From Here to Autonomy

Women's work?

Part of my experimentation with my new neighborhood involved trying a new place for a mani-pedi. This didn't come with a small amount of apprehension; a good mani-pedi place is hard to find.

I got comfortable in my chair, settling into the warm pool of water at my feet. An Asian man--not older than 35--lifted my right hand.

"What shape?"

"Short and square," I replied.

"This color on your hands and feet?" he asked, holding up the bottle of deep red that I had picked out when I walked in.

"Please."

I watched this man study my cuticles and start trimming away at my nails. This was most certainly a first for me--having a man give me a mani-pedi. I've seen more men come to salons to receive services, but never had I seen a man giving them before.

I noticed my judgements: Can this guy do a good job? Will he bungle the polish? I watched him work, when normally I would sit back and zone out.

But why would a man who's trained to give manicures do a bad job? This incident made me think about work, and more specifically, women's work versus men's work. What kind belongs to whom anymore?

____________________________________________


I hand H-band a piece of notebook paper with a list of tasks.

"For the week," I say to him, dubious that he would internalize my requests.

"Yep, thanks."

"What are you doing today?"

"Got some work out back, some shopping, and a call at lunchtime," he says.

I'm uneasy with his answer, "But what about the list? When will you get to the list?"

I wonder if, since leaving his company, he'll be efficient with his time, or productive. When we both worked full-time we divided tasks accordingly: He did household tasks like the dishes and most of the cooking. I paid the bills and planned things like travel and dinner parties. I gravitated toward things in the future; he handled things as they came up.  Now he was taking on everything at home: the immediate, the planned, and, when the baby comes, the primary caregiving.

I remind myself that he's good at this. I come home, and he's made dinner. I know that with our daughter he will do what comes naturally and keep her safe, fed, and loved. But I can't help myself: I plan.

"When will you call the insurance people?" I ask. "Will you hang the pictures today?" "Who are you meeting with today?" I want to make sure he really wants to do this. And I have to ensure he's structured, that he's in movement, that he still thinks of his future.

I need to watch him work because I question his instincts in this realm, even when they are more highly honed than my own.

 

 

Preggers

I saw a line, and a lighter line next to it. I read the box again; negative would be just one line. Any second line, light or equally dark, meant yep--with child. Or with embryo, or multiplying cell mass, whatever you want to call it.

"What's taking you so long?" H-band said, walking into the bathroom. I'd been taking longer than usual to get ready for our Saturday morning stroll for coffee. I handed him the piece of plastic I had been studying.

"We're pregnant." I said, perhaps too casually. I'd said that one time before, and devastatingly it didn't stay true for long.

That was January. I'm now just starting to believe the results. After paranoid judgments that I wasn't feeling sick enough and just didn't look pregnant enough--there couldn't possibly be a baby in there while I could still button my jeans--I'm starting to believe. Perhaps when I went in for the second trimester ultrasound and saw a skull and a spine.

"There are the arms," the lab tech said. I had no idea what she was talking about, I couldn't make out any extremities, but those words helped me loosen my grip on H-band's hand. I had no idea I had been holding it so tightly.

"Two?" I confirmed.

"Yes."

She then confirmed two legs, two lungs, and a four-chamber heart. I was almost back to breathing regularly at this point.

"How about the sex?" I asked.

"The baby's legs are closed," the tech said. I would later learn this is commonly said at second trimester ultrasounds as a CYA mechanism, "I'm pretty sure I can see labia...ninety-five percent sure."

I looked at the mass of white on the screen. "If you say so." I turned to H-band. Perhaps it was because a number of our friends were having girls lately that I had been so sure it was a boy. Or perhaps it was the illogical presumption that I had more Y chromosomes to offer up than X--I always felt like I had a lot of boy in me, despite the boobs and other anatomical indices.

"You happy?" I asked H-band.

"Yep," he said, not very convincingly. He'd told me that he didn't care what sex the baby was, but I could tell he felt a twinge of worry, just like I had over the prospect of having a little boy; a question of whether or not he would be able to understand her. I wasn't concerned; though I felt a little guilty. I grew up in a house of women--we take over.

