Some friends and I started a book club almost a year ago now
(BCers, we better get started planning that posh one year anniversary event!) We rotate the professor position, the one who introduces four picks and then we all cast our vote, while enjoying a few bottles of wine and a delicious meal. Some might say it’s a dinner & drinks club dressed up as a book club.
The literary choices are quite diverse in this book club; some selections include Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast, Twilight and most currently the Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights. We typically organize gatherings at restaurants (new ones and old favorites) where we discuss the week’s reading assignment and propose our predictions for future chapters.
With all of us in somewhat similar industries, the club is an opportunity for us to stop talking “shop,” stop all that friendly gossip and dive into topics we might never have ordinarily thought about. And these discussions can get heated! This weekend was especially hot since book club took a road trip to the Jersey Shore.
This weekend we chatted about The Arabian Nights over hummus and delicious Middle Eastern inspired cocktails, while burying our feet in the sand. It was the perfect escape from the city and the usual. Book Club has inspired an old group of friends to keep things new again and depart from the norm; it’s also our excuse to make a point of getting together regularly even when life becomes hectic. What do you do to escape from the day-to-day norms?
Many people were a little surprised to learn that my idea of relaxing and recharging is to share a beach weekend house with a group of strangers on Fire Island for the summer. It’s common practice for 20 something’s from New York to “do a share” in Ocean Beach, FI, but perhaps not 40 something professionals.
As a Floridian, I firmly believe that life is better at the beach and it’s one of the few places I truly relax. I decided this year to combine the tranquility of the beach with the stimulation of expanding my circle of friends. So, I signed up to spend six weeks this summer with strangers in a lovely home called the High Dune Inn right on the ocean.
I’m happy to report that it’s been an absolutely wonderful experience. Sitting at my desk today looking at my weekend bag, I just can’t wait to jump on the train to the ferry that takes me back to a simpler time.
Here’s what I’ve learned this summer:
Nothing is more therapeutic than pulling a wagon
Bike bells are much more pleasant than car horns
I can still dance ‘til 4am
Pilates on the beach sounds more fun than it is
Strangers can become friends in a weekend
It’s more fun to watch a movie with a big group of people
Outdoor showers are exhilarating
Stress rolls away with each wave
Napping is contagious
Sangria tastes better on the beach
Mosquitoes think I’m sweet
Sunset hues always inspire me
How do you recharge in the summer?
You wondered what kind of a snack you would get on the plane. You laughed with the flight attendants. You felt pretty special. You usually arrived on time. Remember those days?
I’m writing this while on a flight to Chicago. MMC’s director of Media Connections Suzanne Haber, Vice President Jenn Horowitz and I are off to a meeting that we’re really excited about. I’m not sure the friendly skies are as excited as us! We were delayed due to weather. Nothing can be done about that. There wasn’t room for Suzanne’s bag so it was gate checked. I have a feeling we’re going to miss our connecting flight. We’ll probably have to rent a car and drive to our final meeting destination in Wisconsin.
I wouldn’t exactly call this glamorous. But for every cloud – and there are a lot out in the sky tonight – there’s a silver lining.
Being the talkative bunch that we are, we’re using our time wisely. We covered the top media stories this week, the latest pop culture trends (our junior trend watchers at the agency tell us big hair is back and blue for nails is in!), a competitive business issue one of our clients is facing and a big opportunity another client has to drive a leadership story in the marketplace.
You don’t often get quiet time like you do when “stuck” in transit. It reminded me of one of our monthly Strategic Innovations Group meetings and how important it is to put time aside to absorb, think about different perspectives and angles of attack and riff off each other. It was a remote SIG session if you will. Our next slated session is next week. Hopefully, with travel the way it is, I’ll make it back in time for it!
I remember my first sailing experience as if it was yesterday. I was about 10 years old, my family lived in Thailand and along with most other expat families we descended on the yacht club in Pattaya Beach for a getaway most weekends. Like all the other kids my age, I was enrolled in a “learn to sail” course and after a couple of hours of mastering the art of tying a bowline and learning the basic mechanics of the boat, you were let loose on the water. This is where things started to go downhill for me. I won’t go into the actual incident but needless to say I graduated from the course with the “chunk of the fishing boat” award after allegedly ramming the side of a fisherman’s boat somewhere in the Gulf of Siam.
