September 24, 2009
I’m sure many of you have noticed that I’m not writing as frequently as I have in the past on my blog. This is due to a variety of things being led by lack of time and inspiration as well as logistics. I have also been doing some personal hand written journaling so some of my writing needs have been met through that avenue. The thing about writing, at least for me, is that I often have to have a spark of inspiration to start something and then it usually flows.
When I started this blog over 2 years ago now, I felt like I was forced to write because I started it as a tool to promote and build awareness of my business, Babble Soft. So I dutifully wrote. Somewhere along the way, the duty wore off and I started to enjoy it. The comments helped but even when the comments weren’t numerous, I knew hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people were reading (thanks to feedburner, google analytics, and wordpress stats tools), and I was getting something out of it too.
It has became a vehicle for me to sort through and share insights in business, parenting, and life in a somewhat thoughtful, crafted, connect the dots sort of way. For some of my posts I take all the swirling raw thoughts and attempt to distill them down into something usually coherent and sometimes imbibed with meaning that only myself or those close to me can sometimes fully understand. Yet hopefully most people take something away that helps them in business or life…or if not maybe it’s sometimes entertaining?
Since I’ve started blogging, I have come to better appreciate the nuances of writers whose works we analyzed in depth in high school or college English classes. As much as we try to infer from their writing what they were experiencing or trying to convey, we will miss much of it. We probably made up stuff that actually never crossed the writer’s mind at all and did not pay attention to certain words and phrases that were full of meaning to the writer herself, but to other than maybe a few people who shared her space in time would be summarily dismissed. As a woman writer, I’m particularly aware of how women writer’s even 50+ years ago had to make sure their writing not only lived up to their image as the fairer, weaker, well mannered, and sublime sex but also didn’t offend those who could not fathom the depth of a woman’s knowledge, insight, and passion.
As a South Asian, naturalized American, woman writer writing on the topic of entrepreneurship, leadership, management, (the aforementioned still typically a man’s world) and parenting, whose family sometimes reads her blog, I choose my words as carefully as I can. Outside the blog, the words sometimes come out a lot messier, less filtered, and a bit more humorous for some reason. The constraints and richness those life experiences and labels give me have added greatly to what moderate success I have achieved as well as sometimes to my self imposed dramatic misery. 
I have made two attempts to write a larger body of work to publish. One was a fiction novel I started back in 2001 after leaving my first company about a devastatingly handsome, blue-eyed, Jewish male CEO, an Asian female CEO, their relationship, and their different experiences starting technology companies. I created an outline, table of contents, and generated probably about 16 pages and then soon after got pregnant. My first readers (my sister and cousin) seemed to like it, but because life with kids started I left it sitting idly in my computer. Fortunately I printed it out because in one of our upgrades, the soft copy disappeared. I’ve since scanned it back in and one day hope to do something with it.
The second attempt was to write a book on the meaning of life which I discovered most people were uncomfortable talking about so I morphed it to the meaning of success. I got many more people to speak with me but couldn’t really find the right way to pull it together or an interested publisher, so I morphed that project into the university alumni magazine articles on the Success Profiles page of this blog. The great thing was that I actually got paid for those articles!
I sometimes get frustrated at not having the time or energy to finish that fiction novel, but I keep recalling something that one of the wives of the people I interviewed for the Meaning of Success book said. She was a writer and interestingly she wrote about being a vegetarian and hating people who eat meat I think, but she said ‘let the writing marinate in the juices of your life.’ Which thinking about that statement right now is ironic considering you probably marinate meat more than you marinate vegetables. But anyway, she said writing can’t be rushed and it will happen when the time is right. Whenever I say this on my email club of college friends, my screen writer by night and document proofer friend by day, Robb Lanum, who lives in Los Angeles, gives me a hard time and tells me what he pictures when I say that. A description of his vision is not suitable for this blog but it has something to do with the word ‘juices,’ and he’s a guy so you can probably infer the rest!
