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Confessions of a Chart Maker

When I need to figure something out, I want to push words and images around so I can think about them and, more importantly, see and play with the connections and relationships between them. There’s something fundamentally satisfying about putting my thoughts onto paper in a non-linear way. If I can physically move them around, so much the better.

I was startled to realize recently that not everyone does this kind of thing.

I find that I’ve been creating lots of these charts and graphs over the past few months; they’re evidence of an active inner life of feelings and thinking; of changes. Sometimes they’re a misguided attempt to put a rational framework around something in my life that isn’t rational.

Here’s a couple from several months ago. They’re dry, rigid table charts:

The printout is from an excel file; I was grappling with setting priorities about things I wanted to do. This is evidence of a real struggle going on in myself…I had to create two columns, one for “practical priority”, and one for “happiness”. I wasn’t able to give things that simply made me happy a high priority, so I had to create another column to express that. It wasn’t until someone else questioned why being happy couldn’t be a high priority all on it’s own that I was able to see how imposing this rational structure wasn’t really working.

The other “chart” in the photo is just a list of different classes I was interested in taking, and an attempt to categorize them by subject area. After I dumped everything out onto the page, I numbered the categories in order of which they went onto the page (it doesn’t happen top-to-bottom, left-to-right). You can see the same sort of struggle here, because I started starring the things that sounded more fun or exciting. There’s some things on here that are less interesting, but seemed more like things I “should” do.

It’s worth pointing out that these charts are never “done”. I always think of things later to add to them, but rarely go back and do that. I’m off making a new chart.

Here’s a couple from a little later…

What’s not to like about a Venn diagram?! The big circle collage was an attempt to figure out how I could make the different interests and pieces of my life coalesce into something better. I thought that if I could see where the intersections occurred, I might find a unique set of interests that would point to a new career path. It’s another attempt to impose rational structure. There’s so many things wrong about this representation that I don’t even know where to start. If I keep these scrawlings to look back on later, I can see how they’re a representation of my mind at just one given point in time. There’s a big vulnerability in even showing them to other people, because sometimes they become less about what I am and more about what I am not. And sometimes they are a way of trying on another “self”.

The other one here is sort of a plan for a location, a drawing of a place I envisioned, with scrawling notes in random places on it. It’s not terribly satisfying, because the vision is so much more rich than a line drawing. But getting it out of my head and onto paper in some form makes it easier for me to even think of expressing it more fully. I’ve made a few of these; lots go into the trash.

It’s been almost two weeks since I left my job, and my brain has been full of ideas and possiblities. That’s lead to the next exercise, the index cards:

This is a 43Folders geek’s delight…color-coded index cards held in a nice little recycled tin. It draws heavily on GTD and the Hipster PDA (I carry some cards with me to capture ideas as they come up). It ranges from random thoughts about mundane tasks I should get done (white cards) to bigger projects and goals. I don’t really know where this is going, but it’s supremely satisfying to spread them out on the table and move them around and think about them. I’m hoping that eventually I’ll feel “done” with the idea collection aspect of it and be able to use them to make some decisions. Already I’m seeing the cracks in this particular project, again the imposition of a rational system on a non-rational life. Still, it’s quite useful in that it clears my brain…I don’t have to worry about keeping track of all these ideas once I’ve got them written down to refer to later, and it creates space in my head for new ideas to come up.

You can see how the nature of the visualizations has been changing over time. From a the black-and-white straight lines and borders of the excel charts, to hand-drawn scribbles and freeing of the words to move around without borders. As that happens, I see it starting to intersect with other projects that I tend to think more as leaning towards “art”:

The large collage is a an assignment from a class I took, Introduction to Career Development. The assignment was to create a collage of “the things you’d like to invite into your life in the next 5-10 years”. It was an interesting excercise in itself…I don’t want to write too much about it here because I’d like to encourage Steve to do his own and then we can get all verbal about it. But suffice to say that almost item on the collage is symbolic of multiple things (and of course there are things left off). It’s a good exercise; try it and you’ll find that there is much more than meets the eye.

