Month: October 2011

courage, failure

Beginning: Amy Poehler, Baseball, & Why We Should All Keep Trying

Christa Avampato

“This thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.” ~ Mary Pickford (via Leslie Knope)

Network TV is my guilty pleasure. Anyone who says there’s nothing good on television isn’t looking hard enough. Last week I took in an episode of Parks and Recreation. Truthfully, I hated it the first few times I caught a piece of an episode. Then somehow the show found its legs and Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) stopped being a pathetic whiner and became brilliant without losing her quirks. She’s playing a caricature, but a caricature with humanity – something that’s difficult to do. She pulls out lines like the one by Mary Pickford at just the right time without making us feel like we’re being lectured by our parents. Every episode finds a genuine teachable moment.

The quote got me thinking about the necessity of runway that every new endeavor needs. NBC gave Parks and Recreation some room to find its groove. The Saint Louis Cardinals never gave up on the possibility of wining the World Series, even in mid-September when it looked all but impossible to pull that one out of the hat. At our last board meeting, I told the Compass Yoga board members that we should think about building out a second program because it appeared that we had contacted every veteran group in New York City and there were no more stones to turn over. The Board didn’t buy it. Their wise counsel: look harder. I did, and it turns out there are more stones. Stones that are actually boulders with a great deal of richness under them.

Even when all seems lost, even when it seems like we’ve run out of steam, inspiration, and opportunity, there is always more we can do. It takes extra ingenuity and some unconventional risk taking to find those additional options. Even when a way is not apparent, or even likely, we have to keep our will. We just never know when our luck will turn around.

We all stumble, fall, and make a mess. Life is not neat, orderly, or easy. However, there is a lot of good for us to do if we just keep at it. I don’t pretend to understand the magic of conviction and commitment. I just know it’s there. And I also know that if you get knocked down and stay down, then you’re denying yourself the opportunity to do truly great work and you’re cheating the rest of us who would benefit from it. Plus, it’s just plain sad and wasteful.

Take your punches and then stick your neck out again. It’s the only sure way to give yourself the best odds of succeeding.  

adventure, Africa, home, travel

Beginning: Getting Reacquainted with Tanzania, a Place That Still Feels Like Home

Christa Avampato

Today I’m very excited to share a guest post from Nikita Raja. We “met”via this blog over two years ago and since then have kept up a regular correspondence. She’s one of the members of this blog’s community who is constantly encouraging me to continue to share my experience as a way of helping others.

Nikita recently sent me a collection of her photos from her first trip to Tanzania as an adult. She was born in Tanzania and much of her family history is wrapped up in that country. I asked her to share this experience in a guest post as a reminder to all of that new beginnings can be discovered everywhere, even in places from our past. 

This past summer, my sister and I were lucky enough to travel back to Dar-es-Salaam (Dar), Tanzania. Known as my birthplace, and the place I can tie my family’s roots back to – Tanzania is home! Home, because this is where so many of family’s cherished memories and stories have emerged from.

It had been twelve years since I last visited, and my trip ended up being nothing short of an adventure into the wild and a journey back to my roots. Although I was about ten years old when I last visited Dar, it seemed completely unrecognizable to me! But it was refreshing to return to a place that felt both different and familiar and still be able to call it “home”.

While I spent a lot of time bonding with family I hadn’t seen in years and indulging in eating different East African specialities like “Mogo” (Grilled Cassava) and “Kitale” (Coconut filled with potatoes and chillies), I actually got to explore parts of Tanzania that I had never seen before – a two-day safari to the Serengeti National Park, driving through endless running African savannahs and capturing photos of animals in their natural habitat. Simply breathtaking! I also managed to get away for a weekend trip, to the beautiful island of Zanzibar. Known for its paradise style beaches and resorts, spice tours, and rich history.

Through travel, we often gain new layer of wisdom. Wisdom from the experiences we had, the people we met, the food we ate, the stories we heard and the learning we gained made for such an enriching experience. Although life in Tanzania may be worlds apart from life here in North America, it’s through experiences like these that one begins to appreciate travel and cultural realties.

