What is Success?

I gave a talk last week to the Delaware ILEAD group (I'll be posting that talk next week - probably) and part of my talk was about how to be successful. I only had an hour to talk, so I couldn't expound at length on what I mean by "successful." But that's what a blog is for, right?

My thoughts on this are kind of messy, due in part to the fact that external success doesn't always lead to feeling successful. For now, the best way to explain how I think of success is to share that clip from City Slickers. Each person, each project, really needs a separate definition of success. The important part is to think long and hard about why you're doing a thing so you'll know what success looks like.

If at first you don't succeed, immediately reevaluate your operationalization of success.

— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay) June 24, 2015

I think the hardest thing for most people is that they think their success has to look like other people's successes. Sometimes they will, like earning a graduate degree or finding a parking space near the door. For others, it will be highly individualized. I knew my graphic novel collection at a former workplace was successful when I saw senior faculty members, and even emeritus faculty, checking those books out. I knew that this blog was successful when I started seeing library science graduate programs in the Traffic Sources section of my blog stats.

A particularly tricky part of defining success is that people tend to get frustrated when it doesn't happen immediately. I've had twelve years since getting my MLIS to transform small career successes into bigger ones. I've had 2.5 years of being a library director with small successes leading to bigger ones. This process of watching my small successes turn into larger successes is so important to me, and so central to keeping myself motivated, that I've made it a part of my workflow. I regularly document all of my small successes and map them onto larger successes (and I have it in my Google Drive so I have immediate access to it no matter where I am).

There's also the fact that success has an internal measure. We are all so busy comparing ourselves to others. Even if those other people have very similar circumstances to ours, we can't know everything that goes into another project. Timing and people's moods and the small breeze from a butterfly's wings in Bangladesh can all make a difference. Or, in the words of one of my writing partners, "The fleeting and contingent recognition of success is not an accurate representation of the awesome [stuff] your readers are accomplishing."

Finally, and this cannot be stated enough, there's always a little bit of luck involved in success - especially the big flashy successes that get both external recognition and give you an internal sense of accomplishment. This blog, my other publications, my conference presentations, and even my job title all get high marks for recognition and accomplishment. They are also, all, a result of being in the right place at the right time.*

So, how do you define success? Have I made you think differently about it?


*Your mileage may vary, especially when one takes privilege or lack thereof into account.

Wanna Play?, On Integrating Play into Work

A black Labrador in "play stance." (Source.)

I read an interesting quote this weekend: “The opposite of play is not work – the opposite of play is depression.  Respecting our biologically programmed need for play can transform.” (Although it's not what I was reading at the time, this quote was taken from Dr. Stuart Brown's book, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul - a title I immediately added to my To Read list.) That quote got me thinking. It got me thinking about a lot of things, but about libraries and librarianship in particular.

The thing is, I already work to integrate play into how I serve my community. I have run social and fun events and added popular reading materials to collections. This is something I've been doing ever since I learned about need states. Libraries should not be joyless places where people only do work - not even the stuffiest, dustiest research libraries are well served by focusing solely on the academic needs of their community. That kind of exclusivity does nobody any good.

No... what I'm thinking about is how to integrate the idea of play being so essential into how I operate as a librarian and a manager. I feel like I'm already doing some things right. Anyone who follows me there knows that my Twitter feed is only about 25% librarianship and academia - the rest is a mixture of size acceptance, silly animals, and general things that made me smile/think/happy. And then there's my office... I have toys, goofy pictures, and much nerdery all around my small space. Further, I try to do fun things for/with my staff. I've brought/ordered food on multiple occasions, added fun activities to retreats/meetings, gave everyone holiday gifts, and I try to have the atmosphere be as fun and relaxing as possible while still moving forward with projects and such.

But I need to think on this some more. Bringing play into the work place can be such a powerful motivator, so I need to figure out a way to do this intentionally, both for myself and for my staff.

How about you? What do you do, if you're a management type? And the rest of you - what would be your ideal for bringing play into the work place?