I had another attempt at sailing when I was in high school in Sydney. This experience was only marginally better: on day three, I stopped the equivalent of the Staten Island Ferry dead in its tracks. Evidently, attempting to sail a boat head to wind is not the way to avoid oncoming boating traffic that is 30 times the size of you!
Needless to say, I haven’t cared too much for sailing since. So, when a friend asked me to accompany her on a two day “basic sailing“http://www.sailmanhattan.com/ course recently at North Cove Marina in Manhattan, I was, suffice to say, slightly hesitant. Failure however is not an option in my book. If at first you don’t succeed, you try and try again and this was my chance to conquer this sport once and for all!
In two days on the Hudson learning how to take the helm as well as be a supportive crew member I not only learnt how to sail all over again (I am pleased to report without incident this time) but I rediscovered the joy of learning.
Some things in life you learn the hard way or simply take longer to conquer. Sailing was one of those things for me – so was skiing but we will leave that alleged incident for another time.
Other things come much easier like exploring New York afloat (do you know where old subway cars go?) but it doesn’t matter if your desire is to be the next Ellen MacArthur or the next Marina Maher. It’s all just about LEARNING and, I hope you agree: there is nothing like the sense of accomplishment you feel after learning something new.
For most of us, traveling on business means we get to see the airport, a hotel, a conference center and then the sights back to the airport. Whenever I can, I like to see something with local charm or significance. Here are a few worth investigating the next time you’re on the road and have a bit of downtime:
Cincinnati: The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, conveniently located in downtown Cincinnati, is an inspiring place to visit. Telling the story of the struggle for freedom in the US, the museum includes exhibits that make you think and feel about the experience of slavery in this country and the continuing struggles around the world. www.freedomcenter.org
San Francisco: Located 11 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge is Muir Woods, an oasis of green and tranquility
and a place to walk off a few of the calories you’ve consumed from San Francisco’s great restaurants. A visit to this national monument lets you walk through an old-growth redwood forest, viewing the tallest type of tree in the world, the Coast redwood (sequoia sempervirens). You’ll also see countless other plants and animals, including tanoak trees, ferns, redwood sorrel, stellar jays, black-tailed deer, and banana slugs, to name a few. http://www.nps.gov/muwo
Princeton: Getting off Route 1 in New Jersey and heading into downtown Princeton is a nice treat for New Yorkers traveling to see our pharma clients. Not only do you get to see the beautiful campus of Princeton University, the town has many shops and restaurants. One historic site is the Yankee Doodle Tap Room at the Nassau Inn. The restaurant was named for Yankee Doodle after Norman Rockwell painted a thirteen-foot mural about the historic figure for Nassau Inn in 1937. Today, this piece of American art history continues to hang behind the bar in the Tap Room, where fine pub food and drink is served daily. www.nassauinn.com
Please share some of your favorite places to go when visiting clients or traveling on business.
Almost everyone’s done it. Admit it, you have too. You’ve Googled yourself. And if you haven’t, you probably should.
With the ever-growing social mediascape, some aspect of your life is most likely online somewhere, whether it’s updates to your own profile on LinkedIn or pictures tagged of you in someone else’s MySpace album. If it’s not, well
what’s wrong with you? Though it probably sounds like I’m joking with that question, the truth is, if you’re not online in some capacity, you either have an insanely strong team of reputation specialists monitoring the Web 24/7, or you’re living under a rock.
The power of self-promotion and importance of managing your Internet identity became abundantly clear to me this weekend when I scored not one, but two, invites to swank friend-of-friend birthday parties based on my Facebook activity. Seriously. One admitted to enjoying the wall comments I posted, while the other said I just looked like fun from a recently-uploaded photo album.
Both birthday people were called out for not actually knowing me when posed with the question, “Wait, when did you meet Jessica? Have I introduced you?” No, we had not actually met in person. In my opinion, nothing’s more awkward than being caught in the act of online profile observation. I’ve been guilty of this behaving as if I know someone, making them feel uncomfortable by a friendly familiarity, only to realize we hadn’t even met yet I just recognized them from being on the Internet somewhere. Thanks to the World Wide Web, it’s now possible to form an opinion on someone before you even meet them face to face.
The fact remains that there’s a whole new public “you” to be managed. Even with privacy settings, it’s very likely the average person is just a few clicks away from seeing your past online. So is that reputation the one you want to convey? Decide how you want people to see you, and to the best of your ability, manage your Internet identity. Because these days, you need to be your own PR expert. And all I can say is thank goodness for detagging.
