A Dose of Inspiration: Life

“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”

- Charles R. Swindoll, American Writer and Clergyman

The Things That Define Us

We each have experiences in our lives that define us, shape our values and drive our decisions. For Anderson Cooper, those defining moments were the deaths of his father, Wyatt Cooper, and his brother, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper.

This month we’re reading Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, And Survival by Anderson Cooper. In the early chapters, we get a harrowing look behind the curtain at the anguish Cooper experienced when he was 10 years old and his father died during open heart surgery. It marred his life with grief, which he battled for the next eleven years until it was compounded by his brother’s suicide.    

By the time Cooper graduated from college, a year after his brother’s death, he struggled to not only cope with his grief but to understand his purpose in the world. After graduation, he asked his mother what he should do for work and she told him, “Follow your bliss.” He said that he’d been hoping for something a little more specific. “I worried I couldn’t ‘follow my bliss’ because I couldn’t feel my bliss; I couldn’t feel anything at all. I wanted to be someplace where emotions were palpable, where the pain outside matched the pain inside. I needed balance, equilibrium, or as close to it as I could get. I also wanted to survive, and I thought I could learn from others who had. War seemed like my only option.” And it was through these tragic defining moments that Cooper’s purpose began to crystallize.   

Like Cooper, we all face things that define us, though, fortunately, they’re not always tragic…or even negative. For some people, it’s beating the odds and getting a second chance at life, for others it’s meeting the right person, whether that be in the form of a mentor, business partner, motivator, etc. And as Cooper’s life and career show us, these defining experiences can help us find our calling, even if the aftermath has left us grief-stricken and lost.    

In last month’s book, Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi, we learned that Agassi found his true calling - helping children at risk – through a series of situations where he was able to extend help to less fortunate children thereby awakening a sense of purpose that nothing, not even tennis, had ever given him.

Conversation starter: What experiences have helped you hear your calling in life? (Join the conversation by posting a comment).  

Read along! This month we’re reading Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, And Survival by Anderson Cooper. 

     

  

 

   

  

 

 

 

 

The Juggling Act of Life

Working full time while pursuing my dream of becoming a published fiction writer has made “balance” a coveted treasure in my world. That’s why when dream chaser, Jeff Noel, asked me to guest blog on the topic, I was happy to oblige.

You can read The Juggling Act of Life on Jeff’s blog, Mid Life Celebration.

Anyone else out there struggle to maintain a sense of balance?

My First Tweetup

This week I’m over at Lehigh Valley Insite blogging about my first “tweetup” (that is, a meet-up of local Twitter users).

You can read all about my experience, here: http://bit.ly/bv8Eog.

You can also follow me on Twitter: @erikaliodice 

Checking in on my New Year’s Goals & Resolutions

To kick off the new year, I set 10 goals and 10 resolutions for 2010. With January behind us, I thought it would be a good time to check in and see how I’m doing.

As January got underway, I was off to a great start with my resolutions. But that only lasted a week or so and by the end of January I’d managed to break every single one of them. Instead feeling guilty and terrible, I’m taking comfort in the fact that resolutions are on-going committments - a way of life, if you will – and the fact that I fell off the wagon here and there doesn’t mean that I’ve failed, per se, but that I need to do better today, tomorrow and the next day. I liken it to falling off the diet bandwagon. You can’t just give up, after all, tomorrow’s a new day.

As far as my goals are concerned, I’m pleased to report that I’ve accomplished the first two:

1. Complete the fiction writing workshop I’m taking. (My 10-week class ended on 1/12 and I’m proud to report that I attended every session and did all the readings, writing assignments and critiques. I have to say, I loved every single second of it and I learned a ton about the craft of writing fiction).
2. Finish my yet-to-be-titled manuscript.  (As of last week, my first draft is complete and I’ve selected a working title. Now the editing begins!)

As Februrary gets underway, I’ll be focusing my energy on revising and editing my manuscript and searching for an editor who can help me mold it into a final draft.

Okay, enough about me, how are you doing with your goals and resolutions?

Starting at the Bottom

You would think that the son of Gloria Vanderbilt could do anything if he really wanted to. But at 24 years-old, and with no formal journalistic education to speak of, Anderson Cooper wanted to be a war correspondent but couldn’t land a job.

