Almostgotit.com

And another thing.

I’ve developed a pretty keen sense of smell in my old age, and it’s nearly always “right on the nose.”  Last year I turned down a management job at one company just months before the entire company went under; seven months ago I resigned my directorship of another and have watched them lose acres of ground since — as I’d warned them they would.  Nor have the latter found anyone willing to be my replacement. 

Many years ago, I ignored an “icky” smell at another job, until I had to leave that position when we moved to Canada.  I later found out that my boss had sexually assaulted my predecessor. 

My nose knows.

I don’t really want the news my nose is bringing me now, because it’s making me too picky.  I need a job.  I could persevere and take one of these stinky jobs anyway, but I already know the likely outcome: been there, done that.  So for now,  I’m sticking with the schnozz.

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One of my dear friends directs an organization that works with inner city youth. 

These young people are often battered with repeated failures, but Chris believes in them, even when no one else does.  He encourages them to believe in themselves, too.

“Always Begin Again,” he tells them. Over and over.
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I’m helping a woman finish her latest book.  She’s old enough to be my grandmother, but whizzes around the internet like a pro and still hikes in the Andes.  She sent me an email yesterday, along with the latest installment of her manuscript. 

“This is so HARD,” she wrote.

‘But I have a sign up,” she continued, “that says ‘Failure can not tolerate persistence.”  Got it from a wonderful book called The War of Art.’

—–

Andy is home.  He called me today, and he sounded much better.  People have taken good care of him, so he was calling around to check in,  thank everyone.  His client had paid his hotel bill last night, even though he hadn’t managed to finish their show.  He added that Phillip has had some good days while he was gone, but that he himself hit another rough patch,  coming home this afternoon to the empty house.  

But he already has lots of things set up, lots of meetings with lots of people, for his business and to go over the estate, legal and financial things.   A  lot of mail had piled up while he was gone, too.  I could hear him shuffling through it.  He listed some of it for me:  Paperwork about benefits.  Insurance information for COBRA. 

And the death certificate finally came.  

“And, maybe,” he paused, “a grief counselor or something.  That might be good.”
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There’s a quote on scrap of paper on my desk that I’ve been trying to decide what to do with. It keeps getting shuffled to the top of my piles. I heard it last fall from an arborist who was speaking to our group about how badly our area’s trees had suffered from a year of severe drought, last spring’s late freeze, and a summer of record-setting heat.

Then he smiled. “But,  enough gloom and bad news.  I recommend, as all of us do who have the perpetual gardener’s heart: replant next spring!”

Many thanks to Karen over on the Working Girl blog for pointing out a recent Wall Street Journal Article, Advice for Women on Developing a Leadership Style. I won’t rehash what I wrote in my comment on her post here, but I encourage all y’all to click through and take a gander!

“Developing a leadership style” is one of my own next tasks, of course, along with all the other parts of gearing up for a new job. To that end, I’ve just very impulsively made an online registration request for Duke University’s nonprofit management professional certificate program, which offers an intensive 1 week course beginning a week from now. If I get in, I’ll just have to clear the calendar and go, because there are no refunds at this late date!

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Special hello to Genoa, whom I understand has been reading this blog! Talk about a young woman born to lead…

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.

The good news is that I filled two garbage cans and cleared out the piles in the dining room; the bad news is that the piles in my office are even bigger than ever. I’m beginning to suspect that maybe what Jesus really said was “The piles you will always have with you.”

I wonder if our biggest task in life might not be the “getting there” part at all; maybe we need to focus more on learning how to live better during the “in between” parts. After all, that’s where most of our life happens, anyway.

Here’s the exerpt from Anne Lamott’s wonderful book that I referred to in yesterday’s post:

E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

So after I’ve completely exhausted myself thinking about the people I most resent in the world, and my more arresting financial problems, and, of course, the orthodontia, I remember to pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange. I also remember a story that I know I’ve told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

-Excerpt from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
By Anne Lamott

Do you have one of these? I have several, and they seem to get bigger every day. I can still remember when it was fun going out to get the mail… now, whenever I see a mail truck, I feel like screaming, “INCOMING!” and heading for the fall-out shelter.

Things have come to the point where these irreducible piles are giving me brain-rot. How can I do anything at all with the damn things lurking in the background all the time? It feels like I have hangnails, or some kind of terrible skin disease. They make me feel guilty and irresponsible. They’ve got to go!
There are lots of great ideas on how to get organized… and as a natural “messy,” every so often I just have to revisit them.

I’m afraid that my first impulse is always to head to Target or Pier One, giving in to my default conviction that surely the right collection of bins and baskets will solve the whole problem. The real problem, of course, is that my piles represent a series of delayed decisions, which in the aggregate quickly become too overwhelming to tackle at all.

So today, I am beginning at the beginning. Well, after checking my email and blogging, of course! My sword and shield of choice? A large trash can and an egg-timer.

Because even the most tedious task should be bearable in five minute increments. As writer Anne Lamott suggests, some things are best if you just take them bird by bird.

