Pause

Signing off on Pause and sharing my new blog: From Here to Autonomy

So this is kind of sad, and not. I've been in blog purgatory for probably 18 months, wondering what's my blog mojo? One of the reasons that I created Pause in the first place was this ooogy feeling of, what's next for me? And then I found that out, and then I wondered how to continue this blog and keep it relevant. After much thinking, I believe this blog is best served by letting it be a resource for anyone pursuing their passion, not only women, and that a much more targeted blog, specific to my life as it is today is in order.

I'm keeping Pause open and available because I can't let so many of the pearls I obtained on my journey go into the land of cache. That would be a travesty.

So what will I be doing at From Here to Autonomy? If the name is familiar, that's because I wrote many Pause posts under that category: it's the common thread between my past and present. The entrepreneurial drive and desire to fully realize what the spirit wants to accomplish. Only this time there's an actual BUSINESS in place, and new challenges. And, well, I'm not getting any younger. And I'm no longer just dragging myself into the entrepreneurial abyss. This predicament leads to new questions I'm chewing on, and sometimes choking on.

There are some people I'd like to thank for helping me with this transition:

• Mom: I could go for a month without posting and you would always ask me, "So when's your next post?" Thanks for keeping the faith when others just stopped coming back.
• Britt Bravo: For the ongoing discourse and advice from the best blog therapist out there. Sure, everyone's putting up a shingle these days, but not everyone makes sense. Everything you've said about direction and strategy made sense to me. Sure you can blog out of love, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a blog purpose.
• Jesse: My partner and defacto art director. It's true, I had no idea what I wanted to convey with the new blog, but I like what we constructed, don't you? Also, sorry that I somehow deleted the old Pause template you helped me develop. I wanted to keep it up for kicks, but, well, anyway ...
• Riccardo Spina: You've been hired to work on a slightly bigger redesign than mine, so many thanks for the words of wisdom and encouragement, and for letting me borrow from the residue of your brilliance. This was infinitesimally smaller in scope than you are used to, but my readers are much better off now.
• Jim Macove: Thanks for taking my photo, again! You make me look good. And I should stop hoarding you for myself.
• The Pause Readers who kept reading when I thought this site was dormant: Genevieve, Jensey, Mom, and others who poked their heads in occasionally, if for no other reason than to make sure there wasn't a rotting corpse on the floor. I'm alive, I swear!

Hope you like FHtA.

An Entrepreneur's Holiday Weekend: The good, the bad, the unproductive

This week I took some extended time off around the Thanksgiving holiday--two whole days! The first day of my vacation I spent catching up on email, thinking of blog post ideas, and, OK, just checking in on our company team meeting. Hey it was a goodie, not one to be missed. My husband also had the day off and couldn't really make sense of my choice of activities.

"Babe, what's the point of taking vacation if ..."

"I know, I know."

The remainder of the day I played with widget options for my soon to launch new blog, went to the dentist for a follow-up, and then baked pumpkin pie. In my true style of underestimating how long it takes to properly create things In Real Life, I forgot that one must let dough chill before rolling it out. This not so minor detail, and some general wonkiness I encountered with my dough, put me back about 2 hours. I went to bed well past midnight.

Wednesday we drove from the Bay Area to Anaheim to spend Thanksgiving with Jesse's family. We encountered pockets of heavy traffic, which irritated my husband to no end, but which I found rather convenient--it afforded me more time to catch up on trade newsletters and articles I had sent to myself to read when I'd get an extra moment. At one point, I noticed an email request from my business partner and figured, "Hey, I'm in the car, so why not just crank it out."

I worked on the laptop until my power died, then enjoyed the throngs of people stuck in gridlock for the next few hours.

Thursday I really did take the day off. We took a long bike ride on the tandem of Jesse's aunt and uncle. After lunch, I sat on the couch next to Jesse to watch the football game with his grandfather. Next thing I know, I'm waking up.

"What just happened?"

"Enjoy your nap?" Jesse said.

"That was weird. I wasn't even tired."

