Strong Feelings

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Show Up and Be Real with Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen Mar 13, 2018

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In Episode 9, we talk inclusion riders, the importance of pronouns, and how all of us can better support folks from marginalized communities. If there’s one thing we’re sure of, it’s that we’ve got to stick together—and that means supporting and centering the voices of folks with less opportunity and privilege than us. In this episode, we talk with designer and educator Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen about how listening, and finding community, can help us do just that. They also share how parenting shaped their career path, what it was like to come out at work, and why they see allyship as something we practice, not something we have. Listen up. > If I show up at work as myself, then I’m in a state of being in my greatest power. And I think if you can find a workplace where they want you to be there in your greatest power, then like, yeah, show up. This is how you do it.>> —Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen, designer and educator Here’s what we get into—and of course, there’s a full transcript, too. Show notes If you didn’t catch the Oscars, don’t worry—we start the show by filling you in on our favorite parts. Of note: (Ahem) Janelle Monáe’s pantsuit (photo) Jordan Peele’s win for Get Out and the amazing fan art he posts on Instagram Frances McDormand’s acceptance speech mentioning inclusion riders (hell yeah)… …which we go on to explore: Did you know Justin Bieber requires that his dressing room be filled with carnations? Riders can be wild. More important: Nicole Sanchez writes about taking inclusion riders beyond Hollywood and into fields like tech—and apply them to everything from speaking gigs to job offers. Yep. We also touch on Lara Hogan’s wonderful piece about applying inclusiveness to your hiring process, the Enterprise UX Conference’s journey through inclusive programming, how the Design & Content Conference put together a diverse conference production team, and Women Talk Design’s mission to empower organizers to create more diverse events. Interview: Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen It’s not hyperbole to say it was an honor and a pleasure to talk with UX designer and educator Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen. Stevie tells us about the causes that drive them, establishing a career in design, navigating coming out as queer, and what it really means to practice allyship. We talk about: Where Stevie lives in Vancouver, which is the unceded land of the Coast Salish people, particularly the Squamish, the Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Stevie’s work with Out in Schools, a program that engages students on issues of homophobia, transphobia, and bullying. How having a child while establishing a career—and then making choices about your career and your future—become intertwined in a way you never expected. What it means to realize you’re queer at 27—and what happens next. How we can better support marginalized people by practicing ongoing allyship, and provide safer spaces for those communities. (More on the idea of practicing allyship from Mariame Kaba.) Demystifying and sharing pronouns—and deconstructing the hard-coded way we think about each other. FYOTW We end the show with a little self-love and high-five because, fuck yeah!—we made the New & Noteworthy list on Apple Podcasts! AND it reminds us of all the amazing women-hosted podcasts we listen to and love—including a show you should definitely check out, called Good As Hell hosted by Lizzo. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript Katel LeDû This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by Shopify, the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. And did you know they’re growing? If you want to work with a diverse, passionate team that likes to get shit done, then you should talk to Shopify. The best part: they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply to you. So visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about. Jenn Lukas Hey! And welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KL I’m Katel LeDû. Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. SWB I’m so excited today to talk about one of my favorite topics: inclusion. And, more specifically, we’re going to talk about how people like me, like all of us, can step up and make an impact for underrepresented groups in any field. To help us out, we sat down with a friend of mine, Stevie Thuy Anh Nguyen, to learn more about what real inclusion can look like. But, first up, did you all watch the Oscars last week? JL Nope! KL Uh, I did, and I have a few favorite things I kind of want to share because, first of all — you didn’t have to watch it just to see all the pictures that come out of it but Janelle Monáe’s fire red, like military-inspired pant suit was phenomenal. SWB She looked amazing. KL She looked amazing. I also would really like to make a very genuine request to Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph to run for presidents ASAP. SWB Like, co-presidents? KL Like, yeah, absolutely and then, I mean, to top it all off: Jordan Peele won for best screenplay for Get Out, which is just fucking so awesome. I saw that movie and I was so obsessed, I loved it so much that I started following Jordan Peele on Instagram, and he posts a lot of Get Out fan art, it is absolutely worth following. It’s magical. JL I loved that movie. KL It was so good. [2:02] JL Yeah. Um, also, I love this pantsuit. I just Googled it. SWB Get on the internet right now! “Janelle Monáe Oscars pantsuit.” The cape portion of it or whatever that kind of swoopy back is is amazing! So I loved that she really made it her own. Like it was not the kind of look that not just other women were wearing but that, like, anybody was wearing. But it also felt so completely Oscars. Right? Like it felt like she had the whole vibe — fantastic. Ok. So we can keep talking about the Oscars which I also did not actually watch. Uh I like to look at outfit photos later. But, instead, what I was hoping we could talk a little bit about was the story that came out about Frances McDormand and what she said at the end of her speech. She said something about how she wanted to leave the audience with two words and those words were “inclusion rider” So Nicole Sanchez wrote this piece that Jenn actually sent around to all of us, that was about what inclusion rider means in tech or what they could mean in tech. So Nicole is awesome. She is a diversity consultant who runs a company called Vaya Consulting. So she spent a long time looking at diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. And she wrote this piece where she talked about where inclusion riders come from and what they mean. So she credits Dr. Stacy Smith at USC for originally coming up with this concept, and says that it comes from diversifying talent in the media. And the concept is kind of pretty simple, right? It’s like: if you take a rider, which you may have heard about from the music industry— JL So a rider is like what you request if you are going to be performing somewhere. And it could be something like, “I need to have sparkling water, or I need to have a soundcheck of two hours before I’m going to go on.” It could be— KL A fancy rug. JL Or a fancy rug. It could be all these things, you know, maybe you want to make sure that you’re going to have some sort of food. Or in the famous case of Van Halen, you might say, “I demand there be no brown M&Ms.” Which really wasn’t a demand that they needed, they stuck that in their rider to make sure that it was actually being read. So it was one of those things where if they got to a venue and they saw that there was no brown M&Ms, then that means that someone actually read the rider, and the requests that they were going to do, and that they were going to have a good show. KL Paying attention. I mean it matters. JL That’s why Justin Bieber requests that his hotel room is decked out in carnations of a specific color pattern — I’m not making this up! KL I told you! It’s— [4:30] SWB Ok so, so the Bieber rider is not also what we want to talk about tonight. Although we could. Um instead I mean I really like the way that this concept applies to other facets of life. So what Frances was talking about at the Oscars was like, “Ok. If you are an in-demand name in Hollywood, you have an opportunity, in your contracts, to stipulate that the people who are working on the set, and the people who are working with you, um are coming from diverse backgrounds. You have this, you know, you have the opportunity to say that you want to make sure that they’re being paid fairly. You have an opportunity to make some demands that might actually be relatively small in comparison to what you could be getting paid if you’re a big star, but are really, really huge for people who aren’t you.” And so, what Nicole talks about in her article is really applying that other places like, let’s say, a tech conference. Like, if you’re an in-demand speaker, you also have a lot of power. And you can say, “I would love to speak at your event, but I’m going to need you to do some shit for me first.” And getting really specific about what you expect to make sure that that event is inclusive and welcoming to people who are not in demand like you are. KL Yeah, I really like what Nicole wrote because it made it really obvious and seemed really reasonable to have this filter out into a lot of different areas, right? And, like you were saying, you might not be a speaker who’s super in-demand, you might just be starting out. But I think a lot of it is just knowing that it’s very fair and totally appropriate to ask questions about the thing that you’re about to sign up to do. SWB Totally! That reminds me of what Erika Hall talked about when we interviewed her which is like the importance of asking questions and the power of asking questions. I have been thinking about this a lot and I talked about this a little bit actually on Twitter today. Like, one of the things that I’ve started doing is when I’m asked to speak at conferences which, you know, I’ve written some books, and I’ve done a lot of speaking. So I do get asked which is great but I’ve started asking some questions back and I try to make them pretty consistent, across the board, because I find if I ask the same stuff over and over, I’m more comfortable asking and it also feels a little less weird, like it’s not a special standard, it’s just my standard. And so I have a few things that I would say are kind of in my rider, or at least like, they’re in my Go/No Go [chuckling] kind of file, right? Like I won’t go to your event if you don’t answer these questions in a way that I can live with. So it’s things like, you know, for me I always ask like, “Does your event have a code of conduct?” That’s something that’s on Nicole’s list too. But I also ask things like, “What are you doing to ensure that your event has a diverse lineup?” And I ask it that way specifically because I want to hear how people think about it. And if they tell me things like, “Well, we just want to have the best speakers.” Then that’s a big red flag for me because I question, “Well, how do you know you have the best speakers? ‘Best’ according to whom? According to like people you already knew? People your Twitter connections already knew?” You know it’s like it brings up a lot for me. Or at least it’s an opportunity to have a conversation with them. And depending on how that conversation goes, that can tell me a lot about whether I’m interested in coming there, and also it’ll tell me whether I’m interested in investing time and helping them identify speakers they hadn’t heard about, which I’m super happy to do if I feel confident that, you know, if I recommend a speaker who is from a more marginalized group, who’s maybe less experienced than I am, to go to an event, I don’t want that person to be treated poorly. I want to make sure that I’m sending them to an event where somebody’s going to take them seriously. So I feel like by having those conversations, it gives me a chance to feel out how much somebody’s thought about this, how open they are to change, and how willing they are to kind of put in work. Because it is. It takes work, right? Just like we talked about on an earlier episode: it takes work to think about, you know, not centering all your events on drinking, which is a really answer. It takes worth to think about something like onsite childcare but like every single detail you do as an event planner is work and I want them to think about this as an important piece of their job. [8:33] KL Yeah, I mean, you just said that you have an opportunity to do this and I would almost say that established folks, like yourself, I imagine feel like they have a — an obligation to. SWB Absolutely. I don’t know that everybody does. I wish more people who felt like they had some sway — and I, you know, I have like some level of sway. There’s people who — who are like much more in demand and who make a lot of money speaking in our field. And I think that they have a huge responsibility. But I definitely, 100 percent like I — yes, I think of that as an opportunity in the sense of like, I’m glad to have the opportunity. But 100 percent it is an obligation and it is a responsibility. JL Yeah, um I’ve always did a similar thing to you, Sara, where I had a list of a set of questions that I asked every conference opportunity that came up and, you know, like you’re saying, it helps when you have the standard because then you can send an email back that’s like, “This is what I ask all my conferences. No matter what.” And I wrote a post about this awhile back, mine were focused a little bit more about seeing if they — if speakers were paid, and one of the things that I really like to ask is, “What is the cost of the conference? And how many attendees do you expect?” And then afterwards I would say, “What is your speaker fee?” To make sure that then, you know, if a conference will write back, “Oh our conference cost 12 hundred dollars, we’re expecting, you know, a thousand, 2,000, 5,000 people and then the speaker fee is zero, right? KL Then that math is wrong! SWB That math speaks for itself, right? Like it’s like, “Mmm, hmm, how do you like the way those numbers look on the page?” Right. [10:00]JL Not — not too great um so I think it’s really important, you know, for — to realize too and like it’s a mix of educating also, where I think some people never— never thought about that. And I’m not saying that that’s ok. But like it is — then I become, “Well, here are these questions and why I’m asking them because it’s not ok.” SWB Yeah, I mean I wish that everybody would have thought about this by now. I kind of feel like, “C’mon, like you sh— c’mon, you should be thinking about this already.” However, I also accept that that’s not the case and if my goal is to make more people aware, and hope that more people come along with me on this particular journey, then I do feel like part part of it — being able to do something than education is ok and important. I don’t expect everybody to do that, in all circumstances, but I feel like I have enough like sort of comfort and confidence of where I am that I— I can do that. And I think that’s a service to — I’m not so much worried about doing it as a service to the conference organizer, I think that’s like a side benefit. I think about that as a service to the industry, at large, and to the people who need that information to be more widespread. JL Completely. And, you know, I would say that, as a speaker, I did this but as an attendee I’ve asked for things too. And so I feel like people shou…

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Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable with Erika Hall Mar 06, 2018

