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Chatting with Lisa Belkin about the "B" Word

I wrote about Lisa Belkin's NYT Magazine piece two weeks ago, and then got to interview the writer and ask her quite directly about her thoughts on "having it all" and that ever-evasive balance.

Too cool ...

The ironies of being a Web professional

A few weeks ago I invited a young woman (oh God what does it mean when I start calling women in their 20s young women?) to a panel that I was sitting on for Girls in Tech. No, I didn't think she would learn much from me prattling on about entrepreneurship, though she had just moved here from NYC as a writer and was hoping to find work befitting a liberal arts major in San Francisco. This was as close as I could get to hooking her up with contacts.

I'm not sure if I helped or hindered her in discovering "media" in New York. On the panel were women such as Sasha Cagen of StyleMob (now owned by Glam), Sarah Lacey of Yahoo Tech Ticker/Business Week, Aubrey Sabala of Digg, and Mary Hodder of Dabble. I introduced this woman to GIT Founder Adriana Gascoigne of Ogilvy PR, thinking she may want to come over to the "dark side" as we former full-time writers call it, and try our hands at writing for brands.

The day after the panel I received a nice note from my friend thanking me for the invite and opportunity, and who also sounded a bit overwhelmed by it all. Wow, she had said. These folks sure were techie (as a NY media transplant, I don't remember too many industry mixers where all of the attendees were asked to introduce themselves and then share their favorite tech application). But, I kept thinking to myself, the girl's gotta know: This IS media out here. The folks from Digg, from Linked In, from Glam, from Facebook, from BlogHer. Get your technology on, because out here it's in the DNA.

I could totally empathize with my friend's overwhelm. Having come to San Francisco in 1999 I learned quickly that things worked differently out here. And now I'm amused to see how east coast is having to learn so much from the folks on the West Coast in terms of utilizing tech for reach, and yet how freaking difficult it is to hire people out here in CA who operate from both sides of their brains (if you know of someone who loes to Twitter AND can edit ad copy with 2-5 years of client services experience, I'm hiring!)

The other side of it is, I LIKE my print. I just don't get to read much of it anymore. I got a little nostalgic sitting with my in-laws this weekend and hearing of the stories they just read in The New Yorker. I still get the mag, but I can't remember the last time I read a whole article. All of my required reading has moved online.

And then there are the new-ish time-sucking apps/sites that I've tried to protect myself from but can't because they are so ingrained within the community I serve and am part of: Pandora, Seesmic, imeem. I realized this weekend that I couldn't hold out anymore during meetings with advertisers and claim that I knew much about Twitter without starting an account; hearing dispatches from the obsessed would only sustain me for so long. I've been holding out on this decision much like I held out when Rollerblading became popular: I thought I would wait the trend out, and then I realized that I was missing out on something that was not going away. But by that time I was waaaaay behind. I'm happy that my business partner and friend, Elisa Camahort Page, opted into being my first follower.

There's an attraction and resistance with these tools, I find, because though I took to blogging like lint to a cherry popsicle in summer. I can't deny that it's pulled me from some offline experiences that I prized in life: Reading the Sunday paper in a cafe, going out to see live music and films, picking up the phone and calling people whom I've neglected to speak to in so long. I struggle to decide whether to take on another solitary, online experience. Another obsession. And then to feel a bit heartbroken when the rigors of my work schedule keep me from fully embracing it. Try keeping up with Twitter feeds when you are on planes all the time.

I saw the fabulous piece that ABC News did on Heather Armstrong. As a blogger these stories of bloggers building their blogging actually hurt. I would love be back in the swing of writing regularly, sharing myself and my stories online. But I saw something important in building BlogHer and facilitating others' blogging. I have this bidness side that needs to get scratched. I loved blogging and the opportunities that it opened so much that it made sense to take the next step and blow it out beyond my own writing.

Even so, I miss the days when I would crank out posts that took three hours to write. You can argue that posts should not be that long. Hell, who reads long-form posts anymore? Still, I miss the indulgence.

