Careers and Cooking Grease

September 4, 2018 Lindsay Gordon

Several months ago I participated in a fantastic leadership course where I did one of the most confronting yet rewarding tasks in recent memory - make a list of all the areas in my life where I've been "tolerating incompletion" and get them completed.

(If you're cringing right now just reading that suggestion, you know exactly how I felt.)

This could be chores, hobbies, things we told other people we'd do, etc, and from that list, we then had the challenge to complete five of the items by the end of the weekend.

I made a list of 5 things (which was uncomfortably easy to do) by walking around my house and seeing unfinished projects, unused cooking gadgets, household chores and more. Starting the list initially filled me with shame but by the end of the list I was filled with a new sense of freedom and determination. By acknowledging the things that I had been tolerating I could actually choose to do something about them.

But there was one item that I was horrified by how long I had left it incomplete.

The most embarrassing thing that I had been tolerating was... a jar of cooking grease.

The Relationship Between Risk and Entrepreneurship

August 10, 2018 Lindsay Gordon

A few weeks ago my husband and I had dinner with another couple and the conversation turned to risk tolerance.

Our friends said they're solidly in the risk-averse category and my husband and I agreed that we are too - we're savers, we're not incredibly spontaneous and we love a good plan.

It took our friend a minute, but it was clear that our answer wasn't fully computing. He looked at me and said "but clearly you're a risk-taker because you started your own business".

This was a really interesting point and I had to think about it for a minute.

The first answer that popped into my head was "it didn't feel like a risk".

5 Ways To Support Someone Who Is Crushed By Their Job

July 10, 2018 Lindsay Gordon

When you’re crushed by an ill-fitting job, it can be hard to talk to your friends for fear of burdening them with your career problems.

But today, I actually want to talk to the people who know someone who is crushed and are watching the struggle without knowing how to support the person they care about. That can also be a really tough position to find yourself in.

What can you do to support someone who is crushed by their job?

Your friend/family member/colleague is clearly struggling. They don’t want to burden you with their challenge and yet you would do absolutely anything to support them. The question is what can you do?

I want to help relieve you of your feelings of helplessness with a couple resources and steps you can take…

The Miracle Question and The Evidence Question

July 2, 2018 Lindsay Gordon

I recently read a fantastic book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, and I was really struck by an interesting framework they shared that is used by Solutions-Focused Therapists. They use the Miracle Question and the Evidence Question to help patients resolve a particular problem they’re experiencing.

The therapist first poses The Miracle Question:

"Something must have happened! I look different!"

“Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, ‘Well, something must have happened—the problem is gone!’?”

The book points out that the question “doesn’t ask you to describe the miracle itself but to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened.”

I started thinking about this in the context of being crushed by your job.

It's OK to Have a Boring Job.

June 26, 2018 Lindsay Gordon

It’s OK to have a boring job.

(Am I even allowed to say that?)

I don’t think anyone ever tells us that it’s OK to have a boring job. It definitely doesn’t work for everyone. And it definitely does work for some people.

I only just recently noticed how revolutionary this message seems to be. I’ve been sharing it more and more often, the most recent time was at a workshop I co-hosted a few weeks ago. Participants kept coming up to me afterward saying how grateful they were to hear someone say that it was OK to have a boring job.

So now I’m on a mission to tell people that it’s OK to have a boring job if it works for them.

Believing the lie of "You Just Know"

May 14, 2018 Lindsay Gordon

Recently I read The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do by Jeff Goines (a fantastic read, highly recommend) and one idea that he reinforces throughout the book is that 'the way to meaningful work doesn’t always look like a carefully crafted plan'. One part of this in particular really stood out to me, what he calls the myth of 'you just know':

“For the longest time, I believed a little lie about people who were fulfilling their purpose, and it prevented me from finding my own calling. What was it? One simple phrase: you just know. When we find someone doing what they love for a living, we tell ourselves a story. It’s a nice piece of fiction, a familiar fairy tale, and a downright lie.

[...] This is what we hear from people who are too humble to admit how hard they worked or are uncomfortable with acknowledging how they got lucky. It sounds like how we often describe falling in love. You just know. The problem is that it isn’t true.”

They. Just. Knew.

The 2-Hour Job Search: Adding Glorious Structure to a Chaotic Process

April 5, 2018 Lindsay Gordon

I love following rules. If there's a systematic and structured way for me to succeed at something, I will follow the rules to a T.

I recently stumbled across 'The 2-Hour Job Search' and I've never been so excited to think about a job search. If I were a job seeker, I would put it into practice immediately. I've never thought about a logical and structured way to approach finding a job - something that I usually see as a mysterious, uncomfortable, and inefficient thing I dread having to do.

To me, here are some of the most interesting points he makes within the first few chapters

The Purpose of Interviews

March 7, 2018 Lindsay Gordon

I went to a tiny engineering school, Olin College, where part of the interview process is getting invited to 'Candidate's Weekend'. You get to see the campus, do an in-person interview, work with a group of other candidates on a design challenge and generally see what the environment is like.

At the beginning of my interview, my interviewer pointed out that not only is Olin evaluating whether I'm a good fit for them, but that I should be evaluating Olin to see if it's a good fit for me. It was something that they emphasized throughout the weekend and it's still present in their current marketing material:

"The weekends are designed to be fun, informal, and informational experiences. They are an opportunity for you to get to know us, and for us to get to know you."

This idea has stuck with me for 13+ years and I still see every interview as an opportunity for me to evaluate if the place is a good fit for me.