Arugula, Stoves, Sedaris, Success

FYI: One burner doesn't work....

Hello. Have we all been enjoying our arugula? C’mon, you know what I’m talking about. Up and down the East Coast, which is where I've been, we've all taken a new interest in that particular leafy green, because we’ve all read that article in the paper about nutrient levels in leafy greens, and the most nutrient-filled is, yep, you know it, arugula. So don’t even pretend to have always loved it, just tuck into your arugula salads. I recommend a citrus twist. Yum. Just don’t think about that other news item  about how that final spritz of water that perks up our arugula before it arrives on the grocery store shelf contains, more often than it should, E. Coli and Campylobacter bacteria.

Anyhoo. I’ve been away, enjoying my arugula salad and otherwise vacationing. Since we last communicated, Readers, the husband, the 11-year-old, and I journeyed to pick up the 14-year-old from her ballet intensive. At least I think we picked up the 14 year old, although she appears to be a clone of the 14-year-old, a little taller, and a little tweaked, attitude-wise. But we persevered to the beach, and managed to close our garage door when we left the neighborhood. We're all getting used to one another again. Family dynamics have changed. 

Which seems like a good segueway to David Sedaris. Now, I’ve read a lot of definitions of success over the past two years, and I was not expecting anything about that topic from David Sedaris, but there I was, reading his latest book, when I came across something new. David and his boyfriend are driving around Australia with a friend, Pat, who invites them to picture a four burner stove on which one burner represents family, one friends, one health, and one work. To be successful, she says, you have to “cut off one of your burners. And to be really successful, you have to cut off two.”

So they each name the burner they've cut. David says it was friends, though he wasn’t proud of it, and also health, and his partner Hugh says it was work, which makes sense since he must travel around with David to David’s speaking engagements and therefore not have time for his own work; and their friend, a businesswoman with several homes and cars and what to David looks like success says family and health.

What do we think of this? This is so old school. This stove is a pot-bellied one and the analogy is, too. I mean, c’mon. What a narrow definition of success that is. One that excludes maintaining health and human connections. What would Arianna Huffington say about it? Where’s that Third Metric? Although, honestly, we all fear that David’s friend Pat is right – and by we I mean I – that to manifest material success requires singlemindedness, and that singlemindedness requires cutting out those pesky distractions like taking care of your body and meaningful connections to other people, related to you by blood, affection, or both. And vice-versa. Pat’s definition is what landed me in trouble, so feh – I reject it! Maybe we need to let a few things simmer on low while we bring others to the boil; but cutting off a whole burner? Bad idea.

When I started this success blog, I’d done that. I’d cut out work. Yes, yes, I was working – I was being a full time mom – but I wasn’t developing my professional self. I don’t want to wade into the quagmire of seeming to suggest motherhood isn’t work, which necessitates high boots and a tromp though the grasslands of apologia. Motherhood certainly is work, and it certainly should be compensated somehow, by respect, by social security benefits, by family leave policies, etc. That’s a whole different story. My point - and I think I do have one - is that, like many stay at home moms (SAHMs), I identifed myself as something else, too. Something related to a profession. While I was being a SAHM, I was also supposedly a writer, but I wasn’t really, because being a mother of young children is a full time job. So, for large swathes of time, I turned off that work burner.

Did it make me a better, more successful person in those other areas (burners?) No, I don’t think so. In fact, ironically, while that burner was off, it was the only thing that seemed to matter to me. Work. Profession. Earning money. I couldn’t stop thinking how I wasn’t doing any of it, and how much of a failure this made me. It wasn’t as if I focused better on those other burners. No, I focused on that one, and felt that lack of success there meant I was a failure everywhere.

This was a rawther counterproductive and downright miserable cycle of despair in which to find myself, and so I began to look for a better definition. I also began to look for some paying work. But the instant I turned on that work burner, I felt better. No, that’s wrong. First I felt really shitty, and I floundered around looking for jobs and so on, so really, the first time I obtained some paying work related to my profession, I felt better. A lot better. A billion percent better. It didn’t take much. It didn’t take the career coming to a boil. It just took a little bit, a simmer, if you will, and everything started to improve.

