Category: Self-management

Categories
Business Entrepreneurship Self-management

The Grief of Growth

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! And then they do. How can we ever expect to grow revenue?”

Liam paused. “You know what, Rebecca,” he said. “When we came close to $1 million in revenue, I thought, is this bad? Are subscriptions evil? Am I taking advantage? Is my business model inherently wrong?” His answer was to place detailed instructions on how-to cancel everywhere on his site.

More than 150,000 people have downloaded Liam’s products. He’s a smart guy. He’s also part of the Google generation where “Do No Evil” is the motto for life and business. Increasingly, that means making stuff, but not making money.

Freelancer Amber Adrian (disclosure: she works for me through Alice) recently launched a series of essays on perfectionism. Her pricing strategy was “pay-what-you-can,” with a suggested price of $5.

“I wanted to get this into as many people’s hands as possible,” she said, “to pave the way for a bigger package that will be a set price. I’m hoping that people find it super valuable and share it around and that brings in more people.”

She told me readers paid more than what she would have charged, but I still cringed. I had heard about the amount of work she put into those essays. Not to mention, she already wrote (for free) about these topics on her blog. If she believed the essays to be super valuable, why not come out swinging with a price that indicated that value?

The truth is, unless you have an extremely wide reach, discount or zero pricing does not work. And hardly anyone has that kind of reach. The majority of us (start-ups, freelancers, small business-makers, entrepreneurs) are in markets with smaller audiences and niche targets. And that means premium pricing.

Charging for your work or products, however, just doesn’t seem to jive with the so-called basic rules of the Internet. Somewhere along the line, Free! became an acceptable business model, and revenue and sales became a sign that you didn’t get how the new economy worked. Suddenly, we’re afraid to make money.

“It feels weird to be selling to my blog readers,” Amber says. “The lines are a little blurred and I’m working to draw them more firmly. I’m very emotionally attached to my blog and it feels weird to try to turn it into a business space.”

But the lines don’t get less personal when you aren’t marketing to friends. Liam spoke to me about how his customers are from modest means, and he is often more concerned that his customers save money, rather than he make it himself. Even with a healthy level of success most would be envious of – and a growth rate a fully-backed and funded start-up would salivate over – Liam is often worried. And he seems to feel bad and apologetic at his success.

A good many of us want to start and grow businesses (or nonprofits or blogs or something). But the majority of us cannot. Our minds won’t let us. We put up all sorts of barriers and paradigms that tell us no, this isn’t right. Even if you manage to get an idea off the ground, your negative nellies will tell you that the product isn’t great/has bugs/isn’t ready/is stupid and the big one: you’re not good enough.

We all tell ourselves these invisible scripts every day, and they go into overdrive when we try anything new. We literally have a physical and biological reaction that tells us to stop, back away and let it go. Financial expert Ramit Sethi has an exercise in one of his courses where he asks people to identify these scripts. Here is a sampling of what people say:

What will I do if I succeed? Do I deserve to succeed?

Not good enough – Just writing those words makes me irritated as hell. But that’s what I battle with.

What skills, expertise do I have that someone will be willing to pay top dollar for? I’m afraid I’m just not good enough, special enough, have great enough ideas to warrant the financial life I so desire.

And the fear of not being good enough, or un-deserving, does all sorts of weird things to us when we try to implement our ideas. We decide it’s more important to be right, than effective (we don’t want to fall flat on our faces, after all), and we move forward with assumptions that are clearly incorrect.

Despite the current obsession with tracking, testing, metrics and analytics in the start-up world, we still primarily make business decisions based on emotions, not data. Business risk doesn’t depend on your conversion rate, but what you say to yourself in your head.

“It did feel more comfortable for me to do pay-what-you-can,” Amber said, “because I’m still a little uncomfortable with this whole Pricing My Work thing. There’s definitely some fear involved.”

For Amber, having people pay-what-they-could helped her plow through that fear. “Most people ended up paying the suggested $5, but a large number paid in the $10 range,” she reports. “One person even paid $50. Only one person paid less than $5, at 99 cents.” Amber plans to charge upwards of $50 for her next product.

