Erin Albert’s Blog

When I did a PharmD rotation out in Boston a few years ago, I had the luck to attend a lecture at Brown on birds becoming…manic…right before they migrated south for the winter.  I was reminded of that lecture today.  Both this morning and this evening, I sat on my sunporch watching the hummingbirds at the feeder. I’ve noticed this week they’ve increased in terms of number of them at the feeder, as well as aggressiveness while protecting their territory while eating.

More, mania.

I think they migrate south for the winter too.  But, I think I could use a small dose of mania myself right now, for next week marks the beginning of yet another academic year, both at work and at law school.  I’m still not sure if I’m mentally ready.  It felt like summer was about 2 weeks.

If this is your last official weekend of summer too, please be sure to maximize it if you can.  A little pinch of mania probably isn’t a bad thing, especially for next week, at least for me and my colleagues going back to school.  If you’re not going back to fall semester yourself, but have a family member going back instead, please be kind to them.  They’re in transition right now.

Specifically to the Butler students, welcome back. May you have a successful academic year!

Let the mania commence…!

What I’m about to share with you I never learned in college.  But I’m going to share it with you, just like I shared it with my students today.  This is super duper important, especially in this tight economy, and easily the #1 lesson about life that I never got in college.  Ready?  Here goes:

I wish someone taught me in college that I had to start building my social capital back then.  In the stone ages.  Yup.

It’s just that simple.  I never learned that lesson until I was forced to do it in my day job.  If I only had known that earlier, my network would be that much deeper and wider today.  I could help out that many more friends today, and cast my totally bizarro idea net that much further.

If you’re in college, you might be rolling your eyes right now…but please don’t.  Please, start networking N-O-W.  Yesterday!  You need to connect when you don’t need connections - that is the best time to connect!  EM Forester said ONLY CONNECT, and he is right!  It is REALLY important.

To this day, I think about all the friends along the way I’ve lost.  Don’t be like me.  Only connect!

Well, my friends, we are nearing the end of our alphabetical homage to the United States of America!  We really only have 4 letters left to explore: W, X, Y and Z.  I’m making the executive decision to skip X. The only words I can come up with are xylophone (and who really cares about how that relates to the US?) and xenophobe, which, I suppose I could discuss, (probably even more specifically around the Muslim center being built around ground zero as a recent example), but I really don’t know if that honestly adds to the love I have for the US…so…long winded way of saying X is out. We’ll leave that to Mr. Timberlake–to bring the X back in sexy or via some other word.

Now, on to my wrap up of why America is great with my final few letters of the alphabet.

As I’m sure I’ve shared before, one of my favorite book series growing up as a kid was the Choose Your Own Adventure series.  I loved it because as I read the book, I also had a small part in the creation of the story I was reading.  That was super cool!  It is also one of the things I love about America: each and every person has a pretty even and equal opportunity to choose their very own zeitgeist, or path, or future, or adventure!

In some countries, people don’t get the chance as individuals to go to school and get an education, nor do they have the chance to decide what it is they ultimately want to be when they grow up.  While at times it can be a little overwhelming to be whatever it is that you want to be in this country, it is also a fabulous blessing and wonderful opportunity to have.  Others never get this chance.  Others may never get this chance in other countries in our lifetime.  But we have this opportunity in the US.

What do you want to be when you grow up?  What do you want your future to look like?  How will you choose your own adventure?  These are questions that I as an American love to explore, because the opportunities and options, at least in the US, are endless!

I have LOVED sharing my alphabetical homage to USA along with you this summer, and hope you enjoyed reading it too. In conclusion, should you have the chance to study abroad in your future, or work abroad, please consider it.  If nothing else, it will truly make you appreciate what amazing things we do have available to us in the US.  We are so truly blessed.  We just have to get back on track to making this country even better than it has been in the past.  With so many great ideas, options, people and opportunities before us, I’m sure we’ll get back to that place, and far exceed anything we can even fathom at this point in time in the future….should we wish to choose our own awesome adventure as a country!

Inevitably, it is right about the time where I begin to hear from students who graduated about 2-5 years ago, who send me the following info, more or less, in a similar format:

“Dr. Albert, I have been practicing for 2-5 years now at company XYZ.  I’m bored.  Is this all there is?”

Ok, first of all, fear not!  Life does NOT end when you finish undergrad!  Neither does learning.  Today, I’m, well, more than 2-5 years out from my own undergrad experience and heading to NYC for training myself, during my time before I head back to law school this fall.  I’m old(er), but I’m still learning!

Secondly, know this, if you’re one of those 2-5 year graduates heading into your quarter life crisis: it is now going to be YOUR job to figure out what you want to do next–in terms of your personal life, your education, AND your career.  Your ideal job is most likely not written on paper somewhere, in someone’s classified ads.  The good news?  You just might be in the position to create your perfect job.  But, here’s the bad news: you’re going to have to create it, and coupled with that is a four letter word: W-O-R-K.

