Weekend Reading: The Do Cool Things Edition

Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. But I suspect the number of people out there who want to start their own business far exceeds the number who actually do it. As long time readers know, starting a business is one of the things I consider doing when I think about long term goals, so I often read articles about entrepreneurship and finding the will to take some risks and try to "do cool things" in general. Here are some of my recent favorites:

Cal Newport has a summary of an interview with Pam Slim about entrepreneurship and the role of passion. It is an interesting post, and makes me want to read her book. I particularly like this advice:

"Take one idea. Find a simple business model. Then test it using the fewest resources possible (time, energy, money), but in a way that gives you a good sense of whether the idea is viable. This is especially important if you are testing an idea while still holding a traditional job."

I also rather like this article about the dearth of women entrepreneurs, and how trying to plan everything out might not be the best approach. Here's the quote I love from this one:

One of the biggest mistakes we make as women is trying to make plans for how things will fit in our lives. We plan marriages, babies, and even our careers. Coincidentally entrepreneurship is one of those things you can’t really plan. Literally anything can happen on any given day. Last year I wrote on Women 2.0 about organized chaos. It’s how I balance my life as an entrepreneur and single mom who also happens to have some pretty ambitious goals.

Incidentally, the post linked to in that quote is pretty good, too.

And here is another good post from a woman entrepreneur, this one about how no one is likely to be a born entrepreneur, and you need to practice those skills to get better. Here's a good quote from this one:

After starting a number of companies of my own, and meeting with entrepreneurs at all stages of the startup journey, I’ve come to believe that the ability to differentiate good ideas from bad ones and massage bad ideas into profitable companies is like being physically fit. The vast majority of us aren’t born fit. We have to train, practice, and push ourselves to get good at it.

Next,  the funniest link in this post: the seven habits of highly effective mediocre people. I'm not going to try to summarize it. But here is a good quote from it:

We can’t all be grand visionaries. We can’t all be Picassos. We want to make our business, make our art, sell it, make some money, raise a family, and try to be happy.  

I really like this. I think we get caught up in feeling like we need to be amazingly awesome or we can't do something. But the truth is, we just need to be good enough. I played viola all through school, even through graduate school, and then I played Irish fiddle for several more years. I was never going to be a professional musician, but I played well enough to enjoy it and to produce some enjoyment for the people who listened. I think we should approach our work more like that. If we wait until we're unbelievably awesome at things before we'll try them, we will miss out on a lot of cool experiences, and the world may be missing out on some cool things.

So it was in that spirit that I decided to go ahead and try to publish The Zebra Said Shhh. I think it is a pretty good story, but I have no illusions about it being the next Knuffle Bunny. I had lunch with a friend today, and he'd noticed that someone had posted a review on The Zebra Said Shhh Amazon page. He wondered if I minded that the review was a three star review, and he was sort of taken aback by my answer: "Hell no, I don't mind. I think it is AWESOME." First of all, I'm told that even a one star review is better than no review in terms of sales. Second, it is only one review and maybe the next reviewer will like it even more. Third, writing a solid three star book on my first try? Hey, I can live with that. In fact, I will CELEBRATE that.

This is not to say that I don't take the book seriously. Far from it. I worked on the book and made it the best I could. I am fully committed to doing any marketing activities my publisher suggests. I just don't think it fair to expect myself to be perfect, especially not on my first attempt. I'll read the reviews, and learn from them. And my next book (and yes, I've got a next book in the works!) will be even better.

OK, back to the links. The link above about how entrepreneurship takes practice came from a Forbes article by the same author, about how a lot of start ups should focus less on investors and more on customers. There are business ideas outside of Silicon Valley.

Along those lines, I found this piece about running a business that makes products for people who make less than $2 per a day really interesting.

------------------------------------------

Since I was talking about the book and reviews, here are the posts about the book that I've seen so far:

• Alyssa at Apple Pie and the Universe has a review that includes a link to my answers to some interview questions.
• Anandi at House of Peanut has a review that includes a little small world back story.
• Ella Johnson at Mymcbooks has a review with a giveaway, open until March 22.
• Tamia Sheldon (the illustrator) has a short post up about the book.
• Xist Publishing is on Pintrest, and here is the page for the book. The quote on this page makes me smile!

I appreciate any and all reviews on blogs, Amazon, or GoodReads (I'll make sure the book is there soon... it is on my list for this weekend). But most of all, I appreciate you reading here. None of this would have happened without this blog, and the new ideas and contacts it has given me. Thank you.

A Second Fix

I got my second Stitch Fix last weekend. I don't think I'll post after every fix comes in, but I feel like posting about this one. Prepare yourself for another round of crappy fashion photos...

I have to say, I find getting the Stitch Fix box a lot of fun. It is like opening a present, even though I'm ultimately the one who pays for the present. So sort of like opening a gift from my husband, except it is clothes instead of some practical gadget. I guess I just like the element of surprise.

