Month: January 2009

business, economy

My Year of Hopefulness – Be Helpful and Keep Swimming

Christa Avampato

My former boss, Bob G., sent me a great article that recently appears in Business Week. Marshall Goldsmith writes with some advice on what to do at work to deal with all the bad behavior that is happening at companies all over the country. In a nutshell, he is encouraging us to be helpful. It reminds me of that idea that “whatever you seek for yourself, strive to provide for another.” So if you want to be happy, look to make someone else happy. If you want to be safe, provide safety for someone else. 


Goldsmith’s shortlist:
Help more, judge less
Go out of your way to help others who are down
Encourage people to focus on the future
Be aware of your own emotional reactions

If we thought 2008 was bad, just wait until we get through 2009. As Randy Bachman said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” And I say this not as a threat or to scare anyone. The point is that we WILL get through this. We will be different people, a different nation on the opposite shore of 2010 and beyond. And in between there is this large, vast, and deep ocean, potentially without a bottom. 

My friend, Cindy, swam in the Hudson River as part of the New York Triathalon last fall. At one point in the swim, all of the participants found themselves surrounded by jellyfish. An odd, but very realistic, occurrence. And the fastest, clearest way out was through the mass of tentacles. No lifeline was coming. All they had was the support of the swimmers banning together and pushing ahead one stroke, one kick at a time. They all got stung but they all came out of the river okay. We’re in the economic equivalent of the Hudson on that day. Just keep going, and together we’ll make it.    
change, hope, Obama, social change, social entrepreneurship

My Year of Hopefulness – The Power of Intention

Christa Avampato

This year, I’d really like to get my writing out in front of a larger audience. On January 20th, I was inspired by President Obama who believed in himself, believed in us, and called us to take action. He empowered us to change our lives, change our country and our world. “If it has to be, then it is up to me.” I took this to heart as I watched him take the oath of office. First, I jumped around and did a little dance for joy, and then I set about looking for a part-time blogging gig. 


With the enormous need for content generation, there are a lot of blogging opportunities out there. Most of the ones I found are non-paid, though I found one fairly quickly with Examiner.com, an on-line newspaper with city-specific news that spans a number of areas from art to food to business, and everything in between. It pays its reporters, Examiners, by click which is a fair and reasonable system and in New York, they had a need in their Business Section. Perfect. Exactly what I want to write about. So I pitched to them my angle on entrepreneurship, specifically social entrepreneurship, and the power it has to transform society. They liked the pitch and several days later I got the job. My first posts will appear this week and I’ll put up a short post on this blog every week to reveal the week’s topic and give a very brief overview of what will be up on Examiner.com.

After applying for the Examiner.com post, I put the last few stamps on 8 letters I had written to social entrepreneurs whom I admire. At my friend, Richard’s, urging I composed the letters rather than taking a class on the subject. “Just go out there and talk to people doing the work,” he told me. So I walked out my door to the mail drop box on the corner, said a little prayer, and dropped the letters in. Three days later, I received an email from Pat Christen, the CEO and President of HopeLab, a organization in California that built the video game, Re-mission, to help kids fight cancer. She invited me to come visit when I’m in the Bay Area and we’re in the process of setting up a date and time. (Pam Omidyar, the co-founder of HopeLab, will speak at TED next week.)

These two experience taught me about the power of intention. It is fine to hope for fortuitous events, turns of good luck, and the realization of a dream. But after we acknowledge that hope, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. My mom loves the saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” Hope does, too. If we want change, particularly social change, the journey is best started by looking in the mirror and asking ourselves the question, “What am I willing to do to make a difference?”  
Google, Microsoft, technology

Microsoft Could Learn from Google

Christa Avampato

I’ve been a Microsoft customer for post of my life. Even though I moved over to Mac about a year ago, and have never looked back, I still bought Microsoft Office for Mac. After looking for closely at Google Docs, I am beginning to think that I may never need another Microsoft product, ever. 


Google runs most of my life – email, this blog, my blog reader, almost any internet search I do, and I’m even thinking of switching to T-Mobile so I can get the Google phone. I’ve shied away from Google Docs until recently. I’m not sure why. I guess it was just habit to open up Excel or Word, save to my hard drive, and then back up to my external hard drive. 

I’ve recently signed on with Examiner.com to be one of their business reporters – I’m very excited about the gig and have ideas popping up all the time. It’s one of the nice things about being a writer – everything that happens to you, good, bad, or indifferent, is potential material. Most of the time I’m not home, so having documents on my hard drive isn’t efficient. I have to write down my ideas on some scrap of paper or email them to myself and then type them into my Excel schedule when I get home. Inefficient and a time waster. And I hate wasting time.

Google Docs is the answer – whether I’m at home, at work, or out and about with my mobile, I can log in, type my ideas right into my writing schedule, and be done. (Well, except for the actual writing.) And they’re there for you to connect to, any time, any where. Compatible with windows. You can share the documents with others, if you’d like. And it formats well – very well. I mean why doesn’t Excel automatically align column content with the width of the column? And 99% of the time isn’t the top row a header row? 