I think the closest book I’ve gotten to this path is Seth Godin’s Linchpin of late.  He argues the same thing I do: your dream job isn’t going to be handed to you.  Linchpins, or those who are good at what they do and indispensable in organizations, create their ideal job and make things happen.  They are the agents of change who create their own personal utopias.

This post already feels deja vous-y to me, but here are 5 things to consider when you’re at quarter or mid-life, or any other existential time points in your life:

1.  Ask yourself - am I doing what I want to be doing? If not, then you’ve got some work to do.

2.  Sit down and think about 3 times where you were in your ‘flow’ as Csikszentmihalyi or ‘zone’ as Michael Jordan likes to use - you were happy, the work seemed interesting and maybe even effortless for you.  Then, map out what skills you were using in those 3 scenarios.  You most likely will start to see patterns of key skills that you love to use in your work.  Then, create something that plays to those skills.

3.  I still have yet to meet a manager that wasn’t open to any well-crafted and deliberated plans.  (My department chair included - I just asked her yesterday if I could propose a crazy idea and she said she’s always into entertaining new ideas!)  If you have a crazy idea, ask your manager if you can draft something in writing to share with them and GO FOR IT.  The best they will do is see you made the effort and grant you your idea to try.  The worst thing: they say no, but they STILL see that you made the effort, which is more than 99% of the rest of the world is ready and willing to do.

4.  Also, if they totally blow off your well-researched and thought out idea, ask yourself: is this really a place that I want to be working?  If not, again, it’s time for some more homework.

5.  As for graduate school, I can tell you that while I personally think education is important, it doesn’t necessarily have all the answers either when it comes to your personal career development.  Case in point: moi.  I am more clueless now than I have ever been as to what it is that I want to “be” when I grow up, 3.5 degrees in.  That’s part of the mystery of life - to have YOU figure out what it is you are here to do.  Just like I do.  It is incumbent upon all of us to figure this out.  And unfortunately, it might not come in the form of a degree, a training class, or from an instructor.  It has to come from within us.

There are no easy answers, just better questions!

I was contacted by the wizard of this blog about this post, and asked for my opinion on Eat, Pray, Love, since the movie is out nationally this week.  But of course, I had to roll it into my alphabetical homage to the US, because I think the crux of this book and movie–happiness–is a very American thing.

Don’t we have “the pursuit of happiness” in our very own Declaration of Independence?  Uh, yeah.  And, Americans I think are a little overly obsessed with the meaning of happiness as well.  But, I really don’t think that is all bad.  This could get really deep really fast (philosophy and religion, anyone?) but I personally don’t think the higher power, if there is one (and I’m not saying if there is or isn’t), is really having us cosmically join the human race just to suffer.  On the other hand, I think individual happiness is really just that: individual.  I don’t think society’s idea of what happiness is always fits for everyone.

As the blog I linked to shared, Elizabeth Gilbert has been criticized for writing a book whereby she didn’t do the world any good while traveling.  I have to say I disagree with that.  I, for example, read her book while on a trip to Ireland.  She by writing the book has shown what is possible to others, who may or may not be suffering right now on that bathroom floor, and shows people what can be possible with their lives.  I think that is a decent service for writing a book, along with sharing a story about her personal heartache and happiness with the world.  So to me, she did do the world good by writing her book.  Even though she got a fat advance to write it.  Good for her (although, I’m a tad jealous…in a good way)!

In conclusion, the pursuit of happiness I think is a very American and very worthy pursuit.  After all, we are only here once, right?  (Unless, of course you believe in reincarnation, and hence, we go back to religion.) So, if you want to ride off to Bali, India, or just around the corner to your local movie theatre to see Julia Roberts in action, go for it!  LIFE IS SHORT.  PURSUE YOUR HAPPINESS!

I read…weirdly.  I try to read a couple of pages of a lot of different books in a stream, rather than reading one from cover to cover and repeating.  I’m not sure why, that’s just how I roll.

Case in point last night - finishing up Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky, when I was struck by a story which led me to the title of letter U for my USA homage (and yes, I could have picked United, but that was a little too obvioius.)

The story begins on page 138, where Mr. Belsky discusses a situation where he had a friend (who was female) who started a business on the side making jewelry, and began having a lot of success.  He was reluctant to hand her some contacts that could help her meet the demands of her business, because he thought she wasn’t fully “committed” to it (i.e. she had not yet quit her day job, but was expanding this business.)  He concluded that one should fully commit to their ideas–whatever they may be–in order for the community at large to be more willing to commit resources to help you.

But, I respectfully disagree with Mr. Belsky.  I think he is underestimating his friend.

Women, at least through my own research, start businesses differently than men.  They research the hell out of them, and they also tend to start them part time, with their own capital, hand grown by themselves, because of the demands of bills, family and life.  Men, although I haven’t researched them as in depth but have read the literature, tend to start businesses full time, full bore, and stop their day job.

