Quick, which is more difficult – work or life?

Up until a year ago, both competed for my attention, each piling weight onto the seesaw to rise towards the favored position. A year ago, however, I started working at Alice and Ryan and I started hitting our stride (both of which were not without challenges, however… many, many challenges).

While working for a start-up demands hours, it demands more in mental energy, and in spiky unpredictable lengths, where the only invariable is that you know work will be stop and go. This means it’s often difficult to separate work and life, especially in the statuesque pursuit of balance, but while I used to recognize and promote blur, I’m now mindful of the distinct delineation between the two.

Smart people don’t balance two sides of the same coin – your work and life are, after all, inseparable from the backbone of your binding. You can’t push one to one side and one to the other and hope equilibrium presents itself because the entities are glued to each other and to you.

What I mean, for example, is that I cannot see Ryan and refrain from discussing at length our work. I have long agreed that behind every good man is a good woman, and likewise, the same holds true for Ryan and I on both sides. While he is the one that shows up to Brazen headquarters each day, my ideas fill his head. While I’m the one who walks into Alice each morning, Ryan’s sense and advice follows me.

More to the point, I guess, is that there is a mutual respect for what we choose to do with the majority of our day and into the night, and sometimes into our sleep and into dreams. Although when we do relate to each other our dreams from the night before, it’s not very likely to include the mention of a spreadsheet.

Right now, Ryan is across the street from me working. His offices are located diagonal from my condo, but I have yet to see him this week except for when he dropped me off from our weekend in Philly together on Sunday. I was working on a Wall Street Journal exclusive early this week, and he’s working on big plans for Brazen later this week. We also have friends, family, a basketball league, dance classes, books, blogs, grocery shopping, the gym, bill-paying and other magnitudes and minutiae of daily life competing for our attention.

Oh, and the new season of Chuck just started.

When I walk into work, much of that has to go away. I imagine this is natural for most people who enjoy their jobs, but particularly at start-ups you have to be ready to do whatever is put in front of you that day. Everything planned for the day will get eaten up by new priorities, larger plans and whether or not the toucan (our CEO) monopolizes all the time with the dolphin (our President and my direct boss). This can be best described as acting as a pivot, keeping your center, but spinning to each new person and project that appears.

One of the best parts of working at a start-up is that an idea spun in the morning has the potential to be fully realized by the afternoon. It can be that quick and magical and exhilarating. Also, the customers. When I worked for a non-profit in a trailer across from the food pantry that I was raising money for, I thought I wouldn’t again experience the rewards of being in such direct contact with the people I helped. But Alice has that.

One of the more challenging things is that blurring my work and my blog and my life to such an extent can make me very unhappy. Sometimes I feel like I’m always working which is frustrating, so I’ve tried to have clearer boundaries. I don’t really believe in work/life balance as an ideal, but no longer do I trust in work/life blur so much either.

As a generation, we’re always on. Is it okay to tweet during your workday? How often? What about talk to your significant other? Send personal emails? Do you work with your partner at night? Accept calls from the boss? Check your iPhone during a movie? Where is the line drawn and what is acceptable?

For Ryan and I, we have chosen to spend the majority of our day, not with each other, but with two different start-up companies. Our lives and relationship are more difficult and more enriched because of it. What about you? Work/life balance: truth or myth? Does it stand a chance?

The derision and drama on blogs, news and broadcast nowadays is entertaining, like a domino of tabloids back-to-back. And while we instinctively know that insistent self-actualization is an incredibly banal form of entertainment, it remains so vast in its infectiousness, and so strong in its self-referential feeding, that navel-gazing is now suffocating in its empire.

Let’s poke some holes for air.

You are not genuine because you told me of your heartbreak, or your success or your disease or your strengths or your weaknesses or miscarriage or move or relationship or promotion or demotion or disability or conflict or how your cat peed outside of its litter box.

Gross over-sharing is not encouraging or revolutionary or innovative. You are not absolved because you made what was once private now public.

Enough of the cultish drippy-rainbowed sentences: “What’s holding you back? Yourself;” “Motivation is first about taking that first step;” “Do whatever you want, your intuition will guide you;” “Force yourself to look inward;” “Start telling yourself positive things instead of negative things.”