Many thanks to all those who responded to my requests for your “back to school resolutions.” I just knew you had some!

“Marsquat,” who is both a very faithful reader (thank you, Marsquat!) and a recent, first-time mom, wrote:

I’ll have to think about it, ‘cause heaven knows I need some resolutions in my life — like “stop going to the people.com web site during Nathaniel’s naps” and “start being productive and getting my resume together” or “fix parts of the house that are falling apart.” I will enjoy reading more seasoned moms’ resolutions!

“Seasoned moms.” I love it! As if the rest of us necessarily do it any better.

Jenny, mother of two daughters, wrote that her resolutions were

to finally finish sewing the curtains for the basement play room (I’ve had the fabric for about 3 years!) Also, to attend yoga class 3 days a week and clear out the cabinets and closets.

I had to admit, I was impressed. But when I told her so, she quickly ‘fessed up: “Don’t be fooled! I have plenty of inspiration; just not a whole lot of follow-up.”

Ah, there’s the rub. This is my own ongoing struggle as well: how to find the time, energy, and motivation to do all the things I need and want to do. While I have nothing terribly wise or definitive to say on the subject, I have recently been inspired by a couple of articles from Web Worker Daily: Mike Gunderloy borrows a software developer’s trick and shows how “timeboxing” can be used to unlock a perfectionist mind-set so we can get things done; Writer and web technologist Anne Zelenka points us toward the novel idea of creating a not-to-do-list.

And then there’s my beautiful friend who lives and works out of her old farm house and who may finally be figuring it all out.

This year I resolve to spend my car time catching up on literary classics I’ve never read, beginning with Moby Dick then Call of the Wild. If my kids happen to get interested, great. If not, at least we aren’t fussing about whose music to play.

I am also planning to add an hour to my two nights a week, Mommy time, when I take a yoga class, when I’m planning to work on my poetry writing. If I have already muscled my way into the schedule twice a week, why not hang on a little longer?

Finally I am not going to take back my kids’ summer chores like I usually do when school starts. I am usually worried about them having time for homework, but this year, having them at two different schools will increase my commute time from one to two hours a day. They can do homework in the car and chores when they get home. If I can keep up with my usual chores on 5 hours less a week, that’s enough for me to have to keep up with.

As my kids get older, I’m taking better care of myself. It feels great: selfish and great.

That sure doesn’t sound selfish to me: just GREAT!

How about you? Whether or not you have children: what would you like to do to make your life and work more fruitful this coming season?

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

For days now, I’ve been reflecting on something that appeared in one of Penelope Trunk’s recent columns. 

It seems that Trunk spoke to success coach Jim Fannin, who told her “that research has shown that wildly successful people have 1,000 fewer thoughts a day than others, which allows the successful people to have exceptional focus on their goals.”

Well now.  That certainly provides some real food for… well, something in which I’ve been overindulging, apparently.  But I can’t help myself.  You see:  I really LIKE having thoughts.

I was relieved to find out I’m not the only career-minded person who has this strange proclivity.  Maureen Rogers  wrote, in her own marvelous comment at the end of Trunk’s column:

I’m with AlmostGotIt. I LIKE having thoughts, too. After thinking about it, I’ve come to the realization that those of us who are introspective; who really, truly, like to think about things; who are highly analytical are probably just not all that cut out to be risk-taking entrepreneurs. To succeed in an entrepreneurial endeavor, you need to have supreme conviction - and thinkers tend to spend perhaps too much time evaluating risk, playing “what-if”, etc.. A better job for us: chief of staff, advisor to the throne, internal consultant….

“Advisor to the throne.”  I definitely pick that one.   (You know: for now, I mean.)

But perhaps the problem here is that I don’t have the right qualifications to have thoughts.  This possibility has been brought up before. 

At The Institution Which Shall Not Be Named (to pick an example at wild random) there is only a very small allotment allowed for thinkers, and these slots are all taken by highly-trained Thinkologists.   Many of those who have gone through the entire formation process of Thinkology are surprisingly intelligent, diversity-promoting, even iconoclastic thinkers.  However, their thoughts still must be chosen from the approved intelligent,-diversity-promoting,-even-iconoclastic LIST.

Which, needless to say, is entirely unavailable to inflammatory non-thinkologists such as myself.

I decided that Jim Fannin might be onto something.

So I visited his website.  I was glad to find that he has an online quiz,  which of course I took immediately to see if I “[Don’t] Think Like A Champion.”   Here is what I found out:

The results indicate your S.C.O.R.E. Level is dangerously low. You are not in the game. If this score persists either change your goal or approach it in a completely different way. You are on the wrong path.

Wow, this is bad. 

Fortunately, Fannin has a number of products which could help put me back IN the game. Unfortunately, unlike many of his other clients, I don’t have a professional baseballer’s salary to pay for any of them.

But perhaps I can offer him some small repayment-in-kind, at least.  Bob Sutton, a professor at the prestigious Harvard Business School, has developed another little online quiz which, I humbly submit, may be just the thing.

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Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)