I had the opportunity to see Mario Cuomo at 92Y last night and write a blog post about it for 92Y’s blog. I’m absolutely thrilled to join the talented team as a guest blogger and promote their incredible programming. To read my review of Governor Mario Cuomo’s talk at 92Y, click here.
Step 26: We Could Learn a Lot from Conan
Goodbyes say a lot about someone. Does he walk away bitter and angry? Does she simply just shrug off the disappointment that comes with every experience, recognizing that all our experiences are opportunities for great learning? Does he leave grateful for what was, and hopeful for what will be?
This last sentiment describes the very eloquent goodbye given by Conan O’Brien last Friday as he bid adieu to The Tonight Show, his dream job that he wanted for most of his life. For 7 months he got to do this job, and in a series of unfortunate events, he lost the show to Jay Leno. I won’t repeat all of the bumblings and fumblings of this incident – you know them from the massive amount of press coverage it received.
Similar to every late night talk show host, Conan could say anything he wanted to on air, and certainly could say farewell to NBC, his professional home for over 20 years, and to The Tonight Show viewers in any fashion he saw fit. No one, and I mean not a single person other than NBC executives, would have blamed him if he really let NBC have it. He didn’t. Instead, he thanked them.
Some people have commented that Conan whimped out, that he was forced to say something nice. Not possible. Watch the final goodbye. It was heartfelt and sincere and gracious. He feels extraordinarily lucky that he got to have his dream job for 7 months. So many people never get to have their dream job at all. And the part that really got to me was his adamant dislike for cynicism. “I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. It’s just true.” Conan is living proof that this formula works.
I never watched Conan’s shows. His brand of humor just wasn’t for me. However, after viewing his final sign off from The Tonight Show, I’m going to tune in to his next program, wherever he lands. His fond farewell speech may have just brought him a whole new audience. Grace always works in our favor.
Yogoer.com: Find a Sacred Place
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” ~ Joseph Campbell
At the suggestion of a friend, I’ve been reading a lot of Joseph Campbell lately. I recently watched his DVD interviews with Bill Moyers around the idea of myth and the hero’s journey. A piece of the interviews that really caught my attention is their discussion about the importance of having a sacred place in our lives.
For the full post on Yogoer, please click here.
Step 25: Writers Rising
I’ve always wanted to be part of a writers circle. When I first moved to New York 11 years ago, my friend, Neil, and I used to meet regularly to talk about our writing. We did okay, though our styles and genres were so different. I was interested in writing novels and essays and he wrote screenplays. At the time he was the only writer I knew, and vice versa, so we made it work. And then he moved to LA, in the era before cell phones were ubiquitous. Away went my writing circle of one.
Since Neil, I’ve considered joining a few other writing groups, though they didn’t have the right vibe. I felt like I was putting in more work than I was getting of value in return, and getting to the meetings was challenging with my schedule. So for several years now, I’ve just been writing on my own. Over the weekend, my friend, Kathy, asked me to join her online writers group, Writers Rising. I read through the site and quickly realized that this was exactly the kind of group I have always wanted to join. I accepted her invitation right away.
I like the easy flow of Writers Rising, the imagery it conjures up, and the variety of material that comes together when a group writes a blog together. I’m excited to get to know these other writers, to lift them up, and share in this wonderful process of creation. One tiny step toward my goal of working more with friends in the coming year. Thanks to my pal, Sharni, for introducing me to this wonderful group.
I just put up my introductory post, Happy to Be Here, on Writers Rising. Hop over and check it out!
Step 24: Stay Maladjusted
I’m maladjusted and happy about it. Last week, Charlie Judy, the author of HR Fishbowl talked about Dr. Martin Luther King’s encouragement of maladjustment. He didn’t want anyone to be happy and content with the way things are. He never wanted us to adjust and accept things just as they are. He wanted us to keep striving to make things better. Our discontent, our maladjustment, improves the condition of the world.
Jerry Sternin of the Positive Deviance Initiative had this same philosophy. He pushed us not just to think different, but to actually act different and learn as we go. With this attitude, he brought better nutrition to millions of people in Vietnam. His small, heartfelt inquiries and actions changed the course of that nation.
Toyota believes the same thing. In business school, we studied the Toyota Production System (TPS), the secret sauce that made Toyota a global brand. Developed by Sakichi Toyoda, two of the greatest beliefs in TPS are the empowerment of the individual to make improvements and the idea of continuous improvement. Nothing is ever perfect; nothing is ever 100% as it should be.