Enough crowdsourcing your life’s misdeeds, your life’s lessons, your life’s minutiae. Enough with bogus empowerment, dramatics, and inflated realities in the name of support, transparency, attention, acceptance. That is not authenticity. That is allegiance to a culture of nineties motivational speeches.

“For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public space and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy,” philosopher Jacques Derrida maintains. “If a right to a secret is not maintained then we are in a totalitarian space.”

“Which is to say,” author Zadie Smith argues in Changing My Mind, “enough of human dissection, of entering the brains of characters, cracking them open, rooting every secret out!”

Authenticity is not about revealing it all, nor complete transparency, nor opening the door and shining a very bright light on every raised goosebump. Authenticity is not about blurring public with private. Authenticity is not about the flailing and flapping of our entire hearts and minds to an audience of mirrored hosts.

We have a right to our private lives. Dear God, we have a right to keep the corners of our lives to ourselves. And it is delicious to do so.

Gulp of Air.

There are two ways to approach life. Read about it. Or live it.

I read a lot. I like to synthesize information together, saturate my brain synapses, make connections, and curate the exact pieces that will fit my life. Knowledge is my thing.

But it doesn’t matter how much I read, or attend lectures, or watch TED talks, or troll Twitter for the next most interesting blog post. Most of that learning stuff is useless; there’s no better way to learn than to just do.

Become an expert {Phase 1}
Action is the first step. That’s why I encourage job-hopping. Most people don’t know what they like or what they’re good at. Like you could really want to be a CEO, yearn for it with all the matter in your body and brain, and then regrettably discover that you suck as a CEO.

Or maybe you’re really fabulous. A veritable genius! The point is, without working it out for yourself, you’re stuck on the path that others have already laid out. And yeah, that’s a safe plan, I don’t blame you. Our education system is certainly not set up to handle exploration or deviation from a set course. And entering the real world closes the door all together.

In school and at the workplace we’re told exactly how to do tasks, without learning the full explanation behind it. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of a young woman who is trying to solve a mathematical problem. She’s not told the way others have solved the problem, but instead is problem-solving on her own.

Gladwell recounts that when she figures it out, her face lights up: “Ohhh. Okay. Now I see. The slope of a vertical line is undefined. That means something now. I won’t forget that!”

The young woman is working with a professor who encourages his students to unlearn the mathematical habits they picked up on the way to university. Because it’s not about memorizing the right way to do something, but your ability to try that determines your success.

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds,” Gladwell reports.

In order to drive innovation, we need time and space to explore, not regurgitate. To become the master of a topic, you need to understand its underbelly, where it came from, where it’s going, not just the flashy exterior.

Become an expert {Phase 2 – quickly}
Most people are stuck in the land of daydreams and don’t actually reach action, so if you’ve mastered that, pat yourself on the back. I just gave myself a little pat. Go on, you too. Now we’re moving into advanced world domination.

Exploring a topic from top to bottom is all good and well, but what if you don’t have 10,000 hours to devote? What if there was a short-cut? A way that actually helped you make more fiery synapses connections?

I realize I’m starting to sound like an infomercial here, so stay with me.

First, let me preface by saying there’s no substitute for action. And what I’m about to propose isn’t something you should do in lieu of cooking every night if you want to be a chef, but it is the way to super-size what you learn from cooking every night. In an Einstein sort of way, not Mickey D’s.

So tell me, how well can you explain what you do? How well do you understand your passion? Could you teach someone else to do it?

When you do something like send a pitch, for example, you’re learning. You’re testing your ideas and theories through the reaction you receive, the resulting outcome. In this paradigm, it’s okay to fail, you discover through trial and error, and through persistence and hard work, you win.

But there’s an entire level of awesomeness missing. And you can only ascend to the next level by then teaching someone what you have learned. Because then you’re testing your values, ideas and theories with another person’s values, ideas and theories. You understand the underlying challenge more by defining it for another. Teaching – good teaching – requires you to exchange knowledge, not simply impart it. Learning is individual. Teaching is collaborative.

“Nobel laureate physicists such as Enrico Fermi and Leon Lederman took pride in teaching bright undergraduates,” reports Michael Schrage in Harvard Business, “because it forced them to keep in touch with the fundamentals of their field and express themselves simply and clearly.”

I had no idea how to write a stellar cover letter and resume until I started teaching others to do theirs. Groups comprised of individuals in different skill sets – say, marketing, design and finance – thrive when they teach each other. Life-coaches may be so prevalent right now because the coaches help themselves as much as they help clients.