As for Liam, I asked him to reframe his worldview. Instead of worrying if he was ripping people off, he should focus on providing as much value as possible to his users. If you are providing value, there is no reason not to charge, no reason to feel bad. We don’t need to be so wrapped up into “do no evil” that we talk ourselves right out of profit.

Instead of our emotions plowing us into despair over success – or potential success – we should focus on the fact that growth, even and especially financial growth, is healthy. Of course it will take work. Things will change, and with it will come more responsibility and expectations, but only if we can accept that we’re worthy and good enough to provide mad value and make mad money in the first place.

Categories
Happiness Relationships Self-management

A New Residence for Home

Ryan is so very tall and my condo is so very small. So it was not without reservation that we recently moved in together.  We talked about it a lot – the important things, the mundane, the humdrum. In talking about moving in together, we broke our record in effective communication. And then we talked some more. “If we could communicate like this for the rest of our lives,” Ryan said, “we’d be the best couple ever.” And so it went… until.

You know, moving is very stressful, and moving in with someone you intend to spend your life with is this gigantic life decision, and somehow all of the pressure and insanity of it all got put into one question – did we need to buy another dresser?

Perhaps the most romantic notion I had of combining our belongings and everyday lives was that we would be able to use my library card file (currently in use as my sock drawers) as our dresser. But, no. No, no, no.  Ryan needed a place to store his t-shirts. All forty-six of them. And he didn’t find it at all romantic, never mind practical, to store a lone t-shirt per tiny drawer.

I won’t take this moment to comment on the romanticism or practicality of forty-six t-shirts, but I do recommend that you, my dear reader, come to your own conclusion on that point.

Besides his t-shirts, Ryan also likes to hang his towel on the closet door instead of the towel hook we bought specifically for the purpose. He takes out the trash and cleans if I cook. I don’t know when, but he watches ESPN because that’s the channel that appears when I turn on the TV. I am always on the computer and he is always on the phone. He leaves his eye glasses on the bathroom counter, but little else. His shoes are lined up across the top and bottom shelves of our closet, and underneath the bed. Waiting for Cribs, I guess.

He overtakes our small white couch like a dog. If Ryan could be animal, he has said that he would want to be a big, slow dog, so please don’t think I am insulting my incredibly sexy boyfriend publicly. Well, a dog or a lion, he said. There are a lot of similarities.

He has a repertoire of several particularly esteemed dishes that he can cook: pork chops, meat spaghetti – in which the spaghetti is actually egg noodles – and chicken and broccoli “stir-fry.”

He locks the door when he leaves in the morning and says to me when he’s home: “You know you don’t have to lock the door when I’m here, right? I will protect you.”

“It’s a habit,” I reply.

He opens the shower curtain from the wrong side, and never closes the blinds. If you touch him when he’s not expecting it, he will unreasonably flinch and exclaim “ow!” like he means it.

When we watch a movie, he will lie down and I will lie down, and we will spoon and watch the screen and out the sixth-story window. When I get too tired, I will turn around and settle into his chest, and he will kiss my forehead and I will go to sleep.

Ryan moved in on the anniversary of our first kiss.

This weekend, I think we’ll buy a dresser.

Good Hearts.

Categories
Accountability Self-management

How to Deal With Big Jerks

In accordance with the laws of motion, anger and vengeance, I have desired for suitcases to fly satisfyingly through windows, for nasty notes to appear in an inbox or two, or three, and for glasses to break into a great many sharp pieces in response to those big mean jerks who insist on climbing up my backside and making a home.

In some cases, I have succeeded. In many more, I have deftly restrained myself.

It’s an extraordinary kind of derangement to rip into another, and to do so continually and rancorously. The derisive nature of such a person and their seeming hero quests for revenge are certainly not encouraged, although I admit to feeling such pangs myself.

To get that son-of-a-jerk who was not-so-politely requesting the appearance of my middle finger that one time. For instance.

The motivation of a big mean jerk is jealousy gone for the jugular. A normal reaction amplified in an abnormal way. Successful people get the brunt of it of course. Nobody kicks when you’re down, so you don’t see much of that. More, you see unhappy people just trying to be happy, and not having a good run at it.

I’ve been there – short glimpses of what it would be like to be a total creep – so I reply with deference to big mean jerks if at all possible.

Mostly though, I let it go.