I'm in the "honeymoon trimester". I feel like myself, though I find it more difficult to pick up things from the floor. My fitness instructor has to give me different instructions when we get to abdominals. People who don't know me just think I have a gut and am naturally well-endowed in the chest. Oh if they only knew.

The first trimester was difficult. I was hardly sick and not nearly as tired as I was warned I would be. But I traveled throughout and felt that the 20-30 percent less that I could bring to things was glaringly obvious; my insistence on a cranberry and soda at cocktail parties an admission. I wanted to say, "Not getting my hopes up too much yet," then I shushed myself. I didn't want to manifest the devastation I encountered last summer. I would do things differently this time, whatever that meant.

I came back from business trips and crashed over the weekend, too tired and icky feeling to get up off the couch some days. Still I was only sick-sick one weekend, during a trip to Mendocino. I'd puke and buy myself some hours of reprieve. I called my friend Lissa and my sister-in-law--both doctors--to ensure things were OK. Both said the symptoms sounded indicative of standard morning sickness. It must be something else, I told them. I just didn't feel sick enough.

I harbored a bit of a complex over not being "Mommy" enough. Moms get ubersick when they are pregnant. They look abundant. They drip with, I don't know, Momminess. But during the first trimester waiters still asked me if I'd have a glass of wine with dinner; no one insisted on helping me with my bags on airplanes. I wondered if I was fooling myself.

The few who knew early on asked me, "How will you do it?" I know people wonder that. I've not exactly been one who has lived with visible boundaries between my work and life. The past five years have been all-in. There was a point where I had to stop asking myself that same question. It had become an excuse to not try for something else.

A year or so ago I began practicing creating more space--nothing glaringly obvious. While traveling, I'd stop working before I passed out from exhaustion, taking in a TV show or reading a book before I fell asleep. I came home earlier from work, knowing full-well that I'd get back on email later that night, but at least making it home for dinner. I stopped cramming things into the periphery of my day and letting the things I chose to do stand on their own, without having the less-important accomplishments lean against them like tchotchkes from some garage sale, unnecessary bulk.

Yesterday, after a long day working at home--after two weeks of on and off travel--H-band started in,

"You need to start talking to the baby," he said. "She can hear you."

"I've been on conference calls all day," I said. "She's heard me plenty."

He's been insistent on providing stimuli for the baby, just lately playing this game with my gut, poking my side three times and then waiting for the baby to poke back. She isn't exactly a counter yet, but she's responsive.

"One, two, three."

(pause)

"(Thud)"

"One, two, three."

(pause)

"(Thud)"

H-band gets a kick out of this; it's an indication that she'll be responsive to us outside of the womb. We both want that reassurance that the story we're building in our heads--the one we keep repressing--will, in fact, come true.

No promises, I keep saying to myself, then saying more quietly, but why the hell not?

Where did all my hobbies go?

My business partner, Lisa, passed along a questionnaire from a blogger who will be writing about the working habits of female entrepreneurs. Both Lisa and my other partner, Elisa, had responded; I tried not to read their answers as I approached the questions, but I couldn't help but notice that our answers were eerily similar--with the exception that, as a parent, Lisa spends about 1/3 of her time parenting. Elisa and I try to eak in workouts, books/TV and the occasional cooked meal when we're not working or sleeping.

What amazed me about all of our responses:

--Our hours worked: We tend to put in similar amounts of hours, getting up early to address email, getting in a full work day, and jumping back on our computers to address email/reading after our dinners and activities with friends/spouses/children.

--Our time on email: It's an ever-present thing, even when we're traveling or "offline".

--Our dwindling hobbies: Elisa is a theater buff, and Lisa used to ski a ton. I used to go to yoga class religiously and write creatively. These pursuits were not in our answers, or they were mentioned as rare activities squeezed in while on vacation, or with the words "try to" preceding them, as in, "I TRY to catch a show once a month."

As I was typing my responses to these questions about what I did outside of work--working on a Saturday morning, as I tend to knock out reading I didn't get to during the week--I looked over at my husband, Jesse, embarrassed.

