Author: Christa Avampato

The short of it: Writer. Health, education, and art advocate. Theater and film producer. Visual artist. Product geek. Proud alumnae of the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (MBA). Inspired by ancient wisdom & modern tech. Proliferator of goodness. Opener of doors. Friend to animals. Fan of creative work in all its wondrous forms. I use my business skills to create passion projects that build a better world. I’ve been called the happiest New Yorker, and I try hard to live up to that title every day. The long of it: My career has stretched across Capitol Hill, Broadway theatre, education, nonprofit fundraising, health and wellness, and Fortune 500 companies in retail, media, entertainment, technology, and financial services. I’ve been a product developer and product manager, theater manager, strategic consultant, marketer, voice over artist, , teacher, and fundraiser. I use my business and storytelling to support and sustain passion projects that build a better world. In every experience, I’ve used my sense of and respect for elegant design to develop meaningful products, services, programs, and events. While building a business career, I also built a strong portfolio as a journalist, novelist, freelance writer, interviewer, presenter, and public speaker. My writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, PBS.org, Boston.com, Royal Media Partners publications, and The Motley Fool on a wide range of topics including business, technology, science, health, education, culture, and lifestyle. I have also been an invited speaker at SXSW, Teach for America, Avon headquarters, Games for Change, NYU, Columbia University, Hunter College, and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. The first book in my young adult book series, Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters, was acquired by a publisher and launched in November 2017. I’m currently working on the second book in the series. A recovering multi-tasker, I’m equally at home in front of my Mac, on my yoga mat, walking my rescue dog, Phineas, traveling with a purpose, or practicing the high-art of people watching. I also cut up small bits of paper and put them back together as a collage artist. My company: I’m bringing together all of my business and creative career paths as the Founder of Double or Nothing Media: • I craft products, programs, and projects that make a difference; • I build the business plans that make what I craft financially sustainable; • I tell the stories that matter about the people, places, and products that inspire me. Follow my adventures on Twitter at https://twitter.com/christanyc and Instagram at https://instagram.com/christarosenyc.
innovation, Michalski, organize

On Innovation: thebrain.com

Christa Avampato

My mother and brother are huge Trekie fans. I mean, HUGE. And their favorite character, of course, was Spock. That strangely lovable Vulcan who lacked even a single shred of emotion. My mother’s favorite Spock quality – the mind meld. It’s a useful skill really – being able to dump a lifetime of accumulated knowledge into some other mind in a matter of minutes so that way even when the being passes away, the knowledge lives on. Think of all the progress we could have made if we could have preserved all of the knowledge ever amassed in the world! How many mistakes we could avoid! How much pain we would never have to go through!
While no one has yet developed a mind meld device, there is one man who has developed the next best thing: a way to easily map your brain onto your computer for future referral. All that is required is an itty bitty piece of software and your time to input all your information. Behold: http://www.thebrain.com/. It’s creator: Jerry Michalski, http://www.sociate.com/.

TheBrain allows you to map and bucket any thought you have about, well anything. It’s intuitive, easy to compile, and so logical you won’t believe it. The simplicity of the design has such power that you have to try it to believe how magical, and addicting, this tool will become. Forget any project management software, list-making, favorites bar you’ve ever created. Truly, throw them in the trash. TheBrain will keep you organized, on-task, and will get you to see connections between the seemingly disparate parts of your life that you never realized before. Best of all, it’s a permanent record of how you work, what you think about, and what matters to you. Part journal, part accomplishments list, part powerful resource, part to do, etc. You see where I’m going with this…

I’d stay and tell you more, but I have the building out of my brain to think of. Have a look for yourself at thebrain.com.

change, travel

Travels: Delta Rising

Christa Avampato

Delta is a remarkably consistent airline – consistently horrible. As a general rule, I avoid their flights completely. This could be because I associate Delta with Atlanta, GA, my least favorite city in the country. Until recently, I have put Delta in the same class as Sleepy’s, the 7 train, and reckless bicycle riders on the streets of New York City, all of which I have ranted about on this blog in previous posts.