Travel allows us to indulge, learn, and adapt. It was the perfect trip to celebrate my graduation from university and my start into the working world.

Nikita’s photos from Tanzania:

Night time food bazaar known as “Forodhani”, with diverse crowds of tourists
Zanzibar’s Stone Town - a World Heritage Site.
Zanzibar’s Stone Town - a World Heritage Site.
Prison Island, popular beach site in Zanzibar
The Serengeti National Park
The Serengeti National Park
"Kitale” (Coconut filled with potatoes and chillies)
economy, money, passion

Beginning: Passion, Planning, and Promoting in This Wild Economy

Christa Avampato

Welcome to Saturday’s wrap-up, take 2! Thanks for your thoughts, ideas, and encouragement this week. Here’s how it played out:

Make all the plans you want and be prepared to throw them out the window. If this wild ride on the economy slide has taught us anything it’s that flexibility, liquidity, and creativity are tools we need to not only survive but thrive. Need a helping hand to get a handle on it all? Check out my posts about planning and free online sources and courses to get a base understanding of how our economy works.

A few weeks ago, Howard Schultz of Starbucks announced that he had challenged his team to figure out how to make Starbucks a jobs creator beyond their own barista counter. To up the challenge, he also wanted to give Starbucks customers a way to get in on the action. This has prompted similar discussions at other companies. President Obama is right – We Can’t Wait. Sparked by the growing need to bring Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street together, I wrote a post this week on the need to take matters into our own collective hands and become job creators.

Self-promotion doesn’t come naturally to most people. We covet humility to such an extent that we’re reluctant to trumpet the good work we’re doing as well as the good work we’d like to do for fear of coming off as attention hogs. Trouble is we can’t find our pack if we don’t howl. Ditch guilt and sing out loud. This week I launched my first Hire Me page on this site and the following day received word that Compass Yoga is now fully incorporated. We’re off to the wellness races – join us!

Wrapping up the week, my thoughts turned to a post on the role of passion in creating the lives we want thanks to a quote by David Hume. Now is the time to encourage and reward new ways of being and thinking in schools, in communities, in our families, in business, and in our government. Reason is overrated; we can and will do better. The best beat for your life can be found in your own soul – use it.

Hope you all had a good week and enjoy a candy-eating, costume-donning, and snowy(!) Halloween.

choices, passion

Beginning: A Time and A Place for Reason (Always In the Backseat)

Christa Avampato

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” ~ David Hume, Scottish philosopher, economist and historian

Somewhere along the way, “reasonable” got a good connotation and “unreasonable” got a bad connotation in modern society. Comprise, consensus, and contentment hopped aboard the reasonable train. Renegade, fringe, and non-conformity jumped to defend the ground of “unreasonable.” And we all lost in the process. At least until now.

It’s not sustainable. It’s not good for us or for our communities. Reasonable thoughts and behaviors, when left to their own devices, lead us around in circles. They put blinders on us because the preoccupation of a circular path is the center, the indecisive middle ground that stands for nothing except appeasement, which honestly no one wants. Reason needs to be checked.

Think of all the people you admire, products you love, missions of organizations that make you see the world differently, and works of art (broadly defined) that inspire you. Do they define “reasonable” to you? I highly doubt it. I bet they go against the grain.

The trouble is that it’s only when someone achieves the heights of someone like Steve Jobs, my hero of unreasonableness, that we encourage this MO. If someone is “out of line”, meaning that they do something that many others don’t, they get a sideways glance and wide berth as we circumvent their presence, as if we’re afraid of being sucked into their circle of unreasonableness. It shouldn’t be that way. The next Steve Jobs isn’t going to look, act, or sound like Steve Jobs at all. He or she is going to do things his or her own way because that’s what Steve did.

When the phrase “why can’t we all just along?” entered the American lexicon, it was not meant  to be translated into “can’t we all just stand for nothing and never stray from the cookie cutter?” We should be accepting of all people to walk to their own beat. And more than that, we must encourage and reward new ways of being and thinking in schools, in communities, in our families, in business, and in our government.

