I was listening to the last episode of season 1 of my friend Diana’s podcast “Should We”, and the title of this one is called “Should We Actually Try?”
I love Should We because I love Diana, and because there’s something about listening to a podcast where two friends who know each other well are keeping it real (this was something that I was inspired by in the podcast Camille and I recorded). This episode is my favorite because it’s the realest yet – it’s about going for something you’re not sure that you can do, and about the fear of failure when failure is a very real possibility.
This is because they are running a Kickstarter for Season 2. I love the podcast as it is, but I’ve now backed it twice (somehow I have 2 Kickstarter accounts? Who knew?) because I want to support them, and because if I love this low-fi iPhone-in-a-cup version how much more would I love a professionally produced version?
But then at a meta-level, I want to support women who set an ambitious goal. I just started getting leadership coaching and the first thing we did was we went through this thing called “Discovery” where I was brutally honest about some things that hold me back. At some point I wrote about how there are opportunities I am afraid to take because I am too afraid to fail at them. Like Diana and Lisa I am all about the incremental progress, the gradual growing of something. This episode was so real to me because it captured the same approach I take… and the limitations of that.
I think for women the cost of failure is often really high – we avoid it for good reason. And one of the ways we pathologize the ambition of women is to take normal fear of failure, and the self-awareness of things we know we aren’t good at, and label it imposter syndrome. But actually if you are going to be ambitious, it’s normal that failure is a possibility. To take it seriously, consider what would be the outcome, and do it anyway… well it’s inspiring to me to listen to two women doing that, and to hear them being so honest about their fears of failure, and the ambition that they admit to in private, if not in public. I really hope they succeed – but if not, well, I’ll keep listening anyway.
Terror – have people who have had great app indies for 5-10 years – real experts. This has been working 3.5 years. Been an interesting and challenging 3.5 years.
Started because was “meh” at apps. 3 paid apps. Got positive feedback, but couldn’t crack the marketing code. Decided to pause, reconsider, decide what the next thing should be.
This isn’t really a failure talk. Failure tolerant industry. Used to be the case that one big failure could take you out. Now maybe we’ve gone too far the other way – glamourising and valorising failure.
Suspicious about how much data you get from failure. Can fail on the app store but not know why.
Focusing on failure may lead us to mis-categorised success as failure. Leading us to abandon a strategy that is working, but slowly.
E.g. hit 75% of target – do you have a failed product? Did you estimate the wrong timeframe? Do you have a resource allocation problem?
If looking for a failure in that scenario, you’ll find it. But maybe it’s an undersized success.
When you stop, and reconsider, how do you proceed.
With intention, that is how you carry on.
“What do I want to do?” – one of the scariest first world questions. When we answer it, we might actually be able to do that thing.
Let’s not make it too complicated.
We want to make something useful. We can make something entertaining. Entertaining is a use.
Wanted to build on something that was already demonstrably working.
Had released a library – making offline voice recognition look good. Wanted to make offline speech recognition look good. Improve UX by stealth.
How to make it into a business?
Unusual as a sector – most businesses aren’t a single isolated thing. They usually have some diversity and consonance.
In a lot of businesses, diversity, protects you from a shock. Consonance – multiple products build interest in each other.
Wanted it to be free. Didn’t want to do the selling support business model – selling support creates perverse incentive not to make it as simple as possible. But believe it should be as simple as possible.
If something is a core value for you, the best place to put it is in your business model.
In a lot of places where there is one app, there is a quiet second business. Often a media channel. A fantastic blog, or a fantastic podcast. Has a halo effect, your audience is with you in social media. When you talk about your app, that gets amplified by your audience. Don’t do this cynically, but if you’re interested, good way.
Now have 5 plugins, 6 integrated products. One developer.
Little Things
Meet the Neighbours – step from the agile manifesto. When you start a new software project, look at who is nearest and reach out to them. Decide what relationship you want to have with them, and create that. Asked “how can I be of use to them” – this is the question.
Software projects that work, last for years. So decide at the beginning what kind of relationships you have and make that happen.
Having a role model is good. Having an idiot role model is better. Had another software vendor, her vendor, was so angry with them all the time. Doing everything wrong. Wanted to rant about twitter every day. Realised, their product structure is a bit like Politepix. “They could be a lot like my company in 2 years!” Became fascinated, why do they make such terrible decisions, what was going on. Read all of their apology blog posts – it was like a visit from bad decisions future.
