Stacey Abrams: Leading from the Outside

On Saturday, I attended a talk organized as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. The talk was with Stacey Abrams, whose nomination and work for the post of governor in Georgia, as she rightly said, was stolen from her through gerrymandering, voter suppression and suchlike. I found about the event through a whimsical google search for things to do in Chicago and I am so glad I did. It was a mess of a day, with a freak winterstorm breaking the streak of good weather we had. That is not surprising to be honest; it's one of those things I have to come to expect from the midwest, don't pack away your snow gear until it's June.  The auditorium filled up and the demographic was largely older. What was unexpected was that Stacey's introduction would be done by Lori Lightfoot, mayor-elect. 

An Almost Decade of Work

In June of 2019, I will have spent a decade of my life working (with a two year gap for graduate school in the middle). I started work as a callow 20 year old; my first job was as a copy-editor for a firm that provided editorial services. In retrospect, I can only marvel at my reasoning in accepting this job, it was a little bit of a non-sequitur after completing an Economics degree. My next significant role was working in Corporate Citizenship for a consulting firm; it is this job (and the people) that was the most formative experience for me as a young professional in my early career.

Over the course of this almost decade at work, I’ve attended several orientations, worked with people in and from different countries, gone from being a newbie and absolutely terrified of being wrong to understanding that mistakes are inevitable. I’ve worked in three countries and multiple cities; I’ve worked a domestic job that had a big international component and I work an international job that is as domestic and local as it gets. Last year, I spent some time talking to a career coach and this prompted me to scribble a list of sorts, about what I have learned during all this time – not technical or job-specific things but transferable skills and approaches that have and will continue to help me. I’m sharing this list here as a reminder to myself and in the hopes that it is relevant to others.

1. Make notes of what you work on:
I am not talking about your resume (although keep updating that regularly as well, instead of waiting till when you don’t have a choice or the time). I’m talking about all the projects and events and big and little tasks and research and articles, which may be significant in the immediate moment but are easy to forget as you change roles and jobs. This is hardly original advice but I find that even a couple of quick lines every few weeks about what I got done is a great memory jogging tool. It doesn’t just help with resumes, but also with interviews and other professional conversations, applications for fellowships and pro bono work, for side hustles and more and at the end of the day, to remind yourself.

2. Know what organizational tools work for you:
At this moment in 2019, the options to get and stay organized feel infinite. They range from the Getting Things Done methodology to Marie Kondo-ing your life; from Trello to Smartsheets; from Google Calendars to Bullet Journaling and everything in between. All of these don’t work for all of us. Some of these will last and others will fall by the wayside. But what is unlikely to change is your natural organizational personality (if you think you don’t have one or haven’t identified it that is a conversation for a different day). I’ve learned that I must write things down, otherwise they don’t stick on my memory. I’ve also learned that putting events in physical notebooks will only lead me to double-booking myself. I’ve learned that a simple list in Google Keep can be an effective tool to work with another person; while a project plan in Smartsheet, while detailed can often seem daunting to folks. Some people just make notes on their phone. The sooner you figure this out, the more it will help you.

Not Lucky but Favored

Two weekends ago, I had what I can only call a lucky weekend. In a span of 24 hours, I dropped my cellphone in an Uber and honestly I had no idea what to do. I kept trying to use the Uber platform to report a lost item but as has been my experience, it was frustrating and pointless. I kept going outside in the hope that perhaps the phone had fallen somewhere and I would spot it. While that did not happen, what did happen is that the Uber driver who came back with my phone, simply because of the goodness of his heart. Of course I gave him money (the largest bill I had) to thank him; nobody should be expected to perform this for free. I know all the possible outcomes and the fact that this one happened was very, very sobering and heartening.

The next day I was throwing out some trash (for context, there are eight giant dumpsters outside the building). The first few were full and I went to the ones at the end. On my way back, I looked left and saw an overturned earring that reminded me of one of my favorite earrings. I picked it up and it was exactly like my earring. I brought it back with me and of course, it was mine. How I managed to throw it out is not something I know but what I do know is that it was incredibly lucky. I was telling one of my closest friends about this and she said, you are not lucky, you are favored. It was such a lovely sentiment, it will likely stay with me all my life.

An Exercise in Itself

I don't think I set foot in a gym before I was 26 years old. As far as I can remember, I've always felt awkward in the space (it's less now but it depends on how familiar I am with the space). I didn't exercise a lot and if I did, it took other forms: like the time I joined karate lessons or my walk-jogs in the park. I only started going when I started my graduate program, not from a place of wanting to exercise but rather knowing that it was both good and necessary for my health, physical and mental. It was a giant gym, a monument to the sports culture of the university. I mostly stuck to the treadmill and yoga classes but there was the one time I tried running on the indoor track and the other where we went swimming (and managed to somehow lock ourselves out of the swimming area).

What do we do when the internet fails us

My favorite is the one above

So the internet at work is down. Two hours into the work day, it stopped. Four hours later we learned it wasn’t going to come back on for the rest of the working day. Still, no one told us we could leave, so here were most people, hanging out, catching up, taking walks outside, where spring has started showing the promise of summer. I could complain about the day I lost but I’d rather think of it as a day I got unexpectedly. It is (and is not in some ways) surprising how crippling it is to not have internet access. It’s been slim pickings for writing. I don’t have coherent long-form thoughts around any one topic. Instead my mind flits from mental space to physical space and back and forth and so we go on. Life is busy, busy enough I would say, but not the pace of busy I am used to. This is interesting; I had some idea about how “on” I always was but until recently I hadn’t been able to quantify the hours it consumed. On a lighter day, I did so many things I was appalled, because I seem to be deeply invested in doing, much more so than I had thought.