Connecting Ideas

This week I became a regular user of Twitter.  I know this rates pretty low on the early adopter richter scale but it’s still a giant leap from the laggard that I used to be.

For the past few months I’ve held off becoming a Twitter user because I felt that Twitter is a poor excuse for blogging; it’sthe lazy persons blog.  I love the extended descriptions that you need to write if you want to publish a good blog.  I thought that if blogging is a way for people to put their words into well thought out sentences, to describe their world for the benefit of others, then Twitter was created to brutally take the brevity and consequently the meaning out of this process.  I believed it was a bit empty to publish one-liners.

But the thing is I was wrong.  I had to stop thinking about twitter as the same as blogging in order to appreciate it.  I now think Twitter is a way for people to dedicate 140 character to something of value for others be that a link to a useful site or a one line summary of what they’re working on in the hope that it will trigger shared information.  It’s essentially a way for users to connect with each other effectively and quickly.

As soon as I realised this I started to follow my favorite bloggers and media figures and began clicking on the links they had included in their tweets. By the end of the week I felt so much more informed.  I was directed to really great blogs that I didn’t know existed, forums about the progress of the US election like http://election.twitter.com/ and random sites of interest that I have found valuable in some way or another.

So I’m officially eating humble pie, getting off my ‘Twitter has nothing on blogs’ high horse and quietly getting all I can from Twitter.  The really ironic thing is that following people’s internet activity and sharing information on Twitter will probably end up growing my ideas and capacity to write a good blog.  Funny that.

This is a far bigger lesson and I should probably admit it.  I have a tendency to make giant sweeping statements that espouse these really strongly held beliefs like “Twitter is the lazy person’s blog” because I love writing and I want to be a writer and I want to be that person now and in the future.  But for someone who has dedicated my blog to lessons learnt and who admits that the most important thing to me is learning maybe I shouldn’t be so righteous in my beliefs.  It’s great that I have my opinions but really, I’m learning at a pretty intense level on a day to day basis and I should make room for all of the things I just haven’t realised yet.

I love the feeling that Spring is on the way.  It’s cheesy but I get the most excitable feeling whenever I wake up on any given day in September and feel like it’s getting warmer and sunnier and the winter slump that I thought would never pass is finally lifting.  It’s a great feeling.  Regardless of what I have to do that day I’m excited and that feeling seems to last throughout the day.  I think I have a high happiness set point combined with a tendency to be affected by the weather around me.  But his presents a challenge for days when it’s not so sunny…

September in Sydney is a strange mix of really hot days and then overnight it will revert back to winter and for a week we will experience a cold snap.  Being spring the hot weather is well within it’s rights to play this game of hide and seek, but maybe because I’ve lived in Sydney all my life and I’m used to sunshine and warm weather, I feel personally ripped off when the heat goes away and I have a couple of cold days to deal with.

Yesterday, if you listened to other people’s conversations while waiting in lines or on public transport (errr, not that I make a habit of that) the weather was always mentioned and it turns out lots of other people share my feelings.  Talking about the weather was no longer an awkward conversation filler, it became an issue that people felt the need to get off their chest (“It was thirty degrees on Saturday and now I’m back in my coat!!”). And hey, I had to fight off the urge to join in the conversation and stamp my feet and demand weather like we had on the weekend also.

This may seem illogical, I work in an office. It’s the same air conditioned temperature throughout the year so in theory the weather shouldn’t matter to me.  But it does.  Even on days when I don’t even leave the office for lunch I still hate the fact that when I look out the window it’s dark, gloomy, rainy weather outside.  It’s the lack of light and the slight glumness in the atmosphere brought on by rain that causes this feeling.

Yesterday was the first rainy, cold day after a beautiful weekend and I let my hatred of bad weather affect me at work. My energy was sapped and I found that I wasn’t very productive.