Times change, views change, and improvement does happen. I flew Delta to Florida this weekend to see my little sister and brother-in-law, and to throw a baby shower for them. And for the first time ever, my flight left a New York City airport on time and arrived in Tampa, FL 15 minutes ahead of schedule. The same situation was repeated on my return trip.

Now, I am still a bit peeved with Delta because they told me a ticket I changed was good for a year from the date of the originally scheduled flight time and it was actually good for a year form the date I made the change – a difference of a month that rendered that original ticket useless when I was booking my recent flight to Florida. Annoying. Really annoying.

But hey, you’ve got to take the bitter with the better. Improvement is a piece-meal process. Delta may be on the path to getting off my bad side. I’m open to changing my opinion – rare, but it happens.

driving, New York

On NYC: Making your own space

Christa Avampato

“No task is so humble that it does not offer an outlet for individuality.”-William Feather

One thing that I love about New York is its constant battle against routine and sameness. At every moment, around every corner lies an opportunity for individuality and a fresh outlook. Always the chance to learn something new.

On Monday I had coffee with a professional colleague and then stopped in at my doctor’s office for my annual check-up. Great experience. Very efficient. Hardly any wait. And now I have a doctor before I need a doctor.

I stopped back at my apartment to pick up my lunch bag before heading to my car on 94th Street, where I had parked it that morning in a very legal space. And what to my wondering eyes did appear but a row of double parked cars blocking me in that brought me to tears. Of course there was no cop anywhere to be found; no where to turn for help. I was boxed in – completely. I was standing on the sidewalk, thoroughly exasperated, and then I saw this kind elderly man, also standing by a penned in car with a friend of his.

At least I thought he was kind. I asked him what was going on with the double parked cars and he replied, “Aren’t you a New Yorker? It’s street cleaning time and there’s no where for them to park so they have to do this.”

“And how the hell am I supposed to get to work?” I asked.

“Well do you have a better solution? Maybe you should run for mayor,” he said in a mocking tone.

Now I was really steamed.

“Usually they leave a phone number as a courtesy,” he offered

“Courtesy? Please. What would be courteous is for them to get off their lazy asses and drive around to find a legal spot like I did early this morning. I’ve heard of make your own pottery, but make your own parking space? This is asinine.” There wasn’t any phone number on any car in the row either. So much for “courtesy.”

“Well that’s the way it goes, kid.”

Now I’m fit to be tied. First my car is penned in. Then this curmudgeon disguised as a kind old man gives me a hard time with that New Yorker, “Everyone Knows This” nonsense, and now at 31 I’m being called “kid”.

His friend commented to me that I was being remarkably good natured about all of this because she was completely furious. This made me feel better – I thought I was being obnoxious. She counseled me that she felt I could inch my way out with the tiny space between the two cars that had blocked me in. I figured what the hell – did I have anything better to do at the moment?

20 minutes later I had inched my way out, literally inch by inch, nearly hitting the two cars beside me and in back and in front of me. Once out of the space, I breathed a sigh of relief, though still annoyed at that indignant man.

That’s the thing about NYC, just when you think you know what’s going on, you realize you don’t. It will leave you with your jaw dropped and scratching your head on a daily basis. There are more than an ample number of opportunities to make your own way here, figuratively and literally. And the only way to learn these peculiarities is to live through them.

friendship, gifts, volunteer

The moment of giving

Christa Avampato

“Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment. — Jean de La Bruyere”

The saying “It’s all in the timing” tends to be related to a stroke of good luck, a serendipitous moment that occurs quite by accident with some great fortune attached to it. I am a huge fan of surprises. When I think about acts of kindness that I have experienced in my life, they came in the form of a surprise. My memory of the kindness has nothing to do with the actual gesture, but with the time that the kindness arrived.

My friend, Alex, is a fan of sending cards and little surprises in the mail. She sent me a magnet that I just love when I moved into my new apartment in New York. And she sent me a card during the summer I spent in Atlanta, which was miserable for a variety of reasons. She had no idea how much I needed a smile those days, though her timing was impeccable.

Even a well-timed, unsolicited compliment becomes an act of generosity. Occasionally I change out my picture on my blog or my Facebook page and I am always so touched when someone writes to me to say how much they like the new picture. The same goes for friends of mine who read my blog and reference it to me. I feel so touched when I know they’ve taken time out of their day to read what I’m thinking and writing about.

