Category: dreams

career, dreams, friendship, music

Shelby Lynne

Christa Avampato

Nearly all of my new music recommendations come from my friend, Ken. He always knows what’s new and understands my taste in music exactly. A few months ago, he introduced me to Shelby Lynne and I’ve been listening to her recent album that is a tribute to Dusty Springfield. Lynne was on CBS Sunday Morning this morning, and showed a much different personality than her sultry voice lets on. 


She describes herself as a Hell Cat, someone who doesn’t like rules and doesn’t like people who like rules. Now, I like her music even more. She turned away from a big deal music career in Nashville to build her own road on her own terms. When I was a kid, my mom described me as “hell on wheels”. I’m not exactly sure what that means – maybe that I used to raise hell and then run away really fast. It seems that Shelby Lynne and I both have spicy personalities, and neither of us would have it any other way.

As  general rule, I like risk takers who bet on themselves more than they bet on someone else. There’s a certain independence and confidence in those people that I greatly admire. A friend recently told me about her fear that she has no ability to take a risk – twice she has turned down professional moves to companies that eventually went public providing the partners with million of dollars each and the opportunity to do ground-breaking work. Now she’s worried those chances have passed her by. I hope that’s not true and it was a good lesson for me. 

Life waits for no one so if you have something you want to do and something you want to say, it would be wise to do and say it now. There’s no rewind or pause button on the world. And if you need some inspiration or a soundtrack for your journey, I’d recommend that Shelby Lynne album.      
art, California, dreams, movie, travel

Bottle Shock

Christa Avampato

I have a crush on Bradley Whitford. His role on West Wing almost made me believe in the goodness of politicians. I went with my friend, Dan, to see Boeing-Boeing. A bit long, but I loved it. During intermission I was reading the Playbill and saw in Bradley’s bio that he has a role in the new film Bottle Shock. Never heard of it. Then walking around my neighborhood a few days ago, I saw a poster for the movie. Must be a sign – I need to see this movie. Whoever said that good old fashion promotion doesn’t work?


My friend, Monika, agreed to go with me and I’m stilling smiling from the good feeling I got watching that film, even if Bradley’s part is all of 5 minutes long. I can’t believe that I almost missed this film – the promotion seems very light. And that’s a shame for a movie that is so delightful; as an indie film, I suppose money for promotion is scant at best. I’ve heard people refer to it as this summer’s Sideways. Forget that – it’s 10 times better than Sideways. As Monika said, “it’s all the fun with none of the cynicism.” And it’s based on a wonderful, heart-warming, true story. Plus that cutie, Freddy Rodriguez (Ugly Betty), is in it, too, along with a perfectly cast Alan Rickman and Bill Pullman.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited Northern California a number of times, mostly for vacation. I nearly moved there right after college but I didn’t get the job I was interviewing for there and couldn’t afford to move there without one. I have a particular fondness for that area of the country, and if it weren’t for the 3000 that separates it from everyone and everything that I know and love in this world, I’d be there in a heartbeat. But those 3000 miles are significant, and I gave my heart to NYC so Northern California will remain one of those places I adore from afar and occasionally have a fling with while on vacation. 

What I love about Bottle Shock is that it dispels Napa and Sonoma as these snobby, upper-crust places, and tells the story of their humble roots and the people who grew up cultivating that land and building an industry from scratch, despite the presumably superior competition of the French winemakers. But, you know what they say about those that assume…

In a sort of cheeky, sappy moment in the film, there were a few quotes I’ve been thinking about all day. Bill Pullman is walking the vineyards with his intern and says that the best fertilizer for vines are their owner’s footsteps and that it’s best to starve the vines, make them struggle, because that is the way they’ll produce the best grapes. Just before that scene, Freddy Rodriguez discusses his philosophy about wine-making – that it is best done not by the rich who buy up land to grow a hobby, but by those who have spent a lifetime feeling the soil under their nails. 