This idea might be overwhelming at first, though let’s take a moment and see if we can find the bright spot. If everything can be improved, then there is always interesting work to be done that is useful and helpful. Incremental improvement is the focus of Dr. King’s maladjustment philosophy, Jerry’s Sternin’s initiative and the TPM, so even small steps are worthwhile. We don’t need to be paralyzed by the pursuit of perfection because perfection is never going to happen. We can instead be motivated by a desire to improve.
I just began reading Whatever It Takes, the latest book about Geoffrey Canada’s triumphant organization, Harlem Children’s Zone. Canada’s work is one gigantic bright spot in the field of inner-city public education. He is someone who embodies the idea of maladjusted positive deviance. In 2009, President Obama put forward funding and support to have HCZ’s paradigm replicated all over the country. Canada’s incremental improvements to Harlem over the course of several decades will now be levered up to create lasting, positive change for children throughout the US. He’s one individual with passion and determination. His is a bright spot worth replicating in our own lives, in our own way.
Jerry Sternin, Dr. King, and Sakichi Toyoda are smiling down on us. We’re living their legacy.
Step 23: Replicating Authenticity
In yesterday’s post I talked about positive deviance, the practice of finding bright spots in a situation, in our lives, and replicating them like mad to create further improvements. And then I promised you a personal revelation for today’s post that demonstrates where and how I’d like to use positive deviance in my own life.
Think of one area of your life that you really love, that’s going so well that you smile every time it pops into your head. What do you love about it? Be very specific on this – get down to the meat of what makes you really happy about this part of your life. Now, how can this exact same paradigm be ported over to other areas of your life?
For me, one area that’s going really well is my writing. I love the design of this new site, the new people it helps me to meet, everything I learn from the research and writing, and its tangible nature. Now for the specifics: I run the site and get to call all of the shots on content and design. Yes, I certainly take and love input, and at the end of the day I physically make all of the updates myself. I get to tell my stories and share what’s happening in my life. It’s the one part of my life where I do exactly what I want, when I want, how I want. It’s the area of my life where I am the most authentic. Brian is going to be thrilled to hear this – this is the exact work we’ve been focusing on for the past few months. I’m going to become an authenticity addict.
Now, what implications does this have for other parts of my life? I’ve been settling. Lots and lots of settling. Settling’s comfortable, it reduces stress, it lowers expectations, and reduces disappointments. It’s also boring and at the end of the day it amounts to almost nothing. And that has to change. More of my life has to be how I want it to be, not just how it is. The other areas of my life have to have as much meaning and authenticity as my writing. I have to accept that this will be difficult, scary terrain. I will have to trust myself more and follow my gut. I will have to lose my grip on comfort in order to seek and find more meaning in the other parts of my life. I will have to jump off the cliff, arms spread wide, and trust that I can fly.
I should be more frightened by this, though if I look back over my life, history is on my side:
1.) I worked very hard as a student so that I could build a better life by getting a quality education. It worked; I have reaped the great rewards of a solid career, financial stability, and the genuine curiosity that an incredible education bears. I wasn’t always sure how I’d afford this education, nor did I know precisely where it would take me. I made it up as I went along, and it all worked out better than fine.
2.) I have been willing to take new jobs, despite a lower salary and less stability, because I followed my heart and did the work I wanted to do. It worked; I’ve always done the work I love and I’ve gotten to achieve many of the things on my childhood dreams list.
One of the very bright spots of my life in the past few years has been my writing because I show up everyday to convey an honest, poignant story. I take off the blinders, drop my guard, and go for broke. In this part of my life I’m not trying to impress anyone, nor am I trying to be any more or any less than me. Every time I just trust myself, my life always works out better than I ever imagined it could be. It’s a bright spot worth replicating.
Step 22: Seeing Spots
“You cannot think your way into a new way of acting, you have to act your way into a new way of thinking.” ~ Jerry Sternin, Founder of The Positive Deviance Initiative
In this month’s issue of Fast Company, there is an excerpt from Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The book goes on sale February 16th, and this excerpt provides insights into how to find the bright spots, as small and few as they may be, that lead to radical, large-scale, successful change when replicated. The Heaths take a cue from Jerry Sternin, a professor of nutrition at Tufts University, who, along with his wife, Monique (also a professor at Tufts), gave so much to so many around the world. The Professors Sternin founded the movement of positive deviance and advocated for its use around the world.
There is some societal belief that when someone is exceptional, they’re weird. We think that the exceptional do things that no one else can do when really they just do things that no one is doing. William Kamkwamba in Malawi, whom I wrote about earlier this week, illustrates this point perfectly. If we studied them closely, we would find that a couple of key things that they do are different from the majority, and those few differences can be replicated so that the exception becomes the new norm. Jerry and Monique Sternin believed that if we can find the bright spots, we’ll get more understanding of a situation and greater progress than we ever thought possible.