"Jeezus hun! I don't have hobbies anymore."

"You think?" he said, with no small amount of sarcasm.

I love to read profiles of other entrepreneurs, with the voraciousness many have while reading People, In-Style, or some other publication detailing the lives of the rich and famous. I love to hear how they spend their time, down to their commute routines. There's a column in Inc Magazine that showcases a different entrepreneur every month, detailing his/her typical work day. And I marvel at those who do such things as cycle religiously for two hours before sunrise, or who are competitive flamenco dancers on the side. How do they do it and run a business? I wonder.  

I think back to early in my career in New York City, when I worked at several media conglomerates and made it a goal of mine to hit all of the new plays, films, and hot spots I could afford that were listed in Time Out NY magazine. Going through old boxes this past month as I prepared for a move, I found an old collection of Playbills and matchbooks--proof that, once, I did stuff that was not work-related. I found old manuscripts and magazine clips and was amazed at the consecutive hours of creative time it must have taken to write it all. Though I wanted to pare down all the random detritus I'd collected over the years, I couldn't get myself to throw this stuff away.

Jesse and I stole away for a bagel this morning, and I bragged to him that every Saturday, back when I lived in New York more than 10 years ago, I used to walk to a local bagel shop, order one with one of three of my favorite shmear flavors, then stop over at the coffee shop across the street to read The New Yorker or a book I was reading with my book club. I didn't have a mobile phone or a laptop; it was a purely analog pursuit. And I'd spend hours there, enough to get my thoughts swirling. I'd go home and write up a storm.

I used to regularly host friends for dinner, planning the menu days before and often prepping food most of a Saturday afternoon. Or I'd endeavor to bake something I'd never made before.

I used to take classes on such things as fiction writing, winetasting, boxing, or improvisational acting, and attend book readings after work.

I feel slightly wistful, but hardly regretful, of the changes; I'm more mindful of them. On the other side of the coin, 10 years ago I yearned for more adventure out of my work, and to do more than read manuscripts and edit articles eight hours a day. I wished I could travel more. I wished that I could work for myself and maybe even support a family with my work. I wished that the time I did have wasn't spent wishing for more.

I may have no hobbies, but in that last respect the grass is most certainly greener today.

Death of an Entrepreneur

Somewhere around age 45 my father decided he didn't want to work anymore. He didn't tell anyone this; he may not even have told himself. He'd started his own business about ten years before and had worked like crazy. Dad's experience was in automotive print advertising sales and he'd developed a client base among local car dealerships. When he left the corporate world he had a network of clients ready to hire him to promote their dealership sales events. Some people say my Dad could sell anything.

Dad was successful initially through sheer force of will. Though his job was primarily in advertising and promotion, he personally touched every piece of the sales funnel--placing ads in the local papers, orchestrating mass mailings, being the voice of God in local TV and radio ads, donning his tuxedo on Saturday mornings and welcoming people into his clients' dealerships, and even at times selling the cars. At night, he'd come home exhausted, usually not having eaten all day. He'd loosen his tie and fix himself a drinkie winkie. Mom would ask, "How many?" Sometimes it was a number in the twenties, sometimes it was more.

For several years Dad sent out these massive mailings for his clients. He wrote and designed the materials; picked them up from the printer and then personally dropped off boxes of mailers, envelopes, and reams of names and stamps at the homes of my mom's girlfriends. They would hand-address, stamp and stuff, making maybe 40 bucks per job. For particularly big jobs my Dad employed his kids. It took a while before I was allowed to write on the envelopes--Dad wanted the writing to look professional--but eventually I got my own lists. I felt proud being trusted enough to help.

After several years Dad became more efficient. He printed labels for the mailers, which saved time and looked better. Still I think he did things the hard way. His business didn't have nearly the scope of one that would necessitate funding, but I don't think Dad thought along those lines anyway--of borrowing money to make more money, or of hiring staff in order to free him up to do more high-level thinking. His only "employee" was his unpaid bookkeeper, my mother, who admits her only qualification for the job was an ability to balance a checkbook. My father was a quick learner, but I do wonder now if things would have been different if he'd consulted others as he grew.