When I opened this box, I thought I was going to end up keeping all of the items. They all looked "right" for me. Sadly, when I tried them on, I realized it was not to be- one of the items just didn't fit. It was a dress in a wonderful shade of brown and I was genuinely disappointed when it didn't work. But it was so tight across my chest/back that I was worried I'd rip it taking it off. And once I knew I'd be sending one item back (and therefore forfeiting the discount), I looked at everything a little more critically.

So I ended up sending back this white draped top, which seemed like it should look great on me... until I tried it on. I ended up thinking it just had too much volume for me, making me look top heavy.

This top looks better in the picture than it did in real life

I kept the other three things in my box, though.

The first winner was a sleeveless sweater/vest. I first tried it on as a sleeveless sweater, and was unconvinced:

But then I looked at the style card and decided to try the other style it suggested, and then I loved the sweater:

And so did my kids. You can't see it from the above pictures, but the sweater has metallic threads woven into it.

My girls looked at it, pronounced it "sparkly" and said it was the best thing in the box. I am inclined to agree with them.

I also decided to keep the oversize but lightweight teal cardigan:

I couldn't find an outfit using this cardigan that I really loved, but I did love the color and so I decided to keep it and assume that eventually I'll find the right combination.

Finally, there was a pretty silver necklace, which I also kept without any specific ideas of how I would wear it.

All in all, I thought this was a successful Fix. I am definitely enjoying having things in my closet that I actually really like without having had to actually shop for those things, so I will sign up for another one at some point. The thing I most need right now, though, are pants, and as Laura Vanderkam has already mentioned, Stitch Fix doesn't have many pants in their collection, so I will take a break from getting the Stitch Fix boxes and maybe look into trying out a personal shopper. It is one of the items on my 2013 Personal Fun List, after all.

In Which I Become a Published Author*

Once upon a time, a desperate mother who really, really wanted her little girl to go to sleep with a little less fuss made up a story about a zebra who really, really wanted to go to sleep. The mother told the story night after night- sometimes multiple times in a night!- in a quest to train the little girl to go to sleep when she heard the story.

The training didn't work. It turns out that the solution to the bedtime problem was to just wait until the little girl was well and truly done with naps. Still, the little girl did grow to love the story, and even to this day, requests "the zebra story" at bedtimes.

One day, the mother was reading her little girl a book and thinking the book sort of sucked, and she thought "my zebra story is better than this book!"

And she got the idea that she should send her book to some publishers, to see if they would publish it. First, she sent it to some friends, who gave her good ideas to make her story better. And she kept telling the little girl the story, incorporating her suggestions and refining the words.

The idea of sending her story to publishers wouldn't go away, so finally she decided it was time to send the story out into the world. She sent it to some publishers, and didn't hear anything back. She almost gave up, but then she heard about a new publisher, who was making books that would look as good on a digital reading device as they did on paper, and she thought "yeah, the kids books I've bought on the Kindle do look pretty bad, I'm glad someone is trying to fix that." Then she thought, "I wonder if they would publish my story?" So she sent it to them, and they liked it and wanted to publish it!

For a long, long time, the idea that the story would be published still seemed not quite real.

But then she saw the cover art.

And then she got the digital proofs and the advanced copy, and loved the illustrations, particularly the one of the parrot.

Today, her story is available for purchase on Amazon (and will be coming soon for the Nook and whatever Apple's eReading application is called)**:

The Kindle edition: The Zebra Said Shhh

The paperback: The Zebra Said Shhh

Which is pretty darn cool.

-------------------------------------------

*Technically, I became a published author when my first journal article was published, but it would be extremely generous to estimate that 100 people worldwide have ever read that, or any of the other journal articles I've written, or the scholarly book chapters I've written... This is the first thing I've published that my parents (1) could purchase easily and (2) might actually want to own, and "In Which I Become a Published Author of Something Your Average Person May Want to Read" seemed a bit unwieldy as a title.

**I'll update the post with the links as I get them, and will probably be unable to resist the urge to post about this again at some point, anyway. Also, there is info about the book on Xist Publishing's website.

Working from Home, Leaning In and All That Jazz

I should be in bed right now- I'm soloing this weekend while Mr. Snarky visits one of his best friends from his university days, who happens to be in a somewhat nearby location. I am glad he gets to see his friend, but wow, I'm tired. If I had to solo every weekend, I suspect we would not do quite so many activities. Also, tomorrow is likely to start before 6 a.m. and will involve two birthday parties.

But... I have a lot of thoughts about Marissa Mayer and the recent decision by Yahoo to require employees to work from the office, and not the home. And I have a lot of thoughts about the treatment Sheryl Sandberg is getting in the press in advance of the release of her new book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

I feel motivated to share my thoughts, motivated enough to stay up tonight and write a serious post on a weekend (something I rarely do). But I am strangely unmotivated to pull them together into a solid, coherent post.