I’m in David Hume’s camp. Reason, and everything that goes along with it, shouldn’t be vilified but it needs to be contained. For us to progress, reason must be tempered with passion. Not the other way around. And it’s not too late for us – we can turn this around.

business, nonprofit, yoga

Beginning: Compass Yoga is Officially Incorporated

Christa Avampato

Rob, Michael, and I trekked downtown to see our rock star attorneys to review our by-laws. They surprised with the wonderful news that in record time the Department of State has granted incorporation status to Compass Yoga. We are official, moving us one more step down the road to getting more yoga and wellness programming to more people who need it to improve their health.

Up next:
Approve the by-laws
Vote in the board members
Open a bank account
Apply for our EIN (Employer Identification Number)
File for nonprofit 501(c)3 status

As we wind our way through this exciting and complicated process to establish a nonprofit, I continue to pinch myself. I am so grateful to the incredible board, our amazing and generous attorneys, and for the many people who keep encouraging our mission. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that it’s falling into place so well. By putting our very best out into the world we are receiving so much good fortune in return.

It’s amazing how much magic we find when we have the courage to begin.

career

Beginning: Hire Me

Christa Avampato

Last weekend I had lunch with my friend, Sara, and she told me I needed to talk myself up more. I hate doing this. I much prefer to talk up other people. After some reflection, I realized that if I talked myself up in a way that showed others how I could help them and their ideas shine, then that would be a very worthwhile cause. This is a follow on to my conversation with Brian in which he advised me to put my creativity to work to build my career by my own design.

So I did it. I created a “Hire Me” page on this blog. This is a big flipping deal for me because I’ve never done anything like this before. And it was actually fun to do. A true creative confidence builder. I highly recommend you give it a whirl, too.

Two days in and already I am getting a few bites via the contact form on the page. I should have done this sooner. Better late than never.

Click the tab above or here to check it out. Let me know what you think! (And tell your friends, family members, co-workers, neighbors, and Tweeple, too.)

creativity, economy, money

Beginning: Where Wall Street and the Occupy Wall Street Protestors Needs to Go From Here

Christa Avampato
From http://www.illuminatiworld.com. This paradigm has to change for everyone's sake.

We have a lot to learn from history. If we take a trip down Wall Street’s memory lane, we’ll discover that it was founded on the principle of creative destruction, the creation of new industries and companies that build better products and services than those we currently have. Instead, as Tom Friedman so eloquently stated in his column this week, they’ve fallen into the horrible habit of “financing too much “destructive creation” (inventing leveraged financial products with no more societal value than betting on whether Lindy’s sold more cheesecake than strudel).” This is a problem but is not yet one that is too far gone. I believe Wall Street, and by extension our economy and our society, can be saved.

Wall Street can create jobs outside its walls
Most job creation comes from start-ups – companies founded by passionate, insightful people seeing a pain they want to fix and then inventing a product or service to alleviate that pain. Maybe that’s the need for a better vacuum cleaner – thank you, Mr. Dyson – or maybe it’s the need to help creative get their projects funded by small contributions from a large group of strangers – thank you, Kickstarter.

Why can’t financial firms take a small portion of their earnings and provide more loans to start-ups at very low-interest rates? There’s plenty of waste going on in financial firms on projects that never take off beyond the ideation phase, money that would do just as much good being burned in the middle of the street. Instead, take that money and take a chance on a set of entrepreneurs who are trying to build something of value rather than rearrange value by moving money around in a big circle.

Consider it corporate philanthropy or just the right thing to do. Wall Street should figure out how to reinvent itself as a jobs creator, and that doesn’t mean hiring more bankers. It means funding people with good ideas that the world needs. About a year ago I wrote a letter to the CEO of the company I worked for and proposed this type of idea. He never responded; he may never have received the letter. But I’m going to give it a go again and point to a recent peer of his, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, who is doing something on par with this idea.