Why I don't care that low numbers of women are receiving VC funding

My first semester in college I went with some sorority sisters to a set-up (these were small parties that paired a sorority with a fraternity, and for which you were often "set up" with a date from that fraternity. The concept seems almost ludicrous to me now, given the potential room for mis-matches, but I digress). One of my pledge sisters asked me if I had a problem "being set up with a black guy."

The question threw me. I'd noticed, shall we say, homogeneity among my corn-fed, flat-accented, Midwestern sisters. But I'd gone to a racially diverse high school where I had African American friends, and interracial dating was quite common.

"Of course not," I said. I was above such foolishness. I silently prayed he was hot.

"Good," my friend said. "I mean, I would do it but my brother (who was white and even in the same fraternity as the black pledge) would kill me. You're so open to stuff like this; I knew you'd be a good sport."

I recall being offended, not for myself, but for my date. Did he know how his supposed peers felt about him? I resented the assumption that by agreeing to go out with someone of color I was somehow agreeing to take one for the team. And I questioned where I'd settled socially. Did these women accept me because they thought I saw the world like them?

I ended up having a fine, but not earth-shattering, time. My date was shy, even a bit standoffish. After my friend's comment I couldn't help but notice that he was the only black man in his pledge class. I wondered if he was aware of comments said behind his back, like the one my friend made, or if he was oblivious. He seemed restrained, even a bit false. He wore the same preppy clothes as his fraternity brothers; the same garden variety frat boy well-worn baseball cap. I also wondered if I was judging him as fake because he seemed "too white". What if he identified as being white? Was there anything inherently wrong with that?

At some point we started talking about our backgrounds, and he shared that he had been adopted as a baby by a white couple. He admitted to me that he didn't "feel" black and even referred to black people as "them." I felt sad. I felt like he was trying to say to me, "See, I really do belong here."

I wanted to tell him, "You don't really want to belong here. Believe me."

_____________________________________________

A few weeks ago I read several pieces that evoked anger, empathy, even silliness about the lack of venture-backed women entrepreneurs. Some focused specifically on Silicon Valley, tech-related businesses. One piece indicated "hidden biases" of VCs toward younger, male entrepreneurs who presumably have fewer distractions (read: families, concerns about hygeine) than women to worry about. This later led to discussion in the comments arguing for and against women's innate suitability as primary caregivers. One commenter, Carla Thompson:

...As long as a good-sized portion of the population, both male and female, believe that women are the only gender genetically predisposed to adequately nurturing and raising children, this problem will persist.

I knew that these blog posts were, indirectly and yet directly, about me, but I didn't know how I felt about them. In the end, I felt confused--certainly not inspired by comments of women who, despite biological realities, could claim to have managed it all--there were none of that sort offered. And I couldn't say that I have felt the back hand of bias in these matters. My partners and I had a business with a revenue model that was working in a growing industry and several years of experience to back us--that's what has mattered to our investors. Story told.

Have I felt marginalized as a female entrepreneur in Silicon Valley? Made to feel less worthy of funding because I have ovaries and may put them to reproductive use? No. Can I say that because I haven't experienced bias that there isn't a problem? No.

So I backed away from writing on the topic. I didn't feel I had a strong enough opinion either way.

I asked another female entrepreneur if she had read these recent pieces, and what did she think of them?

"What's to say?" she responded. "None of these writers asked actual female entrepreneurs in the Valley how they've felt."

"What would you have told them if they had?" I asked.

"It's a non-issue. Women can have babies and run businesses. Get over it."

I found myself wanting to verbally sweep my penchant for drama under the rug,

"Exactly," I said. "What's the big deal?"

Why do people make a big deal about these inequities when clearly there are women who are making things work? Why do we feel compelled to constantly pull out the data showing the lack of women being funded when, perhaps, most women simply don't want the life of a tech entrepreneur?

Why do I keep thinking of that set-up, my Freshman year in college?