Far be it from me to insist that the technology slow down enough to let us pick and choose apps that we really need in our lives. Far be it from me to complain about it when it's enabled my passion and my business. Still, even while sitting on a panel advocating how technology has enabled me, I'm still mostly interested in telling stories at the end of the day.

It is overwhelming sometimes.

Life in the Weeds

I'm feeling very Annie Dilleresque today. In The Writing Life, Diller jots down her thoughts, little packets of creation that often have nothing to do with each other, but that come together to comprise a portrait of her life. I loved that book so much because that's how I think--in bite-size pieces--and frankly, it's a lot more expedient on a day of having to finish work and taxes. Here, a few of my ridiculous episodes from the week.
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Once a few months back, I asked one of the women on the BlogHer sales team, Megan, how she was doing.

She said that she was working frantically on a number of projects at once--a rush of opportunities that had come her way that she absolutely couldn't turn down, but that were overwhelming, considering they were all needing her attention at once.

"I'm in the weeds," she said, "in a good way."

I think this term defines the past few years for me--opportunity after opportunity, none that I want to let pass me by. They pull me down into a place where I' temporarily lose vision of the whole playing field, down to the blades of grass, where things really happen.

So what's the metaphor? To be like a grasshopper, living in the weeds but jumping over them from time to time to get a sense of place? Or to be like a bird, flying overhead and swooping down occasionally to eat and to rest? When you are in a start-up you often do both, depending on the week.
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Morning Yoga

I had a meeting on Thursday--not an unusual situation. H-band had left for work, and I was scrambling to get dressed and out the door in time to get stuck in traffic. Again, not an unusual situation.

In a typical morning I have to prioritize, and this hierarchy of tasks is dictated by Ginger, our Maine coon. Ginger is soft and lovely, and she makes anyone she sits on look like a Calico Bigfoot--she sheds a lot. The first few years with Ginger I didn't pay much attention and had to endure well-meaning people picking the hairs off of my outfit. Now I wait until the very last minute before getting dressed, avoiding the couch or any contact with Ginger in order to be as lint-free as possible.

I bought a new dress, one that zips in the back. It's plum and made of this plush felt material, the kind that Ginger loves to rub up against. I knew better than to give her that chance, so I waited until the last minute to get dressed, well after H-band had left for work.

It was a bad decision. I had forgotten something pretty critical--the zipper in back of my dress that spanned from my tailbone to the nape of my neck. I zipped myself about halfway up my back and couldn't go any further. Why didn't I take those yoga classes seriously, when I had to try to simultaneously snake one hand up my back and lock fingers with the other hand, which was craned over my shoulder? I never realized the practical application of that pose.

I needed to be at a client meeting in an hour. I took a few deep breaths and concentrated. I was able to inch the zipper with my lower hand about another half an inch, but it still wouldn't join with my upper hand. So I did what I always do when I'm in trouble and my husband is around, I called my neighbor, Britt. But she didn't pick up.

I looked outside my front window for nice, understanding people who might be kind enough to help me out. No one passed by. Would it be strange if I knocked on my other neighbor's door? Or if I kept my coat on when I arrived at my meeting, and then asked my colleague to kindly do me up?

This is absurd, I thought. Dresses that zip in the back have been made for years, and for years did women need to get dressed in the presence of someone else to get them on?

I contemplated a new outfit, or a sweater to cover the opening in back. I had to give it a last shot.

Perhaps it was a freakish, temporary flexibility that came with panic, but I tried once again to snake one arm up my back, and one down my spine. They connected!

I told H-band this story with the same excitement and relief that one has when describing a car wreck that she escaped. He suggested that in the future I use a piece of string to loop in and then pull.

Someone should patent that.
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The Sacrifice

I was boarding a flight I booked very last-minute, meaning I had to suck up sitting in a middle seat. I realize I should be grateful getting a seat, period, when I book the day before a trip, but when you travel a lot, middle seats are just, well, a drag.

