Hasta La Gadget!

Here is some advice I have received and lessons I’ve learned along the way.

1. Be willing to take criticism because it’s crucial to the learning process.
2. Study your superiors. At work, I am surrounded by brilliant female leaders. Learning from their example is incredibly valuable.
3. Find internships. Go to workshops. Obtain all possible experience.
4. Be creative and innovative in the workplace. You are young and offer a fresh outlook into your field. Contribute your ideas and think outside of the box.
5. Understand that you’re never beneath any kind of work, and you’d be surprised what you can learn from seemingly meaningless tasks.
6. Never feel you have to dress less feminine to be respected by others. Your appearance should be irrelevant in professional circumstances. It is your personal choice. Leaders can wear pink. Just be modest and professional and the rest is up to you.
7. On that same note, never feel that your appearance in general matters more because of your gender. It should be unrelated to the confidence you have in career situations.
8. Don’t be ashamed or afraid to ask for help.
9. Write thank-you letters and send thank-you emails. Be clearly and verbally appreciative at all times.
10. Try to save money in all of the little ways that you can. Pack lunches, get REWARDS cards for gas points and shop at Tj Maxx for your blazers instead of the mall. You want to be able to make money from your job, not spend more on it than needed.
11. Be friendly with everyone at work and in your classes. I mean everyone. I am friends with the janitors, and they’re awesome.
12. Not only does being kind to your co-workers create a more positive environment for you to work in, but it is tremendously essential that you can work well with others if you want to be successful.
13. Understand your place and try to be ambitious while still refraining from creating any conflicts or undermining anyone’s authority.
14. Be flexible. Your role will change often. New experience is new knowledge and ultimately leads to being more well-rounded in your field.
15. Never underestimate the power of your education. If you have the opportunity and the means to further it, you should do so.
16. That being said, you don’t always have to pay an absurd amount of money for that education. You are often in control of what you get out of an education based upon how much you are willing to put in. There are plenty of options and there’s nothing wrong with being sensible about funding your schooling.
17. Try to keep personal relationships out of the workplace. They can be messy and you don’t want it to interfere with the success of your work. Also, seeing someone every day after a fall out can be incredibly uncomfortable for both parties.
18. Keep up with current news in your field. Read articles and blogs. Keep your knowledge fresh.
19. Be respectful. You don’t have to like everyone you work with, but you do have to show them respect.
20. Always have a back-up plan for the possibility of one job opportunity not working out.
21. Have a back-up plan for your back-up plan.
22. Basically, just make plans. Be prepared for numerous possibilities.
23. Don’t ever feel professionally inferior because you’re a woman. Yes, women are still the minority among leaders and in management positions, but that’s an opportunity, not a setback.
24. Sometimes you will feel like you have to work a little harder to make an impression than a man would, that’s OK. Don’t use that as a crutch, use it as a motivator to be better.
25. You’re inevitably going to change your mind about exactly what you want to do. Understand that there is nothing wrong with that and just be responsible with your career changes.
26. Be on good terms with your past employers and keep in touch. No door is ever really closed unless you allow it to be.
27. Put emphasis on the importance of small gestures. Make eye contact and shake hands.
28. Never be afraid to express your ideas to superiors. You win some and you lose some, but you win nothing if you keep your thoughts to yourself and confine your creative abilities.
29. Be patient. It’s easy to get frustrated when you aren’t reaching the place in your career that you had hoped. The fact is that all good things come with time, and maintaining a positive attitude is vital.
30. Keep your head up, your coffee strong and your dreams in view, and you will achieve anything that you set your mind to.

There are only a few weeks of summer left, but that’s more than enough time to learn the right way to cut watermelon before the sunny season is over.

Let’s be honest: Watermelon can be tricky. Its round shape causes it to roll around on the cutting board and makes it difficult to slice angular cubes. But one man has figured out the perfect way to cut summer’s most beloved fruit in just a few quick moves.

First, use a large knife to cut the watermelon in half. Then, make two long slices down each side (but don’t cut all the way through!). Next, separate the flesh from the rind by cutting in a circular shape around the center. After that is done, slice the entire center in such a way that you make crisscrossed cuts. Tip it over and watch the pieces tumble out.

Voila! Watermelon magic.

h/t Someeards

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Just in from a place where great things happen: Lionsgate has announced that Lorde will write an original song for “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1.” In addition to her music, Lorde will “curate” the film’s soundtrack.

Grammy-winner @lordemusic to pen an original song & curate #Mockingjay Part 1 Soundtrack! http://t.co/GcpXaGcsrV pic.twitter.com/JANeDiU9uu

— LIONSGATE MOVIES (@lionsgatemovies) July 31, 2014

“Curating the soundtrack for such a hotly-anticipated film was a challenge, but I jumped at the chance,” Lorde said in a press release. “The cast and story are an inspiration for all musicians participating and, as someone with cinematic leanings, being privy to a different creative process has been a unique experience. I think the soundtrack is definitely going to surprise people.”

Lorde teased the news on her Twitter account on Wednesday night.

something exciting is about to happen

— Lorde (@lordemusic) July 30, 2014

This isn’t the first time Lorde has had an attachment to the blockbuster franchise. She covered “Everybody Wants To Rule the World” by Tears for Fears for the “Catching Fire” soundtrack.

I was floored by this Saturday’s New York Times article, “Seeing a Supersize Yacht as a Job Engine, Not a Self-Indulgence.” I was amazed not only by how the subject of the article, Mr. Jones, rationalized his extraordinary consumption habits, but also by the mere fact that the article was published.