___________________________________________________

Just this week I happened to be back in New York the day that my sister, Julie, did a signing for her new book, The Madame Curie Complex. I've browsed the book and read every review that currently exists on it, but embarrassingly have yet to read the damn thing. When people asked me what the book is about, the PR flak in me comes out:

"It reveals how some of the most acclaimed scientific discoveries made by men were actually made by women," I say, then wait for the oohs and ahhs one reserves for books that out Presidents and get you on Oprah.

Fortunately my sister is amazing at Cliff-noting herself at these events--I need to remind her to stop providing so much value at her readings, lest people think they can learn nothing more by buying her book. And she's entirely too noncontroversial. I realized that I've woefully oversimplified the premise of her book. It really has nothing to do with men taking credit for women's brilliant work, but rather women's brilliant work not being seen as brilliant, because it is women's work.

The Madame Curie Complex is a term meant to describe a standard women scientists often set for themselves (and is often perpetuated by men, to be fair). My sister writes in her book:

"No doubt, [Curie's] work helps to make the case that science is made to be manly rather than being inherently so. But Curie’s myth haunts these pages and the psyches of succeeding generations of women more completely than her real-life example, for it has both empowered and stigmatized women, liberated and constrained them, often at the same time. The historian Margaret Rossiter noted an inferiority complex in women after Curie’s tours of the United States in the 1920s, and for generations the Curie complex has continued to allow men to disqualify women -- and women to disqualify themselves -- from science. Women scientists have felt as though they cannot measure up to Curie, and of course how could they, when this mythical measure of female competence has morphed in the American mind over and over again? It’s like trying to hit a moving target."

It occurred to me: women scientists, women entrepreneurs, same freaking difference. How effing sneaky, Julie, Wrapping your latest work up in a geeky little package to get your science-averse twin sister to not think you were onto her. Isn't the Madame Curie Complex what we women in "male" industries perpetuate when we back away from asserting our femininity? When we undermine it? We look at what we do in the world and say under our breaths, "Yeah big whoop ... did I put the milk back in the fridge this morning?"

Because even when we take on "male" industries, we do it in ways that are seen as much less impressive than men, or we do it just like them--both of which approaches are equally alienating and in many cases ineffective.

There was a point in Julie's talk where she spoke about "the numbers," as in: "Why the big stink? Look at all the women MBA's and women who got into MIT." In science academia women are as well represented, if not more so, than men at top institutions. "We need to stop worrying about the numbers of women in science," Julie said, "Numbers aren't the problem."

But, she pointed out, often women scientists are relegated to "female" forms of science--think of those soft mushy behavioral sciences. After all, as Lawrence Summers would posit, those cold, hard facts are just so difficult for us ladyfolk to grasp. Or our more holistic approach to such serious subjects as science, tech, and business have often been dismissed.

For instance, Jane Goodall was relatively untrained in the traditional (read: male) technique of studying primates. Rather than measure their toenails, count their bowel movements, and call it a day, she watched them and took notes, often in narrative form, and often giving the primates' interactions a storyline. Initially this more intuitive approach was seen as amateurish and dismissible, and yet it's now much more indicative of how scientists today frame this sort of research. Goodall proved the worth of a "female" perspective in science.

I think of my own industry and of BlogHer: We didn't invent computers, or the Internet. We didn't invent blogging; but we provided a larger context for its importance, particularly to women. I guess by some definitions this is a girly-girl approach to technology, akin to Goodall's approach to her science. But is it any less valuable; any less illuminating or fundable?

Do I care if so few women are being funded in Silicon Valley? No. I care that women's approach to business is so underfunded, and hence undervalued. I care that those women who are succeeding in it are seen as doing so DESPITE who they are, rather than because of who they are.

I think of that black man I was set-up with 20 years ago, content, silent, and numb. 

Notes entering the third week of travel...

I throw the suitcase on the bed. Jesse hates when I do that--airplane germs he says. That case has been everywhere. The zipper on the left side is broken, has been for a while, but I don't want to look for another suitcase yet. I have honed my packing routine with this one. I know what can fit where. I fear that I won't remember things with a new suitcase. Looking at this one I can tell that I've forgotten things by the thickness, or thinness, of the front pocket. I keep jewelry stashed in secret places in case I forget to pack a necklace, or a bracelet. I decide out of guilt to move the suitcase over to my side of the bed.