Google observed behavior and made a great product to boot that’s easy to use and highly accessible. Microsoft, you have a lot to learn, and Google can teach you.    
charity, education, Junior Achievement, nonprofit, philanthropy

My Year of Hopefulness – More Teaching with Junior Achievement

Christa Avampato

There are few days that I felt as nervous as I did teaching my Junior Achievement class in the South Bronx. It was the first Friday of December 2008 and I received the day off from work to teach Economics to 7th graders at Middle School (MS) 223. This school is just down the street from St. Anne’s, the church featured in Jonathan Kozol’s books describing the Mott Haven neighborhood. Mott Haven is one of the most violent, drug addicted areas of this country. It is ground zero for the war on poverty. 


In MS 223, I felt like I was making a difference to kids who needed role models but what struck me so suddenly was that those kids and teachers had a tremendous impact on me. 20 minutes away by subway from my safe, beautiful Upper West Side neighborhood I found a completely different New York. Many of the students I met that day have never been outside of their own neighborhood. They know that there is something more to the world than the South Bronx but they don’t know if they’ll ever get to see it save for watching it on TV. That one cold day in December changed the way that I looked at this city, and it changed the way I saw my life playing out. 

I was thrilled to get an email at work today from Junior Achievement about an opportunity to teach Corporate Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility at the High School of Economics and Finance. While not in the South Bronx, it’s a subject matter that is very dear to me because of my link to the nonprofit world. It’s steps away from my office building and for an hour a week for seven weeks this Spring, I will get to teach high school students about a subject that I am passionate about. It’s opportunities like this that really make a difference – as much to my life as to the lives of the children I’m teaching. It’s this sharing of knowledge, and the recognition in someone else’s eyes that something you just said clicked for them, that makes our days worthwhile.     
charity, nonprofit, philanthropy

My Year of Hopefulness – United Way Linkages Program

Christa Avampato

I have had the great fortune to move easily back and forth between the nonprofit and private sectors. I started out in nonprofit just after I finished undergrad, then went to the private sector for a few years, back to nonprofit, then to business school, and back to the private sector. This movement between the two sectors has been a great source of strength for me. Firsthand, I have been able to see how the two inform one another, and I learned that while many people draw a hard line between nonprofit and the private sector, it’s unnecessary. The skills, competencies, and structures are so similar it is sometimes tough to tell one from another. 


This ability to draw the connection between the two was the strength I pointed to in my United Way Linkages application. The United Way Linkages Program trains prospective nonprofit board members and then serves as a matchmaker between members of the program and nonprofit board of United Way charities. I was thrilled to learn today that I was accepted into the program and begin my training at the end of February. 

This is one more stop on the train that is leading me to start my own business based in the nonprofit world as part of the growing number of entrepreneurs who are looking toward social entrepreneurship. This is the last piece I need to close the loop – I have worked at nonprofits, large corporations, and small companies, though don’t have any board experience. This training will help me to begin to fill that gap. Another bonus is that it will be a good networking opportunity for me and I will meet other, like-minded business people with this same interest of serving on a nonprofit board. 

In a week when Wall Street and Main Street announced thousands of layoffs, plunging earnings, and more doom to come, this news today about the Linkages Program helped me lift up my eyes and see what’s out beyond the horizon. It helped me to look my future right in the eye and smile. 
books, family, friendship, Hachette Book Group USA, hope

My Year of Hopefulness – Eat, Drink, and Be from Mississippi

Christa Avampato

The Hachette Book Group has a fantastic line-up of book releases this year. I just finished Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi by Nanci Kincaid. I wanted a book that would lift me up and make me feel more hopeful, and that’s exactly what Nanci Kincaid delivers.

We are presented with a family in Mississippi that is very typical of what we might think of as a traditional small town, southern family. By the end of the book, we are witness to the formation of a new family, mostly self-chosen, 3000 miles from Mississippi that personifies the “resurgence of collective possibility”.

Family is a funny thing: in the traditional sense, it’s an entity created by luck of the draw, people who are tied together by biology, and sometimes grow together and sometimes grow apart. Kincaid explores a new kind of family – one that people choose, either consciously or subconsciously. They fight as much as traditional families, and they also love fiercely. They believe in one another, even in the darkest hours. They are drawn to one another.

Through the whole book, I thought about this idea of having a calling, of being drawn to someone, or something, without any true justification. Could be a career, or a certain city, particular people, or a cause you care about. It overtakes you — no one tells you that you must dedicate yourself to this person, place, or ideal. You are just compelled to.

This is cause for great hope for all of us. Some of the characters in the book took a good long time to find their calling, others found it very quickly, and others thought they found it and then realized that they actually belonged some place else. It’s never too late, or too early, to find our place in the world. And sometimes that place shifts, and the best we can do is know that the Universe knows better than we do. One things is for certain: if you are open to your calling finding you at every turn, then eventually it will.

career, hope, job, Marcus Buckingham, Oprah, work

My Year of Hopefulness – Marcus Buckingham Workshop Session 2: Where Are You Now?