So my new view of success is much more holistic than Pat’s. Carrying on with the stove analogy, you want to be an Aga, or a Viking, or whatever. The idea is to get all the burners working. 

Frankly, I don’t think David subscribes to Pat's theory, either. For one, he points out that his friend Pat “seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success.” For another, while he says that he cut off the friends burner, there he is, riding around the Australian bush with his friend. But I’m not going to speak for him. I don’t know what he’s like, really. Antisocial, reclusive, peevish? His sandbox is the nexis of humor and pain, his medium is memoir: We know he’s got problems. Which brings us to the next burner, family. He ends his essay with a painful memory of a senseless power play between his 11 year old self and his father, which ended with him turning off the family burner. But then over time he realized that “without them, I was nothing.” It’s not a heartwarming realization, though. It's more a recognition of how connected we remain to family, even when we’re grown and evolved and fully therapized and can move thousands of miles away. There’s a note of resignation, or perhaps defiance, when he says, “Cut off your family, and how would you know who you are? Cut them off in order to gain success, and how could that success be measured? What would it possibly mean?” With a suggestion or implication or another tendril-like tenuous gesture that you need family, if only to measure how far you’ve come, how different you are from them.

Anyway, somehow, that family burner has to stay on, too.  I write this after returning from a week’s vacation with my sister the psychoanalyst and her family, for a couple days of which our father joined us.

But back to the burners. Yeah, I think the goal is really to keep them all going. As I mentioned, some may need to be turned to simmer for awhile while others come to the boil, but you need them all. As someone’s granny said, “If you don’t have your health, you have nothing.”

You can eat your arugula and have success, too! In fact, you must.

How to Be a Successful Woman: Be Human

Do you want to know the weirdest thing about Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In, Readers? I relate to it.
That is weird. Why would I relate to a book about climbing the corporate ladder? Excuse me, climbing the corporate jungle gym, as Sandberg prefers to describe it. I’ve done everything I could to arrange my life so that I would have blocks of free time in the afternoon. This plan has led me as far away from corporate life as anything could have. I worked in an office right after college, and I discovered that it depressed the hell out of me. After ruining a perfectly swell linen skirt with grass stains on my lunch hour, I had to face it: I am not your corporate type. Whatever that is.

On the other hand, why wouldn’t I relate to a book about how a seemingly competent woman struggles with self-doubt and has to double think and analyze every step she makes? If I’d known I could do that on a stupendously large salary, I might have stayed on the professional path.

I’ve been kind of appalled by the responses to  Lean In. It’s too one-percenty. It’s about “clawing your way to the top.” It doesn’t consider the real problems of most working women, or of most women, or of other particular groups of women.  She was “lucky “ to have Important Male Mentors.

So what? Does every woman have to speak for every other woman to speak truth? To make a difference? Isn’t Sheryl Sandberg’s experience as valid as mine? Or yours? Or your cleaning lady’s? And frankly, it’s the one percent who can make some immediate policy changes just by being who they are at the top. Is this bad?

I have to admit that I was one of the people who read Sandberg’s Barnard commencement address a couple of years ago, and her profile in the New Yorker last year, with skepticism. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to find the flaw. If she’s a great business woman, then she must be a sucky mom, right? Or be divorced.  Or hate other women. When I really paid attention to her, however, I had to admire her words and recognize my own thwarted ambition.

A lot of people complain that she’s blaming the victim, telling women they have to fix themselves internally before structural change will occur. To them I say, have you actually read the book? She’s talking about the need for internal and external changes. Leaning in means not prematurely cutting yourself off from seeking promotions or taking on extra leadership roles just because you might want flexibility to have a personal life and children. She says it’s better to lean in to your goals and keep going towards them, and work out the details later; don’t cut off possibilities for yourself because you’re afraid you’ll have too much work or responsibility. When women do that – and they definitely do – then they often find themselves in lesser work that’s unfulfilling, and ultimately they may drop out of the workforce.

Sound familiar, anyone?

Her section on mentors is a little harsh. In short, she says there’s been too much emphasis on women finding mentors, as if a mentor is the secret key to success. She says, “We need to stop telling them [women], ‘Get a mentor and you will excel. Instead, we need to tell them, ‘Excel and you will get a mentor.’”