I sit down and don't notice the cold right away, not until it begins to seep into my pants. I jump up and pat the seat beneath me; whomever had been sitting there before me had dropped something wet and with ice cubes.

Fortunately the man sitting next to me was sympathetic.

"That's unexcusable!" he said, hailing a flight attendant.

The flight attendant was equally sympathetic; she gave me two options: 1) wait for a seat cushion swap that would delay our flight by about an hour or 2) suck it up.

"I'll take two blankets." I said.

In Defense of Penelope Trunk

I was saddened to see that Penelope Trunk's career column for Yahoo was rendered kaput this week. I read this somewhere, via a vast web of acidic blog posts that basically intoned "See ya later beeeyatch!"

From what I could gather, the more vocal of Trunk's detractors took issue with the following:

• Trunk's often brash "this is the way it is" advice, which at times lacked any mitigation or compassion. I recall some hugely devisive reviews of Trunk's panel at BlogHer'07, in which she spoke about career issues for bloggers. Some women found her advice to be brilliant, while others were positively offended by her approach. I was running around all over the place and unable to attend, but being as career-content-obsessed as I am I would have been borderline aroused had I been there.
• Trunk's questionable career expert credentials. Some of the more conspiracy-theory-minded folks in the Blogosphere went to the trouble of tallying her marketing experience and finding it came short of her stated 10 years. One reader even calculated her wins during her not-so-illustrious or long career as a professional beach volleyball player.
• Trunk's contradictory take on such time-honored coventions as writing resumes and not sleeping with people you work with.
• Trunk's digressions into deeply personal, seemingly non-career-related issues, such as her deteriorating marriage.

I've met Penelope (her real name is Adrienne, another major point of proof of her weirdness by some of her critics) at the BlogHer Business Conference and was pleasantly surprised. As with many bloggers I meet, her often removed writing persona didn't match her in-person energy. She approached me and my partners to introduce herself, knowing that we were likely too crazed to make the rounds to every attendee and speaker. She was warm, even humble. She reminded me of me: full of piss and vinegar in writing, but really a kooshball.

As someone who, pre-BlogHer, made her way writing about career development I was shocked at the ire being thrown Trunk's way. And yet, reading her work I can understand how a writer who says brazen things (pun intended, when you consider the name of her blog and book) can receive brazen comments. But we're not talking politics here, we're talking career! Having suffered the devaluation of my own writing by editors the minute it was determined "career" content, I was heartened to see that Trunk had made this often overlooked subject as contentious as the war in Iraq. I was even envious.

There's something a bit vindicating here: Trunk says she learned from her employers that she was canned because "career" was a low-yielding CPM (cost per thousand views) category, though her traffic was high. Personally I think this is a BS excuse. I work in this industry and see that even lower CPM verticals can generate beaucoup bucks with high traffic. I doubt Yahoo was losing money off of a blogger who was bringing them traffic. But I was glad to see there clearly is a lot of interest in career content, especially when the advice veers from the norm.

Says John Grabowski on his blog:

I am now just a little bit closer to believing there is a god. And that he or she hates stupid advice from a twit.

Back in the days of the guillotine, in a final act of indignity, you had to tip the bladesman if you wanted your head cut off cleanly. In Penelope’s case, they made her travel to their New York offices at her own expense to learn she was getting axed.

Robespierre would have approved.

This is a violent disapproval of a career columnist, but I must say that as a career writer this isn't the worst thing in the world. My worst fear is not people disagreeing with me, but of irrelevance.

