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Regret Me Not Project Day 131: An Infinite Supply

Posted on May 6, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

Yesterday, I was thinking about being ready for opportunity, which subsequently got me thinking about what happens when an opportunity disappears – when you lose a job, when a relationship ends, or when what was supposed to be your big break ends up barely qualifying as a small crack.

Our tendency is to flip out a bit. To get angry. Or sad. Or both.

And our tendency is to assume that we’ll never get an opportunity like that again.

But if we’re really being rational about it, that doesn’t make any sense.

Whatever opportunity we are a lamenting the loss of probably came our way unexpectedly. We didn’t board the airplane expecting to find love or sit down at the coffee shop expecting to find a job. But we did.

The supply of unexpected opportunities is actually infinite. No, they won’t be the same. They will lead your life in different directions. They will teach you something different. But they will be there. 

And the interesting thing about unexpected opportunities is that the more you open your heart and mind to them, the more they show up.

Some of the things that have happened to me over the past few months have seemed a little magical to some people. But the only magic, perhaps, is in my shift in mindset. While I do seek opportunities and work hard to make things happen, I don’t pursue things with desperate aggression or with a unilateral vision on one and only path. Instead, I make sure that I’m open to whatever people and opportunities show up.

Approaching the world that way has helped me appreciate and enjoy what I have in the moment, understand the lessons from it when it goes, and be ready for the next thing when it comes. 

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Regret Me Not Project Day 130: Ready for Opportunity

Posted on May 5, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

This post was inspired by the words of Derek K. Miller in his Last post.

We spend a lot of time waiting for opportunities.

And trying to create them too.

But when an opportunity we weren’t expecting comes up and knocks on our door, we get flustered. It’s a surprise. We weren’t ready for it. It might take us off the path we envisioned for ourselves. We want to close the door and go about our business, pretending that we didn’t see it. We do this with work. We do this with love. We convince ourselves that it’s not that we’re scared, it’s that we’re being responsible and reasonable.

Forget that.

Open the door.

Be unreasonable.

Revel in the surprise.

Stop thinking so much.

Let the opportunity in.

Let it knock you off course.

Will it change your life? Absolutely.

Will it potentially cause you pain? You bet.

But I’m not sure there is any other way to live.

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Regret Me Not Project Day 129: Let’s Just Carpe Diem

Posted on May 3, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

Carpe Diem. Seize the Day. 

I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone who lives that phrase as much as my friend Jonathan does. 

We were talking about going to see Bill Cunningham New York and I was hedging a bit on when we should go, playing over my calendar in my mind. “Let’s just carpe diem,” he said. “And go tonight.” 

I brought over some turnip greens and carrots and baby bok choy from my urban farming apprenticeship and was all ready to hand them off for him to cook later and instead he said: “Let’s just cook them now.” I told him I didn’t know what to do with them. At which point he promptly started heating up a frying pan with garlic and oil and told me that he didn’t either. 

I was complaining about being out of shape on Saturday and we started talking about playing tennis. I said: “We should think about doing that.” He said: “Let’s do it. Let’s get it on the calendar” And now we’re going to look at tennis rackets tomorrow. 

Ever since I started my Regret Me Not Project back in September, I’ve been moving more and more in the direction of just doing things, of seizing opportunity without fear.

But what I noticed around Jonathan is that I still use a different vocabulary then he does. My “we should” is his “let’s do it.” My “later” is his “now.“

I still need to find more of a vocabulary for seizing the day. Thank you Jonathan, for helping me learn a new language.

All of Jonathan’s seizing the day leads to some pretty cool projects like events at Lab 24/7 , the upcoming Kick It! event and the soon to be launched Artseeka. You can find him on Twitter @jzlandau

An amazing piece by Catharina Bruns at  Work is Not a Job

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Regret Me Not Project Day 128: What’s the Prize?

Posted on May 2, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

We often go through life behaving like we’re trying to win a prize. 

But I was thinking the other day…what, exactly, is the prize? 

We’re competitive, constantly comparing ourselves to other people, trying to have more Facebook friends, get more Twitter followers, sell more books, get more press, win more awards, or earn more money. 

And there was a point when those prizes held some level of value for me. They are easy, visible validators of our existence. 

But I realized the other day that except for the almost impossible to curb occasional twinge of natural human jealously over someone’s massive Twitter following, I have lost all of my desire to win for the sake of those prizes.

It isn’t the prizes that matter, it’s the work that matters. And not just any work, but work that is transformed into meaningful art – art that gives the world a prize instead of the other way around.

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Regret Me Not Project Day 127: When Input Exceeds Output

Posted on April 25, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

In the past two and half weeks, I have spent most of my  time putting New York City’s public transportation system to work, transporting me from meeting to meeting throughout the city while I try to absorb as much as can of the New York tech scene.  My days have often started with breakfast meetings and not ended until after midnight, when the networking drinks were done. 