Show notes

Let’s be real: writing is hard. We’ve written and rewritten this intro seven times. Taking on any new challenge or project that requires deep thought, passion, and creativity, can push us outside of our comfort zones. It can make us feel anxious about succeeding—but it can also force us to grow and take on new challenges. In this episode, Erika Hall talks with us about starting a design agency, the power of empathy in everything we do, and her brand-new book. > People are actually terrified of asking questions — and especially people who end up in positions of leadership. To say, “Oh, we don’t know this and we have to find something out, and I don’t have the answer” is really scary, and that’s nothing that we’ve been rewarded for our entire lives. And if you want to have a research mindset or just use evidence to make decisions, you have to be in a constant state of admitting that you don’t have all the answers.>> —Erika Hall, Mule Design Here’s what we get into—and of course, there’s a full transcript, too. Show Notes First, Katel shares a secret: when she started working for A Book Apart, she’d never worked on a book before. But neither had the first author she worked with! And it all worked out ok. We discuss getting used to big new challenges, and how to decide when it’s time to take the leap and write a book—and then give the middle finger to imposter syndrome. Interview: Erika Hall Designer, author, and all-around smarty Erika Hall fills us in on how she spent the last year: writing a book (and getting stuck, and writing some more), teaching people how to make better design decisions, and taking on gender bias in the workplace. We talk about: How she started Mule Design and how the agency—and their work—has changed since 2001. Being outspoken online and fighting the trolls who live in our review systems. Why it’s critical to bring empathy into our working relationships as well as our personal ones—and how feeling comfortable being uncomfortable can be the most powerful thing you can do.Why we won’t solve gender bias with education alone; we have to change our own habits and help others learn to do the same. Her new book, Conversational Design, all about how to use conversation as a model for designing interactive digital products and services that are less robotic and more real. The joys and horrors of writing: making it through 2017, surviving the myth that your second book will be easier than your first, overcoming a health setback—but getting through it all to launch a book. Finding inspiration IRL—no, really, sometimes stepping away from our screens and talking to our neighbors is the best way to rediscover the good in the world. And listening to Oprah. And Ru Paul. Fuck Yeah of the Week We end the show with heartfelt appreciation and admiration for Emma Gonzalez (@emma4change) and the massive student activism movement that has been ongoing in the wake of Parkland.To all the people, young and old, who are standing up and speaking out: fuck yeah and thank you. Links: Tweet from David Hogg RuPaul’s Drag Race BBC’s In Our Time The 9 Rules of Design Research Be a Pal, My Dude Just Enough Research Conversational Design Mule Design’s Gender Bias Workshop Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript Sara Wachter-Boettcher Do you want to work with a diverse, passionate team that likes to get shit done? Then you should talk to Shopify. Shopify is the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. And they’re growing! And they don’t just want you to apply to them. They want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. Jenn Lukas Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. JL Whether it’s a blog post, a conference talk, or a book, writing is hard. Finding inspiration to create is hard, but how do we get through it? On today’s episode we’ll talk with Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design and author of Just Enough Research and, the brand new book, Conversational Design. We’ll hear about what motivates her to write, and how she manages everyday bumps in the road to large-scale challenges. But before we hear from Erika, let’s talk about this whole publishing thing. KL So … when I started at A Book Apart, I had never worked on a book before … and neither had Erika. SWB Wait, hold on. You started being in charge of a publishing company after not having ever worked on a book before? KL Yeah, no, shhh, don’t tell anyone that. SWB So, first up: like, uh, I don’t know that anybody could tell because you did great. But, like. how did that happen? KL So while I was jumping into publishing into a book, I was also getting acclimated to the role, and figuring out what I was doing with A Book Apart. And like really, truly, the company was also sort of figuring that out. Which is good. We were growing together. But it was something I had never done before and I was absolutely terrified. I was basically supposed to be the leader on this project. I was supposed to know what I was doing, I was supposed to keep everything going. I was also supposed to establish myself and get a bunch of people to trust me and to work with me and to know that I was going to lead them in the right direction. Um and [chuckles] I felt like I was starting from scratch and completely flailing. There was also no one I could really talk to because I, all of a sudden, didn’t have any colleagues. I had always worked for companies that were large. I had always worked for organizations where I went into an office every day and, all of a sudden, I was, you know, working from home. I was completely by myself and we didn’t have a team. I was the first full-time employee with A Book Apart. So it was really strange to kind of go from being around a bunch of people all the time to being alone. It took me like a good year to just like get used to it. [2:45] SWB Yeah, I mean, something I was really thinking about as you were talking was like, ok, how much I think we often … underestimate how long it should take to get used to something. And big changes take a really long time. You know they talk about like what are the most stressful moments in people’s lives? And some of them are, you know, grief of a close — you know, losing somebody close to them and going through grief, or going through a divorce, but also things like moving is one of the most stressful things. All of those like high-stress things — new jobs are definitely part of that. And I think like — I don’t know, at least I do this to myself where I’m like, “I should be over this by now.” Or like, “This shouldn’t be that big of a deal,” and then it is a big deal and you end up kind of beating yourself up about why aren’t you comfortable yet or why aren’t feeling more in the groove of things yet? And then like you know [sighs] looking at it from the outside though and being like, “Uh Katel! Of course that took a fucking year [laughing] that sounds really hard!” KL Yeah. SWB You get a different perspective. KL Yeah well and even thinking about like the, you know, the question that you asked in the beginning of kind of like, how did you start at this, you know, at this thing that you hadn’t done before? I had like so many fears about that … because I spent, and again, because I was sort of on my own and didn’t have like an ongoing feedback loop, I was always in my head about like, did I make the right choice? And am I gonna do this job well? Like am I gonna serve this company and these people, you know, to the best of my ability? … I was actually just talking to Erika the other day because, you know, her book is launching and she was like, “Oh my gosh, I hadn’t really realized that was both our first time working on a book.” And she was like, “Well, you know what? It worked out.” [Laughing] And I was like, “Yeah, it totally worked out. It worked out well.” JL I — [laughs] I love this because this is like the quintessential fuck of imposter syndrome [laughter]. Like essentially you were just like, “You know what?” You said it. You said you felt like you were flailing but I mean, spoiler alert, because we’re years ahead now. I mean, you weren’t! I mean, you published a slew of great books! So obviously you took this and you got through and you did do an awesome job. So I love it because I feel like we can now look back and talk a little bit about how you were feeling but you still took on that job. You still did it, even with potentially these doubts that you had, or these feelings of flailing, you took it and you were like, “I’m gonna do this.” There had to be this part of you that was like, “I know I can do this,” because you did it, right? SWB Also, this is the obligatory moment where I have to remind everybody that Katel is now the CEO of A Book Apart [KL laughs], where, that wasn’t where you started, right? Like you were the managing editor when you started there? [5:35] KL Managing director. SWB Managing director, sure [yeah]. Um so, right, going from being the managing director, which is obviously still kind of running the show and getting books out the door, to being the CEO means that the people who founded the company saw that you were doing an excellent job and that you not only could lead publishing but that you needed to be at an executive level of the organization. Like … so … yeah. Like you can do it, obviously. I think we have a lot of evidence at this point [laughing] that you can do it. KL Yeah. Here I’m like wiping my brow. I mean, yeah, and I think while I was stepping into having only been in very structured environments, I was like, “Ok, this might be a little more difficult for me.” But it was also a chance for me to be like, “I can make this something that I want it to be.” Which is amazing. That’s an amazing opportunity. But yeah, I mean I think you have to look for those openings and kind of say, “Alright, I can do this job. You know, I have these skills. And it might just be a little bit of different scenario or the set up might be different but I’m gonna apply that.” JL Yeah, I love this. I feel like a lot of times people feel like if they’re in a path with a specific direction there’s no how do they move over. I love that you did that [KL yeah]. You took those and you applied them to a different direction. SWB I think there’s something else thought that maybe also is a parallel to what happens when you write a book which is like, you also have to be able to look at your past experience and have some faith that you maybe know more than you give yourself credit for, or that things that you learned in the past really do apply. And I think some of the time that takes some experience to be able to look at what you’ve done in the past and imagine it kind of coming together in a different way. I mean I know when it comes to writing, going back to thinking about from the author perspective: nobody goes into writing a book for the first time having ever written a book before — like you have to do it for the first time! Right? [Agreeable sounds from others] That’s — that can feel very daunting and I know it feels daunting for probably most people and I think one of the things that really helped me when I thought about writing a book was like, “What are the strengths that I already have that have led me here?” And I mean obviously part of it is like having subject matter expertise that somebody wants to publish a book about. Ok that’s one piece of the strengths. But it’s not just that. It’s not just like your knowledge, it’s actually also about having the ability to take something big and break it down into small chunks … the ability to kind of think about that macro picture of like what’s the whole arc of this thing going to be and then zoom in on the details. Or maybe it’s skills that people already have in things like just doggedly getting stuff done, checking things off the list, like project management skills are massive. Or perhaps it’s just, you know, you can start out thinking like, “I can do this because I know that I have a voice that’s really compelling for people and I’m gonna have to get much better at [laughing] project management,” which I think is true for a lot of authors. You know whatever it is, you have to be able to kind of identify like, “I don’t just have an idea or a topical expertise, I also have some skills that I can apply to this particular kind of problem.” And I think sometimes it’s like … I don’t know, I feel like we work in a culture that really is quick to label people as this or that and it’s like, you know, so you end up in these — these modes of thinking where you’re very defined by the job titles you’ve had before and it can be hard, I think, to remember that those are just combinations of skills and you could combine those skills in another way and end up with a totally different job title that you’re totally qualified for. [9:11] JL Yeah. I can’t think of like how many people in the past have been like, “I don’t really care what title you put on your LinkedIn, this is what you’re going to be doing here.” And I feel that’s like a common sentiment from employers sometimes. KL Yeah. One of the things I love about A Book Apart is that we really look for authors to have — to come with like not just potentially subject matter expertise but like a point of view. Right like some kind of way they’re going to approach or present the thing that they’re writing about that is different or has some kind of meaning that we really identify with. And, I don’t know, I will just say that you know as many doubts as someone might have about whether — whether they can write a book about something, or they are, you know, the right person to write a book about it. It’s like, “We haven’t read a book about that by you.” So I mean that’s a shameless plug to say that, you know, I love hearing from people about their book ideas so, please, write to us, but [laughs] — JL This episode is not sponsored by A Book Apart. KL [Laughs] It’s not! Sorry [laughs]. SWB Um no I think that um I think that that’s a really important thing to keep in mind because I know that going into whether it’s writing or speaking or just in general like kind of … putting yourself out there and talking about your profession and talking about things you know, trying teach other people things you know, it can often feel like — it feels very daunting if there’s other people have written stuff or said stuff before and I have to be totally new and original and then you start feeling like, “Well, gosh, everything’s already been said.” And of course it hasn’t. And you know for me it’s — I’m always thinking like, “What are the problems that I’m seeing out there that my peers are experiencing? And what are the issues that I think people should be talking about more than they are?” And then figuring out what that perspective is and once you have that perspective, I think things really click into place and you end up with a different kind of book, and a different kind of result than the kind of like “Insert Topic for Dummies.” Right? Like which is a different kind of book which might be helpful [KL right] for some people but [yeah] that’s such a limited view on what a professional book could be. Um you know I always think of it as like — I wanna influence how people think about their work and that’s — versus just saying, “I wanna teach them how to do a thing.” KL Yeah. [11:26] SWB I think that’s something that [laughing] Erika does really well, as well. I thin…

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Be Your Full Amazing Self with Sydette Harry Feb 27, 2018

