Nothing Blooms Every Day: On Work Life Balance in Librarianship (My RECIP/CLRC Keynote)

Below you'll find something approximating the keynote talk I gave a couple of weeks ago at RECIP/CLRC. It's mostly what I wrote ahead of time, with a little bit of my memory of what I said instead. Also, I had a mini-breakout session in the middle of the talk and have tweaked what I wrote to fit this context. Thanks for reading.

Before I get into the meat of my talk, I want to thank Tyler Dzuba and the rest of the conference organizers for inviting me here today. One of the driving passions in my career is helping library science graduate students and early career information professionals, so this conference’s raison d’etre is very near and dear to my heart. On top of that, what a gorgeous time of year to be this far north. Delaware trees have started to turn, but nothing like what I saw on my drive up.

I have one more thing I want to tell you up front... a caveat of sorts, if you will.

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You see, even though I knew my topic for this talk almost immediately, I had a hard time writing it. When the organizing committee approached me, I’d been doing a lot of reading related to this topic and expected to have a good handle on it by the time the conference rolled around. That just didn’t happen, and I felt stumped.

Whenever I’ve given presentations or workshops or whatever in the past, whether invited or proposed, I was always coming from a place of knowledge. I was the one saying, “hi, I did a thing, and you should let me teach you how to do a thing.” But that just isn’t true here. The reason I’d been researching this is because I was having problems myself. In fact, one of the ideas I had for the title of this talk was “Learn From My Mistakes: On Work Life Balance in Librarianship.”

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I've made lots of mistakes in this way, and the reality is that I’ll likely always have problems. So there I was, someone supposedly so knowledgeable that I was invited to give a keynote. Yet I was at a loss.

Actually, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.

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Why did I even agree to give this talk? Why did I propose this topic? But then, it the midst of trying to figure out if it was too late to change my topic, I realized I wouldn’t need to.

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I remembered a conversation I had with a coworker back when I was brand new to the field myself. I don’t remember what we were discussing, other than I’d asked for advice, but I do remember that they stopped and looked away for a moment before continuing. They said, “you know what? That’s good advice for me, too. I find myself doing that a lot… giving advice I need to hear myself.”

So that’s where I am with this topic.

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I’ve done a lot of reading and a lot of soul searching. I even hosted an online chat as part of my work on #libleadgender related to work-life balance. But I don’t want this to come off sounding like “do as I say, not as I do.” I’m still trying to figure this work-life balance thing out myself, and I wanted to be upfront about it: I still need advice, too. Regardless, I have learned some things, and I want to share them with you.

The first big thing I want to discuss is embodied in another title I almost gave this talk:  "It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint: On Work Life Balance in Librarianship."

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There's no other way to say it other than it's a long road. And sure, saying "it’s a long road" is a cliché, but it’s something I remind myself of probably on a weekly basis. Speaking of clichés, though, let’s think about this in terms of the analogy I did pick for my talk title: plants and gardening. I’m not much of a gardener, to be honest. I even managed to kill a bamboo plant, which is supposedly almost impossible to do. But I do know that planting and tending a garden is a long game. Preparing the soil, figuring out what plants work best in your climate and in the space you have, getting or growing seedlings, planting, weeding, harvesting. You need to think of your lives and jobs the same way because your careers are hopefully going to be a long road.

It’s easy enough to say this, right? But how do you put such an abstract thought into action? Well, here are my thoughts.

First, professional development. You’ve got to keep learning, or else you’re stalled. Think about this: when I was in graduate school, the hot new wireless protocol was 802.11b. By the time I graduated, we had 802.11g. So the stuff I learned in my "Computers in Libraries" class was out of date by the time I graduated. Never mind the fact that there have been 6 or 7 further protocols since then. And that’s just one small area of knowledge from one class. The skill that will serve you best in the long run is the ability to learn and adapt, and librarians are great at that despite the reputation we somehow picked up, but it has to be a conscious effort.

The good news is that you are already on top of this idea, since you’re reading a libraries and librarianship oriented blog. Even if you don't read my blog every time I publish something new, I hope you're taking time every week to pursue some professional development - reading or otherwise. I have to admit that, even though I require everyone on my staff to spend at least an hour each week working on some form of professional development, I have a hard time fitting it in myself. Easy to say, but hard to do.