You can learn from mistakes. There are enough mistakes to go around, you don’t have to make them all yourself.
Learn doubly-entry book-keeping. Fired accountant, didn’t understand what he had done. Had to learn it. Like getting an introduction to the history of capitalism from first principles. Will let you do great projections for your business, if you understand it. Once you learn which side of the ledger capital is on when you hear about a terrible startup raising a series A, you will have the appropriate response, which is sympathy.
Big Things
Industriousness
Small business can take up all your time. Have to focus on improving your product. Use programmer laziness. Automate everything you can.
Don’t repeat yourself
Automated documentation pushing this in all formats. Most important, documentation is really pretty.
Code snippets. If you don’t give them snippets, they will go to stack over flow and get a snippet. Then you will have to support it. Created a customisable tutorial tool.
Forums – main problem was pointing people to the right answer when not finding it themselves. Wrote a tool, dealt with 90%. Macros for other 5%.
The third time you do a production task, and it’s not improving your app, automate.
Support became a much less big job, but 1 in 3 shot it would be a horror scenario. Started to dread looking at questions. Wrote a sentiment analysis tool that helps. If sentence particularly negative. If sentence is particularly subjective. What the worse sentence you wrote is. And makes suggestions, “maybe go take a walk before you answer this.”
Tool is “Me on my best day giving advice to me on my worst day” which helps respond to people when they are really stressing you out.
Anything you are doing that requires manual intervention, you can probably automate that.
Automated automated testing. Wrote a fuzzer, called HWHorrorShow. Randomised cross-thread stress-test.
You can automate all kinds of things that you wouldn’t necessarily think you could.
Agreeableness
Learn to say no. Bootstrapping through contracting is great, but you have to stop when you stop.
If you run a product company and it works, you’re probably really good at executing. You don’t know if they are going to be.
No to free updates.
No talking about future plans. When someone asks you, they are asking you because they are making a plan. You only have control of the plans you make at the beginning, things change.
No spending all of your money on the products of famous luxury brand, Apple. Cost control is a real thing. Isn’t discussed that much. Standard business model high growth low revenue, not sure about the end game. Small, sustainable indie – want to be profitable in 12 months.
No to being a fan of Apple. You can like, respect, but you should be clear – if you want to be a fan, be a fan of your peers. They are doing amazing things, it’s going to mean a lot more for them.
No features for individual people.
No to the avoidant decision process. Because you’re afraid of people’s negativity.
The Philosophy of Death
Anxiety is normal. Confusion about your sphere of control. You control your planning, part of your execution, the way that you respond, basically nothing else. If you react to these worries, everytime something awesome happens, there’s something that can bring you down.
A business entities life is not a human life. When fearing business will tank, you will look at doing things that you would not normally.
Looked to ancient greek philosophy to deal with anxiety. Not big fans of positive thinking. Visualise that every morning, and then put it away and then you’re done.
The Doldrums
Not becoming such a dull person that new ideas can’t find your address.
Small business problems can be addictive. You can fill 100% of your time with that. But your creativity is your most important tool and characteristic.
Cultivating your spark is a really big part of your job – like taking care of your health and psychological well being to the best of your ability.
Berlin is full of hidden courtyards. Become obsessed with getting into all of them in neighbourhood.
Find the source of the delight that leads to making delightful products. Don’t think you find that behind a screen.
Don’t eat the seed corn – your creative capacity is what got you into this, it’s the only thing that can move you forward.
Closing Thoughts
Irony in making something very self-sufficient, makes less need for collaboration. And that is a huge loss.
Currently, I’m reading Tim Harford’s Adapt (Amazon). It’s a fascinating book, quite different from the Undercover Economist (Amazon) – which is also excellent. He writes about the importance of experimentation and feedback, and the insanity of centralized military planning – where an individual soldier can shoot to kill, but the General running the base can’t approve a few thousand dollars needed spending.
Seriously fascinating. And timely for me, because lately I’ve been thinking about how we see leadership as being in control, where in fact it’s the opposite.
When you are appointed, or step up, to lead other people, it’s because you’re trying to achieve more than one person can alone. Giving up control and trusting other people to get stuff done is crucial, otherwise you’re just a bottleneck. And it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how brilliant you are, ultimately you will be limited by the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day, and you are just one person. Maybe you trust one sidekick. Still doesn’t scale. Two people and 24 hours each is not double the control, unless you’ve mastered telepathy.