Both Jesse and I knew what had happened--what happens every time I have enough time off to absorb the fact that I'm on vacation--my body shut down. For the remainder of the day I felt bone tired and disoriented, like I was just waking up. Every few minutes I checked my Blackberry for email, out of a nervous habit. With the exception of a few Facebook and Twitter alerts there was nothing. Not having anything new pop into my inbox made me a tad agitated. It felt like there was something wrong. I had to remind myself that it was Thanksgiving. When we arrived at Jesse's aunt's for dinner I put my Blackberry in the glove compartment.

Friday Jesse was up with the sun. I found it much harder to wake up. I sauntered into my in-laws' kitchen and started to pick through the New York Times. I helped set up a wireless router, and then around 1 pm felt this sudden panic that I was letting the day pass me by. Jesse had mentioned that his parents wanted to see an exhibit at the contemporary art museum in La Jolla.

"When are we going to motivate?" I asked Jesse.

"I dunno. I thought I might study for my (licensure) exam for a while."

"We need a plan, Jesse! When are we going?"

"Later today."

"When later today? The sun sets at 5!" My voice became more and more urgent.

"Fine. We'll leave at 2."

At 2:15 we left for the museum. None of us were that impressed with the exhibit, but I was glad to be out and a tourist, taking in the sites on the waterfront. I was already thinking to myself, "Where are we going for dinner? Do we need reservations? When should I squeak out a blog post?" I told myself to shut up. We watched the sun set. I'd done nothing productive, and it was OK.

Saturday I squeezed in some exercise before friends arrived for brunch. I felt more energized than I had been, despite the fact that I had had a work dream that woke me up in the middle of the night and I couldn't fall back asleep for hours. It wasn't a scary or traumatic dream, just one that required a degree of thinking. I found it strange to wake up at 3 in the morning in a state I find myself in during, say, a team meeting: Fully alert and ready to report information.

We did some shopping that afternoon, or browsing, anyway; I found that I wasn't inspired by anything at the stores. Later, I tried to blog and realized I was a blank slate, no words were appearing that I considered compelling enough to write down. I thought to myself that it was a shame, really; I finally had some time to blog, and I couldn't think of a damn thing to say.

Sunday we drove back up from SoCal, and I caught up on more trade newsletters. It occured to me that there were only so many to catch up on before it made sense to let some information go. I listened to hours of CNN on satellite radio and wondered, "Did any of these people take the weekend off?" It seemed that there were many people whose jobs required them to be even more available than mine did on holiday weekends, and I felt grateful and guilty.

We got back home earlier than planned and even a bit unsure of what to do with ourselves. I had planned to start working as soon as I got home, but as a personal dare I decided to think about my long weekend--what I did, not what I didn't do. And write it down, even the seemingly mundane stuff, so that I would be more aware of how I spent my "free" time. I asked myself, how much of it did I actually spend on being free? 

Option 1: Work more; Option 2: Work less; Option 3 ...

Kris at The HR Capitalist caught my attention with his post, "Being a Star - Either Put In More Hours Than Others, or Start Eliminating Stuff (But Stop Whining)...." He says:

Work/life balance is a choice.  You won't be able to be your version of Bono with work/life balance as your goal.  More and more, I run into super sharp people who are amazed at the entitlement culture of talented folks who say they want to be stars, but won't put in the time to outwork others and are outraged when told that's what it takes.

If you are not inclined to put in more hours, Kris says, "you need to start eliminating things that you don't think matter, the things you can get away with not doing, not being involved with at work."

This is the choice of anyone seeking success, but notably of the entrepreneur. As my company has grown, my time management strategy as evolved--or devolved as the case may be:

• Phase 1--The first date that won't end: You have a crush on all the excitement that your business is providing for you in life and unwittingly give it all the time that it needs. Other things need to happen, like sleep, so you just add more work hours to your day and keep plugging after dinner, or after your spouse knocks off for bed. When opportunities present themselves, you drop everything.  For instance, someone you've wanted to meet with for some time wants to connect for breakfast at 7:30 a.m. the next day in New York City, and you are in San Francisco. No problem! Sure you don't feel great after taking a red-eye, but you make it there. And you've set up other back-to-back meetings to get the most out of your time. By the time you are back at the airport you realize you might not have mentioned your whereabouts to your spouse but know he'll understand. And you know that this phase can't last forever, but you must take full advantage of every opportunity now, while you have it.

