One Thing Leads To Another

With a not-quite-launched twenty-something in the house, I am forever giving out life advice. He loves it. Not.

If you don’t pay rent, then you get life advice, kid. Suck it up!

One of my pearls of wisdom is “everything that you do — even things that you fail at or are kinda random — always helps feeds into your next thing.”

During summers in college, I worked in a secretary in a solenoid valve factory owned by a friend’s dad. At some point, people realized that I was good at computers, so I spent one summer creating a sales database for them using Lotus 1-2-3. (Ha.) That experience helped me get my first job at Simon and Schuster for a division that produced computer books, where I went from being an editorial assistant to a full editor in two years. Those editorial jobs helped me get a job in a museum in Chicago and, later, at an education policy institute in grad school. And so on. Experiences pile up, even random ones.

Last year, I ran in a school board election and lost — random experience AND a failure — but that experience spun my life in a strange new direction.

It gave me the kick in the ass to walk away from freelance writing, which wasn’t fun any more. I’ll still write, but on my own terms. I am honing a 3,000 word article on local elections right now and doing semi-regular newsletters, but only as a hobby.

During the campaign, I made a thousand new friends, who now are inviting me to their local do-good committees and parties. I can still make a difference for people with disabilities and school policy, but without the messiness of elections. It’s super nice to have so many people greet me in the street with a handshake and a smile.

A new business — providing information to parents about all the college options for autism — is getting launched this week, so that’s a full time job. I’m using a lot of the skills that I learned during the campaign, like making websites and business Facebook pages. Political publicity work is very similar to business marketing.

People ask me if I would run again. It’s too soon to say. The deadline for the next election isn’t until July. In the meantime, I’m seriously enjoying the “now.”

Sometimes when you lose, you actually win. Now, that’s another great life advice that my twenty-something! I’ll share that with him tonight. He’ll be so happy.