Thank your mentor today!

Did you know that today is National Mentoring Month's Thank Your Mentor Day? It is! I've been so lucky as to have a few incredible mentors in my life to this point, who have literally changed my life. Friends, colleagues, role models ... these people have been integral to my success in college, work, grad school, and life. I learn something from these people who I call friends and mentors every day. I'm calling on them now for a friendly ear as I think long and hard about the next step I want to take post-grad school because they know me and listen to me and share what they've learned with me.

So, get out there and thank your mentor today! Or tomorrow ... I'm sure they'll still appreciate it if you miss that crucial midnight deadline.

"An Exercise In Changing Yourself"

I happened upon this blog posting, "An Exercise in Changing Yourself" by Marshall Goldsmith, an executive educator and writer for a Harvard Business Review management blog in my travels on Twitter one day last week. I've been thinking about it ever since because it seems like such a simple, but powerful way to pick out one solid goal to work on this year and to determine why you want to pick this goal out of so many that I'm sure we can all think of.

One of my favorite passages from the article is, "I have conducted this exercise with several thousand people. Many start with benefits that are "corporately correct," such as: "This change will help my company make more money," and finally end with benefits that are more human, such as: "This change will make me a better person." I will never forget one hard-driving executive who chose: 'When I get better at letting go' as the behavior he should work on. His first benefit was that his direct reports would take more responsibility. His final benefit was that he would probably live to celebrate his 60th birthday."

The exercise goes like this:

1. Pick something that you'd like to improve in your life that fits into the end of this sentence: "When I get better at [this] ..., then [resulting consequence of change] ..."

2. Do it again.

3. Do it again.

4. Do it again.

5. You get the picture ... do it until you really get to the root of why this change that you would like to make will have an impact.

Mine? Here it is: When I get better at not letting the word "should" influence my decisions, I'll follow the path that leads to meaningful work, life, and everything in between.

Next steps: The article doesn't get into the implementation of how to change the chosen behavior or into creating an action plan for change (it is only one little blog post after all), but that's what I went to graduate school for, now isn't it?

Giving thanks

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, which will be upon us in a few short minutes now, I thought I'd offer up a few thoughts on things that I've been feeling particularly thankful for lately. This whole graduating in three weeks thing can cause one to become rather introspective. Pondering the potential for my future naturally causes me to reflect on my past and present.

So, here goes. The list is long, but simple ... if you don't want to read all the way to the bottom, it can be summed up like this: I'm thankful for bold & inspiring people who open my mind, generate ideas, opportunity, hope and love.

But, here's the long version, just in case:

1. people, people, people. all of you. all of them. relationships are what makes my world go round, open my mind, ignite my passion. thanks for sharing your thoughts, ideas & ambitions!
2. my educational opportunities
3. small farmers who grow beautiful, healthy food for me to eat in spite of the barriers they often face to doing this noble work
4. activists and organizers who teach me the power of citizen movements to create social change
5. social entrepreneurs who dare to dream big in the name of changing the world
6. friends and family who love & support me no matter what ridiculous ideas i've come up with lately
7. Twitter
8. a winter CSA share
9. books
10. 8 hours nights of sleep
11. strong fair trade, organic, black coffee
12. Obama's presidency
13. Alan Khazei's senate candidacy
14. Graduation!
15. People who still read my blog, even though I haven't written in over a month. Thanks!

It's been a good year, I think, judging by this surely incomplete list of mine. What are you thankful for? Happy Thanksgiving!

Innovation in tough economic times

Much has been written about this topic - innovation stemming from this time of economic hardship - but I continue to find it all very interesting. Here is an article about how recent grads are turning into social entrepreneurs and coming up with great ideas, partially due to the fact that they have the freedom to think about other options now that their prescribed potential high-power, high-money career options have dried up. My take-aways from this article:

1. the importance of finding work that "feeds your soul";
2. and the potential of my generation to learn lifelong lessons from experiences such as these when we are forced to think of new ways to do things and new paths to carve out

These new adventures don't necessarily involve all of the things we "should" be doing with our education , but I'm pretty sure they're going to have good results for our world overall. My question is how to continue to support and encourage opportunities like this for recent grads when the economy begins to recover and the potential for great wealth from traditional career paths returns?

Three Cups of Tea

I just finished reading "Three Cups of Tea" written by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, and it was truly one of the best books I've read in a while. The book basically details Mortenson's quest to build schools to educate girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is a mountaineer who nearly dies on an attempt to summit K2 and subsequently has a change of heart about what he wants to make important in his life from then on. He becomes what I consider to be one of our greatest social entrepreneurs as he works to fulfill his mission to bring peace through education.

Some of the pieces of his story that I found most remarkable were:

• the determination he showed to complete his goals and keep his promises despite MANY obstacles
• the relationships he formed with his "second family" of Pakistanis thousands of miles from his home
• the way that he integrated himself into a completely foreign culture and came to love it
• his efforts to share his personal story and knowledge of Muslim people post-9/11 in an attempt to diffuse the hatred that was seeping into Americans' culture for this "enemy"

We discussed the book in a book club gathering last night (accompanied by a delicious Pakistani meal!), and one of the questions/comments that arose was a general admiration for Mortenson's complete faith in his mission and his choice to give up most material possessions in order to achieve this mission. I think it's a very real tension that is becoming more apparent as we face the deterioration of our economy and a serious reduction in opportunities for people to "get rich" in the ways that have worked for the past 15 years or so. What is the price of doing humanitarian work? Does the benefit outweigh the cost? Is there a happy medium? Where does idealism meet reality in our financially-based society?

I have some thoughts on this trade-off, which I'll share in a subsequent post because it's a topic that I'm pretty interested in and passionate about ... and I could ramble on, making this the longest post ever! But, for now, read the book! I hope you will love it and be inspired.

Freya's right on the money:

I got this quote in my weekly dose of inspiration via the Ripples email yesterday:

"There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do."
-Freya Madeleine Stark

And I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Stark gets right to the heart of the matter, right to the heart of why we do the things we do, of why people choose to pursue careers that impact the greater good, perhaps of why some people spend entire lifetimes unhappily whittling away at jobs that are unfulfilling and meaningless. If your daily life is not in line with your values, can you ever truly be happy? Goodness - it seems so simple, right? To live out our values in our everyday lives. To believe wholeheartedly in what we are doing each day.

In view of my career as a business student right now, I find this philosophy to be very relevant. As business leaders of the future, we'll need to make sure that our values are injected into everything that we do. When values are not present, it makes it so easy to be part of the business ideas of the past where profits reign supreme and people & the environment finish last. We'll need to operate our personal lives and our companies on the same plane. I see responsible business practices being all about values, all about producing products and services that can have positive and meaningful impacts on stakeholders' lives.

Sometimes I get these quotes in my email and research the quoted person, only to find out that they weren't really all that inspirational in their actual lives and this supposedly wonderful quotation on the meaning of life was really just a snippet taken out of context. Freya came through for me on this one, though. She genuinely and profoundly pursued meaning in her life. She picked up in her early thirties to travel the world, to write, to live out her dreams - she did this in the 1930's, a time when it was unheard of for a woman to be traveling alone around the world. Her biography is entitled "Passionate Nomad". Google her.