Most of the collages in class were rectangular, on a sheet of posterboard, but I chose to do mine within a circular shape because of my emerging interest in mandalas as self expression. You can see my first attempt at a mandala behind the collage there. I’m not sure I want to just put the full thing out there…I’m not ready to write that confessional yet!

These expressions of what goes on in my head are intensely personal. I’ll probably think about deleting this post and the photos a zillion times after they go live. I feel that they’re almost repulsive to others, as if they’re looking at pornography. And at times I’ve often been frustrated by trying to really understand others…I want to thrust a marker and a piece of paper into their hands…just show me, please! Make a chart!

When I look at this propensity for chart and graph making, I see how it’s threaded through my life time after time. My favorite part of science fairs in high school was creating the display of the information I was trying to convey. Later, as a bar manager, I was charting beer sales against the academic and sports calendar at Ohio State, trying to dial in the perfect inventory to have on hand for any given week. At WordStar I made excel capable of drawing beautiful detailed schedules for tech support phone coverage (schedules that never worked in the realm of the real world and real people who weren’t automatons!) The bliss of sitting in an Edward Tufte class. And I’m sure at O’Reilly people often mystified by the white board scrawlings I’d insist on making, sometimes unable to verbally communicate anything without that crutch or at least the chance to slink away to my desk to think things through on a sloppy deskpad with indecipherable collections of almost random words.

But what does it all mean for my future? I have no idea!

I’d imagine that other people do other things…some more verbally inclined might need to talk. Others might write, without making visual pictures with the words. Yet others might use pictures alone. I’m sure there are habits and preferences that I can’t even imagine. So tell me in the comments….what techniques do you have have for thinking about big ideas and questions about your life? And tell me, are those preferences and techniques reflected in the kind of work that you do?

Posted in Work, Art | 5 Comments »

Cue “Pomp and Circumstance”

Wow, look at all the link love I’m getting here…thanks Mark and Justin! I love the first comment by Antinous on that Boing Boing post…”Can’t they just knit one?”

If you’re interested in the job, I couldn’t recommend a better place to work or a better group of people to work with. I know they say that 90% of all people who leave a job leave it because of their boss. But for me, it’s definitely the work. It’s good work, and rewarding in the sense that it’s toward a meaningful end. But thinking about coding web sites or managing contract developers or troubleshooting an RSS feed just makes me want to hide under the covers and not think about it. Not good for me, and not good for Maker Media.

Something I like about working for O’Reilly is that, when you do leave, you’re not “ex” or “former”…you’re GOO…”Graduate of O’Reilly”, a phrase coined by my friend and GOO Tony Stubblebine. The place changes you. You grow there. I’m in really good company.

Folks have been asking what I’m going to do after tomorrow. I love the look I get when I say, “Nothing!” I’ve been reluctant to say more because it seems like such a big overwhelming topic. The short answer is that I’m taking some extended time off to consider what my options are for moving forward, and try to find what I’m really here to do.

I’m taking a class at the Santa Rosa JC called “Introduction to Career Development”. The assessment tests and exercises are very helpful. It’s what I needed: a way to be open to everything instead of sitting here trying to think of one thing after another to seize upon.

Some of the things I’ve learned so far: my high-scoring occupational themes are “Artistic, Realistic, Investigative” — I’m a creator/doer/thinker rather than a helper/persuader/organizer.

My top “interest areas”: nature and agriculture, visual arts and design, writing and mass communication, and culinary arts.

I have a lot of interests (related to work AND to other non-work activities) in common with other women who are librarians, photographers, artists, landscapers, tech writers, translators, editors, graphic designers, horticulturists, and medical illustrators. That’s interesting, because that list describes a lot of the people I’ve tended to surround myself with in life.

I have little to nothing in common with women who are realtors, physicists, elected public officials, athletic trainers, and computer/IS managers. (OK, the computer/IS managers score higher than the realtors…but still pretty low.)

My “work values” survey puts “Independence and Freedom”, “Creativity”, and “Beauty and Aesthetics” a the top. The bottom three? Security, Money, and Power.

I’m still an INTJ, but getting dangerously close to becoming an INFJ. I think you could describe the INTJ personality type as the one who “loves to take personality assessments.”