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Have a love-hate relationship with social media? So do we. In Episode 7, we explore the joys and perils of visibility, and talk with Sydette Harry, an expert in online communities. Trolls, randos, and straight-up neo-Nazis: being a woman online can be tough. This week, we’re exploring how we make choices about what and whether to share online. Our guest this week is the inimitable writer, editor, and tech/media critic, Sydette Harry, also known as @blackamazon. She’s an editor at Mozilla and part of the Coral Project, which is working to create healthier communities and comments sections. She’s also smart as hell, exquisitely blunt, and committed to talking about what’s wrong online in the voice she grew up with. > Yes, in a lot of ways I am more diverse than the average person who shows up to a lot of these things. We’re not going to lie about that. I am, by virtue of being black and female, even though I am a cis, able-bodied person, I am more diverse than the people you usually have in there. That being said, I’m still an Ivy League graduate. I’m still a person of a certain education… So when you say that I am “diversity,” let’s all be clear here: you ain’t doin’ that well, fam. You’re not doing that good.>> —Sydette Harry Here’s what we cover—and of course, we’ve got a full transcript, too. Show notes A year ago, Lindy West quit Twitter—and she’s not coming back. We miss her voice, but we’re also a little jealous. Plus: Jenn moves her sports talk to Facebook, Katel closes the tab and never looks back, and we all wonder whether Klout still exists. (Sara used to be influential in burritos. Just saying.) Interview: Sydette Harry Get comfortable, because you won’t want to miss a second of Sydette’s searing commentary on tech culture, Twitter, journalism, race, gender, and weight. We talk about: Sydette’s work with the Coral Project. Why she’s calling out media for telling amazing people that they don’t belong. How Twitter’s insistence it was the “free speech wing of the free speech party” left it vulnerable to abuse. The Prep for Prep program, the Bronx is Burning era, and the limitations of teaching kids from under-resourced areas how to fit into elite circles. Presentation voice, “home” voice, and the politics of code-switching (or not). Rebuilding life and family in the wake of her father’s deportation under IIRIRA. Managing polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), getting medical care in a fat-phobic society, and how dramatic weight loss changed the way Sydette was treated. Fuck Yeah of the Week: Ladies Get Paid We’ve talked a lot on the show about wages, being underpaid, and how hard it can be to negotiate at work. So this week, we give a fuck yeah to a group educating and empowering cis and trans women and non-binary or gender non-conforming folks to get paid fairly. Check out Ladies Get Paid for workshops, town hall conversations, and more. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript Katel LeDû [Ad spot] This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by our friends at Shopify, the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs like me! And A Book Apart. Are you looking to join forces with a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team? Well Shopify has great news: they’re hiring more awesome people to join them and they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. Jenn Lukas [Music fades out] Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KL I’m Katel LeDû Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. JL Today we’re talking about online personas, communities, and our love/hate relationship with social media. What do we want out of it? And how do we decide how visible to be in a world that’s full of trolls and randos constantly popping into your mentions to tell you that you’re wrong? We’re also joined by Sydette Harry, who works with Mozilla and the Coral Project on building healthier online communities and comments sections. We’ll talk about how race and gender play a role in what happens online. SWB Hey, do you all remember last year when Lindy West quit Twitter? JL No, what happened? SWB Ok, so Lindy is a writer and a comedian, and she had this book come out called Shrill, which is a memoir. And she’s awesome. And she was one of my favorite voices on Twitter, and then one day last January she just deactivated, and she ended up writing about it in The Guardian. She did it on the day that, at the time, our president-elect was taunting North Korea about nuclear weapons on Twitter. And she was just like, I’ve had enough. So she wrote in The Guardian that, you know, “For the past five years, has been a machine where I put in unpaid work and tension headaches come out.” She talks about how she’s used it to write jokes for free, post political commentary for free, answer questions for free, do feminism 101 for free, and she wrote that, you know, “Off Twitter these are all things by which I make my living, but on Twitter I do them pro bono. And in return I’m micromanaged in real time by strangers, neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit, and men enjoy unfettered direct access to my brain, so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.” So she’s been off Twitter for a year, and I’ve been wondering, is Lindy going to come back? Because she was also somebody who I really looked to for interesting insight and conversation. And as much as I really understand everything she’s saying and I agree with it, quitting Twitter also feels impossible to me because it’s something I’ve relied on for such a long time, sort of personally and professionally. Well, Lindy is not coming back. So earlier this month she wrote a new piece called “I Quit Twitter and it Feels Great.” And she wrote about what her life is like now. She’s like, “I don’t wake up with a pit in my stomach every day… I don’t get dragged into protracted, bad-faith arguments with teenage boys about whether poor people deserve medical care… I don’t spend hours every week blocking and reporting trolls.” And I think about this a lot because like I also am spending more time than I would like to on that kind of shit. But at the same time, I love so much about Twitter, and about social media in general, there’s a lot of stuff that it’s really connected me to. And so it made me really curious, like, how are you all negotiating this? How do you think about your visibility online? Do you feel like you’re making choices as a result of all of that crap? JL Well that sounds lovely, I have to say, to some extent. But I have not followed that same path. KL Yeah, I mean, well Sara and I, actually, we were really lucky: we just saw Lindy speak at an event and I actually really liked something that she said about Twitter and Facebook, those platforms, they want you to and they’re really banking on you to think that they’re the only way, the only way that you can connect with other people. And like while that’s bullshit, we know at the core, it’s really hard, like you were just saying, Sara. I mean this is a lot of how we have gotten to know each other, and a lot of people that we’re friends with, and have made really good connections to work. So I don’t know, I mean, I think it’s trying to find some kind of balance, but I don’t know. I look at both of you and I don’t participate that much on Twitter or Facebook, I guess, but I was thinking back on this. When I was really starting to feel like I had something, maybe, to say, or like I would feel comfortable saying something on Twitter, I was watching all these people that I really loved and cared about getting completely trashed just for like existing there. And I got really scared. So I think that’s why I haven’t really put myself out there at all. JL I think one of the things that I find hard to grasp about Twitter is Twitter now versus Twitter 10 years ago. KL Yeah. JL And I feel like I still have this … like love relationship with Twitter, for the Twitter that I loved 10 years ago, which I just felt was way more focused on specific technology news, which is what I was looking for at the time, and sort of what I was really more putting out was technology news. [5:00] And now it’s so much more. And, you know, it’s sort of — when people are like, “Oh, I long for the good ol’ days!” And part of me is like, “Oh! But Twitter used to be this!” And I’m like, “But just because it used to be something doesn’t mean it is that or ever will be again. And I think for me that’s sort of trying to find how much I still interact with it is definitely not how much I used to. SWB And I mean like of course it’s changed, right? It’s a big platform and it has so much power to get the news to everybody in the world really quickly and some of that stuff is amazing, but it is also overwhelming and can be a little difficult, I think, to handle the kind of like context-shifting of somebody wanting to tell me about some article they wrote that’s relevant to user experience that I might want to read about for work. But then also, here’s the latest absolutely batshit thing the president said,” and then also, “here’s somebody with a really funny joke and a dog picture,” which I like. Don’t get rid of those [KL chuckles]. And then all of a sudden we go to the latest tragedy. And I think that that mishmash of everything is hard. It’s almost like a context collapse, right? Like there is no context anymore. It’s all just in this one weird stream. And I recognize that I have control. I can unfollow. I can create channels that I want to use. I can put people into this or that list, I can follow those certain lists for certain things, but that’s not really how I like to use Twitter. That’s not — then I feel like it’s a job to manage it [uh huh! Yeah! Yes! Right][laughing], and I don’t really want that job. But the thing is, it’s also a really powerful place where I’ve met so many great people, and has been super important to my career, and I hear this a lot from women, especially, who feel like that’s where they were able to find networks and establish some professional footing, and yet … if I have to have one more conversation with some rando who wants to explain the topic of my book back to me, I’m going to lose it. JL I think, for me, I’ve had transition what I post on Twitter over the years. So first starting on Twitter I would post about any random thought that popped into my head, a lot of sports, and then also, because my focus is in engineering and technology, a lot of development news, and one of the things I found is I’d get a lot of feedback from people that would be like, “Oh. It’s baseball season. I should unfollow Jenn Lukas because she’s tweeting about sports again.” And I was like, “Hey!” But then part of me is like, well, you know what? What I go to Twitter for is to read technology news, and so I just sort of took that at that time and was like, you know what I’m going to do? My Twitter account is going to focus more on development, engineering, UX, UI, links, things I write, that sort of subject, and then I moved all my more personal thoughts, including sports, cuz that’s personal [laughter]. My love of the Eagles is very personal! KL Gets personal. SWB I’ve seen Jenn do a football dance, it’s extremely personal! [Laughter.] JL But I moved that all to Facebook where I found the audience sort of matched better what I was doing there. So more local friends, more of the people that wanted to hear more about that, and where with the comments on Facebook, I could have more conversations about those personal things. Whereas Twitter where it’s a megaphone versus a two-way conversation there mostly. So there I kept things that were more announcements and then moved things conversational to Facebook. And, like you said though, Sara, you get into this weird context switching. So that’s worked for me and I think it’s worked really well, but there are times where I’ll go to Twitter and I’ll be like, “Oh. I want to post about this thing I wrote.” But then there’s a school shooting and, for me, I can’t look at this stuff and be like, yeah, lemme tell you about a new variable font on the web when there was just a shooting in Florida, and that feels super weird for me. And those are the times where I don’t really even know how to handle social media. SWB How could anybody, right? Like we’re dealing with a world that communicates in such an always-on kind of way, and I don’t know that anybody has figured out what to do with that, and what is a healthy way to deal with that. I sometimes feel like I end up spending all of this time kind of hemming and hawing and debating about whether I should post anything at all. And in a way that I never used to do. And so like, for example, I will sit there and think through the various potential outcomes like, “If I’m going to say something that’s kind of funny, is this something where somebody is going to not get the joke and then they’re going to get mad, and then they’re going to snowball from there? Is this a thing that I’m going to have to be explaining the joke to people all day? Is this a thing where I’m going to have to be, like, defending my own credibility to talk about this subject? Like what kind of labor am I going to have to put in to manage this?” And then also I start thinking like, “Well how does this fit into the overall context of other things that I post?” [10:00] And where I used to be just like, “Here’s a funny, random thought that I had on my way to the bank!” And it was OK. I’ve stopped feeling like that, and I’ve actually found that it’s almost like I have, in some ways, less faith in myself over knowing what I want to be communicating, which is a little bit unsettling. KL Yeah. You’re second-guessing yourself. I mean that’s where my anxiety paralysis comes in really handy because I just don’t do it [laughing] and then I walk away, and then I’m like, “All right, wait till the next decision.” JL And I totally get those feelings. I have them too. I’ve actually been trying to force myself to tweet more, but, again, because I write and I make a podcast with two wonderful friends, and I have to get that out there somehow because I want to share that with people. So I still have that. Like, I would love to quit Twitter, but I also want to keep sharing, and I want to keep seeing what other people are doing, too [KL yeah], and, for me, I haven’t found the exact medium to replace that yet. SWB Well, and also, like, when you do things like have a podcast and write a book or whatever, a lot of the success of those things ends up coming down to your ability to promote yourself. And, even if you have, for example, for my book, I mean, I have publishers, they have PR people, they’ve done a lot of stuff, but if I weren’t doing the work too, it just doesn’t go anywhere. And part of that work is making it visible and so then, then you get into this space where you feel like, “Is all I’m doing posting about my own projects? My own like —” KL Building your own personal brand. SWB Yeah, like, “Hey! Subscribe to my podcast!” JL My Klout score! KL [Laughing] Oh my god! JL Does that still exist? KL I don’t know. SWB I remember opting out of that but, at one point, I was influential in burritos [laughter]. Thank you very much. JL What?! I would eat a burrito with you. KL That’s amazing! [Music fades in.] SWB [Music fades out.][Ad spot] If you’ve visited noyougoshow.com, then you know it’s the center of our…

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Badass Women in Your Corner: The NYG Trailer Feb 27, 2018

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This is No, You Go—a new podcast all about being ambitious, building a career that won’t make you miserable, and finding friends who’ll high-five you along the way. Each episode, we talk about what it’s really like out there: managing jobs and bosses, pursuing goals, and getting shit DONE—even when the world’s on fire. So take a listen. Because everyone deserves a group of badass women in their corner. Especially you.