Room to Think

A friend of mine recently introduced me to Onion Talks. As you might guess from the name, they are an Onion-y satire version of TED Talks. Before anyone else brings it up, yes... I have mixed feelings about The Onion (everyone still remembers their horrible tweet about Quvenzhané Wallis, right?), but then again I also have mixed feelings about TED. Be that as it may, my introduction to Onion Talks came at a point when Barbara Fister's "Some Assumptions About Libraries" was still fresh in my mind. Fister's ideas about libraries and knowledge and learning culture resonated. I'm supposed to be a knowledge worker, but I rarely feel like I have enough time to explore my own ideas - with the obvious exception of this blog - since so much of what I do lately is administrative (bills don't pay themselves).

Back to my friend and the Onion Talks. Imagine me sitting there, with Barbara's post still running around the back of my mind, watching this:

Again, ideas and thinking and knowledge creation and all, but from a very different perspective. Did you catch the slide that popped up at the 1:49 mark? "Ideas Are An Inneficiency"?!?! Compare that statement to Fister's "Libraries are not, or at least should not be, engines of productivity." It was almost a physical shock when I saw that slide. Immediately after I was done watching the video, I filed it under "too true to be funny," and tried to go on my way. But I couldn't... that video has stuck with me, so now I need to do something with the turmoil it caused.

It all comes back to room to think. I'm always trying to read more and do more and be more efficient and pack more into my days. Some of that is a byproduct of my job. Since I'm the director at a library that is understaffed and, like most academic libraries - especially at small, liberal arts colleges - underfunded, it's not like I'm going to be able to block out time just for thinking. Instead, I'm going to have to try to do things more intentionally. Slowing down on occasion to examine my underlying assumptions and goals for my daily activities is one way I can do this. Letting go of my MUST READ EVERY AWESOME THING ON THE INTARWEBS mentality is another.

I'm not sure where this will all end. This intention to give myself room and permission just to think may crash and burn the first time I get a panicked faculty member coming to my office because s/he NEEDS this or that from me for an accreditation or a grant application (for the record: this has never happened where I work now), but I'll never find the space if I give up looking for it before I've begun.

Just think... an Onion Talk (combined with something that Barbara Fister wrote) is making me seriously reexamine my professional practice. Who'd'a thunk it?

Connecting Flights (of Fancy?)

I presented a lot this past Spring. And when I say a lot, I mean three conference presentations in four weeks. The weekend following the third of the three conferences, I went to Indiana to be in my friend's wedding. I managed to drive for one of the conferences since it was just up in Massachusetts, but I still ended up flying more in the space of five weeks than I had in the three years prior. This gave me multiple opportunities to experience airports in close proximity, and there's something I noticed this time that never quite stuck out to me before.

Source

The thing that stood out? The fact the board just outside my arrival gate always had information about the gates for the connecting flights of the people on that plane. Sure, all the flights that are coming into and leaving from an airport have their times and gates and everything else listed on the big boards along the corridors of the airport, but the board beside your gate is just your connecting flights. It's not like that particular board specifically says, "Jessica Olin, connecting to BWI, go to gate B24," but it's clear that they have a way to see who on an incoming flight is making a connection and automatically updating the board beside the gate to reflect those individuals.

I must have heard and seen this particular nicety at work many times before and never noticed. I have no idea why it stuck out to me this time, but it did. Since my brain was already in Library Thinking Mode with the conference schedule, something clicked: I started thinking about how we could facilitate connections for our communities. (There was some mention of an idea that could possibly be an answer to my question in the course text and the MOOC itself that Lankes ran (and that I admittedly dropped out of) recently, but I'm imagining something far less serendipitous and far more specific.)

Perhaps something along the lines of the "Other shoppers who bought [product x] also looked at [product y]" that you get with ecommerce sites, but in a library-y way. I don't have any answers and I'm not sure I'll ever have them, but here are some ideas/questions that I've had:

• Is there a way to connect people in the community (scholars, amateurs, lawyers) without breaking privacy conventions and laws? (I don't think we can do this electronically without exposing ourselves and/or our patrons to certain risks, but doing it in real life might be too cumbersome at larger communities.)
• What about the uncommon connections that we help our patrons make when we talk to them in person? An example of this is the time I realized the person who was looking for the New York Time Index was really looking for the text of a speech that Bill Clinton gave when he was running for president.
• Since the kind of connections we, as librarians, make aren't as uniform in nature as connecting flights, am I just getting lost in a flight of fancy?

It's been a while since I've left you with more questions than answers, but there you are. I'd really love to hear what you all think about this? Should I even keep playing with the idea?