Anyhow. All of this navel gazing is to say that it’s an interesting process, and I’m glad I’m getting more out of the class than the valuable discounts I get with my student ID (Hello, Apple Store for Edcation!). It’s a good complement to my other strategy of trying to get out and have conversations with people whose advice I respect and who have struck out on their own in some way.

But back to the “What are you going to do?” question…

I’m trying to give myself two weeks to just putter around, let ideas surface and write them all down. To do some writing about my life (relax, it won’t appear here), make some things, get my work areas at home ready to do something creative and fun. Read. Hike. Bird. Kayak. Draw. Paint. Spend time with my dog, the chickens, the hawks who’ve taken up residence next to our house. Garden. Ride my bike. Cook. Wander.

Two weeks?! Like I said. Nothing.

After that…well, it depends on what I find out. Some possibilities are going after some freelance writing gigs, taking a permaculture certification class, getting involved with volunteer wildlife work again. A longer process in any case. Graduating is just the beginning.

Posted in Work | 5 Comments »

Thomas Moore: A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do

When I went to hear Natalie Goldberg speak a couple of weeks ago at Copperfields, they announced another upcoming event…Thomas Moore would be speaking on his new book, A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do. When a talk with a title like that appears in your life at the same time you’ve decided to quit your job and try to figure out what your life work is, I think you’d better go.

The introduction was given by Shepherd Bliss. This was interesting to me because I keep hearing this name, either in the context of Sebastopol, or of activism, or of raising chickens. (I’ve just confirmed via the web that all of these contexts are correct…nice to see the person behind the interesting name at last!) The introduction mentioned a couple of interesting-sounding groups…the Institute of Imaginal Studies and the Numina Center for Spirituality and the Arts.

Here’s some really rough notes from Moore’s talk:

• He’d originally wanted to call the book “Opus”, from the word use in alchemy, to reflect the idea of the self and creating a life around it; the entire work. But the publishers didn’t like that.
• Had to battle to get this book published; publishers kept wanting to make it a book about getting jobs. “This is not the parachute book!”
• He feels that being connected to our past can be very helpful with finding our life work. Owning the past and making it vivid is good material for finding life work. [I am relieved to hear this, because writing memoir is something I want to do in coming months, but it hadn’t been making rational sense to me to do that!] Jokes that sometimes he talks to futurists and describes himself as a “pastist”…”I do not believe in the now” [simplification; I think Moore means that when most people think of living in the “now”, they think of that as a very small moment in time…a narrow, confining view]. Alchemists said you need a big pot into which you pour all of your ingredients, and our ingredients are our past, especially the failures and dead ends (he recalls image of boys pissing into the pot). He mentions Jung and how he kept going back to old material and childhood.
• Look at your parents and grandparents relationship to work and see how that influences your relationship to it.
• When we deal with others, “we have a small sense of what a person is”
• “That’s my general recommendation…don’t improve yourself.” The notion of self improvement is evidence of a belief that you’re not good enough. Love yourself instead, you don’t need to improve self. Finding life work means enlarging the self. The soul gives you your identity and your life but it is not about you.
• Marriage is not about making the marriage work (small, narrow, forcing viewpoint), but about allowing the marriage to evoke the opus. Need to make connections between all parts of our life; not about “the job”.
• Some people have a delusion that when they find it, they will really feel like somebody. But all spiritual traditions tell us that it’s really about going beyond the self. You find yourself by giving yourself over to another.
• Do your job with the attitude that it is your contribution to the world; it will change how you do your job and you will be getting closer to your life work.
• Life in the tower; Rapunzel [wow, another eye myth]…Rapunzel’s mother was craving a root vegetable. At the end of Rapunzel, life is very ordinary. Moore: what we always crave are our roots, but we sometimes think that what we want with our work is the tower. Higher and higher in the tower, more disconnected from our roots.
• Rivers as an image of the streaming torrent of life. “If there’s one problem people have, it’s being afraid of jumping into the river.” Mentions Finnegans Wake and river imagery [this book keeps coming up; guess I’ll have to read it].
• Capacity to leap without knowing where you’re leaping. [ding ding ding!] Every time we say “No” to jumping in the river, we set ourselves up for some kind of neurotic behavior.
• His decision to leave before becoming a priest: he just woke up one morning and knew. It wasn’t a painful decision because he knew it was right.
• “You can do more than one thing at a time!” (In answer to a question about feeling the need to attend to the self and not do volunteering and helping others.) Need to get our of yourself, otherwise it’s a narcissistic spirituality.
• Someone asked about how to tell the tower from the river…might not know. Things sometimes reveal themselves gradually. Follow the deep desire. If you desire chocolate, pay attention to that…what is it about the chocolate? Is it the sweetness? Are you desiring sweetness in your life? Then go out and be the sweetness yourself. Expand it and see its poetry. “These desires are infinite; they are only satisfied in divine ways”.
• Deep, open conversations with others can help you sort things out.
• Audience question, “Can life work be draining like a job?” Yes, need to be refreshed. Nurses and hospice workers have needs to refresh because of toll their life work takes. He finds that nurses need to talk to each other about their experiences; may stay for hours after work just to have that chance to talk to other nurses and be able to do the difficult work they do.
• It bugs him to see what people choose to read; what they pull off the shelves in bookstores. People will be very picky about the food they put into their bodies, but when it comes to reading they’ll accept junk that doesn’t nourish them. Like someone who goes to a cafeteria and picks seven plates of jello to have for their meal.

