For some families, business is just part of the package. As someone who grew up in a family-owned business, one of the reasons I ducked-and-weaved every time my husband used to bring up the idea of us owning our own business was because I saw a lot of headache (and heartache) as a result of [ Read More ]
Job hunting is rough for oh-so-many reasons. One of the things that is hardest about it, though, is managing your own attitude and spirits. If there is one thing that is liable to get you into trouble during a job hunt, it is unmanaged anxiety. I’ve written before about some of the things that I [ Read More ]
This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. The fact that we started off as a services company is what allowed us to get started and to avoid having to rely on outside funding. But it was transitioning to a product company that allowed us to grow and scale, and to ultimately [ Read More ]
Not working is easily ten times more stressful than working — unless, of course, money is not a concern in your life. Unemployment or underemployment is difficult to manage on multiple levels, because — just to name a few examples — it has such a huge impact across all spectrums of your life: Financial stability [ Read More ]
I try to avoid ranting on my blog (which sort of puts me in the minority), but I’m going to deviate from my self-imposed rule for a moment, and I hope you’ll indulge me while I stomp my feet and jump up and down a bit, but this is something that is really sticking in [ Read More ]
It’s probably a weird thing for a vocal atheist to quote, but there is something about the famous prayer that has been resonating with me more and more lately. Well, maybe not the “God” part of it, but the recognition part. Grant me strength to accept the things that I can’t change, the courage to [ Read More ]
After writing my post last week, Winners and Windmills, I asked my friend, the lovely and talented Tiffany Miley-Parks if she would be willing to write a follow-up piece that addresses what happens when “passion and skill” are not longer aligned with the “opportunity and circumstance” that make a work environment exciting. She graciously complied [ Read More ]
Accomplishment-oriented people often share a very common character trait: we hate to quit. More often than not, this is a combination of our own need to conquer whatever mountain we have set our sights on, and our belief that others are counting on us to succeed. In both cases, those assumptions are frequently over-estimated. Our [ Read More ]
This post was originally written for and published on Social Computing Magazine. Those of us in the Web 2.0 space who come from a technology background are often a little stunned when we discover that it is frequently our IT cohorts who pose some of the biggest obstacles to prospective enterprise implementations. After all, wouldn’t [ Read More ]
As with most major life lessons, it has been many years of gradual recognition that have allowed me to finally begin to understand the full impact of growing up in a family-owned small business. As with most other major life events or conditions, the lessons I thought I was learning at the time often evolved [ Read More ]
The words every man dreads hearing from his wife: “Does this dress make me look fat?” I’ll skip past the endless stream of jokes that have arisen regarding this quintessential battle-of-the-sexes cliche, and cut to the chase: what are you looking for when you ask someone for feedback? And, just as importantly, what do you [ Read More ]
WordPress’ database isn’t big enough for me to list off everything I’ve learned from John over the years: about business, about change, about leadership, about being a workaholic, about managing clients, about corporate politics, etc. You name a topic, and I can probably find at least a handful of lessons I learned from him. I [ Read More ]