How to Draw a Scientist with Allison Crimmins Feb 20, 2018

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It’s no secret that 2017 was a trash year, and 2018 hasn’t been…easy. But somehow, we’re still here, making it work—and even finding inspiration, joy, and success. We want to talk about how we’re coping during even the most trying political and cultural times. To help us, we sit down with none other than a climate scientist working in government to find out how _she’s _keeping her head up in rough times. > I try as much as I can to talk with college kids or high school kids and most of the time my message is just, “Hi, I’m a scientist and I also happen to be a woman.” It doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that.>> —Allison Crimmins, climate scientist Here’s what’s in store in Episode 6 (and as always, there’s a full transcript): Show notes First up, we look back on last year and how we made it through. We talk about how even though we had some big successes, it was hard to feel accomplished while the world seemed to burn in turmoil. We discuss: How we stayed (and stay) focused amidst a never-ending news cycle Why asking for help is important Why being accountable to something or someone can serve as a bright north star We also discover how to recognize when it’s OK to just turn off and tune out. Hint: it’s always OK when that’s the most healthy choice. Interview: Allison Crimmins Our guest this week is Allison Crimmins, a badass friend who works on climate change in Washington, DC, during the day and cancer research at night—no big. She takes us through her typical Tuesday and tells us how the hell she’s doing these days. We cover: Doing good work during crap times. How limitations and constraints can feel frustrating but also provide opportunities to be more creative and strategic about accomplishing goals. Why good communication matters—and if you truly understand and believe in your work, you should know how to talk about it. Being seen and heard as a woman in a male-heavy field, and normalizing it so we can talk more about the actual work we’re doing. Cutting through the mysticism around science and STEM, and how you don’t have to be a super nerdy genius to be a scientist—you just have to be curious. When kids draw what they think a scientists looks like, the results will astound you! (No, they won’t, but we need to change that.) How bobsledding and curling might just reignite our faith in the human spirit. Fuck Yeah of the Week Finally, we swoon over the unveiling of the absolutely brilliant Obama portraits. If you haven’t checked the work of Amy Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama, and Kehinde Wiley, who painted Barack Obama—do it now. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ _CodePen—a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. _ Transcript Katel LeDû [Ad spot] This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by our friends at Shopify, the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. In fact, my company, A Book Apart, runs on Shopify … and great news: they’re hiring more awesome people to join their team. And they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply to you. Join a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team, and work on the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. [0:39] Jenn Lukas [Music fades out] Hey and welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. SWB You know we all know that 2017 was a trash year, and 2018 looks like it’s going to be stressful too. So today we are going to talk about what we do during these tough times, how do we stay motivated, and how do we keep it together. To help us do that, we’ll talk with Allison Crimmins, who is an environmental scientist working in government — yes, government — on issues related to climate change. Talk about tough times. But before we steal all of her coping methods, let’s talk about the state of our union. KL I don’t know, I had a weirdly good professional year last year, and I don’t know, it was in a lot of different ways. I really wanted to grow in a couple of different areas that I previously didn’t know if I was going to be able to. We had sort of locked down a lot of things that go into the day to day running of A Book Apart, and one area was just marketing. I really was like, “I don’t feel confident in this. I really want to get a better grasp of it,” and [exhales deeply] I feel like I got better at it by asking for help and just realizing that I wasn’t going to get there alone and that I really — I wanted to get stronger in that area and, you know, some others to actually sustain the business. It was really cool to be able to find that and also, I don’t know, just feel like I had really made some progress and felt like I achieved something. And while I felt kind of successful and that I had made an accomplishment, there were mornings, like a lot of mornings, that I would wake up and just feel like, “What the fuck? Like maybe this doesn’t even matter.” It was a weird feeling to have that juxtaposition. It was tough. SWB Yeah, I mean I definitely felt like that too, right? I was working on a book for a lot of last year: finishing writing it, going through the editorial process on it, waiting for it to come out, doing all of the legwork in advance of it coming out. You know, you need to be excited about it, right? Like you have to be excited about your own book if you want anybody else to be. And meanwhile I would be reading Twitter, because I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on in the thing that my book is about, and what do you see on Twitter? Well, you see a bunch of garbage the president said, and all of this stuff that was just really depressing, and it was really difficult to keep focused on anything else, and I felt like that was hard. It’s hard to think about things that are going well and to think about like, you know, if you get praise for something, or sales at A Book Apart go up, or whatever, and to be excited about it when you’re also kind of like, at a macro level what the fuck even? KL Yeah and I mean I think for me too just feeling like, if you’re excited about it, and you’re feeling like, “Ok, we made progress, we had successes.” That obviously rubs off on other people and you want them to feel like things are moving in the right direction. So it’s hard to, obviously not just feel that for yourself but then, make sure [laughing] that you’re not falling apart and that that’s spreading. JL So Katel, what did you do on those days when you were wondering, does it matter? Does this matter? How did you cope with that? KL I mean really and truly it was the fact that I’d done the work of putting a network together and really surrounding myself with people who knew the right steps to take and in the right direction, and having folks that I could rely on. So I think — I mean also being accountable to having a vision and making sure that you are moving in the right direction was huge. JL It’s weird to say this but it’s almost refreshing for me to hear this just because, you know, I think a lot of times we have feelings like that: is everything going to be OK? Am I going to make it through this time of my life? Whether it’s because of external situations going on or internal ones, or just things you can control, things you can’t control. So it’s almost refreshing to hear that other people go through that as well and that just because you have those feelings doesn’t mean that you won’t get through them or learn how to cope with them at the same time. So I think it’s really nice. So thank you for sharing that. SWB Yeah, Jenn, did you ever feel dissonance last year because you had a baby: big exciting thing, awesome thing, not without its own challenges, right? [Laughter] JL Different challenges. SWB But where it’s like, “Oh my god the largest source of joy I’ve ever had in my entire life also what the hell is happening in this country?” 5:16 JL Yeah, I’ll tell you that I struggled, I think, with feelings of guilt a lot last year because I turned off. I turned off a lot of social media, I turned off a lot of news. The current events and just keeping up with sort of like the social network around me I felt all to be a little too overwhelming while trying to make sure that I stayed healthy to be able to give birth to a child. SWB Like what can we do to make you feel less guilty about that? Because like I think you should feel no guilty about that. JL Thank you for saying that but, you know, it’s hard because I’ve read — there were so many great articles and I tried to read about like what can we do, what could you do last year, and how could you get involved. And I have great friends that were doing a lot of things locally that were really awesome. At the time, you know, I was eight months pregnant. Besides just wanting to sleep all the time, like physically you have this physical being inside of you [laughter]. That is like draining. KL Draining you. JL It’s like having this alien sort of inside — he’s going to listen to this when he’s older and he’s going to be like, “You called me an alien.” But I mean like that’s what it is. SWB You know what? Here’s the thing: your kid is never going to be interested in your podcast [laughter]. KL That’s true. But we’re still — by the way, we’re still going to be doing it then. So just — [laughter] get ready. SWB We’ll be extremely famous. JL Um but I mean you have this, like, life force inside of you, sucking your energy and making you tired, and then I would like try to turn on the news for a second and I would be like, “I can’t.” For me it was really important to recognize that I couldn’t. Katel, you mentioned accountability and um, you know, there’s being accountable to employees or a team. For me, I felt accountable to, at the time, my unborn son and being like, “I need to make sure that I’m doing this for you.” So sometimes having a thing that’s not you or a person or — can help you figure out how to make it through this next step. Sometimes I can’t see what the next five steps are, so if I can see through someone else’s eyes it helps me figure out where I need to go. SWB Well, I mean I think it’s very important that now that you have this child, right? What is one of the biggest things that you can do for the world? Raise a son who’s a good person and who’s not a terrible misogynist. I would greatly appreciate that and that’s also — that’s a big task, right? You’re raising a kid in a culture that is going to present some problems and you’re going to be aware and there to work through it. So you didn’t watch the news for awhile. I do think it’s important to pay attention to what’s going on in the world. I’m not trying to say that like, “Oh and none of it matters. Hashtag selfcare, turn it off all the time!” I just mean that you have to recognize what’s going to be useful for you at any given moment in your life and at the moment in your life when you’re like, “I cannot actually do anything about this because I don’t have anything to give.” Turning it off is probably the most productive. So it’s not sucking more energy from you, right? So I actually I applaud that. I applaud that you were able to do that and I hope that you have forgiven yourself for doing that by now because it doesn’t fucking matter that you missed some news. I can fill you in: it was bad [laughter]. KL I think that’s the thing too, like you realize that it’s this cycle of panicking and just being like, “Fuck does it matter?” And then being like, “Well, wait, there are things in my life that I know it matter for or to,” and then realizing like that you need to prioritize and maybe prioritize for other beings or people in your life and then being like, “OK, it’s going to be fine.” And then maybe it starts all over again when things get rough. JL And I think that’s a great point and in terms of forgiving myself now it’s like, “OK, well, let’s podcast. Let’s talk to people. Let’s get out there.” What else can I — what can I do next on things? So it’s not always, “Well, just because I didn’t do anything in 2017 doesn’t mean I can’t do anything in 2018.” So I think it’s that whole like terrible cliche about tomorrow’s another day in here. SWB What I also think a lot about is that gluing yourself to a news stream and going through cycles of freaking out is also not doing anything. That is not actually doing anything. And it’s not to say that there’s something wrong with being informed, but I do know what it’s like to sort of reflexively refresh to figure out like what new fresh hell has unleashed. And what I realized of course is the biggest things that I did last year was, like, I raised a bunch of money for abortion access. I donated a tremendous number of hours to Fair Districts PA, which is working on stopping gerrymandering in this state, and there’s significant progress on that, like we’ve just recently, in Pennsylvania, won this lawsuit against the districts that were drawn last time, which are super gerrymandered. And I was a direct part of the team that worked on digital strategy, and made sure they actually had a brand, I mean I did all of this hands-on work. And then, those don’t do anything to stop Donald Trump. Right? Like in this sort of like — in some of these macro ways that you know things are screwed up, I didn’t necessarily affect those things, but those are really tangible things that I did that are important, and that are important to human people who live in the communities that I care about. And like I was able to that because I had some and energy and expertise to give. And maybe this year you’ll have a little bit of time, or expertise, or energy to give to something you care about, but you gave a lot of time, energy, and expertise to birthing a child last year. 10:45 KL I mean: props [music fades in]. SWB [Music fades out][ad spot] Hey Jenn, do you know what always works during difficult times? JL What, Sara? SWB WordPress.com! So, WordPress.com is one of our wonderful sponsors, and we are so happy to be supported by them. Whether you would like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on WordPress.com helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. And, you know, you don’t need any experience setting up a website. WordPress will guide you through the process from start to finish, and they take care of the technical side. In fact, we use WordPress here at No, You Go, and we never worry that we’re going to get hung up on a question, because WordPress has 24/7 customer support, and it’s great because we are all working on different schedules, trying to get our side project up and running. Plans at WordPress start at just four dollars a month. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo to get 15 percent off your website today. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo. JL You know what else has always been super reliable for me? Our other sponsor: CodePen. CodePen is a social development environment for front-end developers and designers. Ever want a place where you could write and share front-end code with others? Maybe even a potential employer? Your profile on CodePen is like your front-end development portfolio. I’m working in CodePen at least ten times a week. I love it. And if you’re ready for even more more CodePen, be sure to check out CodePen Pro. With a pro account you can upload assets like images to use in your code, you can create priva…

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You Should Run with Elizabeth Fiedler Feb 13, 2018

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On Episode 5, we cure our political fatigue with an interview with Elizabeth Fiedler, a progressive Democrat running for a seat in the PA House. We also chat about wage equity laws, salary negotiations, and why you—yes, you—should run for office. If you’re anything like us, you’re tired as hell of what’s happening in politics: corruption, sexism, and misogyny are on full display. Immigrants are under attack, reproductive rights are under attack, environmental protections are under attack. The list could go on. But despite it all, we’re not about to sit and sulk. Instead, we want to talk about the legislation and candidates we’re excited about—because we could all use some hope right now. > So many of us are held back just by that feeling that like, “Hmm, maybe there’s someone else out there who is more qualified. Maybe there’s someone else who would be better at this.” And in some cases: sure, there is. In many cases, there is not. It’s us! We’re the ones.> —Elizabeth Fiedler, Candidate for PA House District 184 Here’s what’s on the docket in Episode 5: Hey employers: pay up First up, we talk about one of our favorite topics: getting paid—fairly. Here in Philly, we’re upset about more delays on our first wage equity ordinance, which would bar prospective employers from asking about your past salary (which is one of the major ways employers justify continuing to underpay workers from marginalized groups). The law was supposed to take effect in January, but the Chamber of Commerce filed suit—again. Their first lawsuit, last summer, was thrown out for lack of evidence that it would harm businesses. But wage equity laws are coming. California’s went into effect in January, and a bunch more are cropping up all over. And when an economy the size of California makes a law, it tends to have a ripple effect. Now some big employers are announcing that they won’t ask for past pay info, either. While we’re on the topic of compensation, we also chat about how to negotiate those challenging money conversations—and how to avoid getting backed into a corner (or in Katel’s case, a phone booth) to accept an offer that’s not up to snuff. Elect. More. Women. Next on the show, we talk with Elizabeth Fiedler, a candidate in May’s primary for a seat in the PA House, representing the 184th District. That’s the heart of South Philly, where Sara and Jenn both live. Lizz took a break from knocking doors (literally—she is always out there knocking doors) to talk with us about her run. We cover: Showing up at campaign events with an infant strapped to your body.How much we need single-payer healthcare in Pennsylvania—and everywhere.Wearing blue blazers and real pants. Like, without stretch.How to know if you should run for office (hint: if you’re thinking about it, you probably should do it). We love Lizz. Here’s where to get all the deets on her campaign: Campaign website Facebook Twitter Seriously though: Let’s elect some women. After chatting with Lizz, we look at the stats for elected officials in Pennsylvania. It’s not great. We’re ranked 49th in the nation for having women in office. Here are the facts: Pennsylvania has never sent a woman to the US Senate. It’s never had a woman governor. We currently have ZERO women elected to the US House—out of 18 representatives! Only 19% of the Pennsylvania Legislature is made up of women. But good news: women all over are fed up, and a record number are running for office in 2018. Rebecca Traister had a great article about it in The Cut last month. Plus, we’re super excited about folks like Danica Roem, who won a seat in the Virginia Assembly last November, becoming the first openly transgender person to be elected to a state legislature. Finally, we talk about organizations dedicated to getting more women on the ballot, like Emily’s List and She Should Run. Know a woman who’d be great in office? You probably do. Tell her you think she should run. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript [Ad spot] Sara Wachter-Boettcher This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by our friends at Shopify. No, literally. Because so many of the coolest designers, writers, and developers that I know have all recently joined their team. Shopify’s mission is to make commerce better for everyone, and they’re hiring more awesome people—people like you!—to help. Join a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team, and work on the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. Jenn Lukas Hey! Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. KL On today’s show we’re talking about politics, and why it’s so important to have representatives that, well, represent us. We’ll also be joined by Elizabeth Fiedler who went from public radio reporter to candidate for the Pennsylvania legislature. Lizz took a break from knocking on doors and calling donors to tell us all about her life as a first-time political candidate, a mom, and a badass woman. But before we meet Lizz, let’s talk about just one of the many ways that professional is political: money. SWB Katel, Jenn, have you all heard the latest on Philly’s wage equity legislation? It was supposed to go into effect in January, but it’s been pushed back again because of lawsuits from the Chamber of Commerce. And I’m getting super frustrated by this, because I’ve been so excited to see it happen. The legislation is actually designed to prevent employers or prospective employers from asking you about your salary history when you’re in the interview process. And it’s meant to help close the pay gap by prevent people from kind of keeping salaries articifilally low. Right, because so often women and people of of color, and particularly women of color, go into these interview processes and are asked or demanded to share what their prior salary history was, and they end up unable to catch up to their peers, even when they change jobs. So this legislation is supposed to stop that. And it was signed like, a year ago, but it hasn’t been enacted yet because of these ongoing lawsuits. So at this point, I’m starting to get super frustrated. JL I think there was something similar in California. SWB Yeah so I was actually reading that there was some disappointment that Philly didn’t get to be the first in the nation to enact the law because the lawsuit slowed everything down. Because it was supposed to be first but California very quickly thereafter enacted very similar legislation that also ended up going into effect in January and what’s amazing about the California legislation is that, as you might be aware, California has kind of a massive economy and so so many big companies are headquartered there and that means that they hold a lot of sway over how business is done in general in this country. And so what we’re now seeing is all of these big companies, and especially tech companies, which I think is important to a lot of our listeners, are starting to change their policies whether or not somebody is in California. So I was just reading that Amazon has announced, for example, that it’s not going to ask people about salary history during the application process, no matter where it is that you might be working for Amazon because, you know, if you are starting to compete against companies that can’t ask those kinds of questions, it starts to make sense to kind of go with the flow. And so I hope a lot more companies go with this particular flow. JL Yeah, I love this. I mean it’s so often that we can caught in this trap, right? Where you start a job, whether it’s out of school or later on in your career, and you take the starting salary or what they’re offering you and then how do you build up from that? Right? So if people are constantly asking you what you do. I mean so it’s not even one: how do you get a raise at your own job? But then even if you’re leaving, how do you make a significant leap in pay if someone’s asking you what you’re currently making, even though you currently could be way underpaid for your skills and talent. KL It’s so problematic to think about because, you know, in my career — I feel like I’m, you know, pretty well established and I think back to points in time where I’ve tried to negotiate for a raise or make some kind of move with my pay and I feel like I’ve had that latitude. And I think about not feeling empowered to do that and being really trapped by just the last thing that was on your resume and, you know, just in your salary history — that just feels like such a — it’s like so blocking. JL Yeah. I mean you start a job and you’re working there and you work really hard and then, you know, you expect a raise to some extent but then what do you do once you’ve gone way beyond the capacity of your job? Right? And we have this problem where often we’re like, “Ok, well we’ll give you a percentage raise.” But three to six percent on top of your current salary, if it’s a low salary and not as justified for what you should be making, isn’t going to get you to where you need to be. And then sometimes I’ve seen companies — well it’s like, “Ok we’ll bump that up to ten percent.” But percentage-based raises are always really tough. And so then what do you do? I mean you start looking for another job, and then you’re looking for another job, and you’re still stuck. [5:10] SWB Yeah. I mean I remember earlier in my career getting trapped in these kinds of conversations where I would be going from — kind of, you know, individual contributor roles where I was responsible a pretty narrow slice of things to taking on more leadership, more strategic involvement in the organization, you know like being invited to more high-level meetings with clients, and also taking on management responsibilities. But because it was a smaller company and there wasn’t necessarily a clear path or progression, none of that was necessarily treated as if it was a promotion. And so what would happen is I would go into these reviews and I knew that I had been underpaid, I knew that I was being underpaid dramatically, but you go into the review and they’re like, “Well the number you’re asking for is a 25 percent raise and the standard we’re giving is, you know, five percent or something and we just can’t justify something like that.” And it’s like, “But where’s — how do I ever make up this gap?” And, you know, the thing about percentages, right, is that they’re based on the original number. So if you start a job and, I don’t know, maybe you make let’s say 50 thousand dollars a year and somebody starts the same job and they make 60 thousand dollars a year, their percentages are always going to add up to more money! And so even if somebody gives you a bigger percentage, it’s like you will typically end up further and further behind. And, you know, we’ve seen this happen so many times and it’s often to the people who are least likely to ask for pay adjustments and most likely to be judged harshly when they do which is [ahem] women. KL Yeah, I remember very vividly one of the first times I made a move to a higher position, I became a manager. I think I skipped a couple levels at that point in time. And I remember the moment where my boss was basically asking me to agree to the pay rate like in a moment between meetings. He literally was basically like, “Shake my hand. Here’s the amount.” Like, “You don’t even get a chance to say anything.” SWB Were you, like, in a fucking hallway? KL Yeah, no I’m not even kidding we had ducked into a room that was a phonebooth. And I was just like — I really regret that moment because, looking back on it, I wish I had said, you know, “No, wait. I deserve to take some time and think about this and come back to you with some questions.” But at that point in my career I felt like, “I need to take this. I need to make this move. And, great, it’s a little bit more money. Whatever.” SWB I wish our listeners could see my face because [laughter] what my face says is: “What’s his name? What’s his social security number? Let me look him up and have a conversation with him,” because I’m angry. JL It’s a great point, though, that it’s so hard in those moments to be like, “Hold on, wait, I need a second.” KL Exactly. JL But we should be able to say that. There is nothing wrong — I mean what’s the worst that could happen if someone’s going to say, “You know, I’m going to have to get back to you on that.” They’re not going to give you a raise anymore? SWB Well, I think that though — I would say that sometimes people’s fears are justified, not necessarily that the whole thing is going to be rescinded but that when you start asking questions, when you start advocating for yourself, like, sometimes people do react to that and not positively. And I think that that’s a sad reality that we’re trying to negotiate all the time. KL Yeah and I think as women there’s been situations where things have disappeared or been removed from the table and I feel that’s just a really real thing for us. JL I think for moments like that it’s important that we all sort of practice what happens if we’re in a situation like that. And I think for those fears where we are worried about that, which it definitely a justifiable fear, one of the things that I’ve done when I’ve felt uncomfortable is made sure to lead with: “Thank you so much for this offer! I’m so excited to be coming up with a new plan for us or a new partnership for us to work with. Let me just take this back and get back to you.” And sort of, you know, turn the ball where you’re thanking them, not saying that you have to but, again, if you’re playing that sort of defensive, “I need some time,” I think that’s sort of a way to be like: here’s how I can do this without fearing that I’m then causing animosity. SWB And I totally love what you’re saying, Jenn, about kind of practicing this stuff. In a similar vein, I have sat with friends of mine and talked through how much they were going to ask for in a negotiation and then I’ve been like, “Ok, have you ever said that number out loud?” And they’re like, “Oh! No!” [Laughter] I’m like, “No, ok, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to sit down and you’re going to say this number out loud to me over and over again until it stops sounding weird.” And I had a friend of mine who did that a couple years ago and she came back and not only did she, of course, get the job and get the money. She told me that it was really helpful to have said it until it didn’t sound odd and have said it until she was like, “Oh I can own this. I can own this dollar amount.” And … I think that’s hard to do but I think, like, it’s very helpful, I think, to do with a friend. It’s so great when you find somebody you can talk to about this stuff. I love — I love being able to talk to friends about this and being like, “Look, I don’t want to get weird about money. It can be touchy for people. But, you know, whatever the money is that you want to talk about, if you want to talk about it with me, I am so there for that and we can strategize and negotiate and practice until you’re ready to go into that meeting and be like, ‘Look, here’s how it’s going to be’.” [10:55] JL It’s really important to, I think, find either friends that you can talk to about that but I’ve even — Sarah, I’ve talked to you about this stuff before, so I definitely am taking you up on that. But, I mean, I’ve even done it, like, to my cat [laughter]. SWB Totally! Yeah. JL And sat…

