Piloting Your Life: In-Flight Entertainment (Creativity, Whimsy, and Taking Risks) (July 31, 2018)
Welcome Back My GISHy Passengers:
Our summer is rapidly nearing its end with the kids starting water polo practice next week and school in two weeks. I am a bit sad that we only had one family trip this summer but it was a great one rafting and camping on the Tuolumne River with All-Outdoors California White Rafting. This was our third trip (and second 3-day trip) with them and it was fabulous. Apparently you can do the river in one day if you want to work really hard and two days if you want to work a little hard. We opted for three days so that we could be completely unplugged for three days and we ended up being the only family that stuck around for the second night of sleeping out under the stars (on sand with no tent).
It was amazing to think that two weeks prior I was in Paris and just the week before I was in Napa for an investor event. Seems like the right cascade of adventures, from traveling solo in Europe discussing startups and investing to sleeping on a riverbank and enjoying the great California outdoors with my family. These things always help to put things into perspective for me.
While Europe is more my happy-place, the outdoors clearly is my husband Zeke’s happy-place. He even caught a nice rainbow trout which he then released back into the wild.
I checked email and caught up on what I could on the drive back from Groveland, CA and on Thursday was able to pull myself together enough to speak with the current cohort of Women’s Startup Lab (WSL) founders on early stage investing and due diligence. The current batch has founders from the UK, Kentucky, Ohio, Connecticut, and California.
WSL is just up the street from me in Woodside, so I was able to hear their final pitches (while drinking champagne) the very next day. We were sitting poolside as an inflatable unicorn floated around the pool (I think her name is Sally). This beats sitting in an office building in San Francisco any day especially since my husband dropped me off and picked me up without being too much of an inconvenience!
I am still feeling under the weather from a cold I picked up before the rafting trip but I am trying to get back into the groove of my typical Monday calls (advising/investing). I am not quite ready to give up on summer and fortunately this week is GISH which means we are doing crazy things in the name of silliness, creativity, kindness, and love along with thousands of other crazies from around the world. My daughter Rachel is working on creating a rocket wedding cake that we will launch later this week in the name of GISH and I have a few smaller tasks that I plan to do like lighting a bad memory on fire and creating a free-library or pantry (not at the same time).
Rachel recruited her friend Julia (my producer Jacqueline’s daughter) to help with the task of feeding a friend a bowl of pudding or jello from three feet away by flicking it into her mouth. Hilarity ensued as you might imagine.
Even if you aren’t participating in GISH, take the time to bring some extra kindness, beauty, art, love, and humanity to the world this week (and every week). We all deserve the extra brightness in our days.
In-Flight Entertainment (Leslie Jane Seymour)
I often talk about how we women over the age of 40 are so quickly dismissed and yet we bring so much to the table in terms of wisdom, experience, and financial assets. I also talk about how technology creates a sense of isolation and loneliness. This week’s guest, Lesley Jane Seymour, has a solution for addressing both with her new media company, CoveyClub. I saw an article about Lesley on LinkedIn a few months ago and reached out to see if she would be willing to talk to me about what she is doing, why she is doing it, and how she wants to leverage technology to get us back to meeting face-to-face to reconnect as humans. Fortunately, she said yes and you will hear all about it in this week’s show. Enjoy.