I didn’t buy the book last night, but I probably will. I found this excerpt from the first chapter and it seems pretty spot-on.

Posted in Work, Books | 2 Comments »

Leap Day

“Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.” -Ray Bradbury (born 08/22/1920), US writer

On Friday, I handed in my resignation at work. No, I’m not leaving to take another job…I’m planning to take an extended period of time off; to go deep with some writing and other creative projects, spend lots of time outside, develop some new habits that promote a healthier lifestyle for Steve and myself, and try to figure out a path to my life work. It’s a big leap, and decades of work has lead to my decision to not work for a while.

I started working for money when I was in my early teens with the usual things…baby sitting and house cleaning. I’d already worked for barter (working in the school cafeteria through lunch and recess in exchange for free lunch) and for family.

In junior high school, I became interested in astronomy. I liked the projects we did in science class. And I liked that it was something I could talk about at the dinner table that would catch Dad’s interest. The more I talked about science, the more people seemed to notice. Before long, I was vowing (at thirteen!) that I was going to be an astronomer when I grew up. Some teachers encouraged me to keep my options open or even pointed out that my talents seemed to be showing up in English courses instead, but other adults seemed impressed by my professed interest. I got a lot of approval for planning to go into science and in choosing it as a career path. The only problem was, once I’d spoken it out loud, I didn’t feel I could turn back. This career in astronomy took on a life of its own. People were just starting to make noise about women in science and engineering then…they loved it when they found a girl who could win science fairs, and I loved the approval and attention I got for it. Between my junior and senior year in high school, I got my first planetarium job and moved an hour away from home to work at it. The real value in that summer, and the ones that followed it in Toledo, was in the cultural experience of living in a city and around professors, grad students, and their families. It expanded my horizons beyond the isolated farmland I’d grown up in. But it also solidified the path.

I went to college and fell flat on my face (sometimes literally, but we won’t go into that here). Math and physics, the core of astronomy, were huge painful struggles for me. I ignored that I loathed those classes. And I had to work my way through school, never less than twenty hours a week and in the last two years much more. At the beginning of my fifth year, I gave up on the electromagnetics class I needed to finish my degree. I went to my adviser, ready to accept that I’d need to stay in school still longer and change majors. I was shocked to learn that he could sign a paper and simply substitute a history of astronomy course for the electromagnetics for me to get the degree, and I did.

I tried to make the best of it by using my degree to get an internship at Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Like the summers in Toledo, the value of that summer and fall was in making my own way independently in a big city. The internship barely paid a subsistence stipend, even though I found a boarding house that was a nonprofit designed to give young professional women a safe inexpensive place to live in the city. I depended on another skill I’d learned in college, bar tending, to supplement the stipend. I was working full time at one job, and part time at another.