Another reason why you need to take time for professional development, even if your main duty is staffing a service location like the circulation desk or the reference desk, is to give yourself a break from having to do emotional labor. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, it’s the part of your work performance that has to do with the emotions you display. There’s a very limited range of emotions that are appropriate for when you are working with the public, but we all have lives beyond the performance of our duties, right? It doesn't matter to some. Get into a fender bender on the way to work? Too bad, you have to at least pretend be in a good mood if you’re doing a story hour for toddlers. Get into a fight with your best friend? Better put that anger aside if you’re supposed to be leading a class of incoming freshmen through a basic introduction to information literacy. Get proposed to by the love of your life? You can't show how giddy happy you are because you need to be calm and steady if you’re staffing the reference desk for a three hour shift. But that hour of professional development you spend in your office or at your desk or in your work space, away from the public, that hour of turning everything else off in favor of reading the latest issue of College and Research Libraries or watching a webinar on conflict resolution… that’s an hour when you can just be yourself. And we all need that kind of break. Making sure you get that kind of space in your work week is crucial to being successful on the long haul.

Second, figure out your workflow.

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I’ve spent a lot of time researching this and developing my own workflow, but it’s not really something I can teach you because everyone will have a different version. Further, what works for you might change over time - I know it has for me. Right now, I mostly use a website called Habitica that turns my daily to do list into a role playing game. I’m a big ol' nerd, so the goofy 8 bit graphics make me smile every time I’m on the Habitica website. Another attraction of this site is that I go adventuring with a party, so any time I don’t accomplish a task, Habitica lets whatever monster we’re fighting injure the whole party. I also use a paper planner. The act of writing myself a list helps me organize the following day.

If you're trying to get a handle on your workflow, there are some things that I think everyone needs to remember:

1. You need a way to capture ideas immediately. This can be an Evernote file or a Google doc or a box on your desk where you throw scraps of paper with things scribbled on them. Don’t trust your memory - human memories are faulty at the best of times, but when you’re under a lot of stress - like with a forever long To Do list - your brain will turn into a sieve.

2. You need to look at your ideas on a regular basis. I try to do it weekly, but never go more than two weeks. Capturing things immediately is a way to get them out of your brain to make room for other processes, but you can’t ignore those ideas otherwise you won’t have processing room.

3. Keep track of your accomplishments. When you’re thinking long term, sometimes smaller accomplishments fade away and all you can see is the big things you haven’t done yet. Any time I start to feel overwhelmed by everything I want to do to improve my library and the service we provide to our community, I look at the list of things I’ve already done. I wish someone had told me to do this early in my career because this, more than anything, keeps me from burning out when I feel overwhelmed.

4. You need to learn to let go of projects. This is one of the hardest things anyone ever has to do, especially when you love what you do and really want to give the best to the community you’re serving. Sometimes it will be a project that is going well but that isn’t as successful as you’d hoped. Other times it will be a great idea that you just don’t have the money or staffing or energy to accomplish. I find prioritizing easiest when I look at my ideas and ongoing projects in light of the mission statement of both my library and my college. If your library doesn’t have a mission statement, or if it’s a long and convoluted mess of a statement, you could always look at your job description or sit down with your boss to figure out which things are most important.

The third thing you need to remember when thinking about the long haul is that work-life balance is a myth.

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It's never going to happen in the short term. The idea of work-life balance is a myth perpetrated to make us feel even more like failures. It’s the unicorn I was chasing when I first proposed this topic to the organizing committee. If you are tenure track or have a new position or are working on another advanced degree, of course you’re going to throw yourself into your job. That’s the way it works and in a lot of ways, it’s necessary to lose yourself in your job for at times. But there are also going to be times when you’re personal life will take over. You could get really sick - everything from a bad case of the flu to something really serious. You could get pregnant or adopt a kid, at which point you better darn well focus on that new little life. You could end up having to take care of a sick relative.

Don’t neglect your personal life completely because you can’t just be the job. But don’t feel bad about those times when you have to say no thanks to going out with friends because you have an article revision due or a grant proposal due at work. But don’t neglect. The most important thing to remember during those stretches where work seems to blot out everything is the next big theme I want to address: self care.

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Now, let me dispense with a common misconception. Self care is not the same thing as self indulgence. During a recent #libleadgender conversation, someone expressed a concern that self care could be seen as “Treat Yo Self.” Nothing could be further from the truth. When people talk about self-care, they aren’t talking about buying themselves a movie caliber Batman costume. When people talk about self-care, they are talking about drinking enough water and taking a sick day if you have a fever. They’re literally talking about taking care of themselves.

This is another aspect that can be easier said than done, so I want to share with you some of the things I think everyone should do.

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First, spend at least 5 to 10 minutes every single day being still and quiet. If you are religious, this can be prayer or meditation. If you aren’t religious, it can still be meditation but it can also be sitting outside. And I’m gonna say something that you might not want to hear, but watching television or listening to a podcast isn’t gonna cut it. Think about the surface of a pond after someone has thrown a pebble or a boulder or anything into it. What does it take to get the water to rest and be still? It’s not more input. I can’t even tell you how much research has been done into this idea. Really, everything I’m sharing here is based on research. This is basic self care and so beneficial.