A big mean jerk, their demons and their decisions should not be of great concern to you, and are better left to psychology. You can’t possibly know what they’ve been through. Maybe they’re just having a bad day. Or maybe, a bad life.

As such, not engaging a big mean jerk is quite a suitable course of action, one that those individuals will be grateful for at a later date. Because who wants to be like that? No one does.

If a big mean jerk continues to bully, insult or assassinate your person, or if you believe a preemptive attack is necessary, then you can utilize two powerful phrases for such endeavors: “I’m sorry,” and “I understand.” Possibly both, if it’s particularly cankerous.

We need a place to debate ideas, to say no, to be ourselves, to live, to judge a little less along the way. A simple, “I understand where you’re coming from and respect your viewpoint,” goes a long way.

Then, keep going. Keep going on. You can only dwell so long.

Categories
Career Relationships Self-management Work/life balance

One Guy, One Girl, Two Start-Ups and a Relationship

Quick, which is more difficult – work or life?

Up until a year ago, both competed for my attention, each piling weight onto the seesaw to rise towards the favored position. A year ago, however, I started working at Alice and Ryan and I started hitting our stride (both of which were not without challenges, however… many, many challenges).

While working for a start-up demands hours, it demands more in mental energy, in spikes of time about as predictable as a bingo game, where the only invariable is that you know work will be stop and go. This means it’s often difficult to separate work and life, especially in the statuesque pursuit of balance, but while I used to recognize and promote blur, I’m now mindful of the distinct delineation between the two.

Smart people don’t balance two sides of the same coin – your work and life are, after all, inseparable from the backbone of your binding. You can’t push one to one side and one to the other and hope equilibrium presents itself because the entities are glued to each other and to you.

What I mean, for example, is that I cannot see Ryan and refrain from discussing at length our work. I have long agreed that behind every good man is a good woman, and likewise, the same holds true for Ryan and I on both sides. While he is the one that shows up to Brazen headquarters each day, my ideas fill his head. While I’m the one who walks into Alice each morning, Ryan’s sense and advice follows me.

More to the point, I guess, is that there is a mutual respect for what we choose to do with the majority of our day and into the night, and sometimes into our sleep and into dreams. Although when we do relate to each other our dreams from the night before, it’s not very likely to include the mention of a spreadsheet.

Right now, Ryan is across the street from me working. His offices are located diagonal from my condo, but I have yet to see him this week except for when he dropped me off from our weekend in Philly together on Sunday. I was working on a Wall Street Journal exclusive early this week, and he’s working on big plans for Brazen later this week. We also have friends, family, a basketball league, dance classes, books, blogs, grocery shopping, the gym, bill-paying and other magnitudes and minutiae of daily life competing for our attention.

Oh, and the new season of Chuck just started.

When I walk into work, much of that has to go away. I imagine this is natural for most people who enjoy their jobs, but particularly at start-ups you have to be ready to do whatever is put in front of you that day. Everything planned for the day will get eaten up by new priorities, larger plans and whether or not the toucan (our CEO) monopolizes all the time with the dolphin (our President and my direct boss). This can be best described as acting as a pivot, keeping your center, but spinning to each new person and project that appears.

One of the best parts of working at a start-up is that an idea spun in the morning has the potential to be fully realized by the afternoon. It can be that quick and magical and exhilarating. Also, the customers. When I worked for a non-profit in a trailer across from the food pantry that I was raising money for, I thought I wouldn’t again experience the rewards of being in such direct contact with the people I helped. But Alice has that.

One of the more challenging things is that blurring my work and my blog and my life to such an extent can make me very unhappy. Sometimes I feel like I’m always working which is frustrating, so I’ve tried to have clearer boundaries. I don’t really believe in work/life balance as an ideal, but no longer do I trust in work/life blur so much either.

As a generation, we’re always on. Is it okay to tweet during your workday? How often? What about talk to your significant other? Send personal emails? Do you work with your partner at night? Accept calls from the boss? Check your iPhone during a movie? Where is the line drawn and what is acceptable?

For Ryan and I, we have chosen to spend the majority of our day, not with each other, but with two different start-up companies. Our lives and relationship are more difficult and more enriched because of it. What about you? Work/life balance: truth or myth? Does it stand a chance?

