Piloting Your Life: In-Flight Entertainment (Being Vulnerable) (Jan 16, 2018)
Welcome Back My Persistent Passengers:
This has been a bit of a trying week between teenage angst, enduring the nasty cold that is going around, and the loss of a dear friend’s husband. I gave up trying to focus on Saturday and caught up on some shows on Hulu (Black-ish, American Housewife, Grown-ish) and discovered The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime. I rarely watch anything as I have trouble sitting still long enough to get through an episode or I have so many other ‘productive’ things to do that I feel guilty if I am watching something and not also doing something else. Admittedly I was working on some client work while streaming Amazon yesterday but Saturday I simply sat and watched, fairly guilt-free. After a tough day with my daughter Rachel, I agreed to sit and watch Pitch Perfect with her Saturday night and while I was a bit twitchy, it felt good to cuddle with her and reconnect after battling most of the day.
I found out about the passing of my friend’s husband on Sunday late afternoon and for some reason I completely lost it. I hadn’t seen them in years but I was the only non-family member at their very small wedding back in 1995. We have stayed connected through Christmas cards and our parents over the years. I knew he had been ill since he suffered from a chronic illness but I didn’t know he was so ill as to die. Rather than sit in my office crying by myself, I went and found my husband Zeke and sobbed in his arms. This is something I wouldn’t normally do, not the crying, but the showing of vulnerability. I honestly don’t remember when I decided that crying or grieving were things to be hidden but it no longer feels right to do so. As I was listening to the interview with Micah Brown (this week’s guest) when we talked about the definition of success and how much we may sacrifice in order to meet another person’s definition of success, I realized the importance of defining, for ourselves who we are, how we want to be in the world, and how we want to define success. There is no one definition. It isn’t one-size-fits-all.
Please hug your loved ones, celebrate who you really are and want to be, and be supportive of others who are doing the same. It truly is a personal journey that requires a village of support.
In-Flight Entertainment: Micah Brown Part 1
Tuesday Interview: This week is the first of two parts of my interview with Micah Brown of Centiment.io. In the first part, we get the (tragic, as we say in our house) backstory behind the man as he is today. It’s no so tragic but definitely interesting as Micah talks about starting at Barclay’s when he was 16 in South London and hacked the process to get a job in credit risk at Barclay’s after being rejected for not having a degree, which was one of the requirements. He found a way to bypass the system that was used to exclude, but didn’t recognize, that not everyone with talent checks the same boxes. Next week we release the other half of the interview where we talk about his experience as a founder, raising funds, and his work in attempting to level the playing field.