While the movie is about wine-making, these lessons are certainly applicable for all of us. At its core, the movie is about sacrifice and commitment. Can we surrender the certain, predictable choices to stay true to who we are, what we believe, and what we love? There is a passion among wine-makers that is difficult not to share when we hear them speak about their art, their calling, and their love and affection for the land. Their dedication is admirable and their ability to enjoy and savor good wine and a good, honest life left me longing for the left coast. Maybe someday….   
books, career, childhood, dreams, Randy Pausch, technology, travel

Randy Pausch

Christa Avampato

A few months ago, I wrote a post about Randy Pausch after seeing The Last Lecture on YouTube. I followed his blog, read his book, and thought a lot about my childhood dreams. At 47, Randy passed away on Friday leaving us inspired to have as much courage to live our dreams as he did living his. Even as he was dying from pancreatic cancer, he was still having a blast, still living out dreams. 


As adults we sometimes forget about those dreams we has as children. We become too realistic, too practical. We box up our dreams, tape that box shut, and shelve it under the title “nostalgia”. We can lose sight of ourselves, living out lives that we never intended to have. Who we really are is housed in that little box, and it’s worth re-opening. 

One New Year’s Eve, I made a little list of the dreams I had for myself. I’ve lost track of the paper in all of my moves but I remember some of the dreams I had. Of the 7 I can remember, I’ve done 3, and I’m working on a 4th:

To travel to a foreign country

To go on an archeological dig
To be fluent in a second language   
To make an artistic contribution to a film
To go on a safari in Africa
To publish a book of my own writing
To run a marathon

A lot left to do, and I need some new dreams, too. It’s easy to let a list like this fall by the wayside because we’re too busy, too consumed with being an adult to remember how to dream like a kid. The greatest thing that Randy Pausch taught me is that it’s possible to do both at the same time. He had a career, a family, and many demands on his time. And he still made it a focus of his life to live those childhood dreams with equal parts of gusto and grace. He knew what he wanted and he went after it. 

For sure, his life was cut short. With his imagination and talents, he would have been able to usher in more sweeping advances in our technological world. He still had so much to teach us. The best way to honor him and the incredible life he lived is take that box of dreams down from the shelf, dust it off, and rediscover ourselves. At the very least, it’s worth the trip down memory lane, and we may just find a new road take. 
blog, dreams, live blog, work

Token Taker

Christa Avampato

I consciously never learned how to type. This was entirely intentional. I refused to learn how to type. I may be the only person on Earth who can “hunt and peck” at 60 words per minute. 

Today and tomorrow, I am live blogging from the BlogHer Business Conference. Rita Ahrens, a talented and successful blogger, is submitting beautifully formatted live blog posts at 120 wpm without a typo. I’m submitting mine MUCH slower and in a slightly more overwhelmed fashion. She’s a professional, I get it. Editing and writing are her job. Still, I look at her perfect formatting in record time, capturing word for word what’s happening, and wish I could do that, too. Maybe learning how to type wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all. 
Did you see the movie “While You Were Sleeping”? Corny chick flick, yes, but for me Sandra Bullock’s character was all too familiar. I’ve gone through most of my adult life trying to keep from being her portrayal of the “L” token taker in Chicago. I didn’t want to feel downtrodden by a system. I wanted to CREATE the system. 
I watched my mom struggle to raise a family on an admin salary, and there was no way I was going to disappoint her by having any excuse to follow that same route. She wanted more for me and I want more for me, too. So I figured if I didn’t learn to type, I couldn’t be someone’s admin. Now as a blogger, that seems rather foolish. I could be much faster and much more effective if I had learned to type properly. 
Still, every time I begin my hunt and peck routine I am reminded of the goals I have ahead of me. It’s sort of my form of rebellion, and a little reminder to keep dreaming bigger and bigger.  
business, Business Week, dreams, entrepreneurship, happiness, risk, sports

Ice climbing and starting a business

Christa Avampato

Bill Buxton wrote a great post this morning on Business Week’s Innovation blog, http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/. In a conversation with his friend, Roger Martin from the Rotman School, the two friends discussed the parallels between starting a business and ice climbing. They compared the characteristic of people drawn to these two activities, specifically their appetite for risk.