Simple phone calls do the trick, too. I am always excited to get a surprise call or voice message from someone I wasn’t expecting to hear from, especially when it’s not around a holiday or my birthday. I love those cards, emails, and messages that arrive just to say hi, for no reason in particular except to say “hey, I was thinking about you.”

As I consider gifts I’ll be giving this season I’ll be thinking about the experience they create, how much joy they’ll generate afterwards and hopefully for a long time to come. And this quote also gave me a third dimension to consider, timing. While the secret to a happy life may be to have low expectations, it may also be that we can generate happiness for others by providing unexpected generosity just when we sense that those around us need it most and expect it least.

gifts, retail

Granting wishes

Christa Avampato

The season of massive gift giving has arrived! And with the season comes the litany of holiday TV commercials. It’s tough for retailers to cut through with a unique message, though some are doing just that. I saw one this morning that made me reconsider the list I’ll be checking twice. In the past, we’ve focused so much on getting gifts for people, the focus being the product we wrap up in shiny paper.

As retailers shift their business model to dually focus on the product and the experience of purchasing the product, consumers also seem to be focused on not just giving a gift but creating an experience for the recipient. Granting a wish.

We do put ourselves into the frenzy of mass purchasing – pictures of consumers dashing into retailer doors that open at 6:00am or earlier. But if we take a look back, and think about someone as a whole person, and find a way to give them something that’s not just a box with a bow on it. One of these commercials shows a family that redid their dad’s garage because he spends so much time touching up everyone else’s room. Another one shows a little girl who loves fashion though until this year has had to wear a uniform to school. They bought her new sets of fun, funky clothes to celebrate her transition to a new school in which she can wear her own outfits. Both sets of gifts celebrate the core of the person they are given to.

We spend a lot of time gifting, though how much time do we really spend paying tribute to people who make such a difference in our lives? If we focused on this later part more often, we may find our gift lists transformed from simple packages to truly extraordinary gifts, and incidentally may find that the holiday season is filled with a lot more joy and a lot less stress.

Life

On NYC sights and sounds: Having their say

Christa Avampato

What I love about serendipity is that it affords me a wonderful surprise that makes me feel connected to the world. It helps me begin to see the rhyme and reason that threads through one day’s activities to the next. On Tuesday evening, I was late getting back from work and I wasn’t able to get down to the Chelsea Barnes and Noble to see one of my favorite authors, Amy Bloom.

I needed to get a book for work so I just walked down to my neighborhood B&N. I was poking around and stumbled upon another event happening – this one for StoryCorps. I had heard one of their stories on This American Life the previous Friday on NPR. The story was moving, so I decided to stick around and see what this event was about.

I wish I could do justice to the personal stories that were shared – a NYC bus driver who helped a lone elderly woman find the restaurant her friends were at. It turned out that that woman had just been diagnosed with cancer and she was incredibly appreciative of this bus driver’s kind efforts. A WWII vet and his grandson talked about the battle that their loved one faced with Alzheimer’s. A woman talked about how she met her husband; they were one of the first StoryCorps stories recorded, and the husband had just passed away from pancreatic cancer.

StoryCorps’s mission is very simple: record the quintessential stories of everyday American people and create an archive of the stories to be accessed by future generations. They record these stories through two NYC locations, and a few mobile units around the country. It’s a 40-minute unscripted interview between two people who know one another well and usually revolves around the big questions in life. Anyone and everyone is encouraged to sign up. At the end of the session, a CD is given to the participants, and one goes to the Library of Congress if the interviewees would like to have that happen. To date, 15,000 stories have been recorded.

You have to hear these stories for yourself – they will change your life. They’ll make you a kinder person. They’ll make you appreciative of the little sweet moments in life in a way that you couldn’t before hearing the stories. Telling our stories, and sharing them, may be the most important work we ever do.

You can listen to a sampling of the stories and sign up for an interview slot at StoryCorps’s website: http://www.storycorps.net/. Check it out!

