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Posts Tagged ‘hbr’

The Story of My Life. In Mugs.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 16, 2017| 8 Comments »

Pretty much every job I’ve had since the early 1990s came with a free mug. One day I decided to line up my job mugs and take a picture.

The one on the far left is from a Yankee Swap at either Harte-Hanks or Charlesbridge. I can’t remember which. The second is a stand-in for Harvard Business Review. I broke my HBR mug and didn’t love the job enough to replace the free one with a paid one.

The next two are from jobs I had in Minnesota. My husband was running a company in Maple Grove, so I moved to Minneapolis for a few years.

The two mugs after Minnesota represent 15 years of my life and two small pensions. My final paid job (the cute mug with attached spoon) lasted eight months before I decided all I wanted to do now was volunteer in ESL classes for immigrants.

If you have photos of your own job mugs, I’d love to share them.

I’m laughing at myself here.

101117-my-life-in-mugs

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Soup

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 22, 2012| 4 Comments »

In the workplace, people talk a lot about setting goals, achieving goals, surpassing goals.

I guess that’s reasonable enough for organizations. If you sell 5,000 widgets this month and can sell 10,000 next month, that’s good for the company, and you may feel personal satisfaction, too. You may get a trophy for being widget-seller of the month or a free pizza — maybe even a promotion.

Some people do serious goal setting in their nonwork lives, too. I have a colleague who is helping her husband start a church. Another colleague recovered from a life-threatening event, decided to grab the gusto, and now pushes herself to skydive, dance all night, and launch her own company while working full-time elsewhere.

Personally, I don’t think I have goals. At least not Big Hairy Audacious ones (as Jim Collins and Jerry Porras said in an article I worked on back in the day).

I have finally realized that small accomplishments give me more satisfaction: get the document with the metadata to the webmaster by the end of the day; figure out how to connect the new printer to the home computer; remember to mail two packages on Tuesday; make soup.

What gives you satisfaction?

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