Next week I’ll have the chance to read Sandberg’s Lean In and review it for Liberating Working Moms. You can’t go online anywhere without running into the book whether it is a pre-publication review (sometimes by someone who hasn’t read the book), a critique of the review, a critique of the critique and then the inevitable article about why women hate successful women. How meta. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to actually reading the book and deciding for myself what I think about it.
The Huffington Post has been publishing a series of posts by contributors on whether they chose to lean in or lean back and why. They are often short and sometimes not very good: I don’t think some understand quite what leaning in or leaning back means because their stories confuse the terms.
I feel like I’ve chosen to “lean in,” considering that I’m still working and continue to accept more responsibility. I like what I do and find it challenging, interesting, occasionally infuriating and fulfilling (usually). I can’t help but feel, though, that sometimes “leaning in” feels like being “all in” to borrow a term from poker.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about “leaning back.” My intuition tells me that more time at home and with my family could be very helpful right now, but the problem is that is that it’s not easy to “lean in” and then “lean back” without serious repercussions. Ideally, it would be a lot easier to transition between the two states, leaning in, then leaning back when necessary and then leaning in again without hits to salary, benefits and career trajectory . A fluid motion not unlike that of a rocking chair, rocking back and forth with ease.
Maybe the book will have some wisdom for me.
A few interesting links I came across this week:
- Dazed and Confused turns 20. I LOVE this movie. Interesting argument about it being THE movie for Gen X.
- Please Do Not Chillax: Adjoinages and the death of the American pun. I get that Akam is being a bit tongue-in-cheek with this piece, but I think adjoinages are very clever and illustrate how English is still a thriving, vibrant language. English has always been a language that invented new words.
- And then this post proves punning isn’t dead, at least for small businesses
- The Chronicle of Higher Education published the results of its survey on employers’ perceptions of how well graduates were prepared for the workforce. There’s some interesting stuff there, especially in light of NC’s governor wanting the UNC system to focus primarily on preparing students for jobs via technical skills.
- And this funny parody of a horrible, inflammatory article that ran in UNC’s student paper earlier in the week.
Family Building With a Twist 