The parallel drew out some interesting comparisons such as training, having the necessary tools and trusting in the process. I would also add that there is risk in everything – even in not doing something. We often consider the risk of starting a business, going ice climbing, etc. though we rarely mention the flip-side: how will our happiness, sense of satisfaction and accomplishment be affected long-term by deciding not do something that interests us?

Will we get to a point in our lives when these opportunities are no longer possible because of other choices we made, and then look back with some kind of regret and sadness that we didn’t do something more bold that made us feel alive? While more difficult to conceptualize and put data behind, the point merits some consideration. In the long-run, I’ve found it’s the chances we take, combined with the ones we let pass by, that make up a life.

See Buxton’s full post at: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/mar2008/id20080312_205292.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+%2B+design_top+stories

career, dreams, family

Dragon, Fish, and Chameleon in the Middle

Christa Avampato

Recently, I read a magazine advertisement by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Please put aside that this is a boring big 4 (or is it 5 or 6) accounting firm. The ad features a woman (in accounting?), Gail Vennitti, a principal at the company, explaining how her placement in the family line up – middle child – make her well-suited for her job. This is exciting to me. I am also a middle child, and most of the time the connotation of being in the middle is not good. To complicate matters, I was boring in the year of the Dragon, under the zodiac sign of Pisces, and on the Day of the Aerialist. I am by all accounts a dreamy-eyed wandered. Yikes! Who the heck am I???

Gail takes a unique spin on her middle child attribute. As middle children, Gail and I have at one time or another had to be all things to all people. We have to negotiate in a variety of situations – sometimes were the older child, and sometimes we’re the younger child. We are forced to be empathic; to operate in an ever changing world. We fight to be individuals, though recognize the value of being part of a group. In short, we grow comfortable with ambiguity at an alarming rate. Like chameleons we change ourselves to suit our situation, never once being disingenuous. We change when change is needed.

To complicate matters, my Piscean sign and Chinese year make me equally interested in art and science, with an intense imagination and a fierce sense of love and loyalty to causes and people I care about. I have passionate opinions, and love beautiful things. I have a somewhat split personality – there never seems to be an end in what interests me. I can fit in with a batch of surgeons, and in the same breathe address a crowd of cartoonists.

I used to be embarrassed by all of this. I wondered why I could never seem to have one defining interest, and people nearly always seemed confused by my dual-nature. As I get older, like Gail, I am beginning to see my duality as a bonus. It’s the ability to live in the world of the imagination with my feet firmly on the ground that I hope will ultimately lead toward a fulfilling and rewarding life with tangible results that at one time could only be dreamed of.

dreams, frog design, job, sleep, work

The road to creativity is paved with sleep

Christa Avampato

In recent weeks, the news has been covered with new scientific research on sleep and how we are not getting enough of it. We use our jobs, families, and personal interests as reasons to deny ourselves rest.

NPR recently ran a report on sleep. Though geniuses like da Vinci professed not to need more than several hours of sleep, what he didn’t mention was he didn’t need more than several hours of sleep at a time. In many ancient history and renaissance era books, writers often describe first and second sleep, each about 4 hours in length, with 1 to 3 hours of waking in between. This sandwiched time had a magical quality, often bringing to light a person’s most creative thinking. Sleeping, quite literally, is necessary for dreaming – it is a bridge to enlightenment and to the magic of innovative thinking.

This week on Frog Design’s blog, Tim Leberecht explores the possibility that we may not be as passionate about work as we purport to be. Maybe we’re just working scared….

To read Tim’s post, visit http://www.frogdesign.com/frogblog/are-you-a-passionate-worker.html

art, career, creativity, dreams, Gordon MacKenzie

Finding your inner dragon

Christa Avampato

One of my dearest friends, Amy, left for Geneva today. She’ll be there for six months interning for the U.N. I am so proud of her and excited to hear about her adventures in a new place. Amy is someone who “paints her own canvas” as Gordon MacKenzie would say.

I have finally finished Orbiting the Giant Hairball. I was enjoying it chapter by chapter, putting it down after each because there were so many thought-provoking ideas embedded in nearly every sentence. Gordon MacKenzie fully understood the idea of making every word count.