Full show notes at the publisher

Frands Forever with Alisha Ramos Feb 06, 2018

Show notes

HI FRANDS. We’re all BFFs now, right?…Right? In this episode, we talk about how we make new friends as busy adults, how we sustain relationships beyond grabbing lunch or drinks, and how we build the kinds of communities that give us LIFE. We’re also joined by Girls’ Night In founder Alisha Ramos, who tells us how she built a company around a simple concept: connecting and celebrating women who’d rather stay in. > Book clubs are just magical, first of all, because books are amazing. But, second of all, it creates a really interesting common ground for everyone… You’re all showing up because you read the same thing, and you are starting off with that common thing and you end up picking up little pieces of the other person’s life as she’s describing how she read the book and interpreted it, and then it kind of like takes the pressure off.>> —Alisha Ramos, founder of Girls’ Night In Here’s what we covered (and as always, you can find the full transcript below). Show notes Did you know that Sara and Katel first bonded over crab fries? That a full 50 percent of the city of Philadelphia knows each other through Jenn? Well, now you will. We also talk about: How great friends are also generous with their friends Why you have to get over the fear of rejection when trying to keep adult friendships alive Why loneliness is bad for your health Then, we catch up with Alisha Ramos, who tells us how she quit her job last year to start Girls’ Night in, a newsletter for ladies who’d rather skip the party, thanks. Now GNI boasts more than 30,000 members. We bond over: The magic of book clubs—especially when your new book BFFs also invite you to a potluck Celeste Ng’s excellent second novel, Little Fires Everywhere Relaxing, relaxing, and more relaxing—Alisha recommends watching The Crown and re-watching I, Tonya (and if you hate Tonya Harding, read this first). Also in this episode: Thanks to a reader recommendation, Katel’s back in the fiction game with Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. Did you know that Tinder for moms is a thing? (It’s called Peanut.) It’s reboot time in Hollywood! Still! Apparently! First up: get your blazers pressed: Murphy Brown is back, baby! Let’s hope Dan Quayle doesn’t show up to shame her again. An Overboard reboot is also coming, which we’re not feeling great about, given that the plot centers around tricking a woman with amnesia into being your wife—as a comedy! What the world really needs is some of that patented Sugarbaker Sass. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript Sara Wachter-Boettcher Like you, Shopify isn’t a fan of long, boring ads. So they’ll keep it simple. They’re hiring great people. Their mission: to make commerce better for everyone. Shopify is the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs and they want to apply to you. Join a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team where you’ll get shit done. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. [Music fades in] Jenn Lukas Hi! Welcome to No, You Go, [music fades out] the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. JL On today’s show we’re talking about developing relationships and going beyond the quick work lunch or happy hour type of friendship. How do we create deeper connections with people we know and that we want in our lives now that we’re adults, professionals, mothers, activists, multi-taskers—you get the idea. How do we seek out these deeper types of friendships? We’ll also talk with Girls’ Night In founder, Alisha Ramos, about building a community of women, and how she makes space for meaningful relationships in her life. But first on the agenda: hey, Katel, will you be my friend? KL I would love to be your friend. You know, I remember the first time we really hung out and met. We were both at Converge. We started sort of following each other around to the different things people were doing and I had seen you speak and I was like—I really wanted to hang out with you and it was cool that I met you at a conference because it’s always good to have a conference buddy. And I also remember the first time Sara and I really hung out, it involved crab fries, which is very important to the Philadelphia region. She missed a pottery class, I think? Just to keep talking with me, which I felt super special for, and then I think that just was a natural progression into taking over the world. SWB Totally! I remember meeting Jenn through conferences and stuff like that but then, one day right after I moved to Philadelphia, I thought, “You know? I’m going to email Jenn Lukas. I don’t know her very well but she seems very cool, maybe she’ll hang out with me.” [Laughter] And I emailed her and, lo and behold, Jenn lived two blocks from where we had just moved in. Like literally two blocks away. And so immediately, you know, we made plans to get together, and I will say that being new to a place, Jenn and Sutter, her husband, were like—you guys were, honestly, so welcoming, and it was so wonderful because I feel like through you we met so many other people. You were very generous with sharing those friendships that you had with us— KL Aw. SWB —at a time when I think we really needed that. We’d spent a couple of years, you know, moving around and not sure where we were going to land long-term after my husband finished graduate school. And so it was not just that we really connected, but it was also that generosity that I think was so valuable to me. And I really hope that I paid that forward by the time Katel moved to Philly [laughter] and we were sharing crab fries, because I remember sitting there and just being like, OK, we’re not just having professional drinks. We’re hanging out now. It’s on. This is—you know—we’re going to be here for a while.” JL It’s so nice. Wow. I’m having all the feels, ladies [background “aws”]. It’s so nice and I think the other thing is, you know, we make friends through conferences, we make friends through meetups, we make friends through these activities, and lots of times I think we meet people and then we’re like, “Ah man, I really dug hanging out with them,” but then it doesn’t happen again. Maybe you live someplace else. But I think one of the things that was really awesome with both of you is that we maintained a level of correspondence that when you both happened to move to Philadelphia I was like, “Yes!” SWB No, but I think it’s important to put that kind of, I don’t know, a little bit more work in, I guess you would say, because we’re not in college anymore. We’re, um, a couple of years outside of college, and one of the things that happens is everybody gets busy with their own lives. You have a partner, maybe, or you have children, and your career gets demanding, and I travel for work a lot. And so it gets harder to match up schedules, it’s harder to find time to consistently see people, and you have to prioritize that, and I’m really glad that I have friends who do prioritize that also because I feel like we always make the time. And we always—you know, we don’t make a big deal out of hanging out, right? Like we make it a consistent thing that we do without having to make it super formal and it doesn’t have to be like, “Oh I’m throwing a dinner party.” KL Because of our proximity we can kind of do things on the fly which is really cool. And, I mean, it wass so important for me moving from DC to Philly. I knew I knew some people sort of and I had no idea whether I’d be able to be rebuild a network and it happened, I think, so much faster because of exactly what you said, Jenn. [5:00] And also I feel like as you get older you sort of know you’re going to be friends with people. The people you know you’re like, “OK, these are just going to be acquaintances or not as close relationships.” You’re a little quicker to be like, “All right [chuckles], I know the camps now.” You know? JL I think it also helps to never take a scheduling mishap as something that means that we can’t hang out. So I think lots of times with schedules, you’ll ask someone to hang out and they’ll be like, “I can’t,” and then you don’t follow-up. And I think that we all have very busy schedules but we’re never like, “Oh, that must mean that Katel doesn’t want to hang out with me because she’s not available.” And getting over this like — you get these flashbacks from high school of like trying to be friends with people, right? [Laughter] And you’re just like, “No! It’s not that.” And I think that I’m so much more quick to get over that now because I can imagine myself being in the space where I’ve wanted to hang out with people but I couldn’t make it work and it wasn’t that I was avoiding them or doing these things that I feel like we still get self conscious about, sometimes, with building friendships. You know you have to put in that time. SWB Right. It’s not like, “Oh, I invited Jenn to do something twice and she turned me down both times, so now I won’t say anything again. I have to sit here on my hands and wait for her to call me.” You know? I definitely don’t feel that way. I’m like, “Ok, Jenn’s got a lot going on and—” KL I’m just going to ask her a third time. SWB Yeah [laughter]! Third time’s a charm. You know but I’m really glad that we’re all kind of on the same page about this and also able to talk about it because I’ve read all of those studies about how people report that their loneliness levels are really high and particularly as people move into middle-age and that there’s a lot of studies that show that things like the more socially isolated you are, the more likely you are to have health problems, and the more likely you are to actually die prematurely. It’s kind of morbid, but it’s true that loneliness is this really big factor in people’s health that is not that well understood. And the other thing that happens with loneliness is apparently it’s something that’s really common with men. Like men are much less likely to sustain the kinds of relationships that we’re talking about into their middle-age and later and as a result you’ve got these generations of lonely middle-aged who are super isolated. And it’s causing them all kinds of issues and I think that even though that’s more prevalent in men, I mean that’s not something we can ignore for ourselves either because we’re all, like I said, ambitious and busy and have a lot going on in our professional lives that it would be easy to not make time to do that deep friendship stuff. It’d be easy to have that happen and not realize it’s happened until you have been doing it for years and you’re really fucking lonely. JL Yeah. KL Right. This is why it’s important that we make some early plans for the friend compound that we’ve talking about. JL Oh my god! Yes! KL And we can invite our husbands, obviously, if, you know— SWB Meh. JL It’s going to be some kind of farm, right? KL Uh, absolutely. Yes. With a vineyard of some kind. SWB So the friendship compound is like—it’s pretty much what it sounds like — it’s a large facility, homestead, not sure, where we can all bring all of our besties down and form a new, totally not cult-like [laughter] society. KL I think we found a new direction for the show. I don’t know [laughter]. JL Oh no, we’ve tricked people into something they were not expecting here. SWB I said it wasn’t cult-like! It’s fine. KL OK. All right [laughs]. SWB This whole conversation about friendships and sort of like the way that we form connections and keep those connections strong, I think, is a really good way to introduce our guest for today, because I think she’s going to have a lot to say about that, too, and I am so excited to hear it [music fades in]. Thanks to our sponsors JL [Music fades out] No, You Go is proud to be sponsored by wordpress.com. Whether you’d like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating a website on wordpress.com helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. In fact, we use WordPress here for NYG. You don’t even need experience setting up a website. WordPress guides you through the process from start to finish, and takes care of the technical side. They also have great customer support available 24 hours a day. Plans start at just four dollars a month, and you can always get a custom domain for the life of the plan. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo to get 15 percent off your website today. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo [music fades in]. Interview: Alisha Ramos KL [Music fades out] our guest today is Alisha Ramos, the founder of Girls’ Night In, which started as a newsletter for women who’d rather stay in tonight, something I think we’re all drawn to in many ways, and has turned into so much more. Alisha, we can’t wait to hear about. Welcome to No, You Go! Alisha Ramos Thanks so much for having me! KL We’re so excited to talk all about this. Can we kick off by having you tell us a little bit more about Girls’ Night In and just how it came to be. [10:00] AR So Girls’ Night In, as you mentioned, started off as a newsletter for women who’d rather stay in tonight, and now it’s become more of a community of women now. What we do is we send a Friday morning newsletter every week to over, I think we’re now at 30,000 subscribers, mostly millennial women across the US and across the globe, and we kind of share smart reads for you to read during your night in or things like recommendations for you to do, whether it’s watching a TV show that we love or a podcast that we’re loving. So that’s kind of how it started and now we’ve gotten this amazing community of women around it from all corners of the globe. We have readers in Charleston, South Carolina, to Barcelona to London and, you know, our mission at Girls’ Night In is to help women relax, recharge, and cultivate more meaningful community in a world that’s increasingly stressful and lonely [KL laughs]. So one really cool thing that kind of sprung up very organically is our book club. So we do a monthly book club meetup in seven cities now. And that’s been a really amazing way for our community to gather and really live out the mission of Girls’ Night In. This kind of community of women that want to create better connections with one another. KL That’s amazing! I feel like that’s seems like such a beautiful and natural progression of things. What was it about fostering deeper connections than, say, going to drinks or having a quick coffee that you made you decide to kick this into gear? AR I was looking at how we live our lives today. Like I’m in my later twenties and the idea of going out no longer really appeals to me [laughing][KL laughs] for various reasons. I have a hard bedtime now of like 9:30pm I need to be in bed. But I think our relationships are changing so quickly; society is changing; mental health issues are on the rise; rates of loneliness are increasing in our society that’s always on. Like we are so entangled with technology now that we’re kind of burnt out from all of that. And looking at my habits of how I want to spend my time with my friends, I found myself hosting more gatherings that are intimate and cozy in my home versus wanting to go out. So I think Girls’ Night In encapsulates this whole movement of women who would rather spend the time taking care of themselves and developing better relationships, not just with themselves, but with other women, like their friends. And it’s very timely. When Girls’ Night In started the presidential inauguration had just occurred. There was this kind of overwhelming sense of stress and anxiety among my…