Teaching is sharing knowledge, sharing empathy, sharing ideas. It’s pushing you to understand with entirely different lenses. Just like your body needs both cardio and strength training, your mind needs both learning and teaching.

Teaching is the definitive learning experience. And it’s the quickest way to expertise.

I just read, “The new Gen Y employee refused to get coffee!”

It makes me wonder what Gen Y public relations interns think about this. Feel free to comment anonymously if you’d like, but I’m really curious. Do you think it is OK? Or, is it unfair?

I have mixed feelings about it. As an intern, I expect to get less-than-glorious work on occassion. I don’t show up at an internship expecting to be counseling clients and pitching to CNN. Have I been asked to get coffee (or something similar)? Certainly.

But, in both cases the person asking me was nice and respectful about it. They didn’t act like it was my responsibility because I was the intern. In one case, it was lunch needed for a client meeting. In another case, it was for the students helping out with an outdoor commercial on a very chilly day. I didn’t mind at all.

But, I’m not sure how I would feel about being asked to fetch coffee daily because I was the intern. I don’t even drink coffee, so I don’t understand why people will wait in long lines to buy an overpriced coffee from Starbucks (just my opinion on Starbucks).

For me, it would depend on the internship experience. If I am learning a lot and growing my skills, I don’t think I would mind. If you are busy working most of the day, it’s kind of nice to step out of the office for a few.

But, if I were only given assignments such as fetching coffee, sorting mail and making copies, I might be disappointed in the internship experience.

What do you think as a Gen Y intern/employee? Or, what do you think as someone who manages Gen Y interns/employees?

Rachel M. Esterline works as an account executive for Central Michigan Life, the nationally award-winning school newspaper at Central Michigan University. She is as an account executive for PR Central, CMU’s student-run public relations firm and as a public relations executive with the Student Government Association. Additionally, Rachel serves on the executive board of the Public Relations Student Society of America at CMU and has completed a seven-month internship with her university’s public relations and marketing department. Rachel will graduate in May 2010 with a degree in public relations with minors in journalism and communication.

Do you know how good it is to wake up in the morning, get your coffee, flip on your computer, log in to your twitter account and find that YOU are the person being twittered about?  I do, it’s great!   It is exactly what happen to me last week. There were a great many “mentions” on twitter about my being listed as one of the Top 100 Women Bloggers to Watch.   I was surprised and honored.

It is the second time that I have been listed in a Top 100 List and both times I have been surprised and honored. I know that I am not the best blogger on the net and I am not the most prolific, but I do blog from a place that I have passion. As I said in a previous post, passion draws people to you like bee’s to flowers.

That being said, I also spend time on my social networking sites promoting my blog.  If you too are new at blogging use some of these tips to help drive traffic to your site.

1. Comment on other peoples blog – comments let bloggers know that you are reading their material.  It is always a morale boost when I get comments from others even if they do disagree with me.

2. Post your blog on your Facebook account and tweet your link now and then, let people know when you have posted new material.

3. Add links to other peoples blogs. If you are writing on a topic that others have written on, link back to them. It will build visibility and credibility for both of you.

4. Put your blog link on the bottom of your email, on your website, and even on your business card. It is a great way for others to get to know you.

5. Be brief, people do not take the time to read the long rambling blogs.  Say what you have to say in 300-500 words you will get more people to read your content.  And blog frequently, that has been a challenge for me this summer.

I am a novice blogger compared to many on the internet and I am sure there is so much more for me to learn, but I am proud to say that I have made to 2 top 100 list and I can’t wait to see what happens when I get really good at this.

Hazel M Walker, owns three award winning franchise’s. She is a 10 year owner of two BNI Franchises where she teaches members how to leverage their time and network to build each others businesses. She is also a Referral Institute franchise owner and teaches Business Owners how to harness the Science of Referrals to develop Referrals for Life. Hazel is a published author in New York Times best sellers Masters of Networking and Masters of Sales. As a member of the National Speakers Association she travels the world speaking to businesses and women’s organizations on the topics of networking to create a life you love.

“So you really hurt yourself, didn’t you?”  Tiffany asked me the other evening.  “It has to be bad, because I know you.  You’re a shake-it-off kind-of-gal.  I’ve seen you run through some pretty bad pains.  You rest and then you’re back on your feet in no time.  But this has got to be bad if you’re not running for weeks.”