I know that this is probably natural.  Everyone has a small pool of ‘unproductive time.’  This is time where you just can’t get yourself to focus.  In this time I think you can still work by doing the mindless, surf-like tasks that are annoying and demeaning to do but are nonetheless a part of everyone’s job.  But yesterday I just felt restless and I know I didn’t achieve much of anything.

Unfortunately, yesterday afternoon when I was staring at my computer trying not to looked too zoned out I was called in for a follow up of my one year review and was told that the pay rise I requested was agreed on. The first thing that passed through my mind was “They’ve just given you a pay rise and you’re sitting there being unproductive! It’s practically stealing!” Oh the guilt! I’ve decided that the guilt of sitting at your desk knowing you’re unproductive gets worse and worse the more you’re paid.  It makes sense.  Expectations are higher; I’m being paid more because increased output and higher thinking is expected of me.  That’s an easy enough equation to understand.

My question is what does it actually mean to be working to your income level? Does it mean longer hours? Or does it require me become more mature and not get as drunk with the other graduates at Friday night drinks?

I actually asked my boss to answer this question for me and he said that none of that matters.  He said that I need to realise that generating any sort of value at work has nothing to do with the amount of time I’m in the office.  He suggested that I try and get it out of my head that working from 7:30- 6:00 is what good workers do.  I work for a media company which is flexible and informal and any sort of KPIs that he will use to measure our value aren’t related to the time we glue ourselves to our desk.

The point he was making – the point which I took on – was that I can outstay everyone else in the office but what will go noticed is when I create something and contribute my ideas to a project.

I have always communicated my feelings better when I’m writing rather than speaking them.  I find that if I’m trying to communicate really personal feelings, or if I need to confront someone, I stumble through the conversation.  At these times I have trouble saying what I mean whereas when I write about my feelings I can clearly define things in my own head and let people know how I’m feeling.  I think that writing alos gives me the time to build confidence and know that it’s OK to feel the way I do.

Since high school I have written my thoughts down in letters mostly to Jemma, one of my best friends.  We wrote to each other throughout high school and through our first year of university but then in our second year of uni we had a falling out and stopped talking for a while.  During that time I still wrote letters about how I was feeling to Jem, I just never sent them to her.  I realised that writing to Jemma was the only way I knew how to write about my feelings properly.  So I continued writing my journal entires beginning with “Dear Jem.” I didn’t really see the harm in it.  And the thing is I knew her so well that I could imagine her responses.

Our falling out lasted 9 months and when we did start talking to each other again (really talking and not just polite talking) we reconnected and I told her that I had still written her letters in my journal because it made me feel better to get my feeling out in that format.  She said, “When you write to me you’re really writing to yourself.  When you hear my voice replying it’s really your own thoughts.  It’s not me.”  I felt that was pretty profound.

Since then I’ve continued writing down the things that I should probably be saying.  I haven’t really treated this as an issue that has been  holding me back in any way but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe the fact that I can only really communicate my important feelings in writing is becoming a problem.  Especially now that I’m living with someone I should probably push myself a bit harder to confront issues immediately and in person rather than taking my time to think and write about how I’m feeling.

From the start of our relationship I’ve written to my boyfriend when I want to tell him something important.  If we’re having an argument and he asks me to tell him what’s going through my head I know I’m terrible at communicating my thoughts and it makes things difficult.  But then if I go away and think for a while I’ll start writing a long email to him and feel clear enough to send an explanation of how I’m feeling.  I’ve discovered that I can be really communicative if I’m writing to him about a problem I’m having rather than talking to him at the time. He finds the lack of immediacy in my thoughts pretty damn frustrating but after I send my initial thoughts to him then we usually have a great conversation about the issue.

We live and work together so a lot of the time we could be sitting within meters of each other at home or in the office and I’ll still send him the email I need to get out.  Last week I was sitting with my laptop on the balcony at home writing to him while he worked in his office and the only thing that was separating us was the sliding door that leads from his office to our balcony!  I think it was our ridiculous proximity to each other that made me see how silly writing to him can be when I should be speaking to him in person.