On an unrelated note, Robb finally finished a script based on a challenge I gave him two years ago to write a main stream script. He completed it a few weeks ago and I, The Annoying Challenger, still have not had the time to read it and others on our email club have already read it. It pains me actually.
So I keep wondering when all this marinating will be done and when the juices of life will be more manageable so I can write a book that might get published some day…
Oh and by the way, stay tuned for some interesting news about Babble Soft in the next few weeks! 
Posted by Aruni
8:04 pm •
blogging •
September 20, 2009
I interviewed Dr. Ari Brown (pdf) for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, for an article that was published in the July/Aug 2006 issue. My writing partner, Pam Losefksy, and I pulled these articles together a while back and you can see them on the Success Profiles page of this blog. You can see the full article on Ari by clicking HERE (pdf).
Dr. Brown is a board certified pediatrician at the Capital Pediatric Group in Austin. She’s the co-author of Baby 411: Clear Answers and Smart Advice for your Baby’s First Year and Toddler 411. She received her MD from Baylor College of Medicine and did her residency and fellowship at Harvard Medical School/Boston Children’s Hospital. She has two children.
She shares:
The hallmarks of successful people are perseverance, self confidence, and satisfaction in what they do. In my daily work, I interact with parents, and I truly think being a parent is the most rewarding thing you could possibly do. A parent who is raising his or her children well, being a good advocate for them, and ensuring that they grow up healthy and strong in every sense of the word is a huge success.
She goes on to say:
My advice to young people looking to be successful in life is this: You can do it all, but you can’t do it all at the same time. Pace yourself. You want to accomplish many things in your life, but at the end of the day, your family is really the most important. Don’t put your family on hold to build your career; you have your whole life to work!
Parenting is one of the hardest yet rewarding things I’ve experienced. It’s so true that if you can help someone be a better parent and connect with their kids, the world can be a better place. That’s why I admire those people who take care of children from a childcare or medical perspective. As a parent, it was great to get affirmation from our kid’s doctors that we were doing OK or to get advice from them on what things we could do differently.
I have to constantly remind myself of the fact that I can do a lot of things but not all at the same time. I have a hard time pacing myself but I’m learning and trying and saying “no” to many things…even things I want to do but know I can’t do well right now until I get a few things settled. My kids (as are most parents) are the most important things to me in the world and I hope when all is said and done they grow up knowing, believing, and feeling that so they can do anything (within reason of course) their hearts desire.
September 12, 2009
Photo by my very talented 5 year old niece. She saw this shark outside of her window while they were driving on I-405 in Southern California and quickly took a picture of it!
I was talking to someone I admire the other day, and we were discussing how people are affected by certain things in their lives. Sometimes there is no easy explanation as to why things happen the way they do. There is no 1 + 1 = 2 with everyone nodding knowingly in agreement which can sometimes make post mortem analysis of situations and business projects complicated. She said the things that happen can be subtle yet so profound. Those words resonated with me. It can be very subtle, little things that over time have a profound effect on you.
The effects can be positive and negative. On the positive front, in the right company culture people can achieve more than they knew they were capable of. In those environments the positive reinforcement can be obviously observable or subtle, which is most often the case. The people often don’t realize the difference until months or years later when they look back and see what things they were able to achieve and observe how they feel about coming to work. It can even positively affect their home lives because if they are happy at work where they spend most of their waking hours, they take home less stress.
On the negative side, a friend of a friend of mine was recently telling me about an experience she had at work in a large organization where for three years she worked for a manager who yelled at her occasionally when something wasn’t going quite right. Since it didn’t happen frequently, she thought she would just take it and move on, but it took a huge toll on her psyche and her energy was drawn elsewhere making it hard for her to do her job as effectively as she would like because she never knew when he would start criticizing her. She started to be able to tell him that he should not talk to her that way, but it took a lot of her energy to deal with it. Even after leaving it took her a couple of years to get out from under the berating until her self confidence was up enough to find a job she really enjoyed and performed well in! I was proud of her for doing the work on understanding how she needed to build back up her self esteem.