This time has been all about input: listening in meetings, reading emails, scanning my Twitter stream, reading blogs. 

This is not all a bad thing. I needed to rapidly gather information so that I could get a running start in my new role at NY Tech Meetup, and I’ve gained some great insights that will provide amazing guidance going forward. 

But I was listening to an interview with Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, the other day, and it hit me how much of an issue we have with input vs. output.

Turkle talked about how most of our days are built around trying to keep up with input from every direction. We in fact spend so much time trying to deal with input that we have no time to think or be creative, or actually create any output. (and no, email doesn’t count as real output)

It’s kind of like calories in calories out. If you gorge yourself on too much food, you get so full that you are hardly capable of doing anything – you just want to sit around, hold your belly and groan. A diet consisting of too much information input creates the same kind of paralysis. 

With calories, we balance the calories in by exercising and making sure that we burn some of them off. We need to do the same thing with information input.

If we turned off the flood of input for chunks of time during the day, we might actually get something real done.

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Regret Me Not Project Day 125: The Unplanned Life

Posted on April 18, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

Someone asked me recently where I see myself being in five years. 

Normally I would have tried to come up with some kind of response (because we are all supposed to know where we want to be in five years, right?) But being in a particularly candid mode, I told them that I thought their question was unfair. I had no idea where I saw myself in five years, and that even asking me to predict where I would be in one year was pushing it.  

That conversation got me thinking. How can anyone know where they want to be in five years? And why would I want to plan my life out five years in advance anyway? 

Five years ago, my life looked completely different than it does now. Hell, three months ago my life looked completely different then it does now. 

And the truth is, I love my life as it is now more than any life I would have mapped out for myself five years ago. 

There are a lot of people out there who believe that the only way to succeed is to define your goals far in advance. I subscribed to that for a long time, filling out workbooks with my five year plans, which are now gathering dust on a shelf, no longer relevant to the path my life has taken.

Looking back on my life so far, none of the most amazing things that have happened to me were things that I planned.

I didn’t set out on a mission to become the CEO of a non-profit. 

I didn’t set out on a mission to work with Seth Godin or participate in one of his programs.

I didn’t set out with the goal of playing a leadership role in an organization key to the NY tech community.

Those things happened to me because I listened to my gut and went down paths where the work was interesting and exciting. They happened to me because I used my passion as fuel to work hard. But there isn’t a five-year or even a one-year plan anywhere in sight. 

Planning a life in advance might work for some people, but it doesn’t work for me. 

And I’m meeting more and more people who feel the same way, who can’t answer the question of who they want to be when they grow up any farther out than six months or a year. 

We were all taught that we need a plan, but maybe what we were taught is wrong. 

 

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Regret Me Not Project Day 124: What I’m Up to Now

Posted on April 4, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

Yay! Today is the day that I can finally tell you all what I’ve been up to!

It has been slightly awkward to meet new people over the past few weeks because inevitably the “what do you do?” question comes up in the conversation somewhere, and I’ve had to give an extremely vague response along the lines of “I have a new job, but I can’t tell you about it until next Monday.”

Well, it’s now Monday.

And I’m now the Managing Director of the New York Tech Meetup, an amazing organization supporting over 17,000 members of the New York tech community.

I went to my first NY Tech Meetup right after I moved to New York, and what struck me most about the group of almost 900 people who gather every month is that they weren’t a bunch of people who sat around talking about doing things, they were people who actually did stuff.

When I moved to New York a couple of months ago, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do next. I just knew that I didn’t want to keep doing what I had been doing.

Someone was joking with me the other day that my story sounded a little too much like a movie – someone buying a one-way ticket and taking off with a few suitcases and nothing but the whole world in front of them.

But that was really what it felt like when I left California.

As I settled into New York, people kept asking me in a supportive, well-intentioned way, how my job search was going. I kept having to explain that I wasn’t doing a traditional job search – my resume wasn’t on Monster.com and I wasn’t searching job boards all over the place.

I was, admittedly, trying to avoid having a “traditional” job.

“Traditional” for me meant any type of job that involved too much hierarchy, too many rules, and someone watching the clock, waiting for me to show up at 9 o’clock every morning.

That type of work had sucked my creative soul dry.

When I saw the position with NYTM posted, I knew that it would be a different kind of work. The type of work I wanted to do: spending time with people who took risks, who were innovative, and who were interested in solving the world’s challenges and making the world better without the benefit of having a path laid out for them that told them how to get there.

So now I have the ideal situation: I’m NYTM’s first paid full-time staff person, I get to work with an awesome team, my office is anywhere, I get to help build an already amazing organization’s capacity and I’m supporting people who I think are doing the work that is changing the world.