I’ve realised that by taking my own time to write about things rather than saying them at the time, when they probably matter most, I’m giving myself the opportunity to have a dialogue in my head and imagine all of the possible responses I could get.  In this way I feel safer about telling my friends or boyfriend how I’m feeling.  This isn’t always fair on them.  So over the next couple of weeks I’m going to make a huge effort to talk about things in the moment and in person, even if I could’ve said it better if I had more time to write about it.

Does working for a business equate to being a businessperson?

Working for a business doesn’t mean I’m a businessperson yet.  The other day I was told that I lack a business mind and my first reaction to this comment was to reply, in a very contemptuous tone, “What does that even mean!!??” I wasn’t really happy with the answer I was given (“it’s just a general idea of business, of concepts of commercial viability and of basic economics”) but it did prompt me to write this post about something I’ve thinking about for a while.

I studied at a university known for it’s emphasis on academic theory rather than vocational education.  I really did take pride in that and have always loved studying (I’m a nerd, I know).  I wore it as a badge of honour, proud of the fact that I was learning for learning sake rather than focusing on qualifying for my future job.  I figured I could learn my practical lessons on the job.

I’m a fairly reasonable person and I’d say I’m academically smart but that doesn’t amount to being business minded. I spent 4 years at uni and ended up with an honours degree in Australian History.  I loved every minute of it and will still argue that it’s given me the best education from which to build on.  But it’s only since I started working in an actual company that I’ve started to wonder what being ‘business minded’ means and whether I have it in me.

I don’t have a clear idea of how the economy is doing and the ways this impacts in different markets.  I haven’t been totally oblivious but my awareness is pretty much restricted to checking things like how the Australian dollar is doing against the US dollar or whether interest rates have risen.  I read about Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch melting down yesterday but the real reasons the story caught my eye while scrolling through the world headlines is that the story was about the Dow industrials experiencing its largest drop since September 17, 2001, when the average fell 684.81 points on the stock market’s first day of trading after the 9/11 terror attacks.  I was wondering at the historical significance of the of the drop rather than thinking about how it will impact on interest rates.

When I entered the workforce I became exposed to people for which business is their sport and I feared that the contrast between businesspeople and me is pretty stark.  This becomes even more acutely obvious when I’m in conversation with my boyfriend.  He’s the most business minded person I’ve ever met.  I watch him very closely when he’s talking to different people (I have the advantage of doing this because we actually work together) and notice the way he considers who he is speaking to and the impression he wants to give then pulls it off successfully.  We will have conversations about money and he seems to have a really natural understanding that money is just part of an ‘exchange of value’ (be that time, goods or experiences) whereas I still feel that money is a bit of a dirty word, something it is in poor taste to discuss.  While he always argues that there are unfair advantages in life and I need to be more comfortable with that I still can’t get past my slight socialist tendencies.  I can’t be comfortable with the unfair yet.  So even though I’m still struggling to define what it actually means to be business minded I know that I have some personal qualities which seem directly at odds with it.

Some of these include:

1. I’m unstoppably open about myself.
I can’t help spewing forth information about myself in general conversation.  I have never ever felt the need to hold my cards close to my chest.  To me, being open about my life, my family, my friends or my boyfriend is just about being friendly.

2. I give too much information away in emails.
When I started working one of the first things I was pulled up on was the fact that I’m too chatty, offering up more information than is necessary in an email.  For example, when writing to an investor of our company I mentioned an upcoming meeting and finished with the sentence “It’ll be a party.”  I’ll admit, that’s not just something that business people avoid, it’s something sensible people steer clear of also!

3. I use copious amounts of expression in writing.
I have been asked a number of times to curb all of my expression, like all of the exclamation marks I can’t help using, when writing anything a client or basically anyone above me will see.

All of the talks, hints and outright censures I get about my habits are all about the same thing: I need to become more aware of impact, of boundaries and of other people’s expectations if I want to be taken seriously.  If I’m dealing with serious people I need to understand that not everyone finds a cheeky approach amusing.

