Are you shoulding all over yourself?

Besides Dems take the house, I was tickled to come across this gem today:

It’s really silly to just be a slave to work that you can do instead of want to do.

Found it in my interview notes for an article I’m writing on self-employment. The interviewee who said this is a former math professor with degrees up the wazoo. Not long after she began teaching, she found herself dreading Mondays and living for the weekends. So to make life more interesting she started her own petcare business on the side, as an evening and weekend hobby. Still, she didn’t think she could ever give up the day job she had trained so long and hard for, despite the fact that it was bleeding her soul dry. This is what I should be doing, she’d tell herself about the unfulfilling math career. And because women are so underrepresented professionally in mathematics and the sciences, she felt it was her responsibility to tough out a gig she’d grown to resent, if for no other reason than to serve as a role model for young women contemplating what career path to follow.

Somewhere along the way the weekend hobby took on a life of its own, eating up every waking second this woman wasn’t at her day job, all the while remaining a constant source of joy. It was time to choose between shoulding and wanting, and this time to choice was clear: Kick the day job to the curb, and pour her heart into her burgeoning petcare business. And so she did. And happy she remains, with a thriving new enterprise of her own.

Career coach extraordinaire Curt Rosengren first introduced me to the debilitating concept of shoulding all over oneself, though I doubt he put as ineloquently as I just did. As a roadmap of sorts for The Anti 9-to-5 Guide, I wrote an article earlier this year on ten myths of career change we women subject ourselves to. Unfortunately, when it comes to career change, shoulding is just one of the many roadblocks we set up for ourselves. You can read about nine other ways we’re our own worst enemies here. (Free subscription may be required.)

The shoulding ourselves doesn’t begin and end with career decisions though. There’s also the crippling shoulding we creative types commit when we sit down — or avoid sitting down — to work on our arty projects. While devouring all sorts of online interviews with writer Aimee Bender this week, I came across this great conversation she and Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold had with each other, on shoulding all over one’s creativity, among other things. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, I should know the work of all the literary greats before I pick up a pen myself, or I should write literary fiction as opposed to sci-fi/fantasy because everyone knows lit fiction is [insert snooty assertion here], or I should plot out every twist and turn of my novel before I actually begin writing the dang thing, read this interview.

5 comments November 8th, 2006

Madame Speaker

Don’t those words have lovely ring to them? Here’s what Time had to say about Nancy back in September:

Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House, portrays herself as a polite, grandmotherly lady. She constantly discusses her five grandchildren, makes sure her office is stocked with Ghirardelli chocolates, perpetually smiles and never swears in a business in which almost everyone else does. She even has a few cute quirks she and her staff would love to tell you about: a diet consisting mostly of chocolate and chocolate ice cream, and so much energy, she rarely sleeps. Just the other night, she will tell you, she was up watching MTV after midnight.

Don’t believe it for a second. Would your grandmother ever say, “If people are ripping your face off, you have to rip their face off” (Pelosi’s approach to handling attacks from Republicans)? How about “If you take the knife off the table, it’s not very frightening anymore” (her explanation for why she won’t let voters forget George W. Bush’s unpopular Social Security proposal from last year)?

The 66-year-old San Francisco lawmaker is an aggressive, hyperpartisan liberal pol who is the Democrats’ version of Tom DeLay, minus the ethical and legal problems of the former Republican House leader. To condition Democrats for this fall’s midterm elections, she has employed tactics straight out of DeLay’s playbook: insisting other House Democrats vote the party line on everything, avoiding compromise with Republicans at all cost and mandating that members spend much of their time raising money for colleagues in close races. And she has been effective. House Democrats have been more unified in their voting than at any other time in the past quarter-century, with members on average voting the party line 88% of the time in 2005, according to Congressional Quarterly….

Right fucking on!

Add comment November 8th, 2006