As I was stuck in traffic on the 405 and feeling grumpy, I saw the signs touting that the construction is a project of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Sure, I thought cynically, putting Americans back to work -- at minimum wage. Just how does that help me? Even the trickle-down economics of the Reagan era made more sense to me, and that made NO sense. I keep hearing that the recession is over and the job market is improving, and I do see an uptick in the number of job listings on the job boards. I just don't see an uptick in my own results.
Later, still stuck in traffic, I heard a report on NPR that while unemployment overall is down, unemployment among women is increasing. So it's not just me, a small comfort. This sent my mood-o-meter back into the yellow zone, a zone I'm trying to avoid. Some days I win the battle for a good attitude, some days not so much. Guess which kind of day this is.
I'm interested in knowing how others in my boat are coping. It's become clear that The American Dream that I grew up with is obsolete, but there isn't a switch I can throw to turn off my expectations. I know life isn't fair, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it to be. What I want most of all is Opportunity, and it seems to be in short supply. I feel like a plant that doesn't get enough sun to thrive. I am alive, but my limbs are spindly and fragile. If I could just find myself a place in the sun, I know I'd be ok. Unfortunately, the weather report predicts continued clouds.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
The Need To Be Heard
One of the things I learned fairly early in my client service career is that when someone is unhappy, sometimes all they need is a chance to vent. This was a revelation. I grew up in an environment where children were meant to be seen and not heard, so I never felt the gratification of being able to say my piece. If I was unhappy about the way I had been treated, I was supposed to suck it up.
"No one wants to hear you griping. Life's not fair. Keep it to yourself and get over it."
I believed it, as kids do. And I hated complainers, even myself when my internal chatter was about how my brother had it easier than me.When I went into therapy, I experienced the profound relief of telling my stories to someone who cared. More simply, I felt better when I got things off my chest and got some sympathy. Much to my surprise, I learned that this desire to be heard and acknowledged is a basic human need. None of my psychology or sociology or anthropology classes ever covered this. Or maybe I was absent that day.
My first boss was a genius at dealing with people. One of the many things he taught me as a young Account Coordinator was to listen to complaints, and reply with something like "I'm sorry that happened." or "That must have been hard." Don't interrupt and don't make excuses, just listen until they are done. Not everything needs to be solved. Sometimes an attentive listener is enough. This is one of the best pieces of advice I ever got, personally and professionally.
When I started listening in on Twitter, I was amazed at the banality of some of what was said. "Bananas for breakfast, need to get more at the market." Really, who cares? And why use up bandwidth to post something so trivial? All those haters on-line, complaining about the people who talk in the library or who don't start to fill out their check at the grocery store until the clerk is done with their order. Why all the vitriol?
Then it clicked -- the need to be heard. Who do you complain to about the state of the economy? There isn't one person responsible for the mess we're in, and there isn't much satisfaction in sending hate mail to Alan Greenspan. But posting a comment on Facebook and getting a thumbs up can be salve on the wound. I'm not alone, someone else gets it. I'm not in a world where I chat with my neighbors while I'm picking up my mail, and there just isn't much idle conversation in my day-to-day, but that idle conversation fills something in us. Social media gives us an outlet for those thoughts that press on us, or excite us, or scare us.
Now I get it. Social media is here to stay.
"No one wants to hear you griping. Life's not fair. Keep it to yourself and get over it."
I believed it, as kids do. And I hated complainers, even myself when my internal chatter was about how my brother had it easier than me.When I went into therapy, I experienced the profound relief of telling my stories to someone who cared. More simply, I felt better when I got things off my chest and got some sympathy. Much to my surprise, I learned that this desire to be heard and acknowledged is a basic human need. None of my psychology or sociology or anthropology classes ever covered this. Or maybe I was absent that day.
My first boss was a genius at dealing with people. One of the many things he taught me as a young Account Coordinator was to listen to complaints, and reply with something like "I'm sorry that happened." or "That must have been hard." Don't interrupt and don't make excuses, just listen until they are done. Not everything needs to be solved. Sometimes an attentive listener is enough. This is one of the best pieces of advice I ever got, personally and professionally.
When I started listening in on Twitter, I was amazed at the banality of some of what was said. "Bananas for breakfast, need to get more at the market." Really, who cares? And why use up bandwidth to post something so trivial? All those haters on-line, complaining about the people who talk in the library or who don't start to fill out their check at the grocery store until the clerk is done with their order. Why all the vitriol?
Then it clicked -- the need to be heard. Who do you complain to about the state of the economy? There isn't one person responsible for the mess we're in, and there isn't much satisfaction in sending hate mail to Alan Greenspan. But posting a comment on Facebook and getting a thumbs up can be salve on the wound. I'm not alone, someone else gets it. I'm not in a world where I chat with my neighbors while I'm picking up my mail, and there just isn't much idle conversation in my day-to-day, but that idle conversation fills something in us. Social media gives us an outlet for those thoughts that press on us, or excite us, or scare us.
