Bringing Your Full Self to Work

 "Work-life balance" is an almost mythical ideal that I try really hard to practice in my own life as well as set the conditions for it to happen in our office.  A big part, especially in a professional services firm, is to equally uphold that sometimes the job means long hours and tight deadlines, and that yet that people investing in things outside the office - kids, elderly parents, a hobby, a side gig - is celebrated and not looked down upon.  

Part of the selfish logic of the latter is you have to give people space outside of work to recharge and take care of things that matter to them or else they won't be able to give their fullest on the job.  And part of the logic is that these non-work pursuits actually contribute to their work self, in that they give people different perspectives and experiences they can bring to the team and to their clients.

 

Lazy Linking, 235th in an Occasional Series

Stuff I liked lately on the Internets:

235.1 @nypl list of feminism must-reads on.nypl.org/3dOEPMV

235.2 As someone whose "ethnic" name has been mispronounced/misspelled countless times over, I felt this essay deeply bit.ly/2Hidxmt @anand_writes

235.3 These reports on how to support small businesses now are timely & powerful bit.ly/2Htdi7Q @drexellab bit.ly/2To24nE @governing

235.4 Pick a year & @merriamwebster will tell you which words/phrases made their 1st appearance that year bit.ly/34m5j5p

235.5 NASA/Nokia working on cell service on the moon bit.ly/2Ho9GUE @cultofmac

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 251

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches," by Audre Lorde.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 250

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Stan Lee: A Life in Comics," by Liel Leibovitz:

Lee argued that law and order were important tools to keeping society intact; Shero responded that they were nothing but racist instruments designed to punish African-Americans. Lee said he believed that both “the Establishment” and the young radicals shared an interest in ending the war in Vietnam; Shero snarled and said the Establishment wanted to keep the war going for fun and profit. Lee said he saw himself as a liberal; Shero replied that there’s not much difference between liberals and conservatives, and that it would take real radicalism to solve America’s many systemic problems. For the first time in nearly a decade, Lee looked less like the pied piper of hip than like another aging man, rapidly losing touch with the culture.

His creations had struck a chord because, unlike their predecessors, they were designed not to provide answers but to provoke questions. They were deeply Jewish heroes, always quarreling, rarely certain, never submissive. Above all, they were intrigued by life’s greatest mystery, the charge to go on living in a covenant with other humans who were ultimately unknowable and with a God who was ultimately unreachable. Their rights and responsibilities in this strange setting intrigued them, and even when they failed to live up to their potential—which they all did, all the time—they still couldn’t imagine not trying. Theirs was rarely a comforting path—grace was for Superman and the gentiles, not Spider-Man and the Jews—but it was sustainable, and as they pursued it they grew just a little bit wiser, just a little bit more compassionate, just a little bit closer to God.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 249

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "A Lab of One's Own: One Woman's Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science," by Rita Colwell.

 

Two other women scientists—Barbara McClintock and Rosalind Franklin—were more employable because they were unmarried, but both ran afoul of the same man: James Watson. Franklin was on the verge of discovering the structure of DNA and the molecular basis of heredity by herself when Watson was shown Franklin’s spectacular X-ray photograph of DNA’s coiled structure without her knowledge or permission. He described the photo to his lab partner, Francis Crick, who had a background in analyzing crystalline structures. Reminded of the horse hemoglobin he’d studied for his PhD thesis, Crick realized that DNA’s two coiled strands go in opposite directions: DNA was a double helix. It wasn’t until 1999 that Watson publicly admitted, “The Franklin photograph was the key” to their discovery. Franklin died of ovarian cancer at the age of thirty-seven. The Nobel Prize is not given posthumously, so it went to Watson, Crick, and another DNA expert, Maurice Wilkins, four years later. Watson’s subsequent bestseller, The Double Helix, turned Franklin—a strikingly good-looking woman with a sparkling wit and chic French tailoring—into an unattractive, inept spinster. A woman’s appearance and age were important to Watson. When, at the age of thirty-nine, he married a Radcliffe sophomore, he sent a postcard to friends announcing, “19-year-old now mine.” When asked in 2007 why it mattered how a woman looks, he answered, “Because it’s important.”

Lazy Linking, 234th in an Occasional Series

Stuff I liked lately on the Internets:

234.1 1000 yrs before Darwin, Islamic scholars were riffing on natural selection @vice bit.ly/2GOAxJ9

234.2 Isabel Wilkerson & Ken Burns on the American narrative (swoon) @UM_Stamps youtu.be/D_-CCB-Tzzw

234.3 When we're past COVID, our urban gathering spots will be color-infused @thisiscolossal bit.ly/2SIWCLU 

234.4 Shared by my dad, one doc's take on Trump's COVID treatment bit.ly/36OUOcn

234.5 Ugh, Broadway shut down til at least June bit.ly/3ddnhd6 @broadwaycom

Revolutionary Conservative

Can you be simultaneously revolutionary and conservative?  I don’t know, but I feel both impulses tugging at me as I strive to be a whole person whose thoughts and actions and words and dreams reconcile with my deepest held beliefs.

My childhood influences have been mined in this space before but I’ll repeat them as context.  Growing up Taiwanese-American – hyphenated – seared into me an identity that does not easily sit in one camp or the other but that has to navigate between camps.  Doing two-on-two debate in high school – in which you spend the whole year on a single topic, alternating between arguing “for” and “against” – trained me in seeing the merit in both sides of an argument, as did my training in economics in undergrad and grad school.  And making intentional decisions throughoutlife to be in diverse settings – where I work/live/worship, who I’ve married/adopted, which friendships/spaces I prioritize – means I’ve been exposed to multiple perspectives and the logic and humanity behind all of them. 

Recommended Reads, 38th in a Quarterly Series

 

Stuff I'd recommend from the past three months:

Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear (Holland).  I love these kinds of pop-sci books.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Sugrue).  Super interesting to see national historical trends around race and inequality through the lens of a single city.

With All Due Respect: Defending America with Grit and Grace (Haley).  Will we be hearing more about her in 2024?

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Ramey Berry).  An incredible dive into the economics, emotions, and dehumanization of slavery. 

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Wilkerson).  This story is truly epic: what an incredible window into part of the American story, and how masterfully written to weave in first-person accounts and historical context.

Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (Ehrman).  Super interesting look at the evolution of beliefs about the after-life and the historical and cultural influences that shaped those beliefs.