Mr. Jones of St. Louis, we learn, is living the “American dream.” Now in his mid 70s, still married to his high school sweetheart, and apparently a natural born salesman, he built Jones Pharma and sold it for $3.4 billion in 2000 (well done, and good timing). From an earlier 2010 article, it appears that Jones’s personal take from the sale was about $500 million, of which he put 10 percent in a family foundation. I guess tithing is alive and well in St. Louis. With the remaining $450 million, the Joneses are living large in a 33,000-square-foot house in St. Louis, and with several other homes, a Gulfsteam V, and, the subject of the article, a $34 million, 164-foot, custom-built yacht.

To be fair, such a yacht is not extravagant by billionaire oligarch standards. Larry Ellison recently downsized, and sold his 452-foot Rising Sun to David Geffen, his second super yacht. Paul Allen’s Octopus measures in at 414 feet — his second boat is only 300 feet. Who knew you needed two?

Mr. Jones sounds like a nice man. Charitable toward the underprivileged in St. Louis in particular, focused on education, and the homeless. And he shares his good fortune with his old “pre-success” friends, inviting them on his jet and yacht all over the world. Nice.

What floored me was how he rationalized spending $34 million on his new yacht and how uncritically the author Paul Sullivan bought into that rationalization. According to Sullivan, “Mr. Jones said he wanted to encourage other wealthy people to think about how their opulent lifestyles could provide jobs just as their charity helps people in need.” The story goes on to report how his $34 million purchase order in 2013 helped revive the North Western yacht manufacturer who had been forced, out of necessity, to diversify into manufacturing wind turbines and smaller vessels. I guess until Mr. Jones got his mojo back, the mega-yacht purchasing crowd was still laying low following the Wall Street-induced economic collapse. Now that’s the leadership we’ve been waiting for!

Mr. Jones is, however, on to something. Both investment and consumption decisions have broad implications and multiplier effects, including the job creation that is at the heart of Mr. Jones’s argument. But in the 21st century, a new and far more nuanced understanding of financial stewardship than Mr. Jones’s is required of the very wealthy. And it can, and must, change the course of history. Let me explain:

• As we know, inequality has reached levels not seen since feudal times in this country. History teaches that such highly unequal societies devolve into either a police state or revolution. This reality alone demands, among other things, “conspicuous under-consumption” by the wealthy, and vastly more strategically directed philanthropy.

• We are in ecological overshoot, using up more nature every year than the earth regenerates on its own. This means excessive consumption “because they can” by the “most successful Americans” among us impedes others now and in the future from having access to a fair share of nature, including a safe climate to carry on life as we know it. Because of the scale of today’s global economy, this is our new reality, and it is unlike anything we have encountered in the past.

• Few things are more wasteful of our atmosphere’s finite ability to absorb greenhouse gases than a large, fossil-fuel powered yacht. Mr. Jones’s boat burns 3.75 gallons of diesel per nautical mile (not miles per gallon). The fuel tanks of Mr. Allen’s Octopus cost 900,000 to fill up (in the U.S., twice that on the French Riviera) and burns a grotesque 28 gallons per nautical mile (more if it’s in a hurry). Imagine a gluttonous man in a lifeboat dumping water over his head to keep cool knowing it would cause others to die of thirst later. Someday soon, this will not seem like a strained analogy.

• Never in the history of civilization has there been such an investment imperative as the transition off our fossil-fuel energy system and onto renewables, estimated at 30 trillion over the next decades. This investment imperative, not consumption, is where we need leadership from the Mr. Joneses of the world.

• Which leads to my final point. Mr. Jones missed a great opportunity. The shipyard had already diversified into wind turbine blades and smaller (more fuel efficient) boats. Imagine if he had opted for a smaller boat, perhaps crafted out of sustainably harvested wood rather than toxic and unrecyclable composites and with an innovative hybrid electric power system that needs price insensitive early adopters. Perhaps even a sailboat of all things! Either way, he could have put in an order for five of them, and shared them with all his friends so they could still go cruising together (and put them out for charter in the “sharing economy”) while helping stimulate the vital transition of the cruising boat industry in the process. At the same time, he could have invested in the company and helped them accelerate their diversification into wind turbines as a second line of business and actually survive long-term, since manufacturing 160-foot yachts is likely a dead end in the real world. Think how much more valuable and empowering those jobs could have been if the company was at the vanguard of two industry transitions.

There are many entrepreneurs busy at work all around the world helping drive the transition to more regenerative economies supporting healthy and resilient livelihoods. Spencer Beebe, head of Ecotrust across the river from the shipyard in Portland, Oregon, is one such entrepreneur who writes in the latest issue of Commonplace magazine, “My 40 years of conservation work has focused on practical ways to integrate ecology and economics, to promote conservation, while creating jobs.”

We need more such leadership and “job creation” that regenerates natural and social capital. And please save the rationalization of excessive consumption, which is just the example we don’t need to admire at this time. I can’t think of a better way to bring out the pitchforks than by burning that much fuel as a luxury in the carbon constrained world we are heading into, a world where we must figure out how not to burn 80 percent of the fossil fuel reserves we’ve already discovered if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

But it is not altogether fair to single out Mr. Jones as our whipping boy. We are all, in the developed world, complicit in a lifestyle that, when analyzed objectively, is immoral, given the carbon budget truth we must face up to, and the inequities of our current economic system. This truth hits harder as the assets we have the responsibility to steward grows. All outlets have inescapable consequences, whether the money is channeled into consumption, investment, or philanthropy.

Welcome to the new meaning and awesome responsibility of financial stewardship in the 21st century.

 Nooka is one of my favorite watch brands. The creator, Matthew Waldman, originally worked for Seiko and then built his own company, creating a unique line of watches that depended on dots and gauges to tell the time and date. His pieces, which prefigured the rise of weirdo watchmakers like Tokyoflash, were geek chic before there was geek chic. Read More