I don't need to unpack everything--just the used tops, socks and underwear. The makeup and toiletry bags can stay, and the hairbrush, and the belts--those have been placed on the same side and remain untouched. Some items need to be replenished, like my aspirin case, my Q-tip dispenser, my toothpaste, my business card holder. I refill those immediately--I know that I'll never get to them if I wait until early the next morning; my brain is half on then.

I put out my clothes for the next day and plug in all of my electronics at the charging station, even if they don't need it. The chances that I will forget to bring my cell phone or my iPod are lowered when I charge them together next to the computer. I've forgotten many things before--jewelry, charging cords, medication, deodorant--but never my computer.

I hung some clothes up along my bedroom window weeks ago, at the beginning of the travel jag, to spare me from coming home and having to rifle through items in my closet. They've been placed in the order of when I will need them--cold weather outfits, warm weather outfits, cold again. These items are clean and unrepeated. "Unrepeated" is a highly subjective term. Of course I repeat outfits, but I do try to stick to some criteria:

--Can't wrinkle too easily--not a hard and fast rule, but all things being equal the wrinkleable items stay home.
--Haven't worn the last time I was in that city.
--Seasonable
--Has matching elements that are clean
--Will go with one of the two pair of dress shoes I can fit in my case

This criteria makes choosing my outfits the most lengthy part of my routine. It's like a logic problem you might encounter while taking the GRE: If Jory has four clean sweaters, three blouses, three pairs of slacks, two skirts, three pair of tights (two in gray), three pair of clean dress socks, two belts, three necklaces, can only fit two pair of shoes in addition to her gym shoes, must have five unrepeated outfits for meetings in two climate zones and may not check a bag (I forbid it), how many outfits can she create?

This has been my routine since January.

I open my underwear and sock drawers--thankfully I went hog wild at Victoria's Secret over the holidays and stocked up on enough underwear to outfit me for several months without doing laundry, but I'm nearly out of clean socks. I begin my process of bargaining: If I stretched it and wore these socks two days--not consecutively--and wore gym socks with boots, I could pull this off.

Jesse asks if it makes sense to do a quick load of laundry to free up some socks and fitted T-shirts and I tell him no. We have four or five waking hours left to do something together; I'd rather not spend it in preparation for my next trip in the morning.

I throw in some workout gear. My gym shoes hardly fit in the bag and I question for a minute whether I should even bother working out. I disabuse myself of this notion and stuff them in the front pocket. This is going to make it really difficult to stow my bag in an overhead bin, but so be it.

I have a conference that starts in SoCal Sunday, but I'm going to leave a day earlier to visit with my in-laws, who live down there. I love to plan extra time--a day, a dinner--to see people when I'm in town. I've become better about making the time for it. But this also means more time away, more to pack, another appointment, another weekend away. I remind myself: You planned this.

I ask Jess what he wants to do for dinner--let's make something simple here, he says, since I'm home just tonight. I notice we don't have a lot of options in the fridge, but I don't suggest we go and get anything; I rescind my right to add grocery items to the shopping list for the week when I'm not going to be around. Later, after dinner, I notice Jess has broken into the raspberry sorbet I bought weeks ago. We've established an unspoken rule: No griping about Jesse eating my food when I'm not around to eat it. We can always buy more.

I've taken a similar stance on work-related issues. Things in the office happen, and I can't be asked to sound off on everything, just the biggies. I no longer take umbrage when meetings go on without me, but I do desire connection. I get my reports in early--something that used to be an impossibility but that I've made possible. I check in more. I create tiny threads of connection that are barely perceptible, but that keep me from drifting off into space. Sometimes I swear all I can hear is the sound of my breathing, like I'm in a spacesuit, like Darth Vader. I remind myself I'll be back home soon enough. This is just another mission. And I remember: Once I'm on the moon, I'm at home.

I call my mom from the car. She knows the drill.