Speaking as one of many women who has lamented her lack of mentors and looked at finding one as the deus ex machina necessary to success, let me say, “Ouch!” However, after rubbing that bruise, let me also say that her words echo the phrase, attributed to Buddha and familiar to habitués of yoga studios and meditation retreats everywhere, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Honestly, she’s just saying you’ve got to work hard. No one is going to get you there until you’ve proven yourself.

So, here’s what I like about this book:

1.     She’s honest about her self-doubts. Lean in also means learning to work with the negative, doubting voice in the brain and acting confident, even if you don’t feel it; it means, to quote a friend’s favorite phrase, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

2.     She’s honest about her intellect, her luck, and all the help she’s received from men, from women, from bosses, and from assistants.

3.     She’s honest about her mistakes, like the time she failed to see the raised hand of one of the few women in the room and called on man after man. At a talk on gender equality.

4.     She says she’s a feminist. If you think this is minor, just check with any female under forty and find out if she wants to identify herself as feminist, and then look at the other prominent women in business and notice how they distance themselves from the term, and from the “issues” that are “women’s.” Why do you think we haven’t had that final burst of change that would institute meaningful family leave policies, equal pay, paid sick leave, and flexible scheduling across all industries, businesses, jobs? Because women have had to distance themselves from these issues to get ahead. And once they do, like Melissa Mayer, Chief Yahoo at Yahoo, they pretend being a woman makes no difference in the world.

The feminism I grew up with taught that once women made it to the top, they were going to change things for everyone. Well, the movement stalled, didn’t it? As Sandberg says, women who made it found themselves adhering to a stereotype about what men are like, and men often have to do that, too. The point was supposed to be that when women gained equality, then men would have more options, too. Only it didn’t work out that way, because women at the top forgot that last step: speaking out to make change. Sheryl Sandberg didn’t. She says, “I believe that this will create a better world, one where half our institutions are run by women and half our homes are run by men.”

5.     She gives practical advice. She talks about how to negotiate salary. She talks about how to navigate the mentor-mentee relationship. She talks about how to handle negative criticism. In every instance she talks about challenges she overcame.

Yes, Sheryl Sandberg is different from most of us. She’s a corporate superstar, very bright, extremely ambitious, and powerful. She’s not a professional automaton, however; she’s a very human professional. By showing her humanness, she’s also in the vanguard of a changing working paradigm. This is what we were aiming for, back in the 1980s. She made it up there and now she wants to encourage more women and men to join her, and to be human about it. Maybe you don’t want to be part of her working world. Maybe your ambitions are totally different from hers. But I honestly believe that it’s people like Sheryl Sandberg who will help shape work life policy in a more equitable, family-friendly direction, and that will in turn make life better for all of us. She’s speaking her truth, and encouraging others to speak theirs. I say, applaud her for bringing the focus back to what a lot of us would like to think is old news: We’d like to think those feminist battles have been won, because they were exhausting. The battles were not won, however, and the movement, until very recently, had been beaten back into the tributaries of academia and radicalism. With Sheryl Sandberg, the women's movement, feminism, whatever you want to call the effort to achieve equality between women and men has moved back into the mainstream. Let’s lean in on that!

How to Live: Inventing on Principle, Part II

image via Creative Commons

Worldly success is incidental for the successful. That was how I ended my last post. How noble. How sublime. How true.

Yet everyone who says this has worldly success. I mean, maybe lots of other people say it, too, and they have no worldly success. We don't hear them. Or if we do, we don't really believe them when they claim there are more important things to life than worldly success.

But these successful people who deflect the question of worldly success have my ear because of their, uh, worldly success. It's great to know they have these underlying principles. But to implement them, they need a little cash. Cash-olla. Cash flow. Le money.

Which reminds me of a recent article in the New Yorker about a positive rash of books on success being published in China. Most of these books are about--everyone, all together now--climbing the corporate ladder, getting rich, getting powerful, getting WORLDLY SUCCESS. These things have been pumped out to the people for a few years now, instilling the values of getting ahead and the principle of every person for his- or herself. The standard model of success.