Why I think Mr. Belsky is underestimating his friend here is that there is a gender difference in my opinion (and through my own research) that says women just do things differently when it comes to entrepreneurship than men.  One isn’t better than the other, either.  However, where I’m uncomfortable here and where I think Mr. Belsky underestimated his friend was that it shouldn’t be his call to decide whether or not his friend is ready to ‘commit’ to an idea or business.  She already committed by starting it in the first place! It takes guts–woman or man–to start a business, full or part time. Instead, SHE should be making the judgment call on whether or not to contact his contacts.

She was underestimated.  NEVER underestimate an American or an American business owner - part time, full time, or sometime in between.  My parents had a “part-time” business growing up that put my brother and I through college.  Were they committed to their business?  Absolutely!  Did they also have day jobs?  YES!

Maybe we should stop understimating by looking at whether or not someone can do something and instead just help them get to where they want to go.  And never, ever, underestimate them…

That’s the American way.

I read on someone’s blog this morning about staying put your entire life in one place vs. travel.  S/he said, staying put in one place for an entire life, without travel, leads to small thinking.  So, the opposite might be true?  Where, travel can lead to big thinking?  If so, awesome!  And better yet, one can travel within or outside of the US and see so much diversity, even when remaining in the US, which makes travel that much richer, even at home!

Travel in turn, as was hypothesized, leads to bigger thinking.  Big thinking is what the US is known for.  (Not ‘was’, mind you…still is!)  But we must get back to even more big thinking in this country to get ourselves back on track.  We can brand the big think better than other places in the world.

So, if you can, consider travel in your near future if you feel stuck.  A la Eat, Pray, Love, or any other story where someone heads to an exotic place to not only discover a foreign land, but more importantly, come back after finding themselves and sharing the big thinking that went on while they were away.  Travel really does lead to thinking big!  After all, my trip to Beijing is what inspired this very alphabetical series dedicated to the U S of A! Yay!

Ok, my apologies for not posting in awhile.  I’ve been writing and editing over the course of the past week, so I’m giving everything to that and letting the blog slip.  Boo.

Anyway, S to me stands for my home town, South Bend.  South Bend is the quintessential small town in the US, where the American Dream can still come alive and flourish.  Example?  None other than my parents, who not only worked hard at day jobs for most of their adult lives, but also who had their own businesses on the side during most of their adult lives.

We all worked on houses (rental/land contract) when my brother and I were growing up along with my entrepreneurial parents.  And yes, as kids, we saw stuff that happened in houses that kids should probably never see.  However, it was the perfect experience for us to understand, appreciate and discover the American Dream… In South Bend, and other parts of the USA, people can pursue their passions–be it a business, a hobby, a day job, or all of the above, without too much bureacracy and naysayers.  That’s cool.  That’s America.  That’s the American dream.  And that rocks!

Two things happened to me that sparked the “R” word today - in my homage to America…the land of the free, and the home of, Steve Winwood and real toilet paper.

First, I had an appt this morning at school, so I headed there.  I live on the main drag of my subdivison.  But, it has a bend in the road and a stop in the center of the street.  So as I turned the corner to head toward the stop sign this morning, lo and behold, I faced a house…that was TP’d.  REALLY?!? It was so…old school.  Do people really still TP people?  I think those who do should definitely take a trip to China, where they’d swiftly learn the value of really high quality toilet paper.  I guarantee if they hit a few public toilets while there, they’d NEVER TP again.

And speaking of old school, just got back from my power walk for the evening.  Had to put on the dance channel from Pandora on the iPhone while working out.  Stunner #2: someone actually took the time to remix Steve Winwood into club music.  REALLY?!?  I barely liked his music in high school which, er, was more years ago then I care to mention in this forum.  Suffice it to say, someone who actually took the time remix his tracks into dance music could only have happened here in America.  Not sure anyone else would officially bother to wipe the dust off of the track, let alone remix it.  (Not that I minded, but I did a little…Winwood totally reminds me of a really awful high school job I had at the Toasty Shop in South Bend.  Cheesy uniform and all.)  No, thanks, don’t need a higher love…

In conclusion - I’m always amazed in this country by what some people actually value and spend their time doing.

REALLY?!?

For sure.

Ok, it probably should be Bob and I, but really don’t care.  Here’s the good part:

Yesterday, I had a bad day.  Had some annoying technical issues on top of a major speaker we were trying to get politely just say no.  Topped off with dinner with a good friend who I am trying to help obtain their ‘dream job’, albeit thus far unsuccessfully.  While it was great to catch up with this person, I still didn’t feel like I’ve gotten them to where they’d like to be.  Translation: not my best day.

My cat Bob also had a bad day.  He really wasn’t eating much.  And, he’s old and isn’t in the best health.  So, between the two of us we were a little bummed out.

Today, however, was a different story.  Not only did Bob get a massive hair ball up and is now officially ready to eat, but I also received not one, but two emails for people who I connected to others announce they got jobs!  YAY!

This, mind you is not a yay me rant, it is a yay WE rant.  If we all just took a little time to focus on others, maybe we can unblock the hairballs and get people free to be better versions of themselves.

Just like Bob & me, may you have a good, hairball unblocking day in your near future.