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NIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY   BY ASSOCIATION LifeHacker linked to an article about motivation and highlighted one particular one. #3 Socialize with others of similar interest. Mutual support is motivating. We will develop the attitudes of our five best friends. If they are losers, we will be a looser. If they are winners, we will be a winner. To be a cowboy we must associate with cowboys. Despite the glaring and very annoying grammatical error, I must say I generally agree with the sentiment. I've noticed that who you associate with has a lot to do with who you become, what you wish for, what your goals are, and how you spend your days. Being surrounded by your kind of people is crucial. More so than you might imagine. And I mean physically surrounded by. People you go out to lunch with. People you see relatively regularly. When I lived in New York, the people I saw on a day-to-day basis were very different from each other. The people I worked with at TFA would never categorize themselves with the investment bankers or the bookstore people I regularly saw. Despite being so different, every single person I was around was interesting, intellectually stimulating and offered a lot to learn from. I loved that. I soaked up everything around me. Everyone's knowledge. Everyone's excitement. In my environment, it was rare to run into someone who wasn't someone you'd want to know. That environment made me want to become a more interesting person. It challenged me. It motivated me. And I didn't realize how much until I left it. I didn't understand how much of it I was taking for granted. I do now. I think I did realize it relatively quickly after we moved to San Diego, but I didn't understand the depth of the difference until recently. The people around you, the place where you work, the friends you have can electrify you. They can make you feel that you can change the world. Move mountains. They can make you feel like you're excellent, deserving, inspiring. They can bring out the very best in you and help you reach all your unrealized potential. People around you can also bring out the worst in you. They can make you petty, jealous, shallow. Lazy. They can make you scared of yourself and unsure of your abilities. Next time you pick a new friend, a new job, a new surrounding, remember this: whom you associate with determines the person you become. BLACK It's been a rough few weeks in the karenika household. First came some unexpected news that really threw a wrench in the comfort of the household, then came a death, and then came another death. All these events meant that we made four trips across the country in the last two weeks. David, who had never been on a plane prior to April, didn't take well to the redeye but was a champ on all the other flights. He loved the Florida sunshine. He cheered everyone up at both of the funerals and reminded people that there's an order to life and that the most important things is for people to come and go in order. He also added some much-needed humor to the very sad occasions we've been a part of. We spent one of our nights in Florida in a hotel. Since David's bedtime is 6pm, and we had a regular hotel room, Jake and I spent 6-11pm in the very tiny bathroom floor of the Holiday Inn. Like the time we were in San Francisco, the very close quarters of the bathroom, coupled with the whispering not to wake the boy up, makes for some intimate conversation. We ended up chatting a lot about life, our goals, our dreams and all the things we were thankful for. When we're home, Jake and I always have an unending to-do list. There is work to be done, books/websites to read, email, cleaning, cooking, David, laundry, are just a few things that get in the way of us-time. When we're away, we know we're not going to get anything done and we end up having the best conversations of our marriage. Times like these make me really glad to have David around. I tend to get lost in the little things when I'm in a bad place and forget that the world is great. Our lives are great. David's the best reminder of that. His laughs, his hugs. His beautiful face. His mere existence is a daily reminder that we've already achieved one of the biggest successes of our lives. Anyhow, this was meant to be an apology for the lack of posts. I've been making an effort to post more, partly for the few who still read me consistently (thank you), and partly for my own sanity. The last few weeks have been hard and thus ended up with no posts. Things are going back to normal (I hope) and such, I am hoping to be around a bunch more. DIGGING TO AMERICA  There are a few writers whose
books I anxiously await. As soon as they hit the shelf, I buy and
devour them instantly. Anne Tyler is one of those. Digging to
America is about two families who each adopt babies from Korea.
One family is "typical" American and the other is an immigrant family
from Iran. The parents of the adopted child are American (or
Americanized at least) whereas the grandmother, who is one of the
integral characters, is the one who came to the US from Iran. The
novel explores many of the complicated issues around what it means to
be American.