Now I get it. Social media is here to stay.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
The Generation Gap
There's always been a generation gap, it's human nature. My great-grandfather grew up in the country with no electricity. When my grandparents had his former home wired for electricity, he was amazed and annoyed. Why did they need that? He'd gotten along without it just fine.
My grandparents grew up on a farm, and moved to the city. They always had a huge backyard garden. When my parents took over the house, the garden went away and a lawn went in. My grandparents were scandalized. Why buy vegetables when you could grow your own? What were they thinking?
My parents grew up in the Depression. They saved waxed paper and aluminum foil and string, because they might need it someday. I thought it was insane. Why keep all that old crummy stuff around? If you need something, you can buy it.
Now I find myself on the other side of the gap. Recently I was in a meeting and a question came up about profit margins. I figured it quickly in my head while everyone else in the room was reaching for their calculator. When I announced the number, and their calculators confirmed my results, people were surprised. How did I do that so fast? When I told them that calculators hadn't been invented when I learned math, there was a very quiet moment while people tried to figure out just how old I was. For the thirty-somethings in the room it was inconceivable.
Now I face the gap between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants; and I see others struggling with the gap between themselves and digital anything. This has to be the biggest gap yet, a chasm that separates generations so profoundly that it confounds understanding. I'm in the middle between my mother, who was shocked to find out that there is more than one dot-com, and my nephew who recently asked why schools have libraries since you can find everything on the internet. I've worked in technology for more than 20 years, so I'm technology-fluent, or at least I was until a few years ago. Then I found myself on the wrong side of the digital divide, trying to catch up. Thank goodness for UCLA Extension and the great line-up of classes on technology so new that there aren't even textbooks to use. I'm working my way over to the other side of the divide, and it's no easy journey. Many of my contemporaries, especially friends with no children, have given up trying to keep up and are puzzled why I find the digital world so fascinating, and I don't even play video games. This week I sent a link to this blog out to a number of people, and I had a couple of responses along the lines of "I've never read a blog before, what I am supposed to do?" These are not cave-dwellers or uneducated people, just friends my age who don't use anything more complicated than email and their ipod. It made me realize how much I've learned in the past six months, and how much more territory there is to cover. Now I know how much I don't know. What a burden.
I can't even imagine what kind of generation gap my nieces and nephews are going to face with their kids. The rate of change has gotten so fast. I can envision my nephew telling his kids that when he grew up there were big buildings all over the country that housed books. How could it be?
I'll never be a Digital Native (nor speak fluent French) but at least I can have an intelligent conversation, and stay relevant enough to relate. That makes it worth the effort.
My grandparents grew up on a farm, and moved to the city. They always had a huge backyard garden. When my parents took over the house, the garden went away and a lawn went in. My grandparents were scandalized. Why buy vegetables when you could grow your own? What were they thinking?
My parents grew up in the Depression. They saved waxed paper and aluminum foil and string, because they might need it someday. I thought it was insane. Why keep all that old crummy stuff around? If you need something, you can buy it.
Now I find myself on the other side of the gap. Recently I was in a meeting and a question came up about profit margins. I figured it quickly in my head while everyone else in the room was reaching for their calculator. When I announced the number, and their calculators confirmed my results, people were surprised. How did I do that so fast? When I told them that calculators hadn't been invented when I learned math, there was a very quiet moment while people tried to figure out just how old I was. For the thirty-somethings in the room it was inconceivable.
Now I face the gap between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants; and I see others struggling with the gap between themselves and digital anything. This has to be the biggest gap yet, a chasm that separates generations so profoundly that it confounds understanding. I'm in the middle between my mother, who was shocked to find out that there is more than one dot-com, and my nephew who recently asked why schools have libraries since you can find everything on the internet. I've worked in technology for more than 20 years, so I'm technology-fluent, or at least I was until a few years ago. Then I found myself on the wrong side of the digital divide, trying to catch up. Thank goodness for UCLA Extension and the great line-up of classes on technology so new that there aren't even textbooks to use. I'm working my way over to the other side of the divide, and it's no easy journey. Many of my contemporaries, especially friends with no children, have given up trying to keep up and are puzzled why I find the digital world so fascinating, and I don't even play video games. This week I sent a link to this blog out to a number of people, and I had a couple of responses along the lines of "I've never read a blog before, what I am supposed to do?" These are not cave-dwellers or uneducated people, just friends my age who don't use anything more complicated than email and their ipod. It made me realize how much I've learned in the past six months, and how much more territory there is to cover. Now I know how much I don't know. What a burden.
I can't even imagine what kind of generation gap my nieces and nephews are going to face with their kids. The rate of change has gotten so fast. I can envision my nephew telling his kids that when he grew up there were big buildings all over the country that housed books. How could it be?
