Small things that make me happy at work

I like to think and write about being happy at work. Call me an idealist, but I think we should all strive to get paid to do what we like — at least some of the time.

I organized a panel recently where we talked about turning our passions into careers. I invited three pretty incredible women to be on the panel and spent the entire night feeling damn lucky to be in their company: Leah Cramer, the founder of Craftster.org, one of the most popular online crafting communities (which she successful sold last year), Laura Zigman, a close friend of mine who is too modest to talk about the fact that her first book, Animal Husbandry, became a national best-seller, had a movie made out of it, and is widely considered to be the original chick-lit novel, and Christine Koh, the uber-sharp and fashionable brain scientist turned graphic designer and founder of Bostonmamas.com.

During the panel, Leah said something that I found incredibly insightful: “I grew up believing that it’s somehow wrong to get paid to do what you really love, that there was such thing as work, which you did for money, and then other things, like hobbies and interests, which made you happy.”

I never quite articulated this in my own mind, but I’m fairly certain I grew up believing the same. It made some sense in the Communist Russia, but it makes little sense in a country where, terrible economic times aside, we all get a shot to do what we like/love/are interested in/learn a lot from and get paid (something) for it.

In my conquest for being happy at work, one thing I sometimes forget to do is to be happy about the little things that make up my workdays. You know, to sweat the small good stuff. Things like:

• Having my daughter and my husband and my dad come to visit me at our quirky and warm Daily Grommet offices today. The office will feel that much warmer from now on:)
• Reading this too-kind of a post from the founder of Daily Grommet about my joining the team there.
• Being able to work on a flexible schedule, which means that I can pick up my daughter from school on some days and work late into the night to catch up.

These small things add up. Think of some of your own, I highly recommend it.

Fighting my inner perfectionist

No, you’re not wrong — I really have not updated this blog in over a year. I could bore you with lots of explanations, but they really are quite expected and boring: too much work, a lot of other writing, and choosing to spend whatever few spare moments I had with my family.

It’s the new year and I’m a total sucker for fresh beginnings, so after I finished filling in my 2009 planner with birthdays, anniversaries and other dates to remember, made a list of good things I did and learned this past year, I decided to go through my bookmarks. And there it was, my hardly developed and left completely neglected Learning Optimism blog. My first instinct was to just delete it, get rid of it. Not because I don’t want to have an outlet to write about all things blogging-entrepreneur-social media-start-up life-related, but because the inner perfectionist in me would NEVER be seen with a blog that hasn’t bee updated in a year.

But I’m going to put my inner perfectionist in hiatus just long enough to write this post and keep this blog. Because I love blogging. Because I want to keep track of the endless changes and learnings and professional roller-coasters in my life. And because in my not-so-humble opinion this is a damn good name for a blog.

So here’s to a year filled with imperfections (and hopefully less pauses between blog posts).