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The flip side of failure

Hope Perlman

Why Standing Up to a Bully Is Hard for a Bystander

I was at the gym on a recent Saturday on the weight machines, maintaining muscle mass. So were a skinny, blonde, teenaged girl and a macho weight-lifter bully.

Getting Grit, a Q & A with Caroline Adams Miller, Pt. 2

When women’s backs are to the wall, they really discover resourcefulness and strength and courage, and I think that we’re in that time frame right now. Our backs are to the wall.

Getting Grit, Q & A with Caroline Adams Miller, Part I

I’m always intrigued by something that I learned in Overeaters Anonymous, which was, ‘Fake it till you make it’. Act like you're in recovery before you're in recovery.

Tips on Building Self-Esteem, From a Master Coach

Now, I have a teensie problem with self-esteem. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it. I hope you haven’t. Well, I have an exercise to help me with this problem, and it can help you.

Self-Efficacy and Success

This reminds me of an incident with the plumber the other week. I called the plumber. You know plumbers, they charge you $100 to step over your threshold.

Center Yourself

It seems like a good day to reiterate one of the planks of my scaffolding of success: centering. As in, remember what’s in your control and what’s not.

Grit, Grittier 2

Grit is what you think it is: tenacity. But this new definition of grit adds the element of passion. So grit is perseverance in pursuit of something of intrinsic interest to you.

Grit, Grittier

What is grit? Is grit muscling through weekend traffic on 495 and 95 to and from visiting your rising 10th grader at her theater camp's performance day? Sadly, no. That's different

Act Local

The other weekend my next door neighbor dropped dead. He was a grandfather, in his seventies, and had heart problems. Strange as it may seem, I never met him. I knew his wife.

How to Podium: A Person Wants to Be Helpful

According to Martin Seligman, anxiety and depression spring from having “a bleak view of the future.” Not from past traumas nor how they feel about what is happening at present.

Use the Scaffolding of Success to Deal with Distraction

Current events are inconveniencing me, Readers. They are preventing me from splashing happily in my bath. They are keeping me from focusing with laser-like concentration on work.

The Hell Realm

Anyhow, when I took my dog for a walk the other day, I decided to skip my usual pundit podcast in favor of something more conducive to peace of mind, so I picked a dharma talk.

Annals of Success: Be an Anteambulo

What is this anteambulo, you ask, Readers? It's a Roman term. An anteambulo was an artist slash writer with a patron. Ah, the glory days of Roma, when patrons took on artists....

Dignity and Success

I’ve been writing and thinking about what makes people feel successful for quite some time. I have concluded there are five essential planks on the scaffolding of success.

The Joys of the Small Life

Is it enough to live a small life? That is the question, Readers. After all, small lives are often the subjects of books. Of big books, even.

Why Success Matters

I think the drive for success is built into us. It's intertwined with the desire for meaning. Sure, people put a lot of emphasis on happiness, and happiness is definitely desirable

Imposter Syndrome

I was recently infected with Imposter Syndrome. You’ve heard of it. It infects many women. You know you have it if you feel like a fraud in your own life.

Cognitive Distortions and a Myth About Success

The idea that successful people are somehow different from other people. That they have special DNA that gives them a deep down, elementary sense of the inevitablity.

Submarine Parenting

If I’m not supposed to be a Helicopter Parent, and I’m not a Free Range Parent, then what am I supposed to be? A Submarine Parent, says Marie Schwartz, CEO of Teen Life.

Success Is Like Light

What is so difficult about defining success?

Failure Equals Success - and Other Perplexities

In an episode of "Silicon Valley," the very weird genius chief executive of a hugely successful Google/Apple type company launches a product that just totally fails. It’s a bomb.

Success and the Oozing Nature of Work

Scene: Kitchen. Three women, two on the passenger side of a kitchen island. One on the cockpit side, deveining shrimp. All three are mothers. One is a professor, one is a painter of the visual artist variety, not the interior/exterior house variety, and the third is a writer. The professor is cooking. The other two are her guests. What I left out ....

Success Is Not a Zero-Sum Proposition

As upsetting as it is to face, I am grateful for the attention I’ve been forced to pay to structural racism. As a white woman, I don’t expect to be profiled by the police, except, perhaps, if there is a profile for white, suburban moms jacked up on anti-anxiolytics.

Mastering Self-Control. Or Not. Part 2

Here's a video about Walter Mischel's book, The Marshmallow Test. I'm demonstrating one of Mischel's strategies for developing self-control: distraction.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Success

Seeking success is not frivolous, it’s natural and essential. It's a building block towards the highest goal of self-actualization. Some people say there's another level beyond Maslow's tip - transcendence. In any case, a drive towards self-actualization and/or transcendence makes us look outside our lives and help others.

Mastering Self-Control. Or Not.

Scene: kitchen table. Remains of dinner present. Children absent. Just the husband and I and the dog, despairing of collecting any treats at all. The husband reaches into the snack cabinet and takes two cookies. He offers one to me. Me: (After a pause.) No, thanks. IF I don’t have one now, THEN I can have a bigger one later. Husband: Ah! The Marshmallow Test in action.

Why Success Is Like a Jalopy

I used to have a narrow definition of success: professional advancement. Because I had very little of that as a mother and as a writer, I felt like a failure. Now, my definition of success is different. I think of it as a system. And when the system is operating, I feel successful.

Getting Back on Track Successfully

Now seems like a good time to check in with those New Year resolutions. It’s the end of February, and my email inbox and Twitter feed are full of strategies for implementing habits, keeping resolutions, and bits about why We Are Failing To Do So. When I say “we” I mean me. I was struggling to get my routine back on track. I have resolutions to keep me busy.

Mastery and Success

Most of practice is failing. For example, an ice skater spends every practice trying to refine upon and improve technique to accomplish the next challenge, the next turn, inevitably more complicated than the previous one. She spends most of that time trying and falling, trying and falling, until she manages her triple lutz. Then it’s on to the quadruple.

Balancing Negative and Positive to Achieve Success

I’m liking this damaged people, damaged microwave analogy. I could really run with it. But is it what I want to get into? The point is, if there is a point, that once you get to know even those microwaves that look fully functional, those microwaves with deluxe features, even those combination convection oven-microwave ovens, their defects become apparent.

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