• Phase 2--The Trade-offs: You realize that other things--hobbies, friends, wellness--are being impacted, but hopefully now you are experiencing some growth and cannot imagine losing momentum in order to stop and smell the roses. Also, expectations have been set. Clients on the East Coast expect that you will be available during the wee hours of the morning on the West Coast; you've told them to call you if they wanted to talk--anytime; they're just taking you up on your offer. All those opportunities that you have been pushing for are now happening; and you must be there to implement them. You can't imagine having others do it during such a delicate, relationship-building phase. You plan to eventually build replicable, delegatable processes, but you must trail-blaze for how.

You try to fit it all in, but even with extended hours you can't. So you compromise on everything except your business. You skip those biannual physical exams, you whittle that full workout into a few sit-ups before bed, you spam an eGreeting card to your address book this year instead of sending individually written cards. That quality time you book nightly with your spouse or the kids is spent responding to email while sitting next to him on the couch. You don't have to meet with people in-person today, so you forgo showering and getting dressed--time is money, people! The first time you skip these things it feels bad; the second time you can justify it as something you're sacrificing "for now", the third time you've re-identified yourself: "I guess I'm just going to be 10 pounds heavier." "I've never been much of a home cook." "I'm just not a neat person." "I'm the kind of person who always has to be doing something." ...

You start to fear that your tradeoffs are becoming more and more visible. You look older. You have creaky knees and your neck hurts. You indiscriminately hand people not associated with your business, like your drycleaner, your business card. You develop this glassy look that signals to your domestic partner that you are assessing what else you need to get done today, not listening to his suggestions for what to have for dinner. You meet up with friends you haven't seen in ages, and when they ask how you are doing, you update them on your calendar and on your competition.

• Phase 3--Signs of wear and tear: You have much to show for your hard work--both good and bad. You are still pushing hard; forget about cruise-control. But you can speak confidently about the future of your business.

Through accidental situations, like delayed flights and malfunctioning electronics, you find yourself with small pockets of unscheduled time and have no idea what to do with it: Pick up a newspaper and at least familiarize yourself with the happenings in the world, pet your cat, or call people? You realize you don't know where to start and defer to doodling in your notebook. You go to the dentist and they declare you're in for a year of orthodontics due to stress-induced jaw alignment issues. You understand the urgency but just don't know how you can fit that sort of thing into your schedule at this time. Pain is also very time consuming--feeling it, preventing it, containing it. You plan another appointment in several months--hopefully enough lead time to plan around it. You later realize that you do have a conflict but you do nothing. Maybe the other party will cancel. You meet up with friends you haven't seen in ages, and when they ask how you are doing, you have nothing to say. You say, "Hanging in, and you?

People call you successful and you wonder, "How so?" Even if you are, you are so used to the act of building momentum that you don't know what success feels like. Perhaps you've overcome it and it's now trailing behind, and you just feel something dragging. You assume it's another problem to attack. You remove your anniversary dinner from your calendar and enter "figure out dragging issue" in its place.

But back to HR Capitalist's two options: Accept that you are going to have to put in the time, or start taking things off your plate. The frustration of a later-stage entrepreneur who's had a few years to cycle through both options is "what else?"

One could say Option 3 is aspire to less. Let's just say for the sake of argument that this was even possible for the entrepreneur, that we could temporarily suppress this unquenchable ambition and could actually make a logical decision to dial it back a bit. I argue that our natures would kick back in, and we would become crazy about something else.

My friend and former coach Kimberly threw something out to me that was similar to Kris's advice, but offered in a way that I could actually consider.

"I'll bet you could back off about 10 percent and no one would even notice," she said.

