Kontrary by Rebecca Thorman – Careers, Business, and Life Advice | Kontrary is a different take on careers, tech, marketing, start-ups, and life for creatives and professionals by Rebecca Thorman.

Behind-the-Scenes of My New Redesign!

by Rebecca Thorman on May 1316 Comments

When I started writing on Kontrary, I wanted to update the site’s branding right away, but I decided to commit to writing first. If I could commit to a weekly schedule, a redesign would be my reward. And oh, how satisfying it has been.

The old design was reflective of my mood at the time – a bit serious, but also clean and modern. For the new site, I wanted to keep the clean and modern, but dial up the happy factor. And in fact, this is the most color I’ve had on my site. Ever. And I love it, because it’s so much more reflective of who I am right now.

How to “Fake It Until You Make It”

by Rebecca Thorman on May 036 Comments

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Quick background: I spoke at the meetup DC Tech earlier this week, which is a monthly event that rivals the NY Tech scene with more than 1000 attendees. My brief talk was about how you can “fake it until you make it” when learning how to code. It was so well received, and so many people requested the presentation notes, I thought I would share a special screencast version of the presentation created just for this blog.

Also, the sound on this video seems loud to me, so you may want to turn down your volume a bit before watching.

Transcript of this video:

I am not a developer.

The Quickest Way to a Better Career

by Rebecca Thorman on April 2516 Comments

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I hate meeting people. I would prefer to be holed up in my apartment, lovingly arranged to every last detail purely to make me comfortable, than to present myself to the world. It’s not that I actually dislike people, but the whole process. The getting ready, the logistics, scheduling a time, finding a place – nevermind if you can’t meet me in my preferred five block radius. If it’s raining outside, I will cancel. If I have a blemish on my face, I will cancel.

Why Instagram is Art

by Rebecca Thorman on April 1226 Comments

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I love Instagram.

It gives me a great deal of pleasure.

I’m not kidding.

Ryan and I had a big argument about this. He said he felt like a lot of people were on Instagram – including himself – to satiate the human desire to fit in and not be left out. I said it’s because Instagram is art.

Creating is fundamentally part of the human experience. Construction workers report high levels of satisfaction at their jobs (if the project is on time), because they can step back and look and see what they’ve done at the end of the day.

The Grief of Growth

by Rebecca Thorman on April 058 Comments

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Liam (name changed) runs an online business where he sells digital goods on a subscription basis. After approaching nearly $1 million in revenue, he experienced a mindshift. The shift was subtle and unconscious; he didn’t realize the harm he caused until later.

On the side, I consult for Liam’s company. For weeks, I tried to convince Liam to test changes on the site that could potentially increase sales to no avail. I couldn’t understand, why didn’t he want to make more money? Or at least try? Wasn’t that why he was paying me?

Exasperated, I exclaimed, “You’re essentially telling customers to cancel during every step of the process!

Solving the Gen Y Woman’s Career Problem

by Rebecca Thorman on March 2916 Comments

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Levo League launched last week by founders Caroline Ghosn and Amanda Pouchot. It’s a professional social network for Gen Y women, and is funded to the tune of $1.25 million by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Ning founder Gina Biancihini, and Gilt Groupe’s Susan Lyne among others.

Oh, and it sucks.

Big connections mean big expectations and I’d say with the exception of some fantastic and probably un-deserved PR (Can you say privilege ? Co-founder Caroline Ghosn is the daughter of Nissan and Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn), the launch has fallen spectacularly flat.

A Brief Retrospective on Growing Up

by Rebecca Thorman on March 2744 Comments

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My mother says I am in the real world now.

“Things aren’t just handed to you,” she says. “You have to work.”

She is referring to my history of being blessed, the days when jobs, men, friends, careers, and connections came to me. When I had a wide network, when I knew everyone in my city. The days before DC, maybe even farther back.

I moved to DC for an adventure, of course, but mostly – and more than I knew at the time – to support Ryan and his start-up.

The (Online) Self-Educated: Doing What Colleges Can’t

by Rebecca Thorman on June 2914 Comments

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Education is stuck at all levels. Increasingly so the older a student gets. College students not only face back-breaking debt, but also come out of their four-to-six year sojourns with little to no increase in their abilities or knowledge.

In one recent study, a group of students were asked to take a standardized test covering skills students are expected to garner from an undergraduate education, and 45 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” during the first two years of college, while 36 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” at all over their four years of college.

Got a Right to Be Wrong

by Rebecca Thorman on June 2313 Comments

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This is the first installment in a series of behind-the-scenes posts on Kontrary.

Ideas are common, so I’ll tell you now that how I came up with the idea for Kontrary isn’t interesting. What is interesting is how immediately I jumped into a case of “professor syndrome” where I believed that for Kontrary to work, I would have to be less personal and aspirational, and more editorial and analytical. I know better. I know better, but still, I held onto the notion.

I thought business was serious business. And I confused serious with significance in thinking about charging for content. The mistake has cost me hours upon days of sitting fraught in front of my screen with dozens of tabs of half-finished posts.

Work is Irrelevant

by Rebecca Thorman on June 1422 Comments

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Work, that of pursuing a specific passion or purpose, has become irrelevant. As technology increasingly gains momentum, we’ve moved from the age of work/life blur to the age of tech/life blur.

For instance, if you’re a writer, it’s not the content that matters (the work itself), but how the content is consumed and packaged. “We are on the brink of accessing digital content through what they call the ‘splinternet,’” argues Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath. “Devices, hardware, software, applications and content, rather than being offered interoperably in a wide-open World Wide Web are increasingly going to be stacked up in proprietary ecosystems in which denizens can talk only to each other.”

So iPad apps like Flipboard, Zite and others like it are becoming the norm and offer “a much more natural way to consume content on a tablet, and the aggregation they provide is like having a customized newspaper available at any time,” argues Matthew Ingram on GigaOm.

Women in Tech Need to Stop Segregating Themselves

by Rebecca Thorman on June 0818 Comments

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I don’t particularly like writing about women and tech. It’s uncomfortable. And it makes me uncomfortable. It means sometimes critiquing people that have been nice to me. It also means critiquing an industry that people like. It’s companies like Facebook, after all, not BP.

It also means that because I know and have experienced exactly how the tech industry is covert – and not in a Chuck Bartowski kind of way – that I should somehow know how to navigate the mines. That I should somehow be farther ahead than I am. But I don’t. And I’m not.

I don’t think it’s just me.

This is Your Tech Life

by Rebecca Thorman on June 0613 Comments

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The weather has turned, and now I am feeling restless. My eyes are glazed as I look down at the timestamp on the lower right-hand side of my screen. There is a mere splinter of sunlight on the brick wall outside our window and oh, how it makes my foot tap, my chest tighten. Can I stand another moment on my computer? I wonder.

It used to be that if we could escape the cubicle, we could escape the aimless sound of settling that ticks off nine-to-five. Now, we want to escape the sitting. We want to escape the screen. The poor cubicle isn’t forcing our dreams to hunch over; the screen inside of it is.