Categories
Personal branding Self-management

The Corruption of Authenticity

The derision and drama on blogs, news and broadcast nowadays is entertaining, like a domino of tabloids back-to-back. And while we instinctively know that insistent self-actualization is an incredibly banal form of entertainment, it remains so vast in its infectiousness, and so strong in its self-referential feeding, that navel-gazing is now suffocating in its empire.

Let’s poke some holes for air.

You are not genuine because you told me of your heartbreak, or your success or your disease or your strengths or your weaknesses or miscarriage or move or relationship or promotion or demotion or disability or conflict or how your cat peed outside of its litter box.

Gross over-sharing is not encouraging or revolutionary or innovative. You are not absolved because you made what was once private now public.

Enough of the cultish drippy-rainbowed sentences: “What’s holding you back? Yourself;” “Motivation is first about taking that first step;” “Do whatever you want, your intuition will guide you;” “Force yourself to look inward;” “Start telling yourself positive things instead of negative things.”

Enough crowdsourcing your life’s misdeeds, your life’s lessons, your life’s minutiae. Enough with bogus empowerment, dramatics, and inflated realities in the name of support, transparency, attention, acceptance. That is not authenticity. That is allegiance to a culture of nineties motivational speeches.

“For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public space and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy,” philosopher Jacques Derrida maintains. “If a right to a secret is not maintained then we are in a totalitarian space.”

“Which is to say,” author Zadie Smith argues in Changing My Mind, “enough of human dissection, of entering the brains of characters, cracking them open, rooting every secret out!”

Authenticity is not about revealing it all, nor complete transparency, nor opening the door and shining a very bright light on every raised goosebump. Authenticity is not about blurring public with private. Authenticity is not about the flailing and flapping of our entire hearts and minds to an audience of mirrored hosts.

We have a right to our private lives. Dear God, we have a right to keep the corners of our lives to ourselves. And it is delicious to do so.

Gulp of Air.

Categories
Happiness Knowing yourself Self-management

Understanding the Anxious Mind

For the past eight or nine months, I’ve created a bubble around me of people I trust, making sweeping efforts to withdraw from drama. Through this process, I learned; the bubble always pops.

Here’s what that’s like for me: Imagine, you’re a crumb and you fall onto the sidewalk and an ant discovers you. His tiny ant friends are soon alerted and before you know it, you’re swarmed! A disgusting black blanket moves furtively and anxiously to completely and methodically chew through your every last morsel. The very thought makes me sick.

And more than anything, this is what it’s like when things are outside my locus of control. And I love control, especially in all of its anxiety-ridden devastation.

“Anxiety is not fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you, a real and objective danger,” reports the New York Times. “It is instead a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing — but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there. If you’re anxious, you find it difficult to talk yourself out of this foreboding; you become trapped in an endless loop of what-ifs.”

For me, the what-ifs appear with even the simplest of situations. Ryan will inquire, for instance, if I would like to attend a concert last-minute, and my chest will immediately be gripped with all of the possible unknowns, and how all of these unknowns make it impossible for me to go.

Where is it? What time does it start? Are we going to get there late? Do we have to pay a cover? Will I have to walk in heels? I don’t have a cute outfit without heels. It’s going to be cold outside. Will I have to stand at the concert and carry my coat? Will it be hot? Will there be a lot of people? Are the people going be younger than me? Will they be boring? Will the band be good? Who’s going with? Are we going to get drinks after? Will the restrooms be clean? I can’t stand public restrooms.

No, I don’t want to go. I can’t go. Rationality urges me to do my make-up and try on clothes while anxiety grips my heart so tightly that I’m dripping with angst. By the time Ryan arrives, I’m paralyzed into doing everything I can not to burst into tears.

I distinctly remember my first such outburst in a sixth-grade hallway. After an elementary school of calm, I peeled back the doors on middle school to discover inequalities, insecurities and the bulging wart of worry – a reoccurring blemish in my otherwise untarnished path towards happiness.

Taken together, panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress and generalized anxiety disorder, make anxiety the most common mental illness in America, affecting an estimated 40 million adults, reports the Times. That’s not even counting the garden-variety worriers like mothers who fret when their daughter doesn’t call, or husbands that believe a phone call in the middle of the night signals a terrible occurrence.