"But I would notice," I said.

And I thought about that. There are types of effort: level one being "9-5" effort, level two being extraordinary effort, and level three being "Why are you afraid that level two won't suffice?" effort.

I am willing to consider level 2 may be effective.

Encounters: People who don't live in "phases"

A very close friend insisted that I meet a woman she'd just met. She just had a feeling we'd get along. After many fits and starts--business trips, cancelled opportunites and challenges getting into the city at the same time--we finally managed to be in the same place at the same time. I'm all for serendipitous encounters, but I've made far less time for these encounters than I used to.

I recall the salad days of the Dot Com bomb, when we had plenty of time and nothing to lose from meeting people who may or may not be helpful to us. I met people on searches, some similar to my own, and could listen to them talk about their endeavors for the sake of listening. Years later, with a small business to help run, time was at a premium. I've learned a new skill lately of folding in these occasional encounters with official business meetings.

This friend of my friend's was traveling far out of her way to meet me. She'd moved to the Bay Area not long ago and had some challenges navigating suitable places to park in the city. I could have gone to her, I thought, feeling a tad guilty.

Over coffee (or an iced latte; it was a hot day) we talked about what we were up to. Clearly our mutual friend thought to put us together for a reason. I knew that my coffee date was working on her third book. I guessed that my friend hoped I would be a potential reviewer of it when it was ready, or could help her with a blog promotion strategy. As she spoke, I realized she hardly needed my help. She'd practiced medicine as an OB/Gyn for years, then decided to follow her passion for art. After creating a national following (she shows in galleries across the country), she thought to expand on her passion for writing. She is now working on her third book, which had received competing bids from multiple publishing houses. She didn't need my help with online promotion; her growing online community was thriving. She had a staff to help her maintain it. Three years ago she had  a daughter, and her husband, a Harvard MBA, had stopped working to explore his own possibilities and now spent his days at their home near the ocean.

I thought to myself, she has everything she wants. What can I possibly do for her? Perhaps, it became increasingly apparent to me, it was SHE who would help me.

Back to my Roots: The Ladies who Launch Conference

For the past year now, I've spoken quite often about crossing the chasm between advertisers and bloggers. Earlier this year I was asked to sit on a panel for a Ladies Who Launch event in San Francisco to speak about, well, me, and my entrepreneurial journey--such a departure to discussing the merits of blogging, or the power of word-of-mouth marketing!

And yet, this event appealed to me in a way the others didn't. It reminded me of my days of yore, when I actually wrote about the seeds of creation, what brought me to starting a business with Lisa and Elisa, a pivotal time when your foundation for moving forward is built. A time when your previous world has blown up--it has to be blown up, or you'll spend too much energy trying to keep the past intact and not moving forward.

The event was not in any way a traditional conference-like format. Sure, there were panels and interviews, but in back were small businesses selling merchandise and lots of shopping. It turned me off initially--why do we always assume that if women are involved we need to have jewlery and cute things lining the place? But as I got to speaking to the women in the booths I realized they were a re-enforcement of the message behind this event: Anything is possible, and we can help each other get there. What better way of telling the story of your business than having your business brought to the event?

I spoke on a panel of media experts, including the hilarious Randy Peyser, CEO of her own business and author of Crappy to Happy, and The Write-a-Book Program: How to Position Yourself as an Expert by Writing a Book, and the epitome of Chutzpah. She told her story of following her dream and having nothing to show for it initially--except for a single box of baking soda in the fridge (been there!)--she opted to stand out on the highway with a sign "Editor seeking publisher." Incidentally, it worked.

The lesson from her story: It usually takes an act of faith (and insanity) to make a dream happen. And by the way, I could tell that being crazy was not a typical thing in Randy's life; she had to aspire to being crazy. A lot of people think that some people are born with the crazy gene and some aren't. I subscribe to a different theory, we are all born meant to be awake and alive, and those who go through this life without asking themselves if they are passionate about what they do are the ones who are crazy.