In which case, ignore me. Clearly we live in different worlds.
Aside from the time issue of micro-managing, it’s soul destroying to the people being micro-managed. Nothing seems to destroy someone’s ability to make decisions as much as the feeling that whatever decision they make, it will never be the right one.
Of course, as a leader, you need to know what’s going on. Being too hands-off won’t do either. Looking at people who I think are great leaders, it seems that their strategy is to be approachable, non-judgemental, and supportive. They don’t need to micro-manage because they create an environment and build relationships such that people will come to them if there is a problem.
This is hard work. And it takes time. There’s people who hate to seem less than perfect in any way, and it’s really, really tough to get them to trust you with their failings. And you have to learn to be open with your own, too. You need to be awesome enough to inspire respect, but not seem so awesome that someone feels that you would never understand screwing up.
There are the people who want to tell you how awesome they are. Can’t stand those people. Then there are those who will tell you how they’ve screwed up. They are the genuinely awesome, I think. They are the people who others feel they can turn to when they screw up.
The other day I spent some time talking to a new grad who was feeling inadequate. I told them about the myriad of ways I feel inadequate too – in this circumstance it was this, in this circumstance it was that, now it’s something new. My message – OK, you feel like you’re not doing great right now, but that’s normal. Now you need to figure out if you change your circumstances, will you just feel inadequate in a different way to how you do now?
The message of the book? You need to fail to figure out what works. As a leader, you need to allow for failure in order to build something bigger than yourself. Micro-managing and control-freakery might eliminate failure, but they also eliminate great success.
Credit: Geek and Poke / http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2008/10/optimists—part-2.html
I wrote the post Being Human at around 5am having stayed up most of the night to get my edits in for the deadline. I don’t normally work like that – I think I forgot to tell my co-supervisor I was in the UK. Oh well. I never really made it off Canadian time whilst I was there. It’s been blissful to come home and be a morning person again.
I hadn’t been feeling too well, but thought it was mostly jetlag. But then, edits done, I crashed. I got the flu really badly – I don’t remember the last time I was that sick – followed by post-viral exhaustion. My boyfriend got sick too, about 3 days behind me. Result was the laziest holiday ever; we didn’t go to Iceland, or Paris for New Year – we stayed home with tissues and hot tea and Harry Potter Lego (Amazon) – which, frustratingly, I had to leave 98.8% completed.
Still, being sick over the holidays gave me two things. The first – a real break – not just from work, but from the guilt of not working. Secondly, it gave me time to think about what I want and what I’m doing.
The person I emailed at uOttawa, of course, never got back to me. This is what I have come to expect, but it’s still frustrating. I’m so tired of this, and of uOttawa being so for-profit when they insist I must register full time, at international rates, but like a non-profit when they try and cut my TA’s hourly rate by a third (with no notice) because “it’s for a good cause”. And so I haven’t registered, haven’t paid any tuition. Is this how you drop out? I’m looking into transferring because having time to think, I realized that if nothing changes then it’s unlikely that another semester is the answer. The problem is not, I think, time. It’s direction.
On January first (great start to 2011), our education paper got accepted – it’s about the curriculum design for the workshop we were running and is called “Four Hours to Smash the CS Stereotype and Create Something Beautiful”. This brings me up to three papers coming out this year – on widely divergent topics. The IBM paper is on text analytics. The paper I’ll present in Switzerland later this month is called “Following the Conversation: A More Meaningful Measure of Engagement” and is about applying visualization and graph theory to social network analysis. The citation in SIGCHI? That’s a paper on Usability of IDEs and programming languages for teaching.
I look at this, and I think – this is why I’m doing well at life, and failing at grad school. I’m interested in a lot of different things, and apparently I’m creating value in a number of different areas. I’m an incrementalist. I can try and fight it, but on reflection, I get more value and I’m happier when I partner with someone who complements me instead. Having come to this conclusion, there was a post on Escape the Ivory Tower that talks about “mismatches” – and that that’s exactly what the grad school experience so far has been for me.
So, I’ve been talking to people about my options, and I’m looking at transferring to another school, and maybe a slightly different program. They all seem to get it – and nobody has been judgemental. My parents tell me they want me to be happy, but think I do deserve the piece of paper. My friend (who had the same supervisor, and left after a similar experience) tells me that transferring saved her years to finish. It’s interesting, because I have enough work – it’s just not focused enough to create a thesis with.