I'm not linking to this article because I can't remember my password to my online New Yorker account and I'm too lazy to figure it out. So trust me when I tell you this.

The author (Leslie T. Chang, if you want to look it up on YOUR online accounts, my dozens of readers) points out that the Chinese rash of pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps books parallel a similar surge in American books of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries here in the USA. Horatio Alger books, for example, all about making it in the working world. The standard model of success.

Yes, well, there was a lot of poverty around then, and a lot of people needed to accumulate a basic level of comfort. So it made sense. And it makes sense in China, too.

But once the standard of living rose to a pretty decent level for most people in the US, the tone and tenor of these books changed. The self-helpers started urging the self-helpees to remember that there is more to life than work and making money.  People started to realize that the principles of getting ahead extolled in these up-by-your-bootstraps stories don't foster the best in people. It's hard to switch gears from scramble-up-the-ladder-gear to make-the-world-better-for-everyone else gear until you have some basic amenities, though. Yet the gear always does change.

And according to this article in the New Yorker, there's a faint note of the same refrain sounding now in China.

I'd say that people like Bret Victor and his ilk are playing that tune loud and clear. But it hard to have principles other than earning money unless you have some.

I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm saying they're right. I'm saying there's more to success than money. But first you need some money to believe it.

How to Live: Inventing on Principle, Part I

I know indisputably successful people. I'm not going to drop names, so you'll just have to believe me when I say you see some of them on the front page of the New York Times or on the lists of winners of Important Prizes.

And I've read a lot of books about success. I know you'll trust me on that.

The books, and the successful people, all sing the same tune: money isn't the object, because money is not a real motivator. One old friend who has become very successful says his goal is to try and make the world a little better. One Important Prize winner says that people place too much emphasis on Success, meaning on it's outward trappings, and that the best thing to have is work that feels meaningful.

And Stephen Covey says if you center your life on money, you've placed it on a false center.

How to Live

image via Wikipedia through Creative Commons

I once considered majoring in Classics. For some reason, admitting this embarrasses me. Probably because it reminds me of my huge, thick glasses and my complete set of railroad tracks, and my adolescent earnestness in search of Wisdom. I distinctly recall telling my interviewer at Wellesley that I'd like to start a Latin club.

Which I did not. I took a final semester of Latin. I'd been hoping for a class on Catullus' dirty poetry; but they didn't offer it. A semester translating 80-line chunks of Pastoral poetry was the fork in the road for me.

What I loved about the classics, though, was that all these guys were busy thinking about how to live, a topic that appealed to me then as much as it does now. Although most of those guys were Greek, and I didn't read Greek. I read them in English.

I touched on this in another post—how it’s easier to admit to materialism (I love my iPhone4s)  than to an interest in wisdom or meditation or things that might be grouped under spirituality.  That in our culture—or at least in my subsection of it—that kind of talk just doesn’t happen. You’ve got your psychological and your rational and your political conversations. It’s harder to get to those other kind,  the How to Live conversations.

So the other day I came across a book called How to Live in our local indie bookstore. It’s by Sarah Bakewell. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty-One Attempts at an Answer.

How could I resist? It's philosophy, after a fashion, not self-help. But, after all, the essense of most of these self-help books on success is really about how to live in a way that makes success more likely. And that way usually involves delving into what really matters to you, what is most important, so that you can shape your goals around that.

Finding the Sock

I was in labor with my first child. Contractions, fear, anxiety, and excitement rippled through me. The husband had my suitcase. The bed was made. Our one-bedroom-with-a-den apartment was tidied. I was all ready to go.

Then I saw a sock on the floor. It seemed, in my contracting and anxiety-ridden state, too hard to bend over and pick it up--and I am proud to say it also seemed too niggling a detail about which to bother the husband.

I'll get that when we get home, I thought.

And I went and had the baby. Which, as you can imagine, based what you know of me, was a totally trauma-free experience from which I got out of bed and danced a tarantella within twenty-four hours.

Success as Change

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You know, Stephen Covey has quite a program for personal growth--also known as personal change. All of these self-help people do.


I've said it before, but I'll say it again. On one level, all these self-helpers, whatever their subjects may be--happiness, contentment, success, fulfillment--are talking about how to live. They all have these programs for changing yourself.