I'll never be a Digital Native (nor speak fluent French) but at least I can have an intelligent conversation, and stay relevant enough to relate. That makes it worth the effort.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
It's not a firehose, it's Victoria Falls
The flow of content in the online world has been described as a firehose. I beg to differ -- it feels more like the world's biggest waterfall to me. It's overwhelming in its vastness, and that's where I am today. Overwhelmed.
When I was learning to swim, I didn't spend time thinking about which Olympic event I was going to enter, I concentrated on getting across the pool in one piece. When I was learning accounting, I wasn't worried about How Am I Ever Going to Write an Annual Report, I worked on understanding credits and debits, and went on from there. And the idea of writing an annual report is still daunting, but it's not on my life list of things to accomplish. I don't need that level of mastery to do what I do.
I remember now, one of the first steps in learning something new is discovering how much you don't know. That's the stage when overwhelm can set in and knock me off track. The same thing is true about this new world I'm trying to embrace. So many blogs to read, so many twitterers to follow, so much material to ingest, I have to give myself a pep talk to just start somewhere. I'm so anxious to take it all in, that it's easy to forget about baby steps, and about celebrating a sense of accomplishment for what I am learning.
I see so many companies and organizations struggling to get their arms around social media and how it should be used. Ultimately, my goal is to be able to help them do that, a natural extension of my marketing know-how. I am experiencing how overwhelming and confusing it can be to enter this arena, and I'm realizing that dealing with those mis-givings is one of the major challenges that companies face, too. That's actually where you have to start -- decide to start. Even getting consensus on that can stretch already thin resources to the breaking point. I can see that part of my role with my clients is to act as a facilitator of the internal dialog needed to make the commitment to start. That I know how to do, and it is a skill that takes years to develop. Digital Natives have the know-how of the technology and Immigrants have the knowledge of the journey to adoption. That's where I can make a contribution.
So I go on reading my Google Reader every morning, and having a TweetDeck window open all the time to easily check in on what's going on online. I heard about the Japan earthquake on Facebook, and about Osama Bin Laden's demise on Twitter. A few months ago that would have been completely foreign to me, so I can see progress. I just have to be patient and diligent in this undertaking.
I had a client in the early 90's who refused to dedicate any resource toward a website because senior management thought it was a passing fad, like CB radio. Their delay has cost them millions of dollars of revenue and lost opportunities in market share that are incalculable. They didn't know how to start, so they just didn't. A Twitter account is not a strategy. An intern doing daily Facebook posts is not an start, it's a bandaid on Victoria Falls. I'm paying close attention to my learning curve so I can help others with theirs. That seems like the most important step to starting.
When I was learning to swim, I didn't spend time thinking about which Olympic event I was going to enter, I concentrated on getting across the pool in one piece. When I was learning accounting, I wasn't worried about How Am I Ever Going to Write an Annual Report, I worked on understanding credits and debits, and went on from there. And the idea of writing an annual report is still daunting, but it's not on my life list of things to accomplish. I don't need that level of mastery to do what I do.
I remember now, one of the first steps in learning something new is discovering how much you don't know. That's the stage when overwhelm can set in and knock me off track. The same thing is true about this new world I'm trying to embrace. So many blogs to read, so many twitterers to follow, so much material to ingest, I have to give myself a pep talk to just start somewhere. I'm so anxious to take it all in, that it's easy to forget about baby steps, and about celebrating a sense of accomplishment for what I am learning.
I see so many companies and organizations struggling to get their arms around social media and how it should be used. Ultimately, my goal is to be able to help them do that, a natural extension of my marketing know-how. I am experiencing how overwhelming and confusing it can be to enter this arena, and I'm realizing that dealing with those mis-givings is one of the major challenges that companies face, too. That's actually where you have to start -- decide to start. Even getting consensus on that can stretch already thin resources to the breaking point. I can see that part of my role with my clients is to act as a facilitator of the internal dialog needed to make the commitment to start. That I know how to do, and it is a skill that takes years to develop. Digital Natives have the know-how of the technology and Immigrants have the knowledge of the journey to adoption. That's where I can make a contribution.
So I go on reading my Google Reader every morning, and having a TweetDeck window open all the time to easily check in on what's going on online. I heard about the Japan earthquake on Facebook, and about Osama Bin Laden's demise on Twitter. A few months ago that would have been completely foreign to me, so I can see progress. I just have to be patient and diligent in this undertaking.
I had a client in the early 90's who refused to dedicate any resource toward a website because senior management thought it was a passing fad, like CB radio. Their delay has cost them millions of dollars of revenue and lost opportunities in market share that are incalculable. They didn't know how to start, so they just didn't. A Twitter account is not a strategy. An intern doing daily Facebook posts is not an start, it's a bandaid on Victoria Falls. I'm paying close attention to my learning curve so I can help others with theirs. That seems like the most important step to starting.
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