Really what it comes down to, is I have enough publications and an awesome enough job that I’m prepared to hold out and try and do something that works for me, than try and fight with myself to work within a system that doesn’t. I’m confident enough, given everything, that the problem isn’t lack of work, or ability on my part. Lack of focus, probably. Making it work at this point, seems like a lot of effort with very little return – I’m not on board with the level of ROI in terms of the tuition I’m paying, or, more importantly, the time I’m investing.
Back in March, I had a really terrible week. My paper got rejected and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to finish this semester, and the following day, my boyfriend and I broke up.
It’s not uncommon for a paper to be rejected, however, frustratingly, the comments I got were mostly aspects of it that I had been unhappy with, that I had asked for help with, but, perhaps given the short time frame had not got the feedback I needed to fix. Finishing this semester was always tight, and this was really the final straw – my internship this summer is probably better for my employment prospects than a masters degree, and I was risking going in there burnt out and distracted, which I can’t afford to do.
My boyfriend and I had been together for over a year and a half, in fact, he was one of the first people I’d met when I got to Ottawa. I always found this rather romantic, but I had been aware for a while that this meant my identity here was somewhat tied up in being his girlfriend, and most of the friends I have here are mutual. We had been living together, so this was a further complication. Fortunately, he had somewhere to go so I didn’t have to deal with a post-breakup cohabitation nightmare as well.
I don’t fail often, but here were two – huge – failures in one week. I crashed. I’ve been pushing myself so hard and all of a sudden I didn’t have as many pressing deadlines. I also didn’t have anyone to notice if I stayed in my pajamas all day watching My Family. I was physically ill from – I don’t know – exhaustion? Stress? Misery? I pushed myself so hard, for so long, that when it all came crashing down, I did too.
Credit: flickr / James Jordan
This is normal. But yes, this is when my posting schedule went to hell. It’s been on my mind – failure – so it was hard to write about other things. I didn’t have the perspective that I needed to write clearly, and without blame. Initially, my explanation was that we were married to grad school – and cheating on it, with each other. Because honestly? That’s what I had been feeling like, for months. Then I got angry – at the two 30-somethings who had spent most of last winter in our apartment to the point where one day we looked at each other and asked, “how did we end up parenting two 30-somethings?” – that should have been our honeymoon period. They ruined it.
And, of course, he blamed me too – for working too much, and for taking that job in Shanghai last summer.
I am 24 years old, and I am having trouble balancing my ambition with my personal life. I don’t have children. I don’t want children. Partly because I think all this talk of “having it all” and “balance” is a load of crap. We make choices. We prioritize our careers. If we date someone as focused, we might never get to see them. If we date someone less focused, they don’t understand our choices. If we prioritize our personal life, we risk giving things up, making compromises for something that ultimately may not work out. This cuts both ways, of course, but somehow – call me a cynic, sure – a career seems a more certain and reliable thing than our relationship. I know we’re not supposed to say it and there are women that manage but… I can’t see how having children can not affect your career. And what if they grow up to be traffic wardens? Or politicians? Then what? I hear you love them no matter what but I have a hard time believing that is true of traffic wardens. (Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage(Amazon), by the way, is a fascinating exploration of women and marriage – and the compromises women make for family.)
I know very few grad students in relationships. Graduate school is not conducive to a balanced life, and as a result is often not conducive to relationships, other than those with anti-depressants, alcohol, and electronic devices.
Credit: flickr / squarewithin
So, in all, I’ve been knocked for six. And so, I’ve been doing less, whilst I try and regain my balance. It’s amazing; I’m properly living alone, for the first time in my life, and I have all this space – in my apartment, in my head, in my schedule, to just be. And of course I’ve used some of that in mindless TV watching – My Family, Lipstick Jungle, Brothers and Sisters and Big Bang Theory – but what’s been amazing is that when I’ve had to focus, I’ve created some of my best stuff. The other day, I woke up with the math clear in my head for a fractal. My workshop the other day was really successful, and I’m really proud of the content. I’ve read several books – including Women Don’t Ask (which merits it’s own blog post, and will get one). And I’ve been exercising more, and having the time to actual consider what I’m eating and when – rather than just refueling so I can continue to run about.