So instead, here are some lightly edited comments on the topic that I have posted on other people's blogs, with some extra thoughts and bonus links at the end. One of the awesome things about being a blogger and not an essayist is that I can get away with this sort of thing. You get what you pay for, you know.

-----------------------------------

First, about working from home, from my comment on Mommyshort's post on the topic:

When my first child was born, I was working at a large contracting company. I had an office, but most of my work was with people on the opposite coast, so no one cared AT ALL if I showed up to the office. When I was coming back from maternity leave, they all assumed I'd want to work from home. The ones who were parents assumed I'd have in home help. The others had some cute idea about babies sleeping all day, except for when they were awake looking quietly cute on a play mat. (This delusion is how humans are convinced to reproduce, so I don't enlighten them.)

I told them they were all insane and came back to the office. I lived in a small apartment at the time. My daughter would have smelled me and demanded me, because that's the type of baby she was, and that was abundantly clear to me by the time I was going back to work (she was 3 months old when I went back part time, 4 months old when I went back full time).

But, I know that my situation is not the same as everyone else's situation. I'm told that some people's babies really do sleep all the time. Now that my oldest is in Kindergarten, I can also see how it would be possible to work from home with her present and actually produce some work.

So as a manager, I take each person's situation individually. Some people (and some jobs) are excellent candidates for working from home. There is one person who reports to me whom I rarely see in person, and she does incredible work and I would throw a tantrum worthy of my 3 year old if she ever tried to leave. I have other people who work remotely most of the time but come into the office for meetings one or two days per week. My own job, though? Nah, I have to be in the office for the gazillion meetings I attend every single day (why did I go into management again?) and to be available for the other employees I have who need face time with me. I could maybe swing a one day per week at home arrangement (and I would be super productive- I'm good at internal motivation) but the hassle of setting that up doesn't seem worth it, particularly since I need to pick my younger daughter up from a day care 5 minutes away from my office.

Therefore, I'm disappointed with Yahoo's new blanket policy. I think it is short-sighted and lets managers get away with being poor managers. I think that if some people were not performing as remote workers, their managers should have fixed that IMMEDIATELY. I know it sucks to call people out on this sort of thing, but that is why you are the manager. You have to do this stuff. Grow up and do it.

But- Yahoo's policy is hardly unique, even in the tech world, so I don't think it deserves the fuss it is getting. And there are plenty of tech companies with more enlightened policies, and they are using this as a recruiting opportunity. Etsy, for instance. (Which makes the third really impressive thing I've heard about Etsy recently. It is a shame my skills are in science informatics and not shopping informatics, or I would totally look at them as an employer.) The thing is, it is damned hard to find good tech talent and I think any of Yahoo's remote workers who are really good will be able to find a company that will let them continue with their remote arrangement. The ones who aren't good... well, they will either raise their game or suffer the consequences.

--------------------

Next, about the treatment of both Mayer and Sandberg in these discussions, from a comment on Blue Milk's post:

I have been watching the treatment Sandberg’s been getting and thinking to myself: “And people wonder why Marissa Mayer refuses to call herself a feminist?” Neither Sandberg nor Mayer is a perfect person. But none of us are. Would any of our lives stand up to the scrutiny that these two women get? Personally, I find Sandberg much more inspirational than Mayer, but that does not mean Mayer deserves the treatment she is getting from people.

Take the furor over the recent Yahoo decision to require all their employees to work from the office- a lot of other companies, even in high tech, have similar policies. Google doesn’t have the policy, but has a culture that strongly encourages long hours in the office. Yet Mayer is the only CEO who is getting excoriated about it. I don’t agree with her move, because I think it is short-sighted and unlikely to solve the problem she is trying to solve. But so much of the discussion of it is so obviously sexist against Mayer that I have mostly tuned it out, even though productivity and changing our workplace cultures to promote a healthier work-life arrangement for everyone is something I am passionate about.

This is not to say that I don’t think there are fair criticisms to be leveled at Mayer, just that I think we are holding her to a standard we don’t hold male CEOs to. We won’t defeat sexism until we demand change from male leaders, not just female ones.

Similarly, there are fair criticisms to be leveled at Sandberg, but it is unfair to expect her to tackle all feminist concerns. No one can be an activist on all the problems we face at once. She admits that she is only addressing one part of the problem. Personally, I’m glad that she has made time and energy to work on the problems she does address. I am nowhere near as powerful as she is at work, and I don’t often have the energy after dealing with my own concerns to go out and advocate to fix the larger problems. In fact, I just wrote on my blog this week that the flak I get when I write about being a working mother even on my little blog has made me steer clear of the subject. I admire Sandberg for being willing to stand up to the judgement and criticism and keep speaking out.