Life

Advertising what’s not there

Christa Avampato

I was grateful to find a parking space on 95th Street despite that it was 6:30. Most of the time, the spots are gone right at 6pm when parking becomes legal on the right side of the street. It was colder than I planned so I was rushing up the hill to 92nd Street, and had to stop to snap this photo to the left.

Several things could have happened to cause someone to put this posting on the widow of his car. 1.) The car’s been broken into before or 2.) He’s completely panicked about having a car in New York.

Either way, I understand. The news lately is enough to make anyone paranoid. This is what our lives as car owners in New York have come to. Forget getting the club, installing an alarm. Deter them with honesty, and keep them from wasting time trying to find the good stuff where it doesn’t exist. A last ditch effort to keep misfortune from heading our way.

On the way home today, I heard on NPR that Zipcar and Flexcar have merged. The CEO wants to build a $1B business convincing Americans to think differently about car ownership. According to data, 50% of urban car owners could have their driving needs met and spend far less money by using Zipcar. That would cut down on congestion, remove pollution, and decrease road rage. Not to mention what it could do to drop the number of all crimes related to car ownership. Imagine if we could remove half of all the cars from urban areas in America. Then maybe my neighbor wouldn’t have to be quite so paranoid about his radio, or lack thereof.

Life

On Happiness: The people we "know"

Christa Avampato

I was scrolling through one of the blogs I check for work and came across an article about our on-line lives. Everyone is writing about this phenomenon these days – how we have re-invented ourselves through personal pages like Facebook or in virtual worlds like Second Life. I’m kind of tired of hearing about it in all honesty. I like my Facebook page because it helps long-lost friends find me and keeps me from creating long-lost friends in the first place. I’m not home in front of my computer pining away for my “avatar persona.”

I must have been feeling particularly less “know-it-all”-ey than usual because I kept reading the blog entry and stopped to consider its sentiment when the author said how much he appreciated these on-line personal tools because it allowed him to curate his life, the way museum designers curate the lives of famous, and sometimes not-so-famous, artists. I loved that idea. These sharing-tools allow you to create an on-line, multi-dimensional gallery celebrating you. I was feeling better already and kept reading.

The author of the entry then goes on to talk about how “being acquainted with” someone now has a completely different meaning as a result of these sharing platforms. My boss continually uses the line “Do you know (insert name of famous published innovator)?” I always thought this was a little odd – clearly Bob thinks I am a bigger fish than I actually am if he thinks I would know these people. Now I realize what he was saying is “are you acquainted with….”, meaning do you know what their interests and areas of research are? Have you read their books? Do you have a sense of who he or she is without ever meeting?

As a result of my job, I spend a lot of time on-line watching presentations from people like Chris Andersen and Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks to technology and the increasing desire to share insights with a wide audience, many presentations at conferences are not offered up for free after, and sometimes during, the events. Technology has allowed me to know Malcolm, without ever having met him.

This got me to wondering who knows me without ever meeting me. Who is acquainted with me because they read this blog or my facebook page or the other writing I do for some very small publications? What does it mean to know someone today? Or has there been a shift of the paradigm – is the goal now not to know someone, but to merely have an idea of how they think, what they think about, and what interests them? Is that enough?

When I think about curating a life and sharing it with others, the real art is in the edit, just like in writing. Knowing what to overlook and leave out is as valuable as the contents that remain because it gives those remaining a larger stage and greater emphasis. What remains is truly what our lives are about, the rest is just noise. It’s the cutting through that counts so that what’s left hangs together in a picture we can be proud of.

I also like this idea of curating life because it allows me to see where the holes are. For example if I step back from my life and look at what I’ve pasted up on this blog, and bucket the contents, I can immediately see what’s lacking. I’m not writing about volunteering in my community. If this blog truly reflects me, and the best of the insights I gain everyday, then I’m either not volunteering or the volunteer experiences I’m having are not fulfilling. This observation of my “museum of me” helps me start to consider whether volunteering is as important to me as it used to be, and if it is, it will encourage me to actively change my behavior to create fulfilling experiences in that realm.