My coping mechanism is to nest as methodically as anxiety chews. Withdrawing further perpetuates the vicious cycle of shrinking into comfort, into habits, into a place that is safe and away from criticism or mistakes or hurt or anger. I crave the days that are built around everything going according to plan.

Research shows that I’m good for the human race. Without those who are hyperviligant, we wouldn’t be able to leap into action so quickly. High-reactive kids are “less likely to experiment with drugs, to get pregnant or to drive recklessly.”

The Times also reports we’re “generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.”

But for me, the mental anguish of wearing myself ragged “with a brain that’s always on high alert” is suffocating. I long to be laidback. To be the kind of person who doesn’t wring their hands under the table. The kind of person who “gives up any notion of being guarded or protected” in order to be intimately known. A person that can arrive effortlessly to a concert.

Categories
Career Leadership Management Self-management

Become an expert quickly

There are two ways to approach life. Read about it. Or live it.

I read a lot. I like to synthesize information together, saturate my brain synapses, make connections, and curate the exact pieces that will fit my life. Knowledge is my thing.

But it doesn’t matter how much I read, or attend lectures, or watch TED talks, or troll Twitter for the next most interesting blog post. Most of that learning stuff is useless; there’s no better way to learn than to just do.

Become an expert {Phase 1}
 Action is the first step. That’s why I encourage job-hopping. Most people don’t know what they like or what they’re good at. Like you could really want to be a CEO, yearn for it with all the matter in your body and brain, and then regrettably discover that you suck as a CEO.

Or maybe you’re really fabulous. A veritable genius! The point is, without working it out for yourself, you’re stuck on the path that others have already laid out. And yeah, that’s a safe plan, I don’t blame you. Our education system is certainly not set up to handle exploration or deviation from a set course. And entering the real world closes the door all together.

In school and at the workplace we’re told exactly how to do tasks, without learning the full explanation behind it. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of a young woman who is trying to solve a mathematical problem. She’s not told the way others have solved the problem, but instead is problem-solving on her own.

Gladwell recounts that when she figures it out, her face lights up: “Ohhh. Okay. Now I see. The slope of a vertical line is undefined. That means something now. I won’t forget that!”

The young woman is working with a professor who encourages his students to unlearn the mathematical habits they picked up on the way to university. Because it’s not about memorizing the right way to do something, but your ability to try that determines your success.

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds,” Gladwell reports.

In order to drive innovation, we need time and space to explore, not regurgitate. To become the master of a topic, you need to understand its underbelly, where it came from, where it’s going, not just the flashy exterior.

Become an expert {Phase 2 – quickly}
Most people are stuck in the land of daydreams and don’t actually reach action, so if you’ve mastered that, pat yourself on the back. I just gave myself a little pat. Go on, you too. Now we’re moving into advanced world domination.

Exploring a topic from top to bottom is all good and well, but what if you don’t have 10,000 hours to devote? What if there was a short-cut? A way that actually helped you make more fiery synapses connections?

I realize I’m starting to sound like an infomercial here, so stay with me.

First, let me preface by saying there’s no substitute for action. And what I’m about to propose isn’t something you should do in lieu of cooking every night if you want to be a chef, but it is the way to super-size what you learn from cooking every night. In an Einstein sort of way, not Mickey D’s.

So tell me, how well can you explain what you do? How well do you understand your passion? Could you teach someone else to do it?

When you do something like send a pitch, for example, you’re learning. You’re testing your ideas and theories through the reaction you receive, the resulting outcome. In this paradigm, it’s okay to fail, you discover through trial and error, and through persistence and hard work, you win.

But there’s an entire level of awesomeness missing. And you can only ascend to the next level by then teaching someone what you have learned. Because then you’re testing your values, ideas and theories with another person’s values, ideas and theories. You understand the underlying challenge more by defining it for another. Teaching – good teaching – requires you to exchange knowledge, not simply impart it. Learning is individual. Teaching is collaborative.

“Nobel laureate physicists such as Enrico Fermi and Leon Lederman took pride in teaching bright undergraduates,” reports Michael Schrage in Harvard Business, “because it forced them to keep in touch with the fundamentals of their field and express themselves simply and clearly.”