Christa Avampato

A few weeks after we went through the introductory session of Marcus Buckingham’s on-line workshop, I finally sat down to go through session 2. Why such a gap right? Schedules, yes, but there was a larger reason to. Fear – fear of finding and discovering something new and different. Fear of change. 


Sometimes it’s easier, at least in the near-term, to bury our heads in the sand and pretend everything’s fine. That no improvements can or should be made. Change is painful, though it’s so necessary in the long-run. Progress requires giving up the familiar and that brings with it a certain amount of anxiety. No time for dallying now – we had to jump in and get on with it. Change is coming so we might as well greet it politely at the front door rather than waiting for it to huff and puff and blow our house down. 

Session 2: Most people believe that when we consider our performance in life that we will become better people if we focus on improving our weaknesses. Marcus has a fundamentally different view. His advice is to build on our strengths and manage around our weaknesses. A meager 12% of people spend the majority of their day playing to their strengths. He’s willing to give you from 8am – 11am, 25% of your day to play to things we aren’t good at. And then the rest of the day must be spent on strengths.

In our society, we believe that if we study and learn about negatives, we will glean some miraculous insight into the positives. We study disease to learn about health, depression to learn about happiness and joy. There have 40,000 studies done on the topic of depression and only 400 on joy. The equation and our focus on weakness and negativity is sadly and badly tipped in the wrong direction. “You study “bad” and invert it, you don’t get “good”. You get “not bad.” And “not bad” is not good enough. It won’t give us energy. It won’t make all our hard work worthwhile. And it certainly won’t make us happy. 

There are a lot of people out there right now who hate their jobs. Even though they’re grateful for the income with all the layoffs going on, they hate what they do. And that’s the key. The three questions to ask ourselves when examining our jobs are:

1.) Why is this job important to me?
2.) Who am I going to be working with?
3.) What am I actually going to be doing?

When the “what” goes wrong, it effects the “who” and the “why”. So in these times when we may be looking for a new job, the question to ask is the “what” question.  To help answer that, it’s best to take a look at what invigorates us and what drains us, and then go for what invigorates us.
business, career, mentor, social media, technology, Twitter

My Year of Hopefulness – Shementor.com

Christa Avampato

The wonders of Twitter – the connections I’ve made on there never cease to amaze me. If you’re not using it, hop to it – the conversation that is happening out there is invigorating and worthwhile. My latest good luck on the site was meeting an incredible woman, Phyllis, who runs a company called Shementor. 


In this economy, I have been feeling badly about my career – its security, my heavy school loan debt, future prospects for new opportunities. It seems that everywhere we look we see doom and gloom. Enter Phyllis – a bright, vibrant personality who is about building women up and giving them hope. We’ve been messaging via Twitter for a few months, following each other’s tweets, and just today I finally took a look at her website. I have been missing out BIG TIME!

Recently named as one of the 101 Women Bloggers to Watch, Fall 2008 WE Magazine, Phyllis’s mission is to build a community through her website to support and strengthen women managers and women who aspire to be managers. Here are some of the great assets available on the site: a free e-course, read her blog posts, executive coaching, and her frequent posts on Twitter.   

This is a call to action for every woman in business out there, employed or not, manager or not, satisfied with their career or not: we all have important things to learn from Shementor that will improve not only our careers but our lives as well. 
friendship, hope

My Year of Hopefulness – Friends Save the Day

Christa Avampato

I am always so grateful for the compassion, loyalty, and helpfulness of my friends who see me through tough times, who help me solve problems, and who generally make me feel good about being me. I know they’re great people, kind and loving and concerned. 


Today I am wrestling with an especially tough problem and there they were: hopeful, helpful, and supportive. It’s humbling to be surrounded by such bright, positive people who believe in me, hands down. They have an incredible way of helping me see clearly, even if it all looks bleak to me at first. And it’s not that they always agree with me. Many times they don’t. But they help me gather my thoughts and look at my resources a bit differently.

Perspective is helpful – it provides hope more than anything else ever could. With perspective, the world looks brighter.   
hope, kindness, New York City

My Year of Hopefulness – Another Small Act of Kindness

Christa Avampato

Yesterday, I returned home from the airport at 1am after being awake since 4am the morning before, dealing with quite possibly one of the worst days of my life in-between. I arrived at my apartment door frustrated, deeply saddened, and full of disappointment. I looked back at the cab that had dropped me at the curb outside and he waited for me to make sure that I got into my front door okay. Can you believe that? A New York cabbie concerned that some no-name lady got into her apartment building without trouble. His small act erased my sadness. 


I fell asleep last night considering all the ways that I could make that same small effort and truly transform someone’s day:
holding doors open for others
petting someone’s dog and saying how cute the dog is
letting someone who looks frustrated go ahead of us in a check-out line at the store
even smiling – just smiling

There a lot of gloom and doom in this world, especially these days. We can all do a part to let a little sunshine in, and while we’re at it, let the sunshine in for others, too.