This is the real benefit of these sharing technologies – to inspire us to action in “real life”. If we use them as a tool for self-reflection, to learn about ourselves the same way that we use them to learn about others, then they help us to step out into the world and build the collection of experiences and relationships that can truly lead us to happiness. These technologies allow us to step back and consider what it is we’re building with each passing day. As a result our lives on-line will have the added benefit of creating a richer lives out in the world.

business, choices

Monday’s new way of thinking – Barry Schwartz

Christa Avampato

I have been toying with the idea of putting themes to certain days I blog in an attempt to make sense of all these blog postings I create. I examine other blogs very closely everyday to see what they’re writing about, how they categorize their posts, etc. I’ve noticed that the ones I enjoy the most are the ones where I know what to expect. There’s a lot of this general on-line diary stuff happening in the blogosphere, though I get bored with that pretty quickly. I’d like to be more relevant than that.

I started to consider things I am most passionate about:
The creation and maintenance of happiness
Thought-provoking quotes
Green and sustainability, the environment
Innovation
Design

Books
Relationships, etc.

If you google any on of these + blogs, hundreds will pop up. Thousands. I was worried that I may have nothing to contribute to these conversations. What do I have that would be unique or interesting or different? In a conversation via email with my friend, Dan, I realized what I could add, as well as one with my boss about a related topic, I stumbled on it. Action. I can add suggested to action to these conversations, and action, how we play out in our lives the information we take in, is always unique. It has to be because my life, examined holistically, is distinct from anyone else’s.

In going through this process, I was reminded again of a talk that Barry Schwartz, the author of a book entitled The Paradox of Choice, gives at innovation conferences. He brings to light that all this choice we have in our society has increased our stress levels and made us less happy. He gives a multitude of examples, and at the end leaves us with the exact same sentiment he started with – more choices may intuitively lead us to believe that we can increase our happiness, though in actuality, it leaves us paralyzed.

I recently sent the link to Barry’s talk to my friend, Dan, who then wrote an email to me with the sentiment, “So what?” (said much nicer than that of course.) While it is good food for thought, what the heck do we DO about it? And that’s where I realized that writer give context to what’s happening around us. That’s my responsibility as a writer, and I have something to add here.

The “so what?” is that if the world is going to offer us limitless choices, then it is up to us to place our own boundaries in order to create happiness, satisfaction, and a sense of purpose. While I have known this for some time, it has taken me up until this moment to put the sentiment into action.

As an example, whenever someone asks me some question like, “If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it?” I freeze completely. There’s so much I want to do with it that I don’t know where to start. Buy a house? Start a business? Pay off my school loans? Donate to charity? And if I donate to a charity, which one? And if I buy a house, where? If I start a business, what field would it be in? So much choice it makes my head hurt. And then I start to think, “a million dollars is not enough, I need at least 5 million!” And the ridiculousness goes on and on.


I take a deep breathe and give myself a small haven to say, “Christa, you make X amount of dollars in salary, and you have to prioritize what you want to do.” And I begin to calm down and consider what’s really important to me. Small goals, earned one day at a time through careful planning. Making less money than a million dollars actually eases my anxiety. The constraint, in this instance, at this point in my life, ironically helps. (And this is only because I do have enough money to pay my bills and have a bit of fun, too. If I couldn’t make ends meet, then of course the constraint is too confining and I have to look at ways to incraese my earnings. This is exactly one of the big reasons I went to business school.)

This also happened to me when I was trying to decide what to do with my career after business school. I was a mess when given the line, “The world is your oyster.” In actuality, it’s not, and I am so grateful for that. I will never become a surgeon, a lawyer, or an astronaut. I am too selfish with my free time to be in banking or management consulting.

I really wanted to be in retail. I wanted to live in New York. I wanted a boss who was supportive of my growth and development. A turn-around would be preferable. And if my job was in the vein of creativity and innovation that would make my day. I got exactly what I asked for in my current job – it fits all of these criteria, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

Several years ago, I was beginning to feel overwhelmed that I couldn’t keep up with all my friends from every period of my life. I felt like a bad friend, a bad person. And then a co-worker of mine at the time, much older, said to me that that’s okay. People will cycle in and out of your life. Some you will always keep close, others are close now because you live in the same city or have the same job, and some will appear just exactly when you need them, or vice versa. Some will fall away all together. And this pattern has proven true. There are just so many hours in a day and choosing to whom to allocate those hours is critical to our happiness. The great thing about technology, like email, these personal blogs, Facebook, is that keeping in touch and staying close is made much easier, and in many ways richer.

