Category: creativity

creativity

Wonder: Getting my health and wealth in order thanks to Fidelity

Christa Avampato

Yesterday, I attended a lunchtime webcast about health and wealth for personal and professional reasons. I want to make sure I’m doing everything possible to take care of my finances and my health. It was run by Fidelity and featured personal finance journalist Jean Chatzky and Dr. Mike Roizen from the Cleveland Clinic. It was incredibly helpful so I wanted to share the highlights that they sent in a presentation at the end of the webcast. I hope it’s as helpful to you as it was to me.

fidelity_health_and_money_webcast

 

creativity

Wonder: I’ll be talking about YA books on the Lit to Lens podcast

Christa Avampato

I’m really excited to let you know I’ll be talking about young adult books and about my book, Where the Light Enters, on the Lit to Lens podcast. We’re recording at the end of this month and then it will publish shortly after that. I’m thrilled to talk about this wonderful genre and the impact it has on our young people’s lives.

creativity

Wonder: How to make sure you’re making time for your priorities

Christa Avampato

“We must learn to say no to some opportunities in order to say yes to our priorities.” ~Jocelyn K. Glei

I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea lately. We have taken the idea of “when opportunity knocks…” to an extreme limit. We worry about what people will think, say, and do if we don’t do X, Y, and Z. It’s a lot to manage. Recently I’ve gone back to an old filter I used to use that served me well for a long time. Here it is: If I can’t say “hell, yes” to an opportunity, then it’s a “no”. I’m going to try it again and see how it goes. How do you separate opportunities from priorities?

 

creativity

Wonder: A big thank you to the men who won’t condone Donald Trump’s comments about women

Christa Avampato

I have to admit that Donald Trump’s comments on Friday really upset me. What was more upsetting was to hear people in St. Louis cheering him on and laughing at his jokes. All day yesterday I felt upset about it, and then I started noticing something. So many of my male friends and men whom I admire made their perspectives loud and clear, in my conversations with them and all over social media: those comments are completely unacceptable and no, Mr. Trump, not all men talk that way. Not even close.

To the many men in this world who continue to speak out in support of women, I’m so grateful. I appreciate your candor, decency, and courage. It’s easy to hide behind the locker room talk excuse. You’re rising above it. Bravo! And please, for the sake of our entire nation, keep speaking your minds loud and clear well beyond election day. We need you.

creativity

Wonder: In every career, you can strive to make the world a better place

Christa Avampato

“What I build can influence the way people behave in these spaces. For me, architecture is a social act.” ~David Adjaye, architect

In every career, we have the ability to build a better world. We can follow our deepest personal passions and serve others at the same time. For so long, I thought I had to choose between making myself happy and helping others. To now know that I don’t have to choose has given me a lot of freedom.

I’ve been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot of books this past week about David Adjaye, the architect who designed, among many other buildings, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He sees architecture as a form of justice, as a way to influence the behavior and mindset of a community. These may not be the end goals of architecture on the surface of the work, but they are the root of David’s work. It is a wonderful reminder to us that in every career there are ways to do well and do good.

creativity

Wonder: Writing my second book about Emerson Page

Christa Avampato

“We read to know we’re not alone.” ~C.S. Lewis

This is also the reason I write. A few days ago I mentioned that I was in a bit of a writing funk and now I know why. With my book, Where the Light Enters, I created a whole cast of characters set in a whole new world. Now that I’ve finished the first manuscript, I really missed them the way I miss people I love when I don’t see them as often as I’d like. It’s strange to think that we can invent something that gives us that kind of emotion, but we can. I guess it is a great blessing and curse of our imaginations.

And so today I started sketching out ideas for Miss Emerson Page and the enormous task she takes on at the end of the first book. I don’t know where she’s heading yet, how she’ll get there, or who she’ll meet, but I do know this—it’s wonderful to see her again.

creativity

Wonder: Be open to possibility

Christa Avampato

In the blink of an eye, things can change in ways we never expected. We fall in love with a friend, a neighborhood, a home, a city, a job, a pet. We find ourselves drawn to something that maybe we liked (or not) on the surface and then as we spend more time (sometimes by force) we find our outlook changes.

That’s what happened to me and my neighborhood. Even as little as a month ago I just wasn’t sure about the east side of the city. And then something even strange happened—I actually started to see the people and buildings around me with brand new eyes. I said hello to 23 people this morning: construction workers, neighbors, store managers, and even just people passing by. There was almost a lightness to it.

I was walking little Phineas, and he’s got a little trot that could make even the grumpiest person smile. Still I felt some kind of shift as I saw the new construction rising up and beginning to shape what this collection of buildings and streets will eventually look like.

Being open to possibility is a wonderful thing.

creativity

Wonder: Trust the timing of your life

Christa Avampato

We have to trust the timing of our lives. Maybe you haven’t met the love of your life yet, or you haven’t quite found the right home, job, city, or hobby. Maybe things are leaving your life in greater numbers than you’d like and you’re looking around at a lot of metaphorical or physical empty space.

Please take this post as a sign that what is happening to you now must be the thing that happens in order for you to become the person you’re meant to be with the life you’re meant to have. All of this—the good, the bad, and the ugly—is driving you toward your best self. It’s helping you evolve, grow, learn, and discover. Sometimes these things are difficult and uncomfortable. Sometimes there isn’t a way to know what’s going to happen next no matter how much we plan. There will never be enough plan Bs (or Cs or Ds or Es!) to give us 100% security.

The vast majority of life is unknown and unknowable. The best we can do is trust the process, trust our ability to persevere, and trust that what matters most is the learning. That’s where all great progress begins.

creativity

Wonder: The toughest reality about leadership

Christa Avampato

A long time ago I embraced the idea of leadership as service. If leaders take care of their teams, their teams will take care of their customers, and their customers will take care of the company. If we’re going to lead an organization, a group, a product, or a yoga class, the last thing we should do is play the “look at me and look what I can do” card.

This is what so many leaders get wrong. They bury themselves in their work and forget the crux of their role—to support their team members, individually and as a group, and spend the vast majority of their time removing roadblocks so that their teams can do their best work. The roadblocks can be funding, revenue, processes, procedures, services, and the list goes on.

It takes a tremendous amount of two-way trust to lead—leaders have to trust their teams and vice versa. It’s about crossing the finish line together, not beating one another to the end, whatever the end is. Just as the Lean Startup revolutionized how we see entrepreneurship and management, I hope that this idea of leadership as service revolutionizes the way we see company culture. A leader needs to be the last in line, not the first. It’s so much easier to push than to pull.

creativity

Wonder: A walk through D.C. to clear my head

Christa Avampato

On Tuesday nights I play in a bocce league. I walk from my office in Arlington through Georgetown, past the White House, and then to downtown D.C. to the court. It’s a magical ~4 mile path.

Yesterday my brain was tired after work. I’m learning coding in addition to writing dialogue for our AI product, getting up-to-speed on the healthcare industry’s best practices, processing and pulling apart medical triage guidelines (with plenty of medical vocabulary that’s brand new to me!), and planning our product’s strategy, pricing, marketing, and testing. It’s a lot and I needed a good, long walk to clear my head.

As I wound my way through this city yesterday, I fell in love with this city a little more with every step. The architecture, colors, light, water, pattern of the streets, iconic symbols of our country, and people. All of it just dazzled me. It lifted me up out of my tired fog and into a state of supreme gratitude. Movement creates a movement.