Maybe you're an outside-in kind of person, so you like Dale Carnegie's "smile and the world smiles with you" approach. Maybe you're more of an analytic navel-gazer, so you like assignments that have you come up with your values (Covey, for example). Maybe you're more spiritual, so you like Deepak Chopra's methods. 


Whichever you prefer, I would like to point out that some changes are much easier to make than others.


Eons ago I attended a parenting talk at the younger daughter's nursery school. The school psychologist addressed the tendency people have to fall back into situations that are "comfortable" for them. Comfortable, in this sense, means "familiar," what you were accustomed to as a child. So if you came from a warm, open, loving, and supportive home, you'll tend to recreate that for yourself later in life. And if you came from a dysfunctional home where perhaps you were ignored or neglected or worse, you'll tend to feel "comfortable" re-creating these things in your adult life. Indeed, if you start feeling too happy, you might be uncomfortable, and screw things up for yourself until you feel "comfortable" again. 

Success, n.

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Let’s be honest, I’ve gone over to the namby-pamby side of things, where success is called abundance and is defined in much the same way we talk about happiness or contentment. You know, success is whatever makes you feel good. Wealth is friends, family, feeling a little buzz about your place in the world. It’s been a little New-Age-y around here. A little sticky. 

What is it with all this garbage about happiness and contentment? These are consolation prizes, people, for if you happen to notice that while you’re meditating and chanting “ommmm” and smiling at people and giving them candy (did I say that? Is THAT what I want? Candy?) and everything, you haven’t actually gotten rich or famous or become highly prestigious.

These are the kinds of helpful thoughts that buzz around my head when I try to meditate. Or to work.

For some clarity, I  headed to the dictionary. Did I mention I used to work in a library? That’s right. Even considered library school, which has become way cooler over the last 20 years than it was when I took one course and decided no, thanks. Still, I’m all about the reference books.

Besides, as any writer knows, when defining terms, you might as well start at the dictionary.

So I started with my actual dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969) that I seem to have lifted from the cooperative house I lived in for five-and-a-half years in my 20s. No, that wasn’t the 1920s, that was MY 20s.

Success, n. 1. The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted. 2.a. The gaining of fame or prosperity. b. The extent of such gain. 3. One that is successful. 4. Obsolete. Any result or outcome.

I ended up online, of course, where I looked up "success" in 30 dictionaries.  Thirty dictionaries, which all said pretty much the same thing, so I’ll quote you the Mirriam-Webster online definition, since we know and trust the Mirriam-Webster name (although maybe not so much if you’ve taken Reference Librarianship and know things like the 11^th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica was an extraordinary achievement, whereas the 15^th was not.)

            Success, n. 1. (obsolete) Outcome, result.

            2.a. a degree or measure of succeeding. b. favorable or desired outcome; also the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.

3. One that succeeds.

 For thoroughness, I looked up succeed: 

Succeed, intransitive verb.

1.a. to come next after another in office or position or in possession of an estate. b. to follow after another in order.

2.a. to turn out well. b. to attain a desired object or end.

Transitive verb.

1. To follow in sequence and especially immediately.

 2. Come after as heir of successor.

Guess what? Not a single mention of abundance. All this talk about “wealth” and “abundance” meaning something other than having money and achieving concrete stuff notwithstanding, the dictionary offers a pretty darn depressing reality check. Success means having money and achieving things that other people have noticed you have achieved. I could have started and ended this post with the Word tools dictionary:

Success 

1. Achievement of intention. 

2. Attainment of fame, wealth, or power. 

3. Something that turns out well. 

4. Somebody successful.

Bummer for me.  

Can thirty dictionaries be wrong? I mean, is there a way around those key words like fame, wealth, power, achievement? 

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Well, my tens of readers, of course there is. There has to be. And I think--yes, I think I'm pulling out of my slough of despond--and I can see it. 

The dictionary is concerned with the standard definition of success, but most of the successful people I've talked to don't concern themselves with that one. They are, all of them, much more concerned with the day-to-day pursuit of their goals than with the glorious proofs of their attainment. They're more about quality of life, and about purpose than about the fruits of their labors. And if that's how the obviously successful people define success, why should poor slobs like me be any different?

