July 12, 2022

Hello,

Another Tuesday edition!

The Weekly Three

1. Something about advancing your career without managing people: I always think that I'm going to like being a manager. I always think that I'm going to be the kind of leader that I've needed for myself: empathetic, approachable, empowering. Then I actually start managing my team and find that I like it much less than when I was responsible only for myself. How do you go back? Is it really going "back", as in "backwards", a demotion? It doesn't have to be.

2. Something about the next poet laureate and Native American poetry: Ada Limón has been announced as the 24th U.S. poet laureate. Limón says that "right now, so often we are going numb to grief and numb to tragedy and numb to crisis" and that she sees poetry as "a way back in, to recognizing that we are feeling human beings". Poetry can make us feel "and feeling grief and feeling trauma can actually allow us to feel joy again."

The current poet laureate Joy Harjo created Living Nations, Living Words, a database through the Library of Congress that allows you find Native Nations poets, see their personal stories and hear their poetry.

Ada Limón

3. Something about small changes from Atomic Habits: Small changes over a long period of time have a large impact. At first, the small change might not seem like it's doing anything for you, but the key is to persist for the long term yield. "Getting 1% better (or worse) every day has an exponential impact on the long run. Consider a starting point at 1. Then, getting 1% better every day in a year results in an exponential growth: 1.01^365 = 37.8 vs. getting worse: 0.99^365 = 0.03"

Thank you for taking the time to read,

Amber Watnik

(she/her)