I had no idea how to write a stellar cover letter and resume until I started teaching others to do theirs. Groups comprised of individuals in different skill sets – say, marketing, design and finance – thrive when they teach each other. Life-coaches may be so prevalent right now because the coaches help themselves as much as they help clients.

Teaching is sharing knowledge, sharing empathy, sharing ideas. It’s pushing you to understand with entirely different lenses. Just like your body needs both cardio and strength training, your mind needs both learning and teaching.

Teaching is the definitive learning experience. And it’s the quickest way to expertise.

Categories
Career Generation Y Self-management

How to manage your career

I met Ryan through his ideas and opinions. I commented on his blog posts and often disagreed. When I started my own blog, I linked to his, and often disagreed then too. In fact, Ryan was a big reason I established Modite; I felt like I had something to say, something different than was already being said.

The Gen Y blogging niche was small then, the quality blogs were much fewer, but it all exploded very quickly. At the center of it all were Ryan and Ryan at Employee Evolution and then Brazen Careerist. The exchange of ideas was powerful and exciting. Tightropes were walked, ideas were spun, and manifestos were formed with each click of the publish button.

The constant filtering and challenging of ideas accelerated learning, encouraged my dreams, and helped me form key relationships. These ideas and relationships are the reason for my last position, my current position, and why Ryan and I are together.

I knew Ryan long before we exchanged emails, long before we talked on the phone. And by the time Ryan and I met in person, everyone else around us disappeared, and I could only see him. Admittedly, he stands head and shoulders above everyone else – he’s really tall – but don’t scoff when I tell you it was just like a movie. My life changed in that moment.

And from that moment to this, I could not be more impressed and proud that Ryan, the co-founder of Brazen Careerist, is launching a new social and professional network for the Brazen site. Instead of relying on the traditional online resume approach of current job sites that showcase static experience and background, Brazen Careerist provides a platform for you to dynamically manage and enhance your professional identity.

Tech Crunch reports that the Brazen site offers “an environment where users can share their thoughts and activities alongside their resumes.” To fully leverage this environment, Brazen Careerist provides users with a host of opportunities to actively showcase their expertise and develop their network. Users can find and talk with people of similar interests, location or profession, engage in dialogue on career and life topics, and create and join groups that relate to their goals.

That is, your ideas are your value. Brazen allows you to level the playing field against more experienced candidates. And since I’ve been lucky enough to have my ideas already benefit my career and relationships by virtue of Brazen Careerist, I know this is only the beginning of how truly great Brazen will be.

What do you think? Can ideas be your resume? Does a professional network help your career?

Categories
Knowing yourself Relationships Self-management

Trying isn’t good enough

“What did you do today?”

I cried like a druggie in rehab pleading with God and my dead father to help me. Also, I slept. Tried to sleep. To ignore. To escape. Between sleeping and crying, I tried to be normal.

“Nothing much, I ran some errands,” I replied on a Saturday night out at the bar, trying to be normal. Going out with friends for the first time in a long time. Friends that were good enough to forget that I ignored them for the past eight months. Because that’s what happens when I’m in a relationship.

Everyone likes me better when I’m single. If you lined up the town and asked them to raise their hands when they saw a cool person, and then presented Me, In a Relationship and Me, Single, the hands would most assuredly go up the second round, and I would raise my hand in line with the rest. I’m not good in a relationship. Perhaps because I don’t think I am, and perhaps because it never really mattered before now. Because when you date assholes, you can be a bitch right back. So dating a good guy is a complete shock in terms of how to act and how to behave and how to live.

So of course you push this cool person down the same worn-in path as before, and as you go, you look around and know that the two of you don’t belong there.

And I am angry that the Universe could present me with such a being when I’m not primed. I’m not prepared.

It’s not that I don’t feel worthy, exactly. But that I never saw myself with someone so all-American, so normal, so right. Because my life was messed up the moment my father died, and surely God doesn’t think I’m ready for a life that isn’t messed up. Surely, I should keep punishing myself. I am not ready for such greatness. Surely, I am not ready to lead a normal life yet, with barbeques and endless cuddling and television. Life is jaded. Always and forever. This will never heal.

Being single, it doesn’t matter. But being in a relationship – the good kind, at least – brings all this other responsibility. And I don’t really care for all that. To care about someone so deeply and they just might up and leave, or want you, or die, or get sick, or let you down, or need you, or care about you back. I get anxious. So anxious I can’t breathe.