All day today I’ve been looking for bright spots in specific areas of my life. I’m keeping track of them in my little black book. This idea of positive deviance has had me grinning ear to ear all day. Tomorrow, I’ll be back here to talk about some of these recent discoveries. I hope you’ll join me.
The image above is not my own. It can be found here.
Step 21: A Multi-career Life
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” One of the most common questions that adults ask children. I always had trouble with this one. “Can I be an astronaut and a playwright?” “Can I be a paleontologist and broker world peace?” Adults always seemed to want a single answer from me and I couldn’t deliver that so I was labeled as someone who was very talented and just hadn’t made up my mind yet. Actually I did make up my mind – I wanted to do a lot of incredible things with my life.
Now I’m a product developer who writes, teaches yoga, spends a lot of time with social media, and has a passion for improving public education systems. I’m not giving anyone a single answer on what I’m going to be when I grow up. I’m multi-dimensional. I’m not apologizing for it and I’m not accepting a label as someone who hasn’t made up her mind. I made up my mind a long time ago to be me and explore everything that interests me.
Historically, the multi-career lifestyle has loads of successful examples: Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Pickford, Frederick Olmstead. In modern times, we have legions of entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, and designers who have simultaneous careers, leading to multiple income streams. Many own their own businesses, teach, write, consult, and run nonprofit organizations. So why shouldn’t you think of yourself this way, too? Why must your day job be the sole definition of your professional life?
The good old days of a 9-5, Monday to Friday work life as a separate entities from our personal lives are rapidly fading from view. That doesn’t mean that the good new days won’t be just as fulfilling. In actuality, I think they’ll be more fulfilling. Institute for the Future, an organization that tracks long-term societal trends, predicts that by the end of the next decade most people will have multiple careers. You don’t have to choose one interest or passion over another. You can be a political activist-jewelry designer-accountant. The only thing you have to do is find your passion and go for it!
Examiner.com: My interview with Jerri Chou, Co-founder of All Day Buffet
Meet Jerri Chou, Co-founder of All Day Buffet, an organization whose mission is “to change the world through creativity and business. We incubate, advise, and invest into for-profit/for-good companies.”
Under the All Day Buffet umbrella, you’ll find some kickin’ business initiatives like The Feast Conference, an innovation event that will get your creative juices flowing like the Mississippi, By/Association, a mechanism to introduce remarkable people to one another, and their latest creation TBD, a free email newsletter that delivers one world-shaking idea and one collective action to improve our future. It’s this latest venture that sparked my recent conversation with Jerri.
To read the full interview with Jerri, please click here.
Step 20: Design USA
Over the weekend I went to the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum to see Design USA, an exhibit honoring the winners of the National Design Awards for the last 10 years. I love the mix of simple and complex innovations, the great variety of industries represented, and the many pains their innovations look to remedy. What they all had in common was a very basic insight into human behavior and emotion. Many of them tapped needs that we think about every day.
I’ve been thinking about building products for most of my life. When I was very young, I was obsessed with clean water. I was always very concerned that eventually we would run out of it. I have always loved libraries and librarians, and fondly remember the librarian at my elementary school, Mr. Compenino. He was a very kind, very large man. He was teaching us about nutrition one day and shared his weight loss story. In order to lose a lot of weight quickly, he went on a 30-day fast when he drank only water. I couldn’t imagine this. How does someone go for 30 days without eating, and live to tell about it? Mr. Compenino told us that people can survive for a long time without food, though only a few days without water. My fear of not having enough clean water was cemented in my mind in that moment.
On the nightly news, I would see parts of the world like Ethiopia that were plagued by drought and others like islands in the Caribbean that experienced frequent flooding. I began to think about a way to take water from places that had too much and give it to places that didn’t have enough. Then everything could be happily in balance and everyone could have exactly the amount of water they needed. I imagined a giant underground system of pipes that every city in the world could just turn off and on depending upon how much water they needed. Wouldn’t it be great if I could build that?
It’s this invention that got me interested in science and in engineering. I originally was admitted to Penn as an engineering student, and when my phsyics and calculus professors told me I didn’t have any aptitude for the field, I believed them. I became a history and economics major, a decision that of course I’m happy I made, though there is always a part of me that wonders what would have happened to my life if I had graduated from Penn as an engineer.
My way of compensating for this thought is by being a product developer. I take simple, basic needs and think of products and services that help to serve that need. I’m doing exactly what I did in that elementary school library. It’s a very logical basis for a career. People who care about innovation and invention want to be helpful. It’s the greatest aspect of design – once you are deeply involved in it, you begin to see how profound an impact you can have in the world.
Christa Avampato 