When asked about advice I had to making an entrepreneurial vision happen, I had a fairly amorphous answer; this is what I wanted to say: We are born with an obligation to ourselves to do what we are meant to do. Seeing our lives failing to commit to ourselves is often what pushes us over the edge. Personally, I couldn't stand myself any longer, and neither could the people who worked next to me. I brooded and complained once a quarter about not being utilized fully. Be warned: expect to be utilized on the entrepreneurial journey, OVER-utilized, in fact. Expect to have to do some outlandish things like get on airplanes and talk about things like you are the expert. Realize you are the expert and just do them.

Also on the panel is a woman I've been wanting to meet for quite some time--Kate Everett Thorp of Real Girls Media. Being the head of a digital media company, I thought I knew her story, but I didn't. Hearing Kate describe how her mother was instrumental to helping her commit to things at a young age, and how her husband left his work as an engineer to take care of their three children, I realized there are no easy peasy ways of becoming an entrepreneur. Some of us sacrifice more than others, some of us get funded sooner, but none of us had an easy ride. None of us did this without help. The more we tell our stories, the more we free up other women to take the plunge.

A handful of women came up to me, I had assumed, to ask me about blogging. Some did want advice. And three asked me, with shyness, what's a blog? I had to laugh appreciatively; I came equipped to tell of how blogging would increase entrepreneurs' visibility, but it seemed that my expertise was less interesting than my experience. The part I don't share in keynotes--how freaking hard it is to start something no one has done before. Working through uncertainty and learning much more about what you want through discovering what doesn't work for you.

One woman approached me whom I hadn't seen in years. I found it ironic that she'd approached me, since years ago I'd seen her speak, and later she'd become one of my inspirations. In fact, I wrote about her when I embarked on a previous entrepreneurial journey. Here's a snippet:

From Here to Autonomy (Part V): Your Money or Your Life?

If someone put a gun to your head and asked you to give them your wallet, what would you do?

The answer seems obvious, but the truth is that this has happened to many of us—we’ve been forced to choose between our money and our lives—and we’ve chosen to keep the money.

I loved Shoshanna Zuboff’s column this month in Fast Company; she did an informal survey of the other soccer parents living, like her, in rural Maine. Some of the parents were locals and worked in local industry, others were transplants—professionals who had decided to slow down and chose lifestyle over career status. This led Zuboff to explore why people who had “succeeded” in their careers chose not to live in a more urban, status-oriented world that rewarded their success.

By the same token one could ask why a handful of executives, once they hit a zenith in their careers, decide to resign; or why a novelist, with a mass market bestseller under his belt, decides to pen a “quiet” book under a pen name; or why Michael Jordan decided to play Minor League baseball. 

Do people wither in the limelight?

From Here to Autonomy (Part IV): Reading the Tea (or Tree) Leaves

Like I said in the first part of this series, I’ve been working on this Godforsaken book at work. At some point it became my job to do the patchwork required to put the book together: Coordinating the copyediting and proofreading, working with the designer on the cover, and with the printer on the file format and typesetting, and with direct marketing list brokers for marketing it, and with our PR guy for touting the hell out of it.

Let me amend my first sentence, the book is not Godforsaken, it’s actually quite good, or will be quite good when it is done, I’m told. The content is first rate. I wouldn’t know that, however. I’ve hardly read it myself, save for the thousands of redlined words.

This situation has become a wonderful metaphor for the concept of losing one’s perspective at work, entering into a profession with the expectation of immersing oneself into something fascinating, seeing that there are “dues to pay” in the form of lackluster busywork, and then getting so immersed in this busywork that you forgot why you are at your company or what you wanted to get out of it in the first place.

From Here to Autonomy (Part III): Work is cheap, thinking is priceless

I read an interesting blog entry on Worthwhile today that chips away at a dynamic I’m only just beginning to make out. They pulled a quote from -- Michael Ray’s and Rochelle Myers’s book, Creativity in Business:

After finding that about one child in 30 is brilliant and happy, (Harvard psychologist Burton) White did a great deal of research to determine what demographic or psychological characteristics distinguished those children. … he determined that the bright and happy children had only one thing in common: All of them spent noticeable amounts of time staring peacefully and wordlessly into space.