I gave up on astronomy in New York. And I gave up on the internship. Exhausted, I went back to Columbus and became an almost full-time bar manager. I had a great time. During the mornings, I did secretarial work back in the astronomy department, improving my MS Word skills day by day. Eventually I got annoyed with the regulars who would be waiting at the door of the bar when I opened in the afternoon, treating it as if it were their living room. I realized that owning a bar wouldn’t be right for me either. So when my boyfriend got accepted to Indiana University, I leapt at the chance to work for WordStar International, doing tech support at a new center they were opening in Bloomington. Before tech companies outsourced work to India, they tried doing it to us…cheap labor from the Midwest to replace the higher-paid employees in California.

That’s how I landed in tech, and into a series of jobs ending with the one I’m leaving now. I’ve never had more than two weeks at a time free of a job. I’ve always moved from one to another as quickly as possible, leaving when it became too unbearable. It is a huge testament to my employer and coworkers that I’ve been at O’Reilly now for almost nine years. (More on that in another post). I’ve found good and satisfying work here, but the more I open to who I am, the less a job in building web sites fits me.

My career has developed by trying to make the best of poor decisions and a poor career path, brought on by my own stubbornness and refusal to admit that it wasn’t fitting. And it started because I was impressionable and susceptible to the approval I got for being a girl interested in science. I’ll probably get hate mail for saying it, but I wonder how many others there are of us out there who suffered through college and feel that we wasted an opportunity to really discover our true passions. I cringe when I hear people rally to the cause of getting more women into science and engineering careers. It’s hard for me to understand how promoting a specific career path to women is much different than discouraging them from one. I believe that girls are more sensitive to approval, and that they may seek this approval in ways that cause them to deny their true callings, even to themselves. I believe this because it was my own experience.

I’m 44 years old. I’ve got a husband who supports me following my heart. I haven’t had this chance before, but somehow I ended up in Sonoma County, California, in an environment where I feel empowered to take risk and be open to wonderful possibilities, and among people who are inspirational in how they’ve found important work that energizes and fulfills them. And that’s what I want myself.

It will be fun to figure out what it is.

Posted in Work | 9 Comments »

Work and the Hero’s Journey

Lately, my mind has been heavy with thoughts about work. How do I make sure I spend my time on this earth doing something that I value? How do I be true to my self? What sacrifice will that require? Am I prepared to make it, and risk being wrong?

Who do I admire for their life work? Who are the people who spend their time in a way I respect? Dale Dougherty (and aren’t I lucky to work for someone who is inspiring on that level?!). Mark Frauenfelder, Mr. Jalopy, Wendy Tremaine and Mikey Sklar, Ernie Fosselius and countless other makers. Edward Abbey. Henry Miller. Yoko Ono Lennon. John Lennon. Edward Tufte. Allen Fish. Rich Stallcup. Carl Jung. Joseph Campbell. Miki Shamir. Veronica Bower. Edward Espe Brown. Stuart Brand. Natalie Jeremijenko. Chrissie Hynde. Frida Kahlo. Peter Matthiessen. Annie Dillard. Julie Zickefoose. Neko Case. Lloyd Kahn. Dori Seda.

This list isn’t complete by any means, but it’s a brain storm of people who immediately come to mind. These people run the gamut, famous to obscure. They’re my “rock stars”, my heroes, and they’ve made (or are making) the hero’s journey. When I think about these people, the phrase, “I want to be like that and …” leaps to mind. I don’t want to copy them, but there are things about them that inspire me, that make me want to fly. I used to think that if I could just interview people like this, learn all of their habits…how do you organize your time, what do you eat, how much do you sleep, what do you do for exercise, how do you manage your finances and how did you get the money to follow your dreams?…if I could do that and collect them all up, I’d know how to live my own life to achieve whatever it is that I see in them that my own heart wants.

But that’s a rational solution to a puzzle that’s not rational. It might be an interesting exercise (and maybe some day I’ll actually try to do it), but it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.

What’s important about this list of people is that they’re important to me. Understanding what they represent in my own mind is as important as looking at how they accomplish what they do. Still, taking that quick list as a whole and turning it over in my mind…what are these people? What do they have in common?

They are all creators, each one of them someone who has created something expansive out of their own heart, spirit and imagination. They’re independents.

You wouldn’t describe any of them as “employees”.

Posted in Work | 2 Comments »