As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.
Quote of the Week: “A female reporter wrote to me after reading (my) article yesterday and said, ‘For almost 30 years, I’ve been feeling guilty for leaving at 6 to try to catch that last inning of my son’s baseball game, and my editors think I’m just not as committed to my job as my male peers, but the other parents think I’m not that committed to my child, and I feel like a failure in both places,’ she says. ‘Whereas if you let women work when they need to get the work done — when they leave the office but then go back to their computers later, they’ll get the job done. But they’ll do it when they need to do it, juggling what’s most important.’” The Impossible Juggling Act: Motherhood And Work, Anne-Marie Slaughter
Humor Break:
Bev: Good morning Al. Did you sleep good?
Al: No, I made a few mistakes.
Stat of the Week: 5 tips for a fulfilling life after you figure out you can’t have it all. Unfortunately life is a series of trade-offs. But how do you manage the trades and make sense out of where you are and where you want to go. Harvard Business Review offers these suggestions:
1. Where do your options fall on the needs–wants spectrum? Most things fall somewhere in the middle. Some wants are so strong that it’s difficult to separate them from needs.
2. What are the investment and opportunity costs? Most decisions involve both kinds of costs. The challenge is to understand if incurring them will help you achieve your goals.
3. Are the potential benefits worth the costs? Does the benefit you’ll receive warrant the investment you’ll have to make?
4. Can you make a trade? Many of us try to exchange something we have for something else that we want. But sometimes the two items can’t be traded. Money, for instance, cannot buy health.
5. Have you considered sequencing your most valued options? Consciously staggering your goals may enable you to be equally successful in many dimensions over time.
For a more in-depth look at this process, read No, You Can’t Have It All.
Action Tip: Take time to work yourself through these 5 questions. You will sleep “goodâ€. Just ask Al.
The Self-Development Corner: Coursera is the 2.0 of Online Learning. First rate university classes with top professors … and Free! So what’s next for Coursera? My guess is the next Big Thing will be university courses in other languages. The first one is already available in French from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Bill Bradley
Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.
Love this one Bill. It took me back to the book Anita and I wrote 25 years ago that looked at the issue of being a successful professional woman and what the trade-offs are. Not much has changed in all this time…we are still asking the same questions. Number 5 on the list of suggestions from the HBR article is what most of them did. Nice job…thanks.