My life is changing, and that is really scary because it’s like starting over. But I think this pause is helpful – to take stock, to reevaluate. And I’m not going to change completely, but maybe I am going to do a little less, because when you’re constantly moving, you can’t see the view, and because doing less could mean doing fewer things better.
I’ve had a rough couple of weeks. I was told my work didn’t make a contribution, went through a rocky patch with my boyfriend, had loads of events for WISE, including one huge, never been done before one, had the whole job search and resume writing process, wrote a paper in just over a week, hurt my lower back trying to teach a small child to ski and aggravated my knee injury training.
Over the course of this, I’ve been trying to come up with something new and interesting to write on this blog 5 days a week. I often think of these ideas on the walk to school, and honestly, there have been days when I felt so strung out that what I wanted to write about was how I felt like I was having some kind of nervous breakdown, and how do you tell?
I haven’t. In part because I like to be positive here, but also because I had a job interview on Wednesday and I didn’t want that post going out the day I was Googled (yes, they checked out my website). But then I was looking at the posts that I’ve had featured on Brazen Careerist: there’s The Importance of Perspectives (where I admit that I’ve not been loving what I do lately), Dream Big or Go Home (where I admit to being afraid to fail) and Rediscovering Balance (where I write about last semester being miserable and needing to take a break from my life). Of course, I try and give these a positive spin, and focus on the things I’m learning from the experience. But is that the posts people find most useful/interesting? Not my tech-focused posts like this one on humans and developers, or this one on Facebook?
The truth is, that I take on a lot and want to bring 110% to everything I do, but ultimately sometimes I can’t bring 110% or I screw up and this devastates me. I set myself aggressive goals, challenge myself constantly and as a result Ifail everyday. I feel like a failure a lot of the time, but I try to believe that I am only a failure if I stop trying.
So why have the last few weeks been so difficult? I’ve finally had some space to think and I think it’s not the volume, it’s the intensity; i.e. it’s not how much I’m trying to do, it’s how important the things happening right now are. Maybe this is normal as graduation approaches? The university stuff is stressful because this is something I’ve been working on for months, and it directly impacts when I will graduate. The job hunting stuff, well we all know that’s stressful, right? I think it’s the waiting. I interviewed on Wednesday and at the end of the day Thursday I haven’t heard. On Wednesday I was positive, but as I write this (on Thursday afternoon) all I can think of is better examples to answer every question and a concept for the problem we were talking about that I think is really workable (I had the genesis of this idea in the interview, but not enough to think it worth mentioning. Now it’s fully formed). I was convinced after the interview that I would be a perfect fit for this project – and I still 100% believe that – but, I’m also 75%+ convinced I’m going to be rejected and debating my backup plan – should I ski in New Zealand, do yoga in Ibiza? Apply to a work experience/language program in France? Or, stop running away and keep putting myself out there for potential rejection.
There’s an obvious analogy between dating and job hunting, but here’s the kicker: if some guy rejects you it’s easy to rationalize, weird uber-Catholic interfering parents, for example, or (the classic) commitment issues. But when a successful and innovative company rejects you, it has to be you, right? Either you wouldn’t be great at it, or you didn’t present yourself in such a way that you managed to convince someone else you would be great at it.
Now, time for my positive spin. How have I been hiding my meltdown? Literally physically hiding is one way, I guess. Aside from my non-response to email, who can tell? I have been (trying to) maintain a positive attitude in conversation, where instead of moaning about “oh I’m so overwhelmed” I talk about what I’m doing instead. I’ve tried to minimize my commitments, but keep the ones I have made already (I hate being flaky, the guilt of letting someone down typically is more time consuming than actually doing the thing I’ve committed to). Last week, I gave myself a break from working out. I’ve grabbed relaxation time whilst I could, e.g. watching movies whilst marking and running experiments – I find I focus better on boring and somewhat mindless tasks if I’ve allocated a distraction, and as a result I’m less likely to be sidetracked by other distractions.