Yes, it really is that bad.  Taking deep breaths still hurts, so I can’t even imagine how I could run when it feels like I am being crushed.  The pain conveniently sits under my bra line, so underwire brasseries only make it worse. 

For the past two weeks since I crashed my bike, I’ve tried differently physical activities to test my limits.  Swimming hurts.  Mopping and sweeping the floor is a painful chore, but at least now I have a valid excuse for an untidy house. 

Fortunately, sitting at my computer is pain free, which is doing wonders for my backside.  Blogging, shopping on-line, tweeting on Twitter, updating my Facebook and watching videos You Tube do not require heavy breathing.  Well, I guess it would depend on what videos I view on You Tube and of course, I am referring to comedy sketches, because laughing still really hurts.  What did you think I meant?

“What does a mommy blogger runner write about when she can’t run?” Lori asked me the other day.  Then, Tiffany also commented on the variety of interesting topics on Run DMT since my injury.  At least I am expanding my blog’s reading audience!

So, what exactly does a “mom on the run” write about when she isn’t running?  She writes about how she has missed running for a fortnight and feels like her body is turning to mush.  And have I mentioned my face is breaking out too?  I need my stress release again.  I want my ultimate “me time” back before I lose my mind as well as my body.  Since bruised ribs take about month to heal, I only have one more fortnight to go!

I’ve worked hard over the past two years to change my image. I used to dumb myself down, play my looks up. It was easier that way. I didn’t have to buy any drinks in college, for instance. That was my brand, an image that wasn’t who I was or wanted to be. But it worked, so I kept on.

Until my boyfriend told me I wasn’t interesting enough. Until I came home from a meeting one day, furious for not speaking my mind. Until I had one scary frickin’ visit to the ER. Yeah, those life-threatening events, they’ll get you every time.

I sat down to think about who I really was, proceeded to have a quarter-life crisis, and made some tough decisions. They weren’t decisions that were visible. I didn’t quit my job, or become celibate, or move across the country to pursue reality television. But I did slowly, painfully, change and start to brand myself differently.

Personal branding is your personality, who you are as an individual and “the sum of other brands that you either own, work for or touch in some distinct way.” It’s about being you, and marketing the heck out of it.

You, who is reliably manipulative, can’t make a commitment if your life depended on it, and won’t go to bed until you clear the next level in your video game. You, who is only working until you have a baby, hopefully two, so you can stay at home and take care of your family. You, who works eighty hours a week and must separate your jelly beans into color-respective piles before eating.

Branding is marketing those very gems of your personality. That’s not hard to do. Just be yourself. If you’re acting like someone you’re not, then it will come back to haunt you, like when the infatuation wears off in a relationship, and it is at that moment your girlfriend finds your box of hair-regeneration pills in your underwear drawer. Whoever you are, it’s really hard to change, so you win by just being you from the start.

And sometimes, inevitably, you lose. Like this guy.

Branding is inextricably linked to accountability. If you do a good enough job of marketing yourself a certain way, people will start to believe you. So much so that when you mess up, or step out of your brand, it will make others uncomfortable.

I wouldn’t worry too much about this. Instead, focus on how you define accountability and your own comfort level with your actions.

Our lives are out in the open for all to see. Who you are at your job is who you are at the bar is who you are at the gym is who you are during sex is who you are at the company picnic is who you are at, well, you get the idea. Politicians do cheat on their wives. CEOs are bad parents. Artists are erratic friends. So, what? They’re good at their passions, and at the end of the day, we’re all doing the best we can in the circumstances given.

Your image reflects on your company, friends, and family. You, however, need to be accountable to yourself first. If you’re dancing on the tables at the bar, and worried about getting caught, either you have something personally wrong, or you need to find a different job that accepts your lack of inhibition. If your Facebook photos might get you in trouble, take them down, or decide you want to work at a place where they don’t care about that sort of thing.

The lines between work and play are increasingly blurring, and if you’re one person during the day and a different one at night you have to be proud enough to market the heck out of it. If you’re not comfortable, you need to learn more about who you are. You are in control of your brand.