We’re all in this together
The Occupy Wall Street protectors and the banks have conspired together in a war of “us” (the people) against “them” (the banks). It doesn’t need to be that way. And actually it can’t be that way if we want our economic situation to improve. Like it or not, money and creative ideas, together, make the world go round. We’re in this life together, in this world together. And no one person has more of a right to a good life than any other. We are equals, and we need to start treating each other and supporting each other as such.

economy, learning

Beginning: How to Understand the U.S. Economy for Free

Christa Avampato

Over the weekend I watched the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and it took me back into those scary days 3 years ago. I started working in the financial services industry in August 2008, 5 weeks before Lehman Brothers failed and our economy spun into a seemingly hopeless downward spiral.

They were dark days, and somehow I was able to keep my fear at bay so that I could actually use the opportunity to learn something. I had a front row seat to the recession, and at any moment I could have been a casualty. There was little I could do about that potential outcome so every day I got up, went to work, and hoped that I could take some lesson away from the situation. Most of the days that strategy worked.

I was lucky to receive a top-notch education as an undergraduate and graduate student. It gave me a base of knowledge to draw from as I read about and listened to economic data. I adjusted my career and savings plans as a result of the recession and years from now I’m confident that I will look back on these years as ones that were tough and made me tougher.

But then I thought about how many people don’t have the education I have, and how daunting it can be to learn about the economy. It’s a mess of acronyms, numbers, and opinions that make it difficult to decipher the truth from fiction. I was also inspired by Occupy Wall Street and wanted to do something to help the protestors and their audience make sense of what’s going on around them. So I went looking for free sources that could help people who have an interest in learning more about the economy though don’t know exactly where to start.

About.com’s page on the U.S. economy – a well-done overview of the U.S. economy. Suitable for beginners and those who want a brush-up lesson.

Investopedia – I used this resource all of the time when I was in business school. They have a great financial dictionary, tutorials, and a well-organized set of top current news stories that relate to business.

Free online economics classes – collection of links to free Economics courses from the world’s leading universities. You can download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player.

choices, decision-making, discovery

Beginning: Planning Leads to Much More Than Plans

Christa Avampato

“Plans are useless…planning is indispensible.” ~ Einsenhower

As a relentless planner and practitioner, I’ve sometimes wondered if I slog through this process in vain. After all, so few of my plans work out the way I want them to go, or the way I think I want them to go. Maybe planning is a waste of time.

Now, come on, you didn’t really think I’d throw in the towel on planning did you? How could I toss away this highly attuned skill for scenario mapping, decision tree drawing, and pro con list making? It took a lot of work to get here, and even if my plans don’t work out it’s not a waste to plan, is it?

According to Ike, it’s very valuable. And I agree. I do love the act of planning, outcome aside. I like to think about possibilities and compare them to one another. Planning gives me a chance to consider how I want to spend my time and with whom. It gives me time to reflect on past experiences and to relive their lessons. Planning makes me realize just how far I’ve come along in life and they get me excited for what’s ahead. Planning is the compass for self-discovery.

I’ve often heard it said that the act of giving is its own reward. I think that goes for planning, too.

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Beginning: The Week in Review 10.16.11 – 10.21.11

Christa Avampato

I’m trying something new here on Saturdays – a recap post to link together the week’s learnings. I started doing this a weeks ago for my own benefit and then thought it might be beneficial to others. So, here goes:

The week kicked off with reflections on a tough conversation I had with Brian last week about how to manage the fear of taking more of my career into my own hands. Employ Your Creativity to Live a Better Life, Facing Up to Fear, Failure, and Monsters, and You Can Change Your Mind deal with several key lessons Brian conveyed in our conversation:

1.) We are free if we choose to be
2.) If you feel stuck, put your creativity to work to imagine your way out
3.) We can’t shake fear so we might as well befriend it and learn what it has to teach us.

After a month working in close physical proximity to the Occupy Wall Street protests, I put some thoughts down on paper about my initial confusion around their methods and reasoning, and then to articulate why I’m not a part of it.

With all of the news reports piling up that are continually causing us to rethink and reconsider our plans, long-term and short-term, it is easy to feel bogged down and to second guess our abilities. I watched a documentary this week that reminded me so powerfully that the real trick of life is to make good of everything that comes our way. Even from the most horrible, tragic circumstances, we can learn and grow and help others do the same.

Happy weekend and happy reading!