Among all of the beautiful doodles and thoughts on how to run a company, invigorate meetings, and inspire creativity in even the dullest environments there is one story that stands out to me. It’s the first time a business management book actually made my eyes well up. At the very end of the book, Gordon MacKenzie writes a letter from God to a new born child. He uses the analogy that each of us is born with a blank canvas and a sense of wonder. Somewhere along the way the canvas is taken from us and hidden away where the adult world can draw boxes on it. The canvas will be returned to us once we are deemed responsible, only after we have been properly trained to color within the boxes.

Gordon wanted us to buck that notion. He wants us to “create the biggest, brightest, funniest, fiercest damn dragon” we can. He wanted us to grab our own paint brush to swoosh “through the sensuous goo of Cadmium Yellow, Alizarin Crimson or Ultramarine Blue.” In a very real sense he is asking us to reject stifling forces of any kind in any area of our lives.

To be sure, Gordon’s challenge to us is terrifying. We have done well in high school, gone to college, maybe even graduate school, and worked hard to move up in our careers, all to be told that by doing so we may have just been coloring boxes rather than creating a work of art that expresses who we are at our core and what we value and love. 

However, there is something even more frightening than this challenge that Gordon asks us to take up. The final line of the book is “If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can do it, only you.” Very similar to John Lennon’s quote “most people die with the music still in them.” And it’s true. So few people fearlessly and relentlessly live their dreams and truly build their own road to happiness. My New Year’s resolution: to move even a little closer to swirling my paint brush in Cadmium Yellow, to dabble outside the lines, and learn to play my own music. 

The photo above can be found at: http://www.trishamclean.com/chakra/orangedragon.jpg

apple, career, discovery, dreams, innovation

Realism isn’t the road to success

Christa Avampato

This week I spoke to a friend of mine and our conversation turned, as it usually does, to entrepreneurship. Like me, she isn’t part of the corporate cookie cutter mold that defines many people who get their MBAs. I like to think of us as trail blazers, people who carve their own way through the world. We have a hard time in large companies because they prefer us to stay on the sidewalk and we’d prefer to be stomping around in the grass.

Recently my friend told a family member of hers that she didn’t think she was destined to stay in her corporate job for too long, and was very interested in starting her own business. The family member’s response – “well, you have to be realistic.” I would argue that no, you don’t have to be realistic when it comes to career aspirations, and I would argue that if you are ever going to be happy in a career, you had better not settle for anything realistic.

This disdain for realism may come from my days in working in theatre; it may be genetic; I’m a Pisces – that could be the cause. The world of dreaming, imagination, and wild aspirations is really the only world I understand and in which I feel at home. I have to draw from some of the people I most admire and again, must reference Apple’s commercial that salutes “the crazy ones.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUfH-BEBMoY

Einstein, Amelia Earhart, Picasso, Martin Luther King, Jim Henson. They were not the slightest bit realistic, and in the end their defiance is what saved them and inspired us. Here’s to hoping that we all fight the urge to be realists and forge ahead towards dreams.

The photo above can be found at: http://www.stainlesssteeldroppings.com/images/henson.jpg

business, career, dreams, happiness, work

Getting real to get "unstuck"

Christa Avampato

“With lies you may get ahead in the world — but you can never go back.” ~Russian proverb

It’s likely that the Russian who coined the phrase above was thinking about lies people tell one another to get ahead – in business, in relationships, in life in general. When I read it, I considered the lies we tell ourselves and how they distort our perception because if we lie long enough, we actually begin to believe the lies are true. And not only can you never go back; you also may have a very difficult time moving forward. Through lies, we get stuck.

Jim Collins has said that if we want to get great, first we have to get real. So how do we start on this path to real that will lead us to great? I try to start with a vision of where I want to be, regardless of where I am right now. And little by little I work my way back from the vision to my current situation, one very small step at a time. If I want to own my own business, I have to consider the actual tasks I’d be doing when owning the business, and then I’d have to envision what kind of people I want to work with, and then I’d have to think about what kind of service or product I’m supplying and how it’s being supplied, and on and on, until I get to my current work situation.

Getting real is much easier to handle when we break down reality into bite-sized pieces. And when we aggregate all of those small pieces together, we’re able to build a road that leads us exactly to where we want to be.