Not a bad gig. I can’t wait to get to work.

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Regret Me Not Project Day 123: Networking is for Robots

Posted on March 30, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

I hate the term “networking.”

I guess the word in and of itself isn’t bad, it’s just that it conjures up awful images for me:  images of business suit-clad men with greased back hair or cheesy guys sporting custom overblown plastic nametags with bold Twitter handles who have slightly too agressive handshakes and who err on the side of talking too close and who whip out business cards with a speed reminiscent of cowboys in a gun battle. Their goal? Get business cards pressed into the palms of as many people as possible.

To me, that type of networking isn’t human.

That type of networking is something that a robot would do.

I can just see a little robot buzzing around a room, spitting out a couple of scripted sentences about a company and shoving business cards in people’s hands.

So if that’s what robot would do, that’s probably not what we should be doing.

If the point of a attending a conference or event is help you build relationships with potential clients, customers, investors, or business partners, you are less likely to build those relationships by starting out in the traditional robot-like rapid fire business card distribution fashion. You may be casting a wide net, but not many of those connections are going to stick because they aren’t very deep.

And you will have succeeded at annoying the crap out of everyone in the room.

With the exception of exchanging information with people after I’ve given a presentation, I don’t think I have ever once had a long-term, fruitful business relationship with someone who shoved a business card into my hand and walked away as fast as possible.

What happens when the opposite occurs? When business card exchange happens only after a relatively long conversation in which we realize that we actually like each other and might want to work together on something? Those people are now some of my best business partners and collaborators…and some of my best friends.

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Regret Me Not Project Day 122: The Innocent Bystander

Posted on March 28, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

When you succeed at changing something, there are people who want to call you out because the change you’ve created isn’t perfect. Maybe you made some people upset. Or a part of what you were trying to change failed.

And I get that. Success is often presented without an accompanying story of failure, painting an unrealistically rosy picture of what change looks like.

But I also believe that perfection is less important than action.

During my time at Girl Scouts, I was in charge of a dying organization. One whose membership had been declining for ten years and whose relevancy was continually slipping.

I always felt that I had no option but to do something, anything, to set the wheels of change in motion, to put out the fire on the burning platform.

I know that not every action I took was perfect.  There were big ideas that couldn’t quite get off the ground; things on my to do list of organizational development that never quite got done; and things that I thought were great ideas at the time that turned out to fit much more comfortably in the “worst idea ever” category.

But at least I was doing something.

It’s like trying to save someone’s life. The person who steps in and takes action, even if their actions are imperfect, is the only one who has a chance of making a difference.

The inactive bystander on the other hand? It turns out that they aren’t so innocent.

If you haven’t failed it means you haven’t tried.

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Regret Me Not Project Day 121: The Guilt of the Martyr

Posted on March 23, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

As part of my Rebel in a Polyester Sash presentation, I tell the story of how a woman we had to layoff thanked me in the middle of finding out that she no longer had a job: she thanked me for giving her a great place to work and for allowing her to see that it was possible to both be a great mom and to have a fulfilling, meaningful career, something that she had never believed before.

I looked out into the audience at the Nonprofit Technology Conference as I was telling that story on Friday and noticed a number of women wiping away tears. I was moved that my words had caused such a strong reaction, but I was saddened because I knew what those tears meant. They meant that those women had never had that experience.

As I spent time interacting with other conference attendees, I noticed a recurring theme: just under the surface, there was a current of misery and unhappiness running through their work lives.

They had started working for a nonprofit because they wanted to do work that would have a positive impact on the world. But what they encountered were organizations so mired in bureaucracy, red tape and old ways of doing things that the amount of impact they could have was continually minimized.

After fighting the system for years, a lot of them wanted to leave, but instead they stayed. They stayed because they held onto to some level of hope that they could be the one to save things. They stayed because they felt guilty leaving an organization that was trying to do good. They stayed because they felt guilty leaving their coworkers with an even bigger burden to carry. And they stayed because they felt guilty at the idea of leaving those who benefitted from their organization’s work behind.

But the guilt of trying to be the martyr was slowly killing them. Depression. Pneumonia. And just an overwhelming, unshakeable feeling that something was very, very wrong.

As I spoke to person after person caught in that trap, I realized that a lot of them were just waiting for someone to give them permission. They wanted someone to tell them that they weren’t a bad person for giving up and moving on.

What I believe is this: do what you can to change things and when things won’t change anymore, get out.

If you are a person who wants to do good in the world, then get yourself somewhere where you have the greatest possibility of actually doing that. Trying to do good within the confines of an organization that can’t get out of it’s own way long enough to deliver on its own mission and refuses to change is a waste.

You – a person who wants to make the world better – you are precious and limited resource. Use your resource in the place where it will make the most difference.

That is not something you need permission for.

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