One of my stay-at-home mom (I still hate that term and she calls herself a zoom-around mom) friends and I were discussing how our children’s behavior can affect our mood. She was telling me how she woke up one day feeling good and then her toddler was in a terrible mood most of the day and it affected the rest of her day. Of course that’s not so subtle but if there aren’t enough smiles and laughter to offset the “I want to pull out my hair” days then you find yourself depressed. And more importantly you find that you subconsciously establish a way of relating to your child or other people in your life based on the subtle and not so subtle cues you send to each other. If it’s not more positive than negative, then more often than not one or the other doesn’t want to be around the other and if it’s really bad they end up on the Dr. Phil or the Montel show. This can happen at work or at home.
You often don’t even notice the effect of these little things until later. They can deeply affect your psyche and how you relate to the world. That’s why it’s so important to focus on the proper culture in the workplace and at home because if there is no one paying attention to the subtleties, you might just find yourself in a sharky situation. Yes, I know that was a lame attempt to tie the photo taken by my neice to the content of this post, but I thought it was so interesting that I had to find a way to use it in a blog post!
September 2, 2009
I haven’t done a parenting post in a while but I’ve been thinking recently about siblings. I always knew that if I was going to have kids, I was going to have two. I have a sister and despite the occasional hair pulling ups and downs, I wouldn’t trade her for the world! There were times growing up I probably would have traded her, but now I can’t imagine having made it this far without knowing she was there. Although we are very different in many ways and sometimes we don’t understand each other, we are the only two people in the world who have experienced our pre-college years living in the same house. We can reminisce about the good times, the bad, and our perfect dog.
My sister was the pretty/creative one and I was the smart/determined one. Some time in college I realized I was kind of pretty and some time before she got her Master’s she probably realized she was smart too. It’s funny how the labels we get assigned in a family stick with you even when you’ve left home for so many years. I learned a lot from her and was always amazed with what she was able to get away with. I always usually laid everything out on the line and tried to be hyper rational about things since I was a nerd, and she always seemed to know how to get what she wanted. We always had each other. Being the eldest, I would protect her when I could even though she might not remember all those times and even when it got me in trouble. I would bribe her to help me with rolling newspapers when I signed on for my first job, and by association I was a little less nerdy. As little kids we would laugh and play with each other, as older kids we fought and played, as adults and mothers we share.
And that’s why I wanted two kids. The thought crossed my mind for a nanosecond that I couldn’t survive another kid after our son was born. He didn’t sleep consistently through the night until he was probably 4 1/2 years old. He had night terrors and I finally concluded it was past life trauma that he was still trying to sort out. It was a horrible and sleep deprived hazy time. But even after a miscarriage and not sleeping for 2 years, I was determined to have another kid for him before my body couldn’t handle it and fortunately we were blessed with an angel of a girl who slept like a dream. At the time I kept thinking I don’t know if I’ll survive this but I was going to do what I had to do for him to have a sibling. Many of my girlfriend’s felt the same way since we all agreed giving birth and parenting was the hardest things we had ever done. We wondered if our parents felt the same way. Some of my friends weren’t able to have another one for unexpected reasons, but almost all of them wanted at least two kids for the simple reason of them having that shared bond with someone.
As I watch my kids play together, it makes my heart happy. They will run around the house, jump on the bed, and make each other laugh hysterically. They also make each other whine or complain that one is getting more than the other but mostly right now they play well together which gives us a break. They play hide and seek, they build a fort out of all the pillows in the house, they scare and tickle each other, they watch TV together, etc. They genuinely seem to like each other right now. As they get older, I’m sure having each other will hone their negotiation skills plus they will try to devise plans to outsmart us and I’m sure they will succeed!
I am so glad they have each other to share the great times and the inevitable not-so-great times. I hope they will always be there for each other and I hope they’ll be there to turn to each other (knock on wood) after we are long gone. At least they can share the burden of figuring out what to do with us when we get old and senile.
Yes, although I know we will probably have to deal with some sibling rivalry, I feel truly blessed that the greatest gift we were able to give them is each other.
Posted by Aruni
9:34 pm •
parenting •
