inspiration
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An Overarching Theme
→: An Overarching ThemeI feel tremendously fortunate that when I write something I’m hesitant to hit “post” on, people leave these amazing comments that make me feel like less of a failure and like whatever it was I wrote, was worth sharing. Having a crisis about not finishing grad school, I wrote Being Human, and then Dropping Out when I came to…
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Being Human
→: Being HumanIt’s the day of my paper deadline, I have a horrible throat infection (complete with headache and rasping cough) and I’m just FREAKING OUT because it all seems like TOO MUCH and why why why did I not just hole myself up in my apartment and get on with things? Why did I come back…
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Planning 2011: Kiva Challenge, and Post-Grad-Rehab
→: Planning 2011: Kiva Challenge, and Post-Grad-RehabThis time last year, I made a list of what I wanted to happen in 2010. The goals I set were helpful and I met (or nearly met) most of them but next year everything is changing – I don’t know what goals I should be setting. How do I set professional goals for a…
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Making Ideas Happen: The Dreamer, the Doer, and the Incrementalist
→: Making Ideas Happen: The Dreamer, the Doer, and the IncrementalistMaking Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality (Amazon) is a must for anyone who feels their genius is insufficiently recognized and needs to start focusing on action, not ideas. In my In Pursuit of Awesome talk, one of the points was – “Ideas are Cheap. Execution is expensive.” This book is all…
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Being Present
→: Being PresentI hate what I’m working on lately. That’s probably been apparent from the moaning on Twitter and somewhat angsty blogposts. It’s nearly done… but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels endless. What I’ve noticed, is how much of a struggle it is to be in the moment, working on whatever it is that I…
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Ottawa, a Love Letter
→: Ottawa, a Love LetterI received something in the mail last week, and it made me really happy. It was a copy of What Would Google Do? (Amazon) and a hilarious card from the wonderful Ian at the Code Factory. It really made me think about how I changed as a person during the two years I spent in…
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Giving Up On Goals
→: Giving Up On GoalsI’m not doing my weekly review at the moment. At first it was in part because I was ashamed to admit that I hadn’t yet unpacked my apartment (it’s done now). But also, I showed up to the coffee shop to work with my mentee and something exciting had happened to her, and she said,…
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Building, Not Destroying
→: Building, Not DestroyingWhen I was 5 or 6, the school thought I had learning difficulties because I couldn’t read. It transpired that it wasn’t so much couldn’t – as wouldn’t. I refused to read the nonsense little books about Little Jonny Red Hat. Clearly my aversion to things that I find pointless started at a young age. Once…
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In Pursuit of Awesome: The Perils of a Reactionary Workflow
→: In Pursuit of Awesome: The Perils of a Reactionary WorkflowI got an amazing response to my In Pursuit of Awesome post, here and on Geek Feminism. It’s inspired me to write a series of posts where I explore some of the tips I wrote about and related topics in more depth. I ran into my manager from IBM the other week. He gave me some really good…