This post might serve as my belated review of Trunk's book, which she sent to me, and which I simply couldn't read in any timely fashion, due to the increasing intensity of my work with BlogHer. But, months later, I did manage to pick it up one night before bed, and though I rarely get very far with books that I try to read before falling asleep, I found this one a distraction to slumber. I had a few immediate responses:

• I appreciated that she addressed the Gen Y Factor, which Boomer, even Gen X, management dismisses as lazy and needing to get with the program. I know this sucks folks, but we are no longer living in a meritocracy that rewards you for your pain and anguish. "Putting in the time" no longer determines how successful you will be. If an ungrateful 25-year-old has skills that you need to run your business and he wants flextime, you need to figure out how to give it to him. It's unfortunate that this new understanding was baked into the psyche of a generation succeeding ours, but that's the way it is. Some folks have radical disagreement with Trunk on this one, but then you must consider whether you are still nursing the burns from your time under the grunt fire.
• Her de-emphasis on following along a career track feels right to me, but more because of my personal experience and less because I truly know whether following any prescribed path leads to fulfillment. Trunk often points to her invaluable experience on the pro beach volleyball circuit as a necessary distraction for her career. I wonder: if she had won a volleyball tournament, would her advice carry more weight? Do we need to be "successful" at our divergent ventures in order to be considered wise?
• Her ability to call it as she sees it. I've been in career crisis several times and have read everything from What color is Your Parachute to The Bible looking for inspiration. One thing that I can say about nearly every resource I've referenced is that, when it comes to career, most experts take a measured, sometimes annoyingly objective approach that reminds me of a therapist I once visited, who sat with me in silence until I blurted out something, anything. I had come to her for guidance, not to have my rumblings psychoanalyzed and laid out in front of me for my interpretation. Very often people in career crisis have many signs laid out in front of them, but they aren't reading them correctly. They need someone to say, "Here's what this means!" and give you the opportunity to embrace or reject their interpretation.

I don't agree with all of Trunk's advice, but her decisive stance on what she believes is correct provides me with the opportunity to determine which side of the fence I'm on. While Trunk's detractors may consider her subjectivity to be dangerous to readers, I believe that, for more readers, it provides a perspective to parse out with their own intuition.

For instance, Trunk's approval of interoffice dating makes sense from a rather obscure perspective:

“If you tell yourself that men at work are off-limits, you put yourself at a huge disadvantage,” she says. “And if you want to have children, you need to make getting married a higher priority than your career."

Of course, as John Grabowski rather harshly points out, a primary reason for not dating a co-worker is the distraction it presents if the co-workers stop seeing each other, have an argument, etc. It also may create a perception of favoritism. And yet, for women who truly do want children more than they want to advance in their career Trunk is absolutely correct: Where you put your focus is where you get your outcomes. By actively NOT pursuing relationships, you are more likely to not have one. Fact.

Where I don't agree with Trunk is her implication that this workplace convention stems from a more insidious societal motive of keeping women unfulfilled.

"So the adage to not date men you work with is totally antiquated. It assumes that women aren’t equal to men, can push back childbearing indefinitely, and should put their career ahead of getting married. All of these are bad assumptions.”

This implication is heard in a number of places, such as her last column for Yahoo!,

"Here’s what my boss’s boss’s boss said: 'You should write for Lifestyles. That is more women oriented.'

Immediately I was reminded of when my column was cancelled at Business 2.0 magazine.  After I had recently announced that I was pregnant and said I did not plan to take any time off from writing the column.

My editor told me, as he was firing me, 'Now that you’re going to be a mom you should try writing someplace like Working Mother.'"

I suspect that this advice isn't really about a bunch of chauvanists trying to gracefully push out their decidedly brash talent, but rather folks who expect career advice to be about just that: getting jobs, keeping jobs, and staying out of occupational trouble. Sure, career advice can include all of that, but I believe that the best of it includes personal interjection, something more than the career counselor we had in high school who tallied up your scores and told you what you should major in and where you should go to school (by the way, the glaring nugget of insight I got from this testing, when I was 16 years old, was that I should go to St. Cloud State University in Minnesota).