Okay, so I have issues. The kind that should be capitalized and underlined, and you should take note of it.

But I’m working on that, and back to Saturday night, I declared that it was the beginning of “New Rebecca!” exclamation point, let’s take another shot, done and done. I was fabulous. I smiled and was totally level-headed and ingratiated myself back to the good side of the Universe through two hipster bars, three slices of bacon, spinach and yellow-tomato pizza, and a pair of four-inch heels. Cue the soundtrack as the shot pans up and fades out. Walk out of the theater with a happy ending. It was fun and I laughed.

Sunday morning, I got up and cleaned the wine bottles from the counter, threw away someone else’s cigarettes, and vacuumed the dirt from the corner. And somewhere in between, I found a little bit of normal.

Common Sense.

Categories
Accountability Generation Y Knowing yourself Self-management

Gen Y needs boundaries for action

I like motivational talks. Like this one from Gary Vaynerchuk. I get all excited and pumped and ready to work.

Then I get stuck. Interminably stuck. Because I’m really excited and pumped to work, but for what? I’m a lucky person, but I wonder is this it? Really? Because I thought there might be more.

Marcus Buckingham of the Wall Street Journal gets it. “This is a deeply anxious and insecure generation,” he argues. “On the surface they look self-confident, [but] deep down they know that they don’t actually know what it takes to win.”

Apparently it’s going to take a decade of wandering for us to figure it out. New York Times columnist David Brooks describes this new Generation Y life stage as the Odyssey Years – a decade of exploration and experimentation (via Tammy Erickson).

“During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school,” Brooks reports. “They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.”

And all this unbridled choice has us delaying marriage, children, and permanent employment – accomplishments that have traditionally defined adulthood. Not for Gen Y though. Brooks reports that fewer than 40 percent of 30-year olds have achieved these things versus 70 percent forty years ago.

The consequences of our aimless wandering delay adulthood, but also our chance at genuine happiness. Generation Y’s passion is defined by our idealism, not our pragmatism. So while it may seem like we’re enjoying our freedom, research shows that we’d be a lot better off with more structure, less choice, and working through problems instead of moving on to our next big adventure.

We need more accountability. We need restrictions. Because passion needs direction. It needs filters, and red tape, and four walls. Passion needs to be challenged to be passion at all.

This is the fascinating juxtaposition that is Gen Y. We crave structure, efficiency and effectiveness, and yet, we “have a huge willingness to believe in a grand vision of things — both [in ourselves] and the world,” Buckingham reports.

But grand vision makes it dangerously easy to be underwhelmed at the banality of everyday life. Too much choice keeps us reaching and searching and never doing anything at all.

“When our ambition is bounded it leads us to work joyfully,” happiness expert Daniel Gilbert reports. So Generation Y can keep wandering. Or we can open a door and see what happens when dreams hit reality.

Life limits.

Categories
Accountability Knowing yourself Self-management

3 ways to turn weaknesses into strengths

“Um… I can’t think of the word.”

I am not the most articulate person in person. It’s something that I’ve had to work on. A lot.

Mostly, it has a lot to do with my personality type. What’s going through my head sounds quite coherent to me, but I tend to say things first and think second. That makes me stumble in the middle of sentences and prefer to put words to paper instead of lips.

I didn’t really know this was a problem until my last job. A position that was all about public speaking. Speaking. Out loud. All the time. But I did well and survived. Here’s how you too can turn your weaknesses into strengths:

1. Do it small and awkward first.
I practiced my first big speech in front of Ryan. Doing speeches is actually much more difficult in front of people you know. Ryan and I weren’t dating at the time and never really hung out, but I thought he was cute and I wore a cute dress in preparation.

And it was so ridiculously embarrassing.

I don’t know what possessed me to think I could speak publicly in front of the guy that I had liked since the moment we had met, but it was awful. I was sweating. I was hot. And then cold. And I couldn’t even look at him. I looked behind him. At the corner.

Lucky for me, it worked. It totally worked and I aced the speech a few days later.

Make yourself uncomfortable before you have to perform for real. Most bloggers I know had a blog before their current blog. Companies test imperfect products with small groups before a launch. Runners do three miles before ten. You’re not the exception. No magic fairy dust for you. Only awkward, pride-swallowing affairs that give you mad confidence and oh-so-valuable experience.