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Cool Adults with Sara Chipps Jan 30, 2018

Show notes

Today’s show is all about getting started: taking the steps to turn new ideas into living, breathing (and sometimes even money-making) projects. Our guest this week is the totally rad Sara Chipps—the co-founder of Girl Develop It, and now the CEO of Jewelbots, which makes smart, open-source friendship bracelets that girls can code. (We want some for all our BFFs.) > Just start with those baby steps. It’s going to take a thousand baby steps. Everyone has a good idea, right? Everyone. Ideas are worthless unless it’s something that gets made. So you know, if it’s going to take a thousand baby steps, then if you start today, you only have 999 left. But if you don’t, then it’s never going to happen.>> —Sara Chipps, CEO of Jewelbots and co-founder of Girl Develop It Here’s what we covered (and as always, you can find the full transcript below). Show notes First up, we talk about all the URLs we’ve purchased—and how sometimes, spending $5 is just what you need to take your own idea seriously. Jenn shares her love for David Allen’s _Getting Things Do_ne method (and explains how it helped us GTD for our first episode). Katel tells us why “Write Book” is maybe not the best item to put on your to-do list. Sara recounts her love for Jenn’s web series, Cook Inside the Box—where Jenn and our friend Sequoia made recipes from the sides of boxes. Sara’s favorite episode? The one about hot dogs rolled in cornflakes. Mmm hmmm. Then, we fangirl out during our interview with Sara Chipps, who not only created Jewelbots, but also co-founded Girl Develop It. We talk about: Why Sara C. has made it her mission to get more girls and women into coding. The joy of friendship bracelets—no matter how old you are. How to bounce back (and learn something!) when a bunch of kids tell you your idea sucks. Highway1, the hardware accelerator that helped Sara prepare to launch Jewelbots. The importance of finding a co-founder who gets you—like Brooke Moreland, Sara C.’s cofounder at Jewelbots. Why you don’t actually need to be good at math to be a programmer—and how our industry has done newcomers a disservice by pretending otherwise. How Girl Develop It went from a single class in New York City in 2010 to a nonprofit operating in 58 cities and serving 55,000 members (and counting) nationwide. Also in this episode: Woohoo! It’s now light out till, uh, 5:15pm here in Philly, and we can’t be happier about that. We’re already dreaming about two of Philly’s best summertime hangouts: front stoops and beer gardens. Yes, please. Being, like, a totally cool adult. No, really. Ask the kids. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: _CodePen—a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. _ _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript Sara Wachter-Boettcher Today’s show is brought to you by CodePen. Ever want a place where you can write and share front-end code with others? CodePen is that place. It’s full of awesome inspiration and projects with a great community. And speaking of community, the CodePen World’s Fair is happening in May. We’ll talk more about that in a bit, but be sure to sign up for an account at codepen.io. That’s [spells out codepen.io]. [Intro music] Jenn Lukas Hey! And welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. On today’s show we’re excited to talk about getting started. We’ll discuss how we come up with new ideas and then, once we’ve got ‘em, how do we actually take them to fruition? We’re totally pumped today to talk to Sara Chipps, who has taken two of her amazing ideas, Girl Develop It and Jewelbots, and made them into reality. But first on the agenda, let’s talk about how five bucks turned into a new podcast. Getting started with just $5 [1:20] KL So a couple of weeks after we started talking about the podcast, uhhh, got an email from info@noyougoshow.com and saying that we’re paying five dollars a month for the email address and now we really have to do the podcast. And at that moment I really think it became real and like this thing was really going to be real. So we kind of wanted to start there and talk about how that happened. JL Five dollars is all it takes. Five dollars and a dream. SWB [Laughs] yeah, so I was the one who sent that email and I was like, “Well, I got a credit card! I got five dollars a month. I spend five dollars a month on a lot more dumb shit than [others laugh] email accounts.” So for me it was a really low investment to also look at it and be like, “Dude, we are going to take this seriously. And I think that that’s how most anything I’ve ever done sort of came to be—by figuring out something that was small, but really concrete. And the concreteness is what helps it feel real and feel like something that you’re seriously going to do. KL And a little skin in the game. I mean, I know it’s not much, but you know when you kind of feel like you’re putting some actual cash to it, you’re like, “All right.” [Chuckles.] SWB That’s like a whole latte I can’t buy now. KL Absolutely. JL Yeah, I think that there’s definitely been a couple nights where, you know what? Maybe I’ve had a few glasses of wine and that helped make the appeal of certain domains sound good [laughs]. I’ve been known known to buy a domain or two. SWB I can’t relate to this at all. KL No, me either [all laughing]. JL After an exciting night out. But, you know, there’s one thing, you know, you’ll be at the bar with a friend, you’ll be at the coffee shop with a friend, you’ll be at the house with a friend, and you’ll be like, “Oh I have this idea,” and you’re sorta joking around and you’re like, “You know what? Lemme—lemme just pull that trigger and buy that URL,” and the next thing you know: you’ve got a URL and you’re on your way. SWB Yeah, I’m curious, Jenn, you had Cook Inside the Box a couple years ago, this web series little episodes where you and our friend, Sequoia, would cook recipes from the sides of boxes. I loved this series so much, everybody please go Google this right now if you haven’t seen it [laughter]. So I’m curious: how did that start? JL So I do remember how that happened. Oh my god, so many years ago at Converge in South Carolina, one of my favorite conferences. I think I was with Val Head and Chris Coyier and maybe a couple of other people and we were walking to go get some food. And I was telling them about how I was eating a box of Nilla Wafers and um you know those delicious cookies? And there was a recipe on the side of a box for Nilla Wafers which didn’t make any sense to me because a Nilla Wafer is just like a cookie. You just— KL You just eat it. JL You just open up the box and eat it, right? [KL chuckles] But they had this recipe and I was like, “This is amazing.” We talked about, like, what other boxes could possible have recipes on them and then I became a little bit obsessed with figuring out [laughter] that, and I thought it was really funny. And then one day a few weeks later I was telling Sequoia about this conversation and she was like, “I would totally do that with you.” And I was like, “Really?!?” I was like, someone else— KL This is a good idea. JL —someone else is in invested in this?! That’s amazing! And then that was it. We went to the grocery store and started our user research. SWB What was the first recipe you made? JL It was the Nilla Wafers’ Nilla Yogurt Freeze, which was a mix of strawberry yogurt, frozen with Nilla wafers, and the serving size was: one [laughter]. KL Was it as delicious as it sounds? JL It really actually was. It was just a little bit sad. SWB I think my favorite episode was the one where you rolled hot dogs in ketchup and then rolled them in— JL Cornflakes! Yes, cornflakes. [5:00] SWB Yes! And baked them for…not long enough? And that was a treat. Mm hmm. JL Yeah I heard that was quite—that was when I was a vegetarian so I had an easy out of not eating that, so I avoided that one. KL Yeah, you were like, “That’s all you.” JL Yeah. But yeah, you know, all of a sudden you take this thing that just happens in casual conversation, next thing you know you’ve got a YouTube web series [laughs]. SWB You know something I always think about is that one of the challenges is anything that feels big. Like there’s a lot of steps, there’s a lot of moving parts, there’s a lot of pieces to it. And so some of the biggest stuff that I’ve needed to take all the way from end to end is book stuff. And I don’t consider myself necessarily a like typical writer, just because I think everybody has a different process. But the way I do it tends to be, like, I need to have some kind of outline that’s enough structure, enough substance to it that I can imagine it coming together. And then I have all these weird tricks to actually getting it done where it’s like I pick off the easy chapters first, so then I feel like I have something of substance, all of these different things. But I don’t know a lot about techniques or process for getting something big like that done, just sort of what I’ve cobbled together and made up. Katel, running a publishing company, do you feel like you have developed some of those tools or techniques for people to kind of tackle big things? KL I was actually just talking to an author recently who had [chuckles] told me that for the past couple of months a “to do” on her list had been “write book.” And I was like, “No!” [Laughter] “Don’t do that.” I was like, “That’s too big. You’re never going to get to check it off and that’s going to feel terrible.” So along with looking at kind of how she could break things down and sort of structure them and, just like you said, pick off some things that were a little easier. You know, get a framing set up first and kind of plug in the meatier bits. One thing that we’ve started doing is just having check-ins during the writing process and I think that’s helped a lot because it’s a bit of accountability. So folks don’t feel like they’re just off in the ether writing and writing and not knowing whether they’re going in the right direction. So I think just having some tetheredness helps a lot. JL One of my favorite books of all time is Getting Things Done by David Allen, and he’s got a really, for me, approach that really resonated well, which is, you talk about what the next step is that you have to take. And you don’t worry about, like, what’s the 20-step-ahead step? It’s, what’s the next thing I want to do for this exact thing? So if it’s something like, you know, I want to write a book. Well, I was like, “Well, what’s my next step? Maybe it’s get in touch with someone who I know, like Katel, who publishes books. So my next step is to email Katel.” Just that. Not even, like, come up with an idea, not write it, not find a publisher, it’s just write someone I know. And then the other thing that I really liked about the getting things done approach is if it’s something that it’ll take less than two minutes, to do it right away. So if I can write you an email that just says, “Hey Katel, I want to talk to you about books. Let’s grab dinner sometime this week,” and that’ll take me less than two minutes, then I’d send that email. KL Yeah, I think breaking things down to as small as possible so that you can actually start checking things off your list is—it feels better than anything. SWB You know something that you just said, Jenn, about “if it takes two minutes, just do it.” I totally noticed that when we were working on starting this podcast. So you know one night we’re sitting, talking about lots of different things we needed to do, like all these macro to-do lists, right? Like, “we need to figure out microphones,” and like themes, and guests, and schedules, and like—you know it was very, very broad. And one of the things that we knew we needed to do was start recruiting a few people who could contribute to our first episode where we wanted to have these short snippets. And Katel and I, I think, both had kind of the same reaction, like, “Okay, let’s make a list of those people and assign each of us a list of those people to contact. And then, you know, we’ll do that after this meeting,” and meanwhile Jenn is literally over there like, “Okay, I sent all my emails to my people!” [Laughter] And you know that doesn’t obviously work for everything. It works for those short things though, and I think that that really gave us some momentum, and that momentum at that particular moment was really, really important and helpful, and got us all the way here where we are today! [Laughter] JL GTD, man! KL That’s right [music fades in]. Thanks to our sponsors SWB Hey Katel, do you know what I love getting done? KL Um, nails? Snacks? SWB I mean yes, and also yes. But more than anything, I love thanking our sponsors, because I’ve realized that starting a podcast is just a lot of work. There’s so many little details to take care of and so many pieces that have to fall into place. Getting some support from wonderful sponsors has made that so much easier. One of those great sponsors is wordpress.com! WordPress is the first place I went to create our site: noyougoshow.com. It’s also how I run my personal site, sarawb.com. [10:00] Whether you’d like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on wordpress.com helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. I love WordPress because it’s easy. You don’t need any special skills to create an amazing site fast. You can just pick up a template and go. But it’s also super customizable. So if you’re working with an awesome developer like our co-host Jenn, you can turn your WordPress site into pretty much anything you want. Plus they have 24/7 support and plans that start at just four dollars a month. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo to get 15 percent off your website today. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo. KL We’re also so excited to have CodePen as our sponsor. CodePen is the place to write and share code with the front-end community. You can share your code with others and explore what they’ve created by browsing all sorts of Pens. And this spring, the CodePen community is coming together in real life for the first time ever with a CodePen World’s Fair, taking place May 30th through June 1st in Chicago. Three radical days of hanging out with people who love CodePen as much as you do. Day one is an expo with art exhibits and interactive installations, day two will be amazing conference talks about front-end dev, and day three will feature fantastic workshops! Sign up at codepenworldsfair.com to hear more. That’s codepenworldsfair.com. [Interstitial music fades in and out] Interview: Sara Chipps [11:15] JL So though I’ve had a slew of my own ideas, some better than others, I’ve also been fortunate enough to be part of other projects that were the creation of others. One of these was teaching for Girl Develop It, a non-profit organization that provides affordable programs for adult women interested in learning web and software development in a judgment-free environment. I met Sara Chipps over six years ago. She co-founded GDI in New York and was looking to expand it to Philadelphia. I can’t begin to explain how flattered I was when Sara had asked me to teach the first class here in Philly, which was an intro to HTML and CSS class and, to this day, I can say that it’s been one of my favorite parts of my career. She has since embarked on new feats in robotics and wearable technology, and is the CEO of Jewelbots. I am so, so excited to have Sara here today to talk about the opportunity that she has given people to join in some of these projects with her and hear more about her current adventures! So, welcome…