Which leads to my next gripe about the Penelope gripes: That she isn't the career expert she pretends to be. This leads to the next logical question: What constitutes the proper experience needed to be a career expert? Nobody questions that Tony Robbins should not be a transformation catalyst, no? Career advice ain't brain surgery, it's a lot gushier--figuratively, that is. I found that just by writing about some of my career drama I was helping people deal with theirs. Never have I told people what they should do with their lives, and yet I've been asked to speak about career development with college students and entrepreneurs. I received a book contract for my collection of career stories and turned it down in part because I felt nervous being called by the publisher a career expert. I'm more a career survivor. Yet, looking back on this, I think I was hard on myself. I don't hold a degree in Career Competence, but "Career" is an amorphous enough topic in that a general ability to dispense wisdom--or at the very least, get people thinking about career, like Trunk does--constitutes competence.

Other criticism I read included Trunk's overindulgence with including detailed accounts of her personal life, including marriage counseling with her husband. Some of these accounts read like they come from a woman who is a bit smug over her career, angry at her husband, and resigned to end her marriage.  Knowing the grief I experienced when I first started writing about my relationship (a practice I continue only with extreme caution) I cringed reading the details; and I wondered what purpose describing the issues in her marriage had in helping people with their careers.

But this was short-sighted of me. While Trunk was not offering up service journalism she was offering up an experiential outcome that anyone navigating career and marriage must face, and she was offering it up as clearly as she knows how, by describing how it is affecting her personally. The personal and the professional ARE the same. And while I don't think it's fair to write about one's husband so personally, and while I don't think that describing one's success in a blog ("I tell the mediator I have a busy speaking schedule and a six-figure contract for my next book. I even talk about my blog, and the estimated 450,000 page views a month") endears one to her readers, I do understand the purpose of sharing such private information for the purpose of enlightening, and even for the much more indulgent purpose of healing herself.

What strikes me as the primary beef of Trunk's anti-fans is her inability to remove herself from her advice. But this expectation is a bit of a double-edged sword. Advice that comes from a completely objective source lacks meaning. We want our doctors to be completely objective and yet empathetic. We don't want to be told we're going to die without an ounce of compassion or sadness for our plight. We want Trunk's advice without having to smell her own issues, but then we would lack the benefit of recipes borne from failure, from too much salt or heat. The best kind of advice IMHO, is sorted from the struggles of those who need it most.

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:

What does a career look like when you have nothing left to prove?

It felt a little bit sinful, talking to R on a Wednesday during work hours. We'd been trying to catch up for nearly two weeks, and she had found a pocket of time to call me during her commute on the East Coast. Of course I wanted to talk with her, but my conversations with R were never brief. Since college, and the few times we'd connected afterward, time stood still. Life was moved to the side. 

My business has propelled me so quickly forward these days that I've had a hard time looking sideways at what's going on around me, let alone behind me. But the universe conspires sometimes. Much of my business travel has brought me back to New York, where I cut my teeth in publishing, or to Chicago, where I grew up but never stayed long enough to appreciate it. This blog has been a conduit to people that knew me at very different junctures in my life. These people have reached out and re-connected. I have been forced to see how much--and how little--I've changed. R had found me via the blog and wanted to pick up the thread where we'd left it years ago.

R wasn't a traditional "BFF"--we didn't do everything together. And after college, when our careers took us to very different places, we didn't make a point of visiting each other. But I've always held her in my heart as a close friend. I felt I was at a significant disadvantage when she emailed me; she knew about my exploits from the blog and I knew nothing about hers.

The last time I'd seen R was at her wedding, nearly 10 years ago. She'd invited a group of women that I had become close to through her--all but one of them were married, or had been married, and some were having kids. And then there was me--single, unemployed, and living in New York City, about to start another miserable job that was to last not three months. I felt far less grounded than the rest of the women, but R brought me back to the reason I was there--to attend the wedding of someone whose life was so different than mine, but with whom I'd shared a unique connection. Despite the very different paths we both knew we would take after college, we used to spend hours on the phone or at the 24-hour diner talking about everything--boyfriends, the ridiculousness of others, and wanting to be impactful and in control of our lives. 

R wanted to spend her last night of singlehood with her girlfriends. At the end of our evening out she drove me to my hotel, where I learned there had been a mistake with my reservation, and I didn't have a room.