2. Appreciate that weaknesses are your best asset.
The second time Ryan and I ever met and hung out, we got into a huge argument outside of the bar. And then he walked me home and asked why I was so cute when I was so angry. (And no, I didn’t let him come up.)

It’s totally annoying to fight with someone you like, but when you realize that you fight because you care things get better. You see, weaknesses are inextricably linked to strengths. They are the manifestation of fear from the things you want the most. And we avoid things that are scary to us. Like success. And love. And hard work.

But really, it’s not scary to take the first step towards being promoted to bank manager, or writing a book, or learning to swim as an adult, because then you just take another step, and then another.

3. Stop buying into natural talent.
Ryan is constantly telling me, “Relationships take work.”

I huff and I puff and then I agree. Because really, what do I know. I didn’t grow up with an example of a good relationship. Ryan did. My father died when I was in second grade. His parents are still together. My examples were happy endings. His were real people, not characters in a movie.

Nobody is excelling without practice. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests it actually takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any area.

“The people at the very top don’t just work much harder than everyone else,” he reports. “They work much, much harder.”

And according to the 10,000 hour rule, I still have two or three years of serious relationship practice left before I get my happy ending. But even then, happy endings take constant vigilance because happiness is such an attention hog. Nobody ever tells you that, right? Like, usually when you reach your goals/success/nirvana the work is supposed to be over.

But since Tiger Woods isn’t taking a day off, neither can you (except maybe when it’s 83 degrees outside after a Winter in Wisconsin). The real meditation is in the constancy of habit.

Strong Side.

Categories
Career Management Self-management

How to deal with a bad boss

Having a bad boss doesn’t excuse you from being a good employee. And good employees manage up.

This works because work relationships are all about control. Your boss may be threatened that you’re young and intelligent, may not want to give you more responsibility, could be on a power-trip, or might just be an inexperienced manager. There could be any number of reasons why he’s not so nice.

But if you had more control at your job – if you could be in charge of more or your boss could be in charge of less, things would be better off, right? Managing up allows you to retain your sense of poise and productivity, and requires that you:

1. Perform like you’ve never performed before. It doesn’t matter if your boss told you to wash dishes. If that’s your task, you had better be the best darn dish-washer there ever was. It’s really hard for a boss to complain if you’re doing everything right and smiling about it. And you’ll feel better after accomplishing something instead of complaining.

Besides, no one gets to skip paying dues all together. Sometimes the workplace is dirty, unethical and downright salacious, but you should never be a part of that. By complaining and not doing, you’re being complicit in a negative environment instead of showing your real value and true work ethic.

2. Realize what the real point of working is. Even if you feel like you can run miles around what you’re doing or on the flip side, that your task is too difficult, realize that the opportunity in most jobs is not to learn a specific or creative skill, but to learn people skills, which are far more important at the end of the day.

It’s people skills that differentiate you and help you succeed over anything else. That’s why you’re actually lucky to have a bad boss. There will never be a deficiency of difficult people at your job or in your life. This is a prime opportunity to use that to your advantage.

3. Discover what your boss cares about and learn to care too. For example, I once had a boss that would bully me in private and become my best friend in public. Her main concern was image, mostly hers.  Once I understood this, I took less of what she said to heart, and focused mainly on tasks that would increase the positive sentiment of our organization publicly. I never failed to compliment her to others, and so I knew when she said, “I’ve been hearing great things about you,” she really meant “I’ve been hearing great things about myself.”

Your boss could equally care about leaving at 5:00 pm to see his kids, or pushing through her pet project on eco-friendly envelopes, or making sure he never has to write notes at a meeting again. Whatever the push-point is, find it and use it to make your boss look good. Real good.

4. Care like you and your boss are real people. Because you both are. Not all of us are suited to be inspirational leaders, and most of us don’t realize how difficult it really is to be a good manager. And many more don’t even realize that the onus is truly on the employee to bring out the best in a manager. Where would Obama be without the ideas and enthusiasm of the American citizens for change?

Your participation, empathy and respect towards your boss will be reflected in how your boss treats you. Try reverence for a change.

Boss it up.