My mother used to tell me, “Remember who you are,” whenever I left the house. People with integrity and confidence don’t worry about “getting caught,” because they know who they are. They know that dancing on tables is acceptable to them, or that their Facebook pictures show another layer of their onion. And if it’s not okay to them, they act accordingly.

In summary, to rock the branding/accountability boat:

1. Know yourself.
2. Be yourself.
3. Love it.
4. Repeat.

By the way, I still enjoy receiving free drinks, because I’ve realized I’m okay with using my looks… Sometimes.

Be yourself, or perish, yo.

Note that these are strictly from a business marketing perspective. If you are involved in social media for personal fun, then you can ignore all of these (instead focus on some of the personal privacy rules).

1. Have a (really good) website that sells something. It’s simple: if you are engaging in social media for marketing purposes, then you need to have somewhere to send people online (a website) and something that you want them to do (a call to action). You don’t necessarily need to have e-commerce, but you should have a call to action clearly defined on every page of your website (if you don’t have a product to sell, then a good call to action is to call or e-mail you). Without a good website and online call to action, you are wasting your valuable marketing time on social networks.

2. Know who your online customer is. If you don’t have an online customer, then don’t invest marketing time on social media, which is inherently online-based. If you do have an online customer, then get really clear about what that customer does online – where does she spend time? what websites does she visit most? what does she care about? This is Marketing 101, but it’s also easily forgotten in the online world. Remember that in most cases your online customer is very different from your offline customer.

3. Determine where you’re going to focus your efforts. There are lots of social media options out there (i.e. Twitter, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.), and even huge corporations have trouble managing all of them. My recommendation is that you pick one or two social media outlets and focus your marketing energy there. How do you pick? Well, of course you pick based on your answers to No. 2. Go where your customers are. It’s that simple.

4. Establish an online identity. It is best to use a photograph of a person rather than your logo when interacting in social media spaces. This is because people expect to be social with another person, not a logo. For most small businesses, the “face” of your company is probably going to be your owner/president, but it can vary. The important thing is that you identify a single person who will represent your company in social media settings (Note: this person should best identify with your answers to No. 2). Take some good photos and establish a compelling bio that gives both the person and the company a personality, and you’ve got a winning online identity.

5. It’s not about you. The single biggest mistake companies make when using social media to market is marketing themselves too much. Social media is about community and communication, and if you are too aggressive in your marketing/sales efforts, you will be ignored or, worse, booted and ridiculed. Share interesting industry information that your customers are interested in, participate in discussions about all sorts of topics, and share, share, share. In general, you should share and participate in an indirect manner 90% of the time. Only occasionally should you directly promote your company.

If you want to talk to me about social media and how you can use them to grow your business, then e-mail me or give me a call at 310.453.7008.

Best,
Virginia

When I first started creating, writing and designing companies’ e-newsletters, we simply adapted the format we marketers had used for print newsletters. Now, however, with a huge proliferation of e-mail marketing out there, we have to be more strategic. Here are three quick tips for making your e-mail marketing work:

1. Build your list slowly. The print newsletter model allowed us to mass-mail, but that is heavily frowned on in the e-mail world. Instead, slowly build an opt-in list of people who actually want to hear from you.

2. Avoid graphics. This is hard for me to say, since I love graphics, but with so many handheld devices acting as people’s main form of e-mail retrieval, graphic-heavy e-newsletters can actually work against you. Stick to simple text, and you have a better chance of getting your e-mail read while someone is waiting for their flight or sitting in a doctor’s office.

3. Keep it short and simple. This is also hard for me to say, since I love to write, but there simply isn’t time in the day to read all of the information that passes through our e-mail boxes. Use bolding and bullets so that your readers can quickly skim your e-newsletter.

Virginia Ginsburg is an entrepreneur and business & marketing consultant who delivers strategic, affordable marketing services through her company accordionmarketing. She also writes a blog called Body > Mind > Business, which discuses the connection between business health and personal health, and the struggles she faces in pursuit of work-life balance. Virginia has an MBA from the University of Southern California and is currently (slowly) pursuing a Ph.D. in Psychology at UCLA. She has more than 12 years of experience as a senior marketing consultant, and has served as a trusted partner, coach and consultant to more than 100 sole proprietors, partnerships and corporations. 
Virginia lives in Santa Monica, CA with her husband and daughter. As part of her passion for working with entrepreneurs, Virginia is actively involved in small business development projects in the U.S. and in developing countries.