And that brings me back to where I began, really: finding out what makes people feel successful.  After all, as my sister the psychoanalyst told me, you can be one of those people who achieves a great deal, but who, because of your psychology, is incapable of feeling good about any of it. 

Who wants to live like that? 

Phew, that was a close call. I almost had to shut down this whole operation. 

Success: Some Conclusions

Image via Google from alphabetgames.wordpress.com

Okay, so it’s time to check in. What I’ve learned, how I’m feeling about Success. Those self-help how-to be successful books are still in the (reusable) grocery bag. I wanted to wait until I’d examined my own ideas before cracking them – and I still haven’t gotten to them.

So one inspiration for this whole project was Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project. Since she’s one of those hard-driving, confident Type-As, her book and her website, because of course she has a website, are full of tasks, steps and mini-projects for her (and her millions of readers) to do to be, um, happier. ‘Course a happily married, materially and professionally successful Ivy-League educated woman seeking additional happiness seems like overkill. She admits it. But even I’ve had a few friends ask me, in re: success, How much is enough?  For me, unlike perhaps for Rubin, my answer is, “Uh, at least some.”

We’re talking about personal measures of subjective states, ultimately, so it’s a little like trying to ride a seal – slippery purchase there.

Anyhoo, since my last two posts have been about my immobility (conflict, tantrums), I thought I ought to show a few of the things I have been actually doing related to feeling more successful.

First, channeling Gretchen Rubin, I bought myself a dedicated notebook to carry around and jot down short or long thoughts on success. With my trusty notebook secreted away, I’ve pigeon-holed any willing friend, relative or acquaintance and asked her or him for thoughts on success and feeling successful. Then, back at home, or huddled in the car, I’ve written down everything I can remember of what they’ve said.

A few conclusions:

• People have more and different ideas about success than I expected. I expected most people to have what I’ll call the Standard Model.

• Standard Model people feel successful by comparison to norms. By achieving societally selected markers of achievement, by moving up the ladder, they are able to evaluate their lives and feel successful by looking to their peers who are also climbing rungs. *

            *Ambition drives motivation here, and outward signs of success (material possessions, etc) don’t guarantee feeling successful, as there is the drive to climb, and therefore satisfaction only lasts a short time, until the need to achieve kicks in again.  Catch-22 operates here with the following exception:

• Self-aware Standard model people, the rarae aves, who know what enough is for them, and can appreciate their achievements. They accept their limitations, etc, or aren’t hung up on proving themselves to others (!!)

• Classicists take the long view. I’ll call it the Mensch Theory of life. In the Mensch Theory, the question of success is unanswerable until you’re dead, and then you’ll know you were successful if people talk about you at your funeral as a person you could depend on to do the right thing. If you were a mensch, you were successful. The classicists tend to be iconoclasts, or at least unafraid to live individualistically, outside the standard model.

• Spiritual folk feel successful if they can retain faith in the ultimate worth of the pursuit of the Good while tolerating the problem of the ephemerality of everything in life, even the love of family.*

               *This comes across in some as soldiering on in the face of life’s essential futility (and handing one’s friend who’s obsessed with attaining something in life a copy of the Tao Te Ching.) Kinda the shadow or flip side of spirituality and its implication of belief in something More, but I’m a stubborn gal and I can group them however I like.

• Creative types, whether in the arts or sciences, seem to need the spur of feeling frustrated with their achievements to generate new ideas and create their next thing. They feel most successful when creating, and perhaps enjoy their creations briefly, before churning up reasons to make more stuff. Ambition obviously comes into play here, too.

Everybody’s definition includes recognition. Oh yes, even the classicists. They’re just willing to be absent when they are recognized as stand-up folk. Modes vary and may include money, approval, thanks, readers, or mourners talking you up, but however you look at it, recognition is one common essential to feeling successful.

Those are my general conclusions. I don’t want to make this too long, so next time I'll get into a few specifics. I will say that I feel more successful--by writing this blog and noting, through comments, or  FB "likes" or compulsive checking of my page view stats, that each time I post, a few more people are reading my writing. That feels GREAT. (Recognition.)