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Pocket Rabbits with Eileen Webb Jan 20, 2018

Show notes

We made it to Episode 2—and hey, so did you! High five! This week, we’re all about TIME: how we make it, how we use it, and how we think about it. We’re also joined by our very first guest, Eileen Webb, who straight-up blew our minds with her take on making time on your own terms. Seriously, it’s . Just listen already. > Why should my work get all of my best brain?> —Eileen Webb, founder of Webmeadow Here’s what we cover. (Yep, there’s a full transcript below, too!) Show notes First things first: is it time for for lunch yet? We think so (we’ve been thinking about snacks since 10:15). We start out with a segment on reclaiming lunchtime for, well, whatever you want: Jenn tells us how she convinced her coworkers that watching Jeopardy at work is healthy. (We’re totally sold.) Katel sits down for a fancy meal for one. Sara heads out for a midday run, meetings be damned. Next, NYG sits down with web strategist-slash-farmer Eileen Webb for an interview that’s sure to stick with all of us for quite some time. We talk about: How Eileen and her partner went from burnouts in the first dot-com boom to running a bakery to finding their niche doing digital strategy from their home in northern New Hampshire. Why morning meetings don’t work for Eileen’s brain, and how she avoids them. Why Eileen trades the 9-to-5 for a sunrise hike every Tuesday—and never once feels guilty about it. How to stop letting your calendar (and other people’s bullshit requests) run your life. Also, pocket bunnies (no, not those kind). Follow Eileen on Twitter, or hire her at webmeadow.com. Also in this episode: America’s Favorite Quiz Show® (and don’t you dare tell Jenn otherwise) The big-ass boats (no seriously there are so many) at the Philly Navy Yard New Year’s Liberations from Cate Huston, Ellen Pao, Karolina Szczur, and Erica Joy And of course, we profess our undying love for those ’90s Noxzema girl ads Thanks to our friends The Diaphone for the use of our theme song, Maths, off the album of the same name. _This episode is brought to you by CodePen—a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. _ Transcript JENN LUKAS: Today’s show is brought to you by CodePen. CodePen is a place to write and share front-end code. You can try out new technologies, learn new things by forking other projects, and show off your own awesome work. Your profile on CodePen is like your front-end development portfolio. Learn more and create your own Pens at codepen.io. That’s c-o-d-e-p-e-n dot i-o. JL: Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KATEL LEDÛ: I’m Katel LeDû. SARA WACHTER-BOETTCHER: And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. Today on No, You Go we’re talking about time. How do you make time for things you want to do while keeping all the things you have to do in check? We’ll explore making—and breaking—routines and habits, and pull apart the politics behind how we spend our time. And we’re really excited because today we’ll be joined by Eileen Webb, who’s here to talk to us about things like sunrise hikes, why she doesn’t book meetings in the mornings—and, oh yeah, running a consulting company from a farm in rural New Hampshire that runs on solar energy. But first on the agenda: I’d like to take Lunchtime with Jenn Lukas for $500, Alex. [Intro music] JL: There was one night that we were staying late working on something and my whole joke was, “I gotta get home in time to watch Jeopardy. And someone was like, “oh, you know we could stream it.” We streamed Jeopardy while eating dinner together as a group while we were working hard to finish a project. And it sounds a little silly but it was, like, really awesome to take a moment while we were trying to meet a deadline. But then we stopped to all eat dinner together while watching Jeopardy, which is probably the greatest game show of all time. And I don’t say that lightly, because I’m like really into The Price is Right. So it just became a little bit known about how much I like Jeopardy at work. And we would talk a lot about it. And that got other people—other big Jeopardy fans would come out of the woodwork and start telling me about how much they loved Jeopardy. The Jeopardy thing just sort of continued. Some of us would come in the next day and be like, oh, did you see Jeopardy last night? And we would talk about Jeopardy. Someone made me an Alex Trebek Slack icon, you know, the usual.SWB: What do you call a Jeopardy—are you, like, a Jeop-head? Like what do you call that? JL: I do not care for that! KL: Did you all end up playing that first night? Were you, like, playing along? JL: Yeah we are all for the yell out the answers. There’s no, like, “don’t say the answers.” And no one says “what is.” Actually, someone says “what is” now, but to be fair, we have a new coworker at work, and he was on College Jeopardy. KL: Whoa. JL: Yeah, legit. Anyway so this kept going. And then like once the weather turned cold, we would—when it comes down to lunchtime, we would eat lunch outside a lot. We have a really great outdoor setup down at our campus—and, oh, I hate the word campus—laughs—down at our workspace. Anyway, once the weather got cold, we still wanted to do things together, but it got a little weird because you don’t always want to eat in the cafeteria, so sometimes people bring lunch back to their desk. And we actually just renovated our office space, and we have this great pod setup.So we started doing Jeopardy lunch where we would just pull it up on the TV. And then people would start hearing the theme song, and they’d be like, “You guys are watching Jeopardy?” And we’d be like, “Yeah, we’re watching Jeopardy.” KL: Get on in here! JL: Right? Exactly. So it just started being a thing. Like, “Hey, are we going to watch Jeopardy today?” And it was like, “Yeah, we’re all going to grab lunch now. So we’d go grab lunch together, bring it back, and now we watch Jeopardy. And we have a little Slack channel, so we can let people know when it’s starting. Though, we have a very open building, so it’s pretty obvious when Jeopardy is starting. [Laughter] SWB: How many people come and gather and watch Jeopardy at lunch now? JL: I’d say it’s anywhere between like 5 and 10, but a variety. KL: That’s a good group. JL: So like, there’s a rotating group of I’d say 15 or 20 people. SWB: When you started doing this, was it ever difficult to feel like this was a good use of your time, or feel like you should be back at your desk instead of taking the time away to watch the show? JL: Yeah, totally. And not to mention, our desks are right there. You can see it. In fact, someone made a quote-unquote joke one time that was like… I was like, “Hey, wanna watch Jeopardy?” and they were like, “No, I have work to do.” And I was like, “Yeah, but this is lunch!” KL: Yeah, like, remember that? JL: You know, they have these amazing studies where, like, you can only focus on things for such a length of time. There’s this interesting thing, it’s every 10 minutes that you have to stop what you’re doing for a minute to digest what you’ve done and get back at what you’re doing. So we’re talking about four hours at this point. And I think at that point it’s really important to stop for a minute, take a break, eat lunch, watch a Jeopardy or whatever your thing is, and then get back to what you’re doing. And I think you start fresh. I think that’s how you avoid daily burnout. SWB: Yeah, you know when you were talking about Jeopardy lunch, I think a lot about some of the pressures that I’ve seen in offices around constantly looking like you’re busy, or looking like you’re working. I’ve realized that much of that is a show, that people who—you know, you feel pressure to constantly look like you’re working, so you eat lunch at your desk. People who do that, they’re not actually more productive, and they’re probably more miserable, than if you just took a real break and sat your ass down somewhere and did something that was not work and was not intended to look like work and was not pretending to be work. [5:00] JL: Yes. Ugh, yes. [Laughs] It’s funny, they have all these browser extensions to stop you from looking at certain sites while you work. And it’s so much easier to do that if you are focused, and then you take that official break. SWB: I think a lot about the conversations we have about time, and how we get really focused on making sure you carve out time to do big things. People will write about how, you know, “Oh, I wrote my book by sitting down every morning between 6 and 8am and writing 1500 words for two months, and that’s how I wrote this book.” That seems like a miserable way to write a book to me, personally, but I think that moreover, so many of those conversations are just about how do we do big things. But what we’re talking about here is much more around how do we make time for things that seem small, but have a much greater impact on our wellness and on our psyche and on our ability to have boundaries. JL: Down where I work, we work at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia, which is in South-South Philly, you can’t go any further, it’s surrounded by the river. There are some really neat areas to walk in. I know people who will just walk down by the river and look at the old ships during lunch break, too. And so, there’s all sorts of like—you really take a lunch. Eat your lunch, get some air, and do something that clears your mind to give you a good second half of the day. SWB: Katel, what do you do for lunch? KL: Oh, gosh, well, sometimes, I do have to admit, sometimes I will eat something very hurriedly over the sink so I don’t get any dishes dirty. It’s very efficient, and it’s very sad. I was actually just thinking, one of my absolute favorite things is when I am traveling whether it’s for work, or I am out somewhere and I just happen to be on my own, sometimes i will go and just have a really fancy lunch by myself somewhere, and I’ll just get something extravagant, just because I can. Or something that’s like, oh I should save that for dinner, or whatever. And sometimes for me, just having that, even if it’s not a two-hour thing, it’s really nice to kind of like, sit with yourself. SWB: I don’t love going out to lunch most of the time. Like Katel said, I love going out to a fancy lunch every now and again, but for the most part, I prefer to eat home foods for lunch. I like to make a sandwich or assemble leftovers or put together a salad, and that’s fine. But what I’ve found is really important for me is to get out during the middle of the day, and I find that that’s my favorite time to go to the gym or go for a run. Something I have been prioritizing more and more is making sure that that happens, and that happens before it’s super late in the day. Because I work from home, and because I tend to have a fair amount of autonomy over my schedule—I mean, I have meetings and things, but they’re meetings that I agreed to set—I can kind of, you know, always fit it in where I want, in theory. But time slips away so easily. So it’s like, you have a couple meetings, you do a little work. All of a sudden you’re really hungry, so you eat something. Well, can’t go running right after you eat something. So now I get back involved in some work and some meetings, and suddenly it’s 5pm. And while I can still go for a run then, what I have found for myself is that making sure I get the time to go out sometime more in the middle of the day, I am doing something that is totally distinct from work, and that forces my brain out of the work zone, and I end up having an overall better day, a more pleasant day. And so I really have been trying to prioritize that, and prioritize it on top of things that seem more important in the short term, but I’ve realized in the long run aren’t. KL: That’s one of the things I’ve struggled with the most not working in like an office or a structured environment. Because my time is my own—and that’s really great, and I am very grateful for that—I also don’t have any accountability to anyone to be like, okay, I gotta go take a break, and this is going to help me be more productive in the long run. I don’t know, I am just thinking back to when I was starting out in my career, and maybe I didn’t have as much time or flexibility, or didn’t feel quite as much like I could take a break, I think, like, conversely, removing myself from the office and actually like—even if I wasn’t going out and like buying a nice meal—I would just go eat lunch somewhere else so I would feel like, okay, I wasn’t sitting at my desk and I wasn’t being judged, but I am taking time for myself. JL: Yeah, that’s so important. I can only imagine. I mean I luckily sometimes have someone who sits next to me and says, “hey, you gonna go get lunch?” KL: Yeah, it’s like, hey, are you just going to sit there all day? JL: You need a lunch app that rings, that’s like “hey!” SWB: Well you know, this whole conversation about reclaiming lunchtime and taking time for yourself, it makes me extremely excited to introduce our guest for today. Katel and I had the chance to sit down with Eileen Webb. [10:00] Eileen is somebody I’ve known for years, and she’s always the person I turn to when I want someone to give me some good advice and some thoughtful ideas about how to look at my time differently, and how to make sure that I’m creating space in my life and habits in my life that are going to give me some sustenance and some perspective and not burn me out. [Musical interlude] JL: CodePen’s a powerful tool that allows designers and developers to write code—like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—directly in a browser, and see the results right as you build. Whether you’re new to front-end code or have been writing it for years, it’s the perfect place to learn front-end programming languages. You can show off what you create, build test cases, and get help on tricky problems. Not to mention, you can find inspiration browsing all the awesome pens that other people are out there making. It’s a great community that I love being a part of. Whenever I have a new idea and want to get right to making it happen, I open up a CodePen and just start coding. I can skip all the things that are roadblocks for me—like setting up environments and getting hosting—and just get right to the projects I want to create. CodePen has so many cool things to explore, like CodePen Pro and Projects. Sign up today and get started by visiting codepen.io/hello. [Musical interlude] Interview **: ** Eileen Webb SWB: I’m excited to introduce all of you to Eileen Webb. Eileen is a friend of mine, and she’s also the director of strategy and livestock—no, seriously, livestock—at Webmeadow, a solar-powered web consulting company in New Hampshire. When she’s not tending her chickens or Instagramming her bunnies, she’s helping progressive organizations with their digital and content strategy, giving talks at lots of different tech conferences, and she’s teaching workshops (sometimes even with me!).Eileen, welcome to No, You Go. EW: Hello Sara, hello Katel. KL: Hi! SWB: I am so happy we could interview you nice and early, because I feel like you have so much insight into making a working life work for you, and getting comfortable with the idea of that not looking like everybody else’s, that I think people are going to really love. EW: My life is definitely not looking like other people’s. [Laughter] SWB: Yeah, so I would love to start out talking about that. I know that you live in northern New Hampshire, you don’t live where a lot of us would imagine an ambitious tech professional would live. Can you tell us a bit about what your day to day looks like? EW: Sure I live on a small farm. And so a lot of my day to day actually revolves around animals and livestock and like, in the right season, vegetables and growing things. But right now, the depths…