In terms of my blog, there are a lot of things I could write about because I’m interested in many different topics. So each day of the week, I’ll post a piece on a specific interest of mine. (And maybe other random ones will sneak in as well if I’m feeling especially prolific!) You’ll know what to expect, I’ll have more of a context to write within, and hopefully this blog will become more useful.

From the title of this post, you’ll see that Mondays will be about innovation and trend, in other words “a new way of thinking”. I am very lucky in that I am learning so much at my current job and it’s proving so beneficial to me that I want to share it in the hope that it inspires people the way all of this knowledge inspires me. Today in particular focuses on Barry Schwartz, an innovation and trend expert. You can see his video from the TED conference at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/93


So while there are a dizzying amount of choices out there no matter what concept we talk about, not all of the choices pertain to you. Carve out your priorities, what really matters to you, and then evaluate options based on those priorities. You’ll be amazed by the number of choices you will have to set aside for the sake of better options, and that limiting will increase your satisfaction with the end result.
Life

Where have all the honey bees gone?

Christa Avampato

I am a self-professed news junkie. I am one of those people that psychologists worry about – the ones who remain glued to their seats watching hour after hour of CNN or MSNBC, unable to tear themselves away from the screen depicting all of the misery and violence happening around the world. Some people may think this obsession, like most obsessions is unhealthy. I like to think of myself as abnormally aware of what’s happening in the world.

60 Minutes and CBS Sunday Morning are two of my favorite shows. It’s my dream to be one of the people that hunts around for obscure oddities in the world, reporting back to the rest of the world on how these seemingly unimportant events really have impact on our lives. For now, I’m just on the sidelines of my couch, feeding my inner nerd.

Tonight was no exception. Having my date cancel at the last minute, disappointing though sadly not surprising given his career choice that forces him to work insane hours, I was happily in my home watching 60 minutes over a bowl of comfort food.

Do you ever wonder exactly where your food comes from and all of the steps that went into getting it to your plate? Bees. That’s the answer in almost every case. 60 Minutes is reporting about the decimation of the honey bee population in America, and now I am as worried about that as I am about melting polar ice caps and the little penguins in South Africa who have had their population cut to 1/8 its size in 10 years. (This penguin story was reported early on the evening news with Lester Holt.)

Part of being an environmentalist is that you are a nervous wreck over the state of our planet. If you think about it too much, you truly could become paralyzed by the enormity of the problem. It turns out that there is a step-child industry of bee keepers who rent out their beehives all across the country. 40,000 bees to a hive. And they are the sole reason we even have fruits and vegetable in this country. It takes 30 trips by bees to a single flower per season to make a pumpkin grow. 30 per pumpkin! The unemployment rate of bees is a negative number. Probably a negative triple digit number.

60 Minutes interviewed a honey bee farmer who’s family has been in this business for 50 years. He’s been visiting his hives around the country and many of them have deserted their hives. Gone. Destroyed. There’s honey inside the hives, and even other bees not associated with the hive won’t come anywhere near it. The eggs and larve have been abandoned, a practice very atypical of honey bees. And there are no dead bees anywhere in sight. A scientist who studies honey bees says that the environment is contaminating the hives, driving the bees out. Normally honey bees can find their way back to their uniquely-scented hive within a two mile radius. They aren’t getting lost – they are running away.

This poor honey bee farmer has lost 80% of his bee population, and has spent $100’s of $1000’s of dollars replacing the bees. And he is not alone – honey bee farmers all over the country are experiencing the same problem. No one knows what’s going on and no one knows what to do.

So while we may be celebrating the mild weather we’ve had all fall, I am very worried. Our planet is going through an unnaturally frightening time. In a very real sense, if these bees go, our produce will be sky-high in cost, if not non-existent. So while we may think that the smallest creatures are unimportant when compared to us all-important humans, we need to be more thoughtful about our inter-dependency. In reality, we need the bees much more than they need us.