"Where are you going?" she says. I haven't told her I was going anywhere yet. I take an ounce of comfort in the fact that the Bay Bridge is far less congested on a Saturday morning, and I'm surprised when I get to the Red Carpet Club at the United terminal and most of the seats are taken. Some are leisure travelers. Most are like me--opening their laptops and getting to work. I actively decide: It's a Saturday. I'm not doing email now. I'm going to blog.

Encounters: The Exit Strategist

Ten years ago I moved to San Francisco from New York. I had been bitten by the start-up bug, having worked for a hybrid start-up (one that had the chaotic feel of a start-up but had already gone public) and was intrigued by the notion of starting something from scratch. I finally got my chance, though it meant moving across the country.

A few weeks into the job I was asked to meet with potential editorial partners. Co-marketing relationships, I was to learn, were a dime a dozen for Web start-ups in the 90s. Non-exclusive, often cashless transactions where you linked back to a partner's Website and vice versa in an attempt to expand your Web traffic. These kinds of deals still exist, but in general I think we as new media professionals have become a lot smarter about when these partnerships actually make sense. I think about some of the deals I did back in '00 and cringe (Online therapy? Really?), but I digress.

What occurs to me now is that these deals didn't need to be particularly sustainable--they just needed to provide a quick burst of traffic, or even just the promise of traffic. The goal was to appear to be growing so that when the time came to exit, the optics were there.

The fellow I met was roughly my age--27 or 28 years old. He'd started his career in San Francisco and seemed much more comfortable with the start-up ethos than I.

"Is it me, or do people seem not to care as much about work around here?" I said, half-joking. I had a small staff of writers that ambled in and out as convenient, and rather than see this as a management issue on my part, I opted to demonize these people for not having enough drive. I don't think this guy understood.

"We work around the clock," he said. I suppose that was true of many of my co-workers as well, despite my complaints. Staff might have come into work at 10 or 11 in the morning, but they often stayed on call through the night. They just didn't have the intensity I would have preferred. It seemed that they could be doing what they did for any company; ours was just the one that had hired them first. I was used to making my company my cause d'etre.

"It's fine for now," he continued. "Once we sell I'll just chill out."

Now here's the part of this story that people don't believe, despite the fact that I knowingly moved across the country to work for a new media start-up, despite the fact that I had a stock option package, I really didn't understand exit strategy. The thought of working your ass off to someday stop working sounded so foreign, even ludicrous, to me that I wasn't sure I understood.

"What do you mean, 'if you sell?'" I asked him. "Is that why you are doing all of this work? To stop working at your company?"

"Of course," he said.

"But what will you DO after that?" I asked.

"If I play my cards right, I'll never work again," he said. A few things went through my head at this point: Fear that perhaps in my haste to secure this job I hadn't paid enough attention to the stock option portion of my compensation. And I felt a more enveloping fear: What if it should ever come to pass that I don't need to work for a paycheck? I had always been validated by work; I would just keep working, would have been my default answer. But this guy felt differently. Who's the chump? Him or me?

"But seriously," I asked again, "what would you DO?"

Now he looked at me like I was nuts. "I'd sleep in, go to the beach, surf more. I don't know; I would just figure it out."

It didn't seem possible to me that he wouldn't want to continue to build on his success at his current company, or maybe even another one. The thought of just stopping didn't make sense to me. Why would someone stop working? I thought of what I would do if I had the option of not working. All of my aspirations were related to work; I couldn't think of anything. I might travel, but then I would have stopped after a few weeks and started working again. Work was my only compass.

This is a rather dramatic example, but I think this encounter gave me an early glimpse into where I needed to be aspirationally before becoming an entrepreneur. We represented two ends of a spectrum of motivation; each on its own could be disastrous to entrepreneurs. Some of us may be more lifestyle-motivated, and some of us more achievement-oriented, but survival as an entrepreneur must borrow from both sides: A life you want, plus a desire to make things happen.

Aliza Sherman's confessional post makes me wonder: How Am I As a Boss?

