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What does success look like?

15 Mar

In her memoir, The Mighty Queens of Freeville, author, columnist, and occasional panelist on NPR’s “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!,” Amy Dickinson, writes, “I am surrounded by people who are unimpressed with me.” It’s perhaps my favorite line in a book that I really liked. The self-deprecating humor of famous folks. It’s funny. As I was walking from the parking lot to the library this morning, I couldn’t help but think that it’s been a bit of a surreal week for me as I’ve had encounters with some incredibly successful people. To paraphrase Ms. Dickinson, “I am surrounded by impressive people… and I remain impressed by them.”

It’s a testament to the world we live in, the social media aspect of it in particular, that I had the week that I had…

Friday, March 8 - Brattleboro, VT

Friday, March 8 – Brattleboro, VT

Rosanne Cash

Last Friday, my spouse and I traveled to Vermont to see Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal in concert. This was not the first time I got to meet Rosanne. We became acquainted via Twitter about a year and a half ago. I followed her. We tweeted back and forth to one another a few times. She started following me. In November of 2011, I got tickets to see her perform in Fall River, MA and asked if she’d be so kind as to let me say hi to her after the show. Ever gracious, she did. The same happened last Friday. Kind and funny and smart and one of the greatest singer-songwriters of our time, she gave me a hug, joked about our mutual love of ironing (remembering this from our previous meeting), talked about librarians… it’s one of those moments I’ll cherish. And then, perhaps even more unreal, the next morning as Lynn and I were walking down Main Street, we heard from behind us, “Hello, ladies!” Turned around and there was Rosanne. We chatted for a minute on the sidewalk in Brattleboro, VT like some kind of old friends. Pinch me.

Sherry Pagoto

Bright research star here on our campus, #Plankaday Nation co-founder, author of the #1 health blog of 2011 (FUdiet), and one of my biggest advocates for the new work I’m doing on campus, Sherry Pagoto and I hung out in her office on Tuesday to work on the details of a proposal that will allow me to work on her President’s Award grant. She took me on a few years ago as an exercise physiologist for one of her studies and today is a fantastic champion of me as an informationist. We  have a Nobel Laureate on campus, a few Howard Hughes investigators, and some really outstanding leaders in biomedical and health sciences research. How I got lucky enough to have one of them in my corner… well, pretty lucky!

Facebook chatting with Amy, Wednesday, March 13.

Facebook chatting with Amy, Wednesday, March 13.

Amy Dickinson

As mentioned earlier, I’m also a fan of Amy Dickinson, the Amy of the syndicated advice column, “Ask Amy.” We also “met” through Twitter and I take part in the discussions she tosses out on her Facebook page. She’s promised to take part in my “Jam 51” birthday party, if she can. Maybe the folks in Freeville are unimpressed, but not me. I’m counting on the face-to-face meeting in the future. In the meantime, I’m working up some turmoil in my life so that I can call into her Thursday noontime webcast from the Chicago Tribune. And look! She’s hoping for the same. 🙂

Suzy Becker

I had lunch yesterday with my uber talented and brilliant friend, Suzy Becker. Suzy is an author and a cartoonist and a teacher and one of those people you’d hate if she weren’t so darned nice. We talk over chicken shawarma sandwiches about girl’s high school basketball, her next book, her latest class at the Worcester Art Museum, her innate aptitude for Twitter, Lynn’s and my trip to Brattleboro, the PBS documentary “Makers,” why no women have sports talk shows, and the fact that she’s been on the Diane Rehm Show three times (3 times?!). She gives me a lucky horse shoe as a belated birthday present. I’m going to hang it in my new studio. She leaves to get her kid to the dentist on time and I walk home, still thinking about talking to Diane Rehm and helping someone with a Ford Foundation grant and knowing someone who’s putting together a new radio show and… lunch with me?

So “Lean In” on This

As I think about my week and how it intersected in different ways with 4 unbelievably successful women, I notice how not a single one of them fits the mold of “success” that Sheryl Sandberg espouses in her book, “Lean In,” that coincidentally also had a big week. Sandberg has been all over the air waves, sharing her thoughts on why women have not achieved success equal to men, despite now years of “equality.” We need to lean in, be more aggressive, change our priorities. Maybe. If you want to be the CEO of a gazillion dollar enterprise. Me, I’m glad for the successful people that I know (or at least have had the chance to briefly meet) in my life. And incidentally, not a one of them fits Sandberg’s definition of success.

Tip #1 in Daniel Coyle’s, “The Little Book of Talent” is “Stare at Who You Want to Become.” These are some of the people that I stare at. Despite their respective success – and a few of them are darned successful! – I’m not star struck. (Well, maybe a little.) No, just grateful to see and know and have people in my life to stare at, so that I can model the things that they do that bring them success.

How about you? How was your week? Did you find inspiration from anyone? Do you look to certain people to be your models of success?

(As an aside, just as I was finishing this post, my friend and colleague, Lisa Palmer, showed me pictures of her trip to Italy – when Pope John Paul II blessed her in 1983. I think it may have been some divine message for me to stay humble. I am surrounded by people who are unimpressed with me.)

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The $64,000 Question (Odds and Ends)

27 Feb

My week of birthday celebration is behind me now and what a week it was, filled with a party and a holiday and a lecture to a data management class and a professional group board meeting. One is hard-pressed to complain about a full, fulfilling life. Thanks to all of my friends and colleagues near and far who helped me celebrate well.

The full schedule left me with a bunch of notes in my notebooks, things that I don’t have the time to expound upon right now, but I want to offer as “odds and ends,” in case you might find something useful in any/all of them.