This month we’re reading Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper. In the early pages of his story, we learn of Cooper’s steadfast perseverance. He didn’t let a journalism degree (or lack thereof) stand between him and his dreams; instead, he dove head first into his passion and traveled to war-torn lands with nothing more than a fake press pass and a home video camera. It was through this giant leap of faith and unwavering persistence that Cooper finally landed his first job as a foreign correspondent a year later. And as we know, he built a mega successful career from there.

The roadblocks that Cooper faced early on are similar to those that so many of us face. Whether you got a degree in the “wrong” field or can’t seem to land a job in your dream profession, Cooper’s early struggles remind us that persistence, mixed with creative thinking, can help you seize a game-changing opportunity.

In life, sometimes you have to start at the bottom in order to get what you really want, but, as Cooper’s success demonstrates, from small beginnings come great things.

Conversation starter: Did you ever have to start at the bottom in order to pursue your dream job?

Share your story by posting a comment!

Read along! This month we’re reading Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper.

Legends Book Club: February’s Book Selection

Last month I introduced the Legends Book Club, a virtual book club designed to explore the lives of “legends” (from athletes and artists, to businesspeople, politicians, scientists and more). Our goal is to understand how these extraordinary people reached their dreams (and all of the challenges, fears and roadblocks they faced along the way) so we can learn from their experiences as we follow our own dreams.

In January, we read Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi. Today I am excited to announce February’s book:

Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper

Target reading pace: 8-10 pages per day

 

 

 

 

 

Synopsis

Few people have witnessed more scenes of chaos and conflict around the world than Anderson Cooper, whose groundbreaking coverage on CNN has changed the way we watch the news. In this gripping, candid, and remarkably powerful memoir, he offers an unstinting, up-close view of the most harrowing crises of our time, and the profound impact they have had on his life.

After growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Cooper felt a magnetic pull toward the unknown, an attraction to the far corners of the earth. If he could keep moving, and keep exploring, he felt he could stay one step ahead of his past, including the fame surrounding his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, and the tragic early deaths of his father and older brother. As a reporter, the frenetic pace of filing dispatches from war-torn countries, and the danger that came with it, helped him avoid having to look too closely at the pain and loss that was right in front of him.

But recently, during the course of one extraordinary, tumultuous year, it became impossible for him to continue to separate his work from his life, his family’s troubled history from the suffering people he met all over the world. From the tsunami in Sri Lanka to the war in Iraq to the starvation in Niger and ultimately to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Mississippi, Cooper gives us a firsthand glimpse of the devastation that takes place, both physically and emotionally, when the normal order of things is violently ruptured on such a massive scale. Cooper had been in his share of life-threatening situations before — ducking fire on the streets of war-torn Sarejevo, traveling on his own to famine-stricken Somalia, witnessing firsthand the genocide in Rwanda — but he had never seen human misery quite like this. Writing with vivid memories of his childhood and early career as a roving correspondent, Cooper reveals for the first time how deeply affected he has been by the wars, disasters, and tragedies he has witnessed, and why he continues to be drawn to some of the most perilous places on earth.

Striking, heartfelt, and utterly engrossing, Dispatches from the Edge is an unforgettable memoir that takes us behind the scenes of the cataclysmic events of our age and allows us to see them through the eyes of one of America’s most trusted, fearless, and pioneering reporters.

Haven’t participated in our book club before? Here’s how it works: At the beginning of each month I’ll announce the book we’ll be reading and the target pace. You can read along with me or simply tune in for the discussions. Throughout the month, I’ll be posting questions and topics for everyone to discuss. You can join in the conversation by posting your remarks in the comments section.

Tune in tomorrow for our first discussion topic: Starting at the Bottom.

Got a reading suggestion for the Legends Book club? Feel free to e-mail it to me at Erika (dot) Liodice (at sign) hotmail (dot) com.

A Dose of Inspiration from J.D. Salinger

“Why the hell don’tcha, instead of keep saying it?”