And going forward, what can I change? Really, I want to try not to cram so many stressful/highly important things together in a short space. I think for the past 3 weeks, it’s been unavoidable, but maybe I could have managed it better – or managed expectations better so that during this period people at least stopped asking me for things. But aside from that, being told my work had no value hit me for six, and I spent a week and a half feeling discouraged by that (or, until I had a meeting where someone who understood better what I was doing made it clear that he didn’t think that was the case). Linking my productivity to my self-esteem is not great. Linking my self-esteem to what someone who doesn’t know what I’m doing says about my work, though, is really ridiculous, and I see that now. I should be confident enough in what I’m doing, the value I’m creating, and in the feedback I’m getting from so many other people that this one person doesn’t carry that much weight with me. So I guess I’ll be working on that, too.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about having dreams, in the context of graduating and finding a job. What is my dream job? What is the difference between a good job and a great job?
What’s the chance that I’ll fail?
Is that saying true, you know, the one that says “aim for the moon, even if you fail you’ll end up amongst the stars”?
(Of course not, the stars are actually further away than the moon…)
Teaching skiing last Sunday, I had a little girl who was desperate to go up the mountain. Once we got up there, it was much bigger and scarier than she thought it would be. She came down so close behind me, so that she could ski into me and stop if it got too scary. At the end, she was so tired and scared, she was in the back of my snowplough, holding my hands.
Fear is exhausting. And haven’t we all been like that little girl, scared to look down the terrain we have to cross? Hiding behind someone. Not experiencing it.
I’m trying to tell myself, that it’s okay to have big dreams. And it’s okay to miss the star and land on the moon, or even just back on earth. As long as I don’t stop dreaming.
On Wednesday, uOttawa WISE had the latest talks in our Inspiring Women series. As has happened every time so far, I think this is the best yet. How do we top it in February? (OK I have a sneak preview of what will be happening in February, and that’s going to be awesome too).
Our speakers were: Dr. Jennifer Decker, Team Leader, Metrology for Nanotechnology, Institute for National Measurement Standards, National Research Council Canada; and Mrs. Stephanie De Silva, Head, Monograph Management Unit, Natural Health Products Directorate, Health Canada.
I didn’t make notes about specifics, so I’m just going to write a little about the different themes it pulls out for me.
First up, I was struck by the similarities in what these two women spoke about, despite the disparity in their career paths and ages. We think we’re unique, that our problems are special in some way, but they’re not. We all have similar things that arise, we just deal with them differently. We all struggle to find balance, but being imbalanced is okay – if we manage our imbalances. I.e. unbalanced weeks are okay, but we can aim for our overall life to be in balance.
Second, I was reminded of Clay Shirky’s “A Rant About Women”, which I blogged about the other day. Both of them had been persistent in getting the job they wanted – without being pushy. If you want to work in the government, calling regularly to say, “so, how’s my application going?” is likely a good idea.
This is something I struggle with, and it was a reality check for me. I released on Monday but I’m not sure some people who I wanted to notice had (it’s hard to pick out one tweet in a stream if you follow a lot of people). And I knew I should message them and say, “hey, thought you’d like to know I released this” but I was prevaricating because maybe they noticed and weren’t that interested.
Seriously, I was holding off letting people know who had already expressed an interest in my work, that I had released something new. OK, I don’t want to be a jerk but this is likely going to far the other way! And isn’t it more arrogant to think they would just notice? People are busy, I’m just one person in a stream of information. Saying, hi and letting them know is not such a big deal! So I pulled myself together and put it out there. I’ll probably do it a couple of people at a time.
(As I write this, I’ve contacted two people. One of them replied within an hour suggesting we connect via phone next week. Seriously – why was I prevaricating?)
Third was asking for help. Stephanie has a young family, and wasn’t ashamed to say that being a working mom was made possible by the help of her friends and family and the support of her husband. This was echoed by Dr. Decker. I think we can be reluctant to ask for help because we think we should know, but none of us is superwoman! The most effective people I know don’t mind asking for help, and do it with regularity. There’s nothing less effective than spending hours struggling with something that someone else could take 5 minutes to set you on the right track with, really, is there?
So Thursday morning I took the thing I’d been struggling to write for nearly a week now and emailed the guy who asked me to do it. Because I’m angsting that I’m on the wrong track. And he can just tell me, and probably make some really helpful suggestions. Of course he was nice about it, and arranged to meet me later the same day.
The fourth, and final aspect, was failure. Some people get seized up by failure, and waste their time berating themselves about it. But if you’re not failing, you’re not pushing yourself. So fail, dust yourself off, and try again.
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(Amazon), by the way, is a fascinating exploration of women and marriage – and the compromises women make for family.)