"Don't worry," R said. "You can crash with me." We ordered some fries from the drive-thru of the Steak & Shake and went back to her parents' house, where she was staying that weekend before the wedding. I remembered what I found so remarkable about R--her lack of formality, despite her ambition. Most women I knew who were "career" women wanted everything in their lives just so; they needed to perpetuate an image of perfection. R had spent her last night of singlehood out until 3 am, eating cheese fries, and sharing a bed with me.

Project management for real people

My latest, on BlogHer. One of my favorite people has a book coming out, and--like her coaching--it's really good.

Life in the Entrepreneurial Weeds

"So, what are your hobbies these days?"

I was having coffee with Nick, a peer from my high school days who found me via this blog. He'd just moved to the Bay Area, just a few blocks from my place. We'd agreed to catch up at a local coffee shop. Unbeknownst to Nick, our tete-a-tete about the past 17 years would make him more caught up with my whereabouts than most people in my life.

I didn't expect his seemingly benign question to cause such consternation with me.

"I travel...on business mostly," I said. "But I enjoy it...when I can get away. I write--or wrote--a lot. I do like to write, when I can." I wondered to myself, Is watching Top Chef a hobby? What about doing laundry?

The truth is, I have no hobbies--none that I actively pursue, anyway. I've stopped carving out spare time to pursue non-occupational interests. Spare time is for errands, or catching up on email. Thank God Nick was into salsa dancing--at least someone had something to talk about other than work.

Just before that I had been running errands with H-band doing things that for most people would seem mundane, but for me was good together time: buying towels and a shower curtain. My friend A laughed uproariously when I told her earlier last week that doing dishes was a nice respite from the Treo. Before her reaction I hadn't realized that I have become a bit insane; at best a one-trick pony.

Just lately I've become more aware of this, when people from my past have called and told me of the kids, doctorates, salsa lessons in their lives, and I speak of business trips. I've had more well-rounded periods in my life, when I took wine-tasting classes and belonged to reading and writing groups, but entrepreneurism demands a new level of commitment--at least it has for me--where the yoga classes are no longer possible, nor the lingering chats over coffee. The irony is that I chose an entrepreneurial path to balance life and my work; in truth I have experienced a bottleneck and have had to choose.

Nick told me that he'd spent 12 years on his doctorate. It was an all-or-nothing situation; he had to publish or have nothing to show for his time. The dichotomy and risk involved with academia pushed a colleague of his to leave and get a job in finance. He figured he'd make money first, then pursue his interests later.

"Twelve years is a very long time," I said to Nick, I could relate to his friend. "But you never know if your friend will ever do what he says he'll do."

"That's just it," Nick said. "You don't know."

Some people choose to work hard, play later; some people honor the journey and are willing to slow it down to widen the path. Some people never choose; they do it all. And I look at them, wondering where they put this ability to make it all happen; are they hiding it in their mouths? Despite all the lessons I love to cook up I still struggle with how one does it--puts work down to lift every thing else, without trying to cheat.

I've been reminding myself that despite my penchant for working I used to be quite familiar with the latest foreign films, wine varietals, NBA standings, and the best bike paths in San Francisco. I used to read all the reviews in The New Yorker and know odd facts from issues past. A long time ago I used to dance. And a long, LONG time ago I used to play video games.

Nick could hardly believe this when I revealed that I was an avid Atari player. Avenger, Frogger, that game with the tar pits. I could play all day.

"I didn't know you were a geek," Nick said.

I had forgotten that for a sustained period of time, a LONG time ago, I knew how to play. 

The most depressing new term ever: Working-Class Millionaire

I was out to dinner Saturday night with some friends who were discussing how subjective money is in the Bay Area and New York: What seems like "good money" in some parts of the country is unworkable in the City. Then this morning I read an article in The Times that backed this theme: One person's nest egg is another person's chump change. Apparently a million bucks just isn't such a big whoop anymore. At least not in Silicon Valley.

Exploring why we work

Just some thinking that I did over at BlogHer. Why do we work? To earn, to achieve, to torture ourselves?