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Fancy, via South Philadelphia (Bonus!) Jan 19, 2018

Show notes

Hey look, it’s a bonus-ode! We sent our demo to a bunch of friends, and they sent us back, like, a zillion questions. So we thought we’d answer a few on air—and then ask you a question of our own. > Does it alienate potential clients if I’m tweeting a lot about sexual harassment in tech? Do I care?> —A listener from San Francisco As always, we’ve got the show notes—and a full transcript—right here. Show notes How many bottles of wine does it take to answer your mail? Technically none, but it’s more fun this way. In this week’s mailbag, we talk about: The, uh, pleasures of Pennsylvania’s state-run wine and spirits stores. What it means to do “big” things, and the reasons women often minimize their accomplishments (it ain’t all imposter syndrome, folks). Whether this podcast is business or pleasure (it’s BOTH, dammit). Why the Instant Pot is “all game no shame.” What growth and career progression look like when your job’s not a standard 9-to-5. The personal, the professional, and the ramifications of tweeting with reckless abandon. Karen McGrane’s “Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck.” inspired Sara to get more vulnerable in her writing. The fact that Katel’s a CEO. Just sayin’. Thanks as always to our friends The Diaphone for the use of our theme song, Maths, off the album of the same name! Transcript JENN LUKAS: Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KATEL LEDÛ: I’m Katel LeDû. SARA WACHTER-BOETTCHER: And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. SWB: Hey everyone, today on No, You Go, we’re doing something a little bit different. You see, we sent out our demo episode to a whole bunch of friends recently, and we started getting a lot of questions back from them. So what we thought we would do is go through that mailbag and answer some questions. And we thought, even better, let’s open up some wine, and answer those questions with the mics on. So, why don’t we go ahead and see what our listeners have to say. [Intro music] SWB: So, Jenn, what are we drinking tonight? JL: I have good news for you, this wine is already started. We are drinking tonight a lovely Côtes du Rhône. ALL: Mmmmmmmmm KL: That’s fancy, for fancy ladies. JL: It’s from the wine cellar of 11th Street Liquors. [Laughter] SWB: I was gonna say, it’s fancy, via South Philadelphia. KL: That’s right. JL: The South Philadelphia State Store. Thank you state store. KL: We don’t mess around. SWB: Okay, so let’s see what’s in the mailbag!” KL: So, a listener from Vancouver, Canada asks, “How did you know you wanted to do big things?” SWB: That’s such a tough question. I spent my childhood and early adulthood feeling really ambitious, but kind of not knowing where to put that ambition—like not being clear what I was working toward. And it was not until probably my late twenties that I had some idea of what I might be working toward in my career. I feel like it was more of a gradual figuring out on my part, to get an idea of what made me tick, what made me feel satisfied, so I knew where to put my energy and wasn’t feel like I was throwing my energy all over the place. KL: It doesn’t always necessarily feel like big things, but I am always looking for things that make me feel uncomfortable and nervous, and speaking in front of people makes me feel that way. So, I don’t know, this just feels like really good practice, and it’s exciting. JL: I think I’m with you in that I don’t necessarily think of them as big things, but I guess that’s the same as answering one of those questions like, “Well, my biggest weakness is caring too much.” [Laughter] So, I don’t want to be cliche here, because, they are big things. I also don’t want to sell anything that I do short, or anything that we do short. I think thought that if they’re things that I really like doing, it makes it easier to then get into it. So I think I just always wanted to do things that I really liked doing, and sometimes if you really want to do something that you love, you have to go big. KL: Totally. And it might not feel like, oh, I’m going to embark on this huge thing to you, because you like all these things about it. SWB: I think it’s also, you know, tying back to something we talked about in our first episode was that we really wanted to talk about being ambitious, and what that means. And I think that’s a scary word for a lot of people to use, and I think maybe particularly for women to use, because it’s like, you’re not necessarily socialized to think that what you’re doing should be ambitious. So it’s like, I don’t really think of anything I’m doing as being big things, but when I look at what other people are doing, I think that they’re all doing big things. So maybe I am doing big stuff and I am just not—I’m minimizing it. JL: Yeah, totally. Yeah, you’re completely right. And we almost get used to downgrading it, and thinking that is wasn’t a big deal, and it almost becomes a self-defense mechanism. KL: Yeah, like just in case it doesn’t happen, or you fail, or you stumble. SWB: Or in case somebody out there shits all over it. KL: Yeah, sure. SWB: That’s certainly something that I have felt. When I started writing publicly about my work—not writing in my work, but writing about my field—I was very nervous that people would think that my ideas weren’t valuable, weren’t adding anything. Or that they were just plain wrong. I think that a lot of people have that sensibility. You know we talk about imposter syndrome, and feeling like what you’re doing is not that important. And we try to tell women to be proud of their accomplishments. But part of that is a very real fear, because there are definitely assholes out there who will tell you that what you’re doing doesn’t matter, isn’t valuable, or isn’t good. It can be healthy to protect yourself a little bit, and it can sometimes also be difficult, I think, to like, parse out the difference between minimizing your accomplishments because you don’t want to take up too much space, or minimizing your accomplishments because you don’t want to be a target. You know, I’ve definitely had—not too bad so far, but—my share of trolls who have come after me for things I’ve written or said online, and a lot of their arguments really boil down to: How dare you? How dare you have thoughts and opinions, and how dare you exist in the world sharing them? How could you not see all of that around you all the time and not kind of internalize that a little bit? JL: Sara, I think that’s a great point. So, how do you know you want to do big things? Well, if you’re willing to put up with that shit, then I guess you know that you want to do big things, because you care about it even with the potential negatives that come with putting yourself out there and doing big. If it’s important to you enough that you can be like, eff those jerks. SWB: Totally. Like most days I have that feeling. I can put a middle finger up and get out there and do what I want to do. There are times, though, when the assholes get the best of you. And I think that’s okay. I tend to look at it as like, part of doing ambitious work is also recognizing that it’s not like, one unbroken line of progress. You’re going to have those moments where you’re really feeling capable and you can get a lot done, and you feel confident to get out there and talk about your work, and then you’re going to have those moments where you don’t feel that. And that’s okay. Because it doesn’t mean you’re not going to have another idea or another opportunity to get out there and bring your ideas to the world. JL: Here’s another question that we got: “My attention is spread thin across so many things.” She wants to know: How do you have time for hobbies? Do you have time for hobbies? KL: Sometimes I’m not even sure what my hobbies are anymore—we’ve talked about this before—because I feel like there’s a lot of crossover between things you love to do and things you’re doing for work. But I did realize recently that I haven’t read a full book front to back in a really long time. That made me super depressed. That’s one of my goals this year. So I know that’s not necessarily a super glamorous hobby, but you have to prioritize it. SWB: Well I also think, you know, what counts as a hobby? Is this a hobby? On the one hand, I think that this podcast is a super-serious part of my work, in the sense that I am putting a lot of focused time into it, I’m taking it very seriously, we’re thinking about things like sponsorships and producers, and we want this to be something that is polished and legit. On the other hand, it is also an opportunity to hang out with some of my closest friends, and drink wine, and order Thai food, and laugh—and that’s a good social activity. And so where does this sit? Like a lot of things in my life, I feel like it sits somewhere halfway in between. And I’m okay with that. That said, I think, you know, we talked about this a bit in our first episode, and you do have to have time that is not work time, and you do have to have things in your life that are not work things. For me that includes lots of physical activity; I really like to make sure that I go running and I go to the gym and lift. And it also means that I spend time reading books, and I don’t read all of the professional books that people around me seem to be reading. I sometimes do read books in my field, but I spend a lot of time skipping those in favor of picking up fiction, because I feel like that’s a healthier choice for me. KL: I just want to say that I do read the books that I publish. Just to any authors who are listening, I just want to make sure that you know that. [Laughter] JL: Do you know the last book that I read? It was called Solving Child Sleep Problems. [Laughter] KL: Sounds accurate. SWB: So, a really fun hobby. JL: It’s really great. I actually listen to the Audible book when my child wakes up at 2am, and I nurse him. KL: Is there a hobby that either of you have that you used to do earlier in your life that you wish you could bring back into your life? SWB: Not exactly, but there is something that I used to do way more of that I realized a little while ago had fallen by the wayside a bit on, which was cooking. I have always liked to cook and I really like to be able to make things from lots of different types of cuisines, different types of foods. And for a long time my husband and I would cook pretty much every night. Originally, we couldn’t afford to go out to eat all the time, and we still liked to eat interesting and good things, and healthy things, and things that come from vegetables, and so we would cook them. Over time, you know, I found that we would have more disposable income and it would be easier to go out more often, and that’s fun, but I was starting to really miss the feeling of setting down my work and doing something that was a complete shift in my brain and doing something with my hands. And so I have been trying to make sure I set my work down earlier more often, and really spend a little bit of time on the whole chopping, cleaning vegetables, prepping things, sautéing things—all of those little bits of cooling that are not necessarily fancy, but that I want to have a pause to make a meal from scratch. And so I have been really making sure that I am making time for that more evenings than I was for a while. JL: I keep going on the opposite spectrum. We now have an Instant Pot, and we do not do as much. KL: Hey that’s not shame, that’s all game. SWB: Instant Pots are great. I love my Instant Pot. Can we just do like an Instant Pot episode? JL: But yeah I don’t mean to keep bringing it down, but I’m going to be honest: no, I don’t have time for hobbies. That’s just not a thing I have time for anymore. So I do sort of as Sara was saying consider this a hobby, because it’s not my 9 to 5, and I really enjoy this. So I guess it is how you define hobbies. If hobbies are something you choose to do that doesn’t necessarily pay your bills, then yes, this would be a hobby for me. I like, seriously schedule every hour. I don’t preschedule it, but every hour of my day it’s either at work, or with my 10-month-old, or sleeping. So every hour I’m spending not trying to catch up on sleep is I guess a hobby. So then this would be a hobby. But other things I keep struggling to try to make time for. I don’t exercise or cook as much as I want to. To go to a yoga class, oh my god. KL: It takes planning. JL: And the yoga class near me is an hour and a half. Who’s got an hour and a half? KL: That’s so much yoga. JL: It’s like, so much! SWB: I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I hate yoga. KL: I love it, but those are long classes. JL: Yeah, they’re real long. So then I try to do online workout videos where I can, but even then, you have to do it when your kid’s napping, and I think, if my kid’s napping, then maybe I should be napping. Everything’s a choice now. KL: Yeah, and you’re like, don’t hop around and thud around on the floor. SWB: Well okay, so I know that when you have a small child, that becomes so painfully clear that everything is a tradeoff. It is definitely easier for those without small children to make some of those choices about how they spend their time. But all of us are making tradeoffs about how we spend time, right? JL: Yeah. SWB: A lot of it has to do with what gives you energy, what makes you feel good. And for some people, they need more of that pure downtime. And other people, myself for example, kind of lose their shit a little bit when they have too much downtime. So like, if you take me to a cabin for a weekend in the mountains, and you’re like, let’s all hang out in this house all day, I’m like, that sounds awful. I am going to die here; when are we going outside for a walk? And other people don’t feel that way. So I realized, for me, I need less of that really downtime stuff, that stuff that’s really relaxing for other people, I need less of that. And that having something like this, that is sort of a creative outlet, and I’m making something, but is sort of low-stakes—that is very positive for me and that feels good in my life. JL: Let’s get another question! KL: Yeah, here’s one from San Francisco: “Something I’m interested in lately is the notion that when you’re on the corporate career track, there are clear “stages”—early career, mid-career, senior level, etc.—that are tied to titles and responsibilities. When you’re in a smaller company or work for yourself or as a consultant, that sense of being on a track isn’t so clear. What does it mean that I’ve been a consultant for 10 years? How do you talk about that or even THINK about that?” SWB: I have the same question; I’d really appreciate if someone could answer that question for me. [Laughter] KL: That is such a good question. I think that is actually an issue, a little bit, in companies in general where there aren’t necessarily clear tracks everywhere. And I think that’s also just because the way we work has evolved so much in the past decade, five years. SWB: Yeah, and I think, Katel, you’re a CEO—which is, first off, badass. Katel’s a CEO, I like to tell people that. But secondly, okay, well, you’re not getting promoted. Which is cool, because you’re in charge, but what does that mean for what growth looks like, or what the next level looks like for you? How do you know what that is in your job? And it’s unclear. You have to define that in new ways that we don’t necessarily have vocabulary for. KL: You do, and I think that is one thing that I learned along the way. I sort of had to take a lot more ownership of it than I kind of expected to. I had to—not necessarily decide, but navigate, and say, okay, I think it’s time to make some sort of progression upwards or to over here, and try this new responsibility out or whatever. And I think you kind of have to forge that ahead a little bit for yourself. And if you’re at a company that has more team members, get people who are going to advoca…

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