As always, it's a fantastic read and a wonderful snippet of the ordinary and yet incredibly complicated lives of people who live in the United States. It made me think a lot about the life my son's going to have. How he will forever be half-Turkish. How that might be interesting/exotic for him or it might be alienating/weird. How the way he feels about himself and his place in the world/country will say so much about what his place ends up being. That goes for all of us: we're so much of what we say we are. The way we see ourselves, defines the way we become. Defines the way others see us. Defines many of our shortcomings and strengths. The image you exude is the image others start getting to know you with. Before I get too off topic, Anne Tyler has written another terrific novel and made me wish she was much more prolific. KAFKA ON THE SHORE  When I asked AskMe what books to read this
year, Kafka on the Shore was the most widely
recommended book. I figured one way I could guarantee that I would
read it was to pick it for our book club. I rallied the other women
around the idea and we picked it as our June book. So, of course, as
soon as I was done with Glass Castle, I picked it up. For some
reason, I was worried I wasn't going to like it. I thought it would
be dense and hard to read. I thought it might tire me out. It came at
a time when other not-so-great things happened to me so I sort of
didn't want to read it, if it was going to be hard.
But I was wrong. I was so wrong. I should have known to trust those AskMe people, they haven't strayed me wrong yet. I loved every minute of Kafka on the Shore. When I read the blurb, it sounded like it was going to be mystical and weird and not good and it was anything but. It was weird and it was mystical, but it was a breeze to read and it was interesting to the very last page. It did get predictable towards the end but I loved the predictability. I loved the ideas, the essence of the book. I couldn't wait for the stories to intertwine. I normally hate open-ended books but in this case, I didn't mind it one bit. And I think it was a perfect pick for the book club, it will lead to a very interesting discussion. Now that I've discovered him, I'm going to have to read Murakami's other works. I hear Hard-Boiled Wonderland is fantastic, too. Women and Startups Amidst a funeral and two coast to coast red-eyes, I attended Y Combinator's startup school last weekend. Stanford's Kresge Auditorium was packed to the brim. Every seat was filled and the back was full of people sitting on the floor with laptops. I was originally supposed to attend the previous evening's event as well but we had to fly to New York on the red eye on Thursday and flew back Friday evening and didn't make it into San Francisco until 9pm, so when I showed up at Kresge, I didn't know a soul. Having worked as a programmer on Wall Street, I imagined the male/ female ratio would be skewed. I attended Carnegie Mellon. I worked at an Investment Bank and I am a programmer. Being a minority as a woman isn't new to me. I had, however, assumed the percentage of women in the room would be something around 10-12%. I was way off. It was relatively hard to count because the room was so packed and because some male hackers have long hair, making them indistinguishable from women when you can only see them from the back. My best count was eight. Excluding the speakers and organizers, I counted eight women in a room of over 400 men. That's around 2%. I've never been a huge women's rights activist or even a feminist to be honest, but this depressed me. For the last few weeks, I've been asking many of my entrepreneurial friends if they knew of technical companies started by women (where the women were the technical individuals as well as the founder and when I mean technical, I mean more than HTML or CSS). Some were able to name maybe one or two and many couldn't even think of a single one. There are many cases where established companies are led by women. When I was at Goldman Sachs, our CIO was a woman. I know some fantastic women coders. There are also cases of companies started by women. Women who are in advertising, marketing, design, fashion and tons of other non-technical fields. But there seem to be very few cases of technical women entrepreneurs. Women and men are different. They live differently. They work differently. They manage differently. They lead companies differently. This is not to imply that all men are the same but just to point out that there are fundamental differences in the genders that makes their styles of starting and running companies varied. One of the greatest things about America is that we have a lot of choices here. Anyone can start their own company. Anyone can do anything they truly want. This means that if I want to be an employee, I have a large number of companies to choose from. I think having more technical female entrepreneurs would give me, and others like me, more options. I feel that not having those options is depressing and unfortunate. I don't know what stops technical women from wanting to start their own thing. Maybe it's the kids (I have a lot to say on this and I'll save it for my next post) or the fear of instability. Or maybe it's the lack of balls. When Chris Sacca from Google gave his speech, he said he'd take two questions but one had to be from a woman. The woman he picked asked for suggestions on helping women make more effective/ forceful pitches. Hearing the question made me even more upset. There is no inherent reason for a woman to be more unsure of herself than a man. When I believe an idea, I am so forceful and passionate that it's scary. That's how I talked my way into my graduate degree and that's how I was able to accomplish most of the biggest achievements in my life. I just felt like if this is the best question this girl can come up with, it says a lot about why women don't do startups. |
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