This week Aliza Sherman gets my Entrepreneurial Cojones Award for her post on Work It, Mom, "I was the boss from hell." In this post, Aliza--an entrepreneurial superpower in my book, whose candid take on building a business and a personal life are inspiring--takes on a ghost from her business past: her first business. More specifically, her ineptitude as a manager.

Ten years ago, I was running my first company, and I was in a bad place in my life despite being in an excellent place with my company, at least on the surface. Although I still don’t have a full picture of how my employees at the time saw me, I get bits and pieces as I reconnect with some of them over time, and the picture is not pretty.

Some suitable words to describe me as a boss at that time would be:

    * impatient
    * paranoid
    * angry
    * frustrated
    * bitchy
    * demanding
    * irrational
    * emotional
    * disempowering
    * unpredictable
    * insensitive

Aliza uses this post to apologize for this behavior (something I dream about seeing from bosses in my past, but that's another post), and to point out the stresses in her life that made her a bad boss. The point of this post is not to excuse her behavior, but to allow other entrepreneurial women to understand how some common, and not so common, stresses can lead to bad managing. Frankly, I suspect Aliza is being somewhat hard on herself, but I appreciated this candid, useful piece.

While I don't have the same issues as Aliza did, I could relate to the fact that not all of us go into business for ourselves because we want to be great managers. Usually entrepreneurs go into business to get something done, and they realize they need others to help them do it.

Still, as Aliza says, if you are going to hire people, you must address how you will manage them:

"Being a boss, like it or not, is kind of like being a parent. If you can’t do your absolute best when managing other people, just don’t do it. Find another job. Put someone else in charge. Because bosses can have such deep impacts on the people in their employ, and no one should take that responsibility lightly."

In my current business I've had direct reports and then not. When I was managing I took my role very seriously, but I often felt like a bad mother being on the road and unable to work with my staff as directly as I'd like. I had a discussion with my partners about my best use, and realized that in order for me to fulfill my role in the company I would need to work cross functionally more, and manage less. I still like to catch up with those who were on my team; I feel a special connection. But I no longer oversee their work. Rather than a "mother", I'm an "older sister".

This has had a mixed effect: On the one hand, I'm freed up to manage my work. I don't have to worry about "checking in" with the team. On the other hand, as someone who craved mentoring in my career, I have less opportunity to directly affect their learning. They're doing more than fine without me, but there remains a hankering to be more impactful there. It's a feeling for me similar to being childless. I know it's a choice, not a condemnation, but I also ask myself, is this how it is because I would be a bad mother?

Are People Who Sleep Less More Successful?

Early in my working life in New York City I read a feature story, I think it was in the Times Business section, about the sleeping habits of top-performing media executives. The common thread among all of them: They slept no more than 5 hours a night. Most slept less. This tendency to not sleep was positioned in this article as a competitive edge, even a requirement to being successful.

I remember feeling discouraged. I had been slogging it out at magazines and was looking for some way to distinguish myself, but I wasn't an early riser. As a teenager I often slept until 10 or 11 in the morning. An early-bird class I had one semester nearly did me in. In college, I dropped the one class I had that began before 10.  I was fortunate to work in an industry where people ambled in between 9 and 10am. I never minded working late.

But the luminaries in this article--many of whom I forget now, interestingly, though I do recall book publisher Judith Regan--often worked long hours. A typical routine: Wake up at 4am; jump on the treadmill (these folks had the money and the space in their Manhattan apartments to have exercise equipment in their homes, something I aspired to have); shower and get dressed; read all of the dailies; and still manage to get into the office before everyone else.

For a while I tried to wake up early--around 6am--to fit in a workout before going to the office, but the effort was short-lived. My body much preferred working out in the evening and the scramble to and from the gym took too much time. I loved to read, but I could never get through all of my material on a subway ride. I figured I was just too inefficient and lazy.

Years later I still wonder how it's possible to hold to this kind of schedule. I work longer days now, but I can't function if I can't sleep at least 6 hours (insomnia notwithstanding). If I have to get up early for a meeting, or to catch a plane, I'll get up; I have to. But it's been only recently that I've accepted that all things being equal, I prefer to sleep in.