I don’t think I should hold being business minded or having business acumen up as this elusive quality, like a Yoda predicting that the force is strong in some but not others.  There are so many private and government courses that promise education in business skills, principles, management and negotiation that all appeared when I typed ‘business skills’ into my Google search box.  The point is these courses are about training, like anything else in life.  I never came across a course that promised to locate and awaken the inner businessperson in me.

My point is that if I’m going to acquire a business mind it’s going to happen through taking on the little lessons like thinking about who I’m writing or listening to, watching my boyfriend and just continuing learning at work.  So after working for another year I’ll be a little more business minded, and the year after that and the year after that….

I once emailed Penelope Trunk.  I had only newly discovered how much I appreciate blogging.  Penelope Trunk’s blog was the first blog that I read, loved and got drawn into.  A couple of months ago, when I first discovered Brazen Careerist I was hooked and read all of her archives. I really do love the fact that Penelope Trunk is open, thoughtful and knowledgeable.  I realised that those are the qualities I appreciate in my friends so I can understand that it is her style of blogging that initially hooked me.  Once, after thinking a lot about a particular entry, I emailed her with my own thoughts.  I consider Brazen to be a fairly big business and I don’t know, I didn’t really expect a reply.  BUT SHE DID!  When I looked up onto my second screen at work, where my email sits, there it was! My reaction was a strange mix of disbelief and the feeling I can only assume a fanatical stalker gets when they know they’ve gotten a reaction from their object of obsession.

I realised that that’s the strange thing about blogging.  The blogger is pouring their thoughts, feelings and perspectives out and the reader is feeling closer and closer to a person they have never met.  At first I thought I was just possibly turning into a strange internet stalking psychopath but then I started to think that no, I’m a completely normal person but even I have this strange feeling of attachment to Holly Hoffman and Penelope Trunk.  Blogging is a dialogue and the comments that readers leave after a blogger has posted are considered, thought about and always helpful. I think that people write primarily to help themselves before then can think about helping each other.  Writing is cathartic so even readers who choose to comment at the end of a blog entry are using the perspective offered up in that blog to help themselves.

I’ve never believed that you can separate yourself from your writing.  The language you choose, even completely fictional characters come from somewhere (even if it’s the boy with a constant runny nose you knew in Year 1 and always wonder what he’s like now).  Even if you’re not writing explicitly about yourself you still are.  I believe your experiences find their way into everything you write.  And Blogging is just a candid representation of that.

For me writing has always ordered my world.  I’ve kept a journal since the middle of High School and I don’t expect blogging to be very different.  I write firstly to make sense of the things in my own head and then offer those perspectives up to you.

Im a 23 year old girl.  I plan on working hard and being successful in a career I’m really only one year into.  I struggle to find a balance (or accept that there isn’t one) between my friends who mean the world to me, my boyfriend whom I have just moved in with and a really diverse job in online media which I love. I have feminist tendencies and while I enjoyed Gender Studies at university I now have some pretty fierce debates about what feminism actually means in real life (I find that I can’t always come up with the answers but still know I want to defend it.  That’s possible isn’t it?).

I was going to call this blog Connected Concepts but that really implies that I have some idea of how things do connect. So I settled on Connecting Ideas. I sat down and tried to write about a few of the things that I would really like this blog to revolve around.  I know I think about work a lot, I think about the fact that I want to be successful but I haven’t really figured out what that means to me.  I think about how I’m supposed to make my relationship with my boyfriend work when I really have no idea what I’m doing. I think about my friends and my family.

But you know what? I don’t really have any concrete themes just yet.  I’m just pretty much starting out my (hopefully long) career, learning how to live with a boy, wondering about women and men and learning how to be a good family member when all of a sudden you don’t live at home with your parents anymore.  So those things, in all of their ambiguity, are what this blog is about.