t in it.

But tonight, after an exhausting day I started leafing through the book.  And there, at the very end, the final essay in the collection, I found it.  Really!  I don’t know how it got there, but it feels like a gift.  This is what it’s called:

“The Tyranny of Petty Coercion.”

Which (my usually good memory not-withstanding) apparently appeared in the August 2004 issue of Harper’s Monthly, not in the Atlantic, and here, moreover, is a quote:

Courage seems to me to be dependent on cultural definition.  By this I do not mean only that it is a word that blesses different behaviors in different cultures, though that is clearly true.  I mean also, and more importantly, that courage is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it.  Theologians used to write about a prevenient grace, which enables the soul to accept grace itself.  Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave.  It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage, or, more typically, withhold such permission.  We also internalize prohibitions, enforcing them on ourselves – prohibitions against, for example, expressing an honest doubt, or entertaining one.  This ought not to be true in a civilization like ours, historically committed to valuing individual conscience and free expression.  But it is.

. . .

It is sad to consider how much first-rate courage must be devoted in this world to struggling out of the toils of sheer pettiness.  The Saudi women who first drove automobiles risked and suffered penalties, overcame inhibitions, and shattered norms, heroic in their defiance of an absurd convention. We have our own Rosa Parks.  That such great courage should have been required to challenge such petty barriers is a demonstration of the power of social consensus.  How many minor coercions are required to sustain similar customs and usages?  How aware are any of us, absent direct challenge, of how we also deal in trivial coercion?

Click here to read The Tyranny of Petty Coercion article