- J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger, Before He Was a Legend

The passing of author J.D. Salinger marks a sad day in the literary world. He was one of the greats, a legend whose provactice work “touched a nerve” with readers and stirred decades of controversy. But who was he before all that? And how did he climb to such incredible heights in his writing career? In celebration of his life, we’re going to find out…

Salinger’s story started out like many of ours: he found a passion early on but didn’t follow it because of someone else’s opinion. For Salinger, that passion was acting. Through a number of high school performances he proved that he had a natural talent for it, but he never pursued it because his father was strongly against it. It wasn’t until after high school, when he was attending the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, that he discovered his love of writing. They say that he used to write stories under his covers late at night by the glow of a flashlight

Of course, his short stories didn’t offer much to build a career on, so he ventured off to college at NYU, where he thought about studying special education. He didn’t even make it through the first year before dropping out.

After his stint at NYU, his father urged him learn his business - meat importing – and sent him off to Austria to work. When he returned two years later, he gave college another try, this time at Ursinus College. But that only lasted one semester.

It was then that Salinger decided to take a writing class that Columbia was offering in the evenings. You’d think he would’ve been a star right out of the gate. But that wasn’t the case at all. According to his teacher, Whit Burnett (the editor of Story magazine), “Salinger did not distinguish himself until a few weeks before the end of the second semester, at which point ‘he suddenly came to life’ and completed three stories.” It was through this ‘coming to life’, that Salinger produced ”The Young Folks”, a short story that was accepted for publication in Story in the spring of 1940, when Salinger was 21.

This is where his writing career takes off, right? Well, not quite. At age 22, Salinger tried yet another path and began working as an Activities Director on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. All the while he kept writing and soon he began submitting his short stories to The New Yorker. But one by one they were rejected. After seven consecutive stories had been rejected he finally caught a break and the eighth was accepted. “Slight Rebellion off Madison”, was a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with “pre-war jitters”. Jack pot, right? Wrong. Because of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Salinger’s story was pulled and didn’t end up getting published until five years later.

During those five years, Salinger served his country in the war, collecting experiences that he later drew on in his work. After the war, he continued submitting his stories to The New Yorker but again, the rejection letters flowed in.

Salinger thought his big break had finally come when Whit Burnett (his teacher from Columbia) got him a book deal for a collection of his short stories, but the publisher overruled Burnett and ended up rejecting the book.

After so much rejection, most people would’ve given up and gotten a new dream. But Salinger persisted and wrote “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” when he was 29. Once again he submitted it to The New Yorker. This time they loved it and they accepted it immediately. In fact, they were so impressed with it that they signed a contract for the first right of refusal on all of Salinger’s future stories. This marked the turning point for Salinger.

In the years that followed, he quietly worked on The Catcher in the Rye, a novel based on Holden Caulfield (the protagonist from his short story “Slight Rebellion off Madison”). Salinger was 32 years-old by the time The Catcher in the Rye was published, which was well over a decade after his writing dreams began. Of course, The Catcher in the Rye was an instant success and it rocketed his career to unfathomable heights. The book spent 32 weeks on the New York Times Bestsellers list and, to date, has sold more than 65 million copies worldwide.

Sadly, Salinger died of natural causes in his home in New Hampshire this past Wednesday. He was 91.

In honor of his life…what is your favorite Salinger story/character/quote?

Intrapreneurs

Do you have the conviction, passion and drive of an entrapreneur, but work for a corporation? If so, there’s a name for you: intrapreneur. 

Intrapreneurs have been responsible for developing some of the world’s most famous products - like Post-It Notes, Sony PlayStation, and Java (the programming language, not the drink) – all from within the structure of an organization.

If you have entrepreneurial traits but don’t want to venture out on your own, intrapreneurship may be something to consider. The up side is that you have the power of an established brand behind you as well as company resources (money, people, overhead, etc.). Of course, with any company, you’re bound to run into limitations, like bureaucracy and company politics. But you may find those roadblocks easier to traverse than the prospect of captaining your own ship.  

One important thing to remember is that intrapreneurs are only successful when the company they work for is supportive. So how do you know if your organization is intrapreneur friendly? Ask yourself the following questions:  

1. Are the owners of your company motivated more by creating new value than protecting their wealth?   

2. Does your company openly and easily embrace change? 

3. Is your organization driven by forward-thinking leaders? 

 If you answered ‘yes’ to all three questions, that’s a good sign.  

Want to learn more about some of the great intrapreneurs of our time? Click here: http://bit.ly/9tW6Td