See, all that time my mother let me vedge out and watch episodes of Gumby was not a waste; something was happening there. I used to daydream a lot in class about sports, boys (those pre-sexual bubble-bath fantasies), and being the youngest actress to ever win an Oscar for Best Actress (screw you, Tatum, you only got best supporting actress). None of these habits have been cited as contributing to success later in life, but perhaps this now makes the case for adults who give Palm Pilots to their kids so they can manage their busy extracurricular schedules. Thanks Mom and Dad, you have taught your kid to be a no-questions-asked suck-up. You have taught your kid to be a Do-er.

The Burton study provides a beautiful argument for letting adults free their minds and see what answers come to them....at work. Certainly, making required contemplation a company policy might be interpreted as early Happy Hour for some, but for others who are craving the time to simply sit and think it could make all the difference.

From Here to Autonomy (Part II): The Do-ers, The Be-ers, and The Visionaries

Somewhere down the line I suspected I was a Turncoat, a mutineer from the Do-er ship. Several jobs ago, at a Dot Com, when I was a generously compensated Do-er, which makes Doing much more bearable, our company endured several rounds of startling layoffs. I never saw them coming, of course; I was too busy Doing to notice—so you can imagine my surprise.

It was even more surprising when our management brought in a Guru to help build morale. Morale-building, in my book, was very anti-Do. It took away from the time I needed to file, call, follow-up, draft, input, etc.

The Guru asked us to assign ourselves into one of three groups: “Do-ers,” “Be-ers,” or “Visionaries.” My guess was that by doing this we would better understand how our colleagues defined themselves, and we’d get a better sense of how to work with them. And seeing as we now had half the colleagues we used to have, we would have to understand underlying motivation quite clearly, lest we force a Be-er to be a Do-er and incite violence in our now vacuous hallways.

I gravitated over to the “Visionary” side of the room, prompting an immediate response in one of my colleagues,

“What the hell are you doing over here? You’re a Do-er! Go be with them.”

From Here to Autonomy: An Employee's Journey (Part I)

I got a call from my boss this morning, not so unusual except that today is Saturday. He was reviewing a book that I’ve been working on with him for several months. We are in the homestretch; just reviewing the proofs to make sure everything is copasetic before we go to press.

Unfortunately things were not copasetic.

“The wrong chapter is in this thing!” he said, referring to a chapter that had been submitted late, then shuffled through an edit and copyedit several times, then returned to be rewritten and copyedited again. Somewhere in the hullabaloo of managing 21 other chapters, most of which had also been submitted late, or with changes, or with special instructions, I must have submitted the wrong version to the publisher.

Clearly my boss felt that this a was big enough deal to call me on a Saturday morning,

“I know you are on a deadline, and I didn’t want you to have to find out about this Monday morning,” he said. Thrill: I now have the pleasure of stressing about it for the rest of the weekend.

I supposed he wanted to tell me in case I might find it imperative to go to the office and fix the problem so we’d be back on schedule Monday morning. I browsed my schedule on my Palm Pilot to see what else I had going on this weekend. This is what I had listed for today:

            --Read

            --Sked hair appointment

            --Write/think

            --Groceries???

            --Plans/JM

Boy, tough day, huh? Still, I shut off my Palm Pilot and went back to my reading. It was very important article in O Magazine.

I’ve found a radical shift in my behavior over the past few months; I surprise even myself sometimes. Here my BOSS is working on weekends and calling me about something important, and I—the underling—cannot find the time to address it.

I’m not trying to be contrary or rebellious. I take great pride in my work. It bothers me that the book schedule is now thrown off because of my mistake. But a new question arises when these things happen? I no longer ask, “What can I do to fix it?” I ask myself, “What am I committed to being, a “Do-er” or a “Visionary”? At least, this is the question that I ask on weekends; when I ask it every day I will be in a new place, at a new level. Employed or not, I will be autonomous.