--------------------

Here are links to two articles that express my opinions better than I do:

Jessica Valenti on Sheryl Sandberg.

The Economist on how forcing Yahoos to the office is a symptom of Yahoo's problems, not the solution.

-------------------

And here are my closing thoughts:

I am really, really, REALLY sick of people tearing into Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg on work-life issues, but giving Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and all the other male executives a free pass.

Should senior managers care about enabling their employees to have good work-life arrangements? Of course. Should they try to ensure that the ability to pursue a rewarding career and be a mother is something that is available to all women in their organizations? Definitely.  ALL senior managers should care about these things, not just the high profile female ones. ALL senior managers should be held accountable for this stuff, and not just because decent people should care about the impact of their actions on others, but because getting these things right is good for the bottom line. And yes, there is research that shows that, but no, I'm not going to take the time to go dig it up tonight (some of the research about productivity is linked to on this page, though).

Also... we should remember that some of the underlying problems may be best addressed in the public sector, not the private one. Issues with commute times, availability of high quality affordable child care, and school-work schedule mismatches are problems that could perhaps be solved more efficiently by trying to act through government, rather than leaving it up to individual companies to figure out. Not all companies have the resources of Facebook or Yahoo, after all.

So sure, let's discuss how best to arrange our work cultures to promote productivity. Let's discuss the fact that for many women, the idea of leaning in or out is laughable- they are running as hard as they can to keep from getting flattened in this economy and have no option to ease up. But let's stop laying these problems at the feet of two women and letting a host of men in similar positions off the hook. Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg have difficult, high pressure jobs, and single-handedly fixing the problems of all working parents is not in either of their job descriptions.

OK, I feel better now. Rant over. I can go to sleep.

Weekend Reading: The Writing and Libraries Edition

You are all probably well aware of the fact that I have a children's book coming out next Tuesday, March 5. (Mark you calendars!)  So in honor of that, I thought I'd make this week's links all about books and writing and libraries.

First, via @CaleeL (who runs the company publishing my book), I offer you a nice post about what we can do to support the authors whose work we love. Even before I decided to try to get my "zebra story" published, I was interested in the changes happening in publishing, and how authors could find an audience- and a paycheck- in this changing landscape, so I like to think that I'd like that post even if I didn't have a book coming out next week.

I have, in fact, been trying to do more to spread the word about books and stories I like for awhile now. I've done two links posts with short eBooks, and I am trying to write more reviews on Amazon. I also finally joined GoodReads, and will probably write reviews there, too. I guess once I started thinking about the economics of being a writer, I realized how much that enterprise depends on volume!

Given all of this, when I came across this post at the Guardian looking for good Indie Sci-Fi and Fantasy, I decided I had to post my recommendations. I wasn't even deterred by the need to register on their site to post, which is what usually stops me from commenting on any mainstream media sites. I think you can find my comment on page 3. I recommended three short eBooks, two of which I've included in earlier links posts, and one that is on the list waiting for my next eBooks recommendation post.

I do not discriminate against independently-published books, particularly not short ones that don't require a large investment of time or money, but I am also not convinced that they are the future of publishing. I agree with a lot of the issues Chuck Wendig spells out in this post about how not every writer wants to be a publisher. Certainly, I had no desire to be a publisher once I thought about what that would actually entail.

There was a recent dust up about libraries and their impact on book sales. I won't link to the original article that started it all, because I never bothered to read it. I got enough of a flavor from the quotes in the reactions to it to make an educated guess that it wasn't something I wanted to spend time reading.

But there have been some really good responses. I like Paul McAuley's defense of the economics of libraries, and John Scalzi writes beautifully about the importance of libraries in his life. 

I have to admit that I am far from impartial on this front. My father is a retired librarian, so I may have even more fond memories of time in public libraries than most. I can still remember the thrill of discovering a new author- bonus points if that author had an entire series of books I could read! I remember when I first got interested in science, thanks to a series of books about the human body that I checked out from the library. And I remember when I was finally old enough to go out into the grown up section of the library to look for books to read there. One of the first grown up books I remember checking out was a book about modern epidemiological mysteries called The Medical Detectives (it may have been this one, but I'm not sure). I loved that book, and I was also inordinately proud of how thick it was- it was the thickest book I had read to date.

I think libraries are hugely important, and am sad that they are facing attacks from people who should know better in addition to declining budgets. However, like all institutions, they may have to look at new ideas to stay relevant. So I am intrigued by the idea of libraries as start-up incubators. (Also, it is nice to see some good news out of my home state!)

That's all my book and library links for now. Feel free to leave your thoughts and memories about libraries and/or your thoughts about the business of writing (or anything else, really) in the comments.

And here is a completely unrelated by truly awe-inspiring video to send you into the weekend in style:



(found via Boing Boing)