First, the word of the week appears to be EMPATHY. It’s come up in two different books that I’m reading; Dan Pink’s, To Sell is Human, and Lee Lefever’s, The Art of Explanation. I recommend both, by the way. Pink’s book offers advice on moving people, getting them to buy what you’re selling – a service, an idea, or an area of expertise. Lefever’s is about… well, it’s pretty self-explanatory … the art of explaining things to people. It’s an art, he argues, and thus something that we can learn to do. For both of the author’s, a significant key to success in these areas is empathy. Being able to put one’s self in the mind and shoes of another helps to get our point across.

It seems a pretty good message for me as I seek to find my place on research teams. The better I understand the people that I’m trying to sell on the idea that they could use an informationist on their team, the better my argument will be. Likewise, the better I can explain what the heck an informationist is in the first place, the better I’ll not appear to them as an alien from the planet Librarius.

I have the opportunity to give a lecture next week to students in our graduate program in Clinical Investigation. It’s a course on Team Science and the faculty member teaching it said to me, “You’re always going on about how it’s important to have an informationist on the team. Come teach my class one day.” It goes without saying that I’m working up my empathetic nature so that I can both explain and sell this group of clinicians and researchers on the idea. Stay tuned for a report of how well I do.

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I really enjoyed giving a lecture last week to the students taking the Data Management Planning class in Simmons College’s GSLIS program. It’s a small class and the majority of students are auditing it, as they are already professionals working in the field. We had a great discussion about the skills one needs to find success as an embedded librarian. I’ve posted my slides from the lecture to my Slideshare account. As you might imagine, they are more visual in nature than textual, but you may be able to get something from them.


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On my embedded days, when I’m not in meetings, I often search out a quiet spot somewhere on campus (not in the Library) where I can work uninterrupted. We have a new research building on campus and during this transition time when people are slowly moving in to the new lab spaces and the cafeteria has yet to open, there are many good places that fit the bill. Yesterday morning I was sitting in what will eventually be a bustling lunch area, preparing for the weekly team meeting, when a few students came and sat at a nearby table. Recalling an assignment that I once had for a writing class, I eavesdropped on their conversation and took a few notes. They looked like this:

Conversation

Ignore the “Also overheard…” bit in red. I just found that really funny and worth a doodle. No matter how new an HVAC system, it seems we just can’t help but complain about the temperature in a room. Must be encoded in our DNA.

No, the part I want you to notice is what I heard the students saying AND the question it prompted me to write. I don’t have an answer for them. Do you? Is a plan the same thing as a solution? If I went up to them and talked to them about creating a plan for managing their data, would this be helpful? I’m not sure and my lack of sureness left me with the question, “Have we got a solution we can offer?” As you note, it could be “masterful,” if we can create it. (By the way, that was a quote from one of the students. Not my word.)

EDITORIAL: A Colleague emailed me after I first posted this, telling me that my notes didn’t make sense. He was right. Here’s a bit of clarification – They said, “I could have saved a whole day of work if there were standards and consistency in file formats.” Then one said, “That’s a masterful idea if there is a master table.” But such a table doesn’t exist and they don’t have time to go back and make one now. Do we have a solution for them that helps them now or can we just make suggestions for the future?

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Finally, I’ve been looking for a tool that will help me keep my projects and tasks and ideas and such in order. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to trade in my notebooks. (As a matter of fact, I got a fresh supply of Field Notes journals on Sunday, courtesy of my wonderful spouse.) No, pen and paper and doodling will remain a staple for me, but I need an online tool to help me organize a working schedule and working demands that aren’t quite as routine as they once were. Yesterday, I stumbled across Curio 8 and downloaded the free 25-day trial to my Mac laptop. In a word, “Whoa!!”  It’s pretty rare nowadays to find something that you can figure out how to use in about 10 minutes. It’s not a high-powered project management tool, but that’s probably to its advantage for me right now. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles, but rather something that I can put into use quickly and easily. I have a feeling this is it. Is anyone out there using it? If so, I’d love to hear your feedback before I decide on purchasing. It’s not overly expensive ($100), but I like hearing from others before putting my money down.

That’s it for this week’s check-in. Oh! Except to say that I realized this morning that you can enlarge the font size on an iPad to make reading an ebook on it easier. Is this a new feature? Nah… but my 50 year old eyes are!

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Breaking Stereotypes

18 Feb

Like a “Where’s Waldo?” puzzle, how many stereotypes can you find us breaking in this video clip? Watch and read on, and you’ll find out.

 

My birthday is this coming Wednesday. I’ll be teaching in Dr. Elaine Martin’s data management course at Simmons College (Boston) on that day, so we had to celebrate early.

Oh, who am I kidding?! I celebrate my birthday for DAYS! And I believe everyone should do the same.

So to begin the week of celebration, my spouse and friends threw me a grand “Jam 50!” party this past Saturday evening. I share this particular video here to entertain, but also to point out that there are librarians, business folk, teachers, editors, and self-employed entrepreneurial types on that stage. In the conga line we have medical researchers, a pediatrician, more librarians (from different libraries), and even an old tax man! And guess where we’re singing and dancing… a Baptist church’s fellowship hall.

All of this goes to show that too often, too much of what stops us from building relationships that make life and work so much better (and successful) are stereotypes. Better put, the fears that they give us, thinking that we’re really different from one another – too different to work and play together. Let’s get beyond them, everyone! And for those of us trying to make our way into the embedded librarian world, I have but one piece of advice:

Invite the researchers you want to work with to the party! Conga line!!

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