“Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.”
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
Happy New Year!
December 31st, 2011What’s Your Life Strategy?
December 30th, 2011Do you have a strategy for your life? According to Clay Christensen, you should have one:
“Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.”
While at Oxford, he spent an hour every night thinking and reading about the purpose of his life. What he learned:
- “People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.”
- “…it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.”
- “Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.”
The Female Olympics
December 29th, 2011By Carina Chocano, NYTimes Magazine:
“One way to think about the ‘Real Housewives’ shows is as a kind of perverse, televised postfeminist-feminine-status Olympics. Here’s how it works: A group of highly competitive, thoroughly confused women are pitted against one another in five events: wealth, youth, beauty/body, husband and glamour career. In order to participate, the housewives must qualify in at least three of these categories. They need not have all of them in order to win, but it helps. Some categories trump others. For instance, wealth trumps beauty, and husband trumps glamour job. Kids-plus-husband trumps job, too — especially if the process of acquiring them leads to a show of one’s own. Every show features at least one aggressive instigator whose job it is to ratchet up the jealousy and paranoia and keep the interpersonal conflicts coming. All you really have to do to be a real housewife is take pride in your privilege, your leisure, your profligacy and your willingness to amplify the melodrama at every possible opportunity. You can’t win unless somebody else loses. “
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