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Next, take a lunch break. The occasional - like once or twice a month - lunch hour spent snarfing food at your desk while you continue to work on a big project is okay. But don’t make a habit of it. You are not doing yourself or anyone else any good if you work work work straight through. In fact, there are countless studies and articles that talk about how taking a break and letting yourself rest improves the quality of your work. If you’re more introverted, go somewhere quiet away from your office and eat lunch there. If you’re recharged by spending time with people, go to the staff room or the dining hall or to a friend’s office to eat.

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Here’s another one: you need to get sleep. But remember that enough sleep for one person isn’t going to be enough for someone else. I need 7 hours or else I’m cranky and shaky, although I can every once in a while survive on 5 or 6. I’m middle aged, so I’m cranky enough already. Trust me, you don’t want to see me crankier. If you’re having a hard time sleeping, whether from anxiety or other reasons, get yourself to a doctor. I went and slept overnight at a hospital a few years ago in order to figure out why I wasn’t sleeping well, and you better believe I followed every one of my doctor’s suggestions. Insomnia and lack of sleep only makes things worse, so staying up late to get more done… well, that isn’t going to cut it either.

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Another thing you need to do is you need to move. Yes, I’m talking about exercise if you’re capable of it, but I’m also talking about seeing different sights or hearing different sounds. Don’t overtax yourself or think you’re not doing things right if you can’t take a walk because you have mobility issues. Even just moving to a different part of your library can help you.

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The final admonition I have about self-care is that you need to make time in your life for something that isn’t librarian related. You need a hobby or a club or other kind of activity, and reading doesn’t count because that’s still library related.

[At this point in the keynote, I asked people to discuss hobbies - something they love but have neglected and something they've always wanted to try - with the people sitting next to them, before sharing my own hobbies.]

For something I love to do, but that I haven’t done in a while, I need to admit to neglecting my guitar. I didn’t pick it up until a couple of years ago, but a couple of months back when the semester started, that 10 to 15 minutes I used to spend with my guitar went into other things instead. And for me, playing the guitar and learning a new song or new technique is bliss - even when it’s challenging. Maybe especially when it’s challenging.

And for something I want to do, I want to learn to be a better baker. I can do a few thing, like my great grandmother’s pumpkin bread recipe or pizza dough, but I really envy people who are good bakers. And more than anything else, I want to learn to make bagels. I am obsessed with bagels lately, and I end up spending so much money to get the good ones at the bakery.

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As for me, I will learn a new song and try a bagel recipe. Before Thanksgiving. And I’m expecting you all to hold me accountable. I’ll post that I learned the song and pictures of my bagels, and if I don’t meet the deadline, please call me out. In fact, if I don’t meet that deadline, I’ll donate $100 to a charity and I’ll let you all chose. Deal?

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And this leads me to my third big point: you need to have a support network. Before I get into this part, I want each of you to exchange contact information with one of the people you just talked with and pick which hobby or activity you are definitely going to do over the next month. You’re going to hold each other accountable just like I’m asking you to hold me accountable. So take a moment more to give business cards or email addresses or whatever.

A support network is how self-care and thinking long term can come together.

One way this works is with goal setting, like the one I just had you all set. So let me tell you about my best friend. She’s this amazing, strong, and kind person.

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For those of you who know Parks & Recreation, my best friend is definitely the Anne Perkins to my Leslie Knope. I even made her watch all 8 Harry Potter movies, but luckily for me my bestie loved Harry Potter. Anyway, we have become each other’s life coaches. We meet once a week to set goals for ourselves for the next week and to check if we’ve met the goals from the previous week. If we met the goals, we get to take a nap that weekend. If we didn’t, we have to socialize with a coworker who drives us crazy. It’s making the promise to someone else, with ramifications, that gets me to keep up with the goals I set for myself.

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Another way this works is you have a cheering section when you start to doubt yourself. When I was new in my current position, I had a day that left me feeling worn down and wrung out. I was exhausted and feeling a little despondent because something I’d been working on for a while had gotten stalled yet again. A good friend of mine was trying to make me feel better. I told him that I couldn’t keep up my normal witty banter because I felt like Buffy Summers after she triumphed over the demon mayor, and that I was at the “fire bad; tree pretty” level of tired. My friend responded, “so what you’re saying is that on your worst day you’re still a vampire slayer?” It made me laugh, which made me feel better.

My best friend is a psychology professor and my online friend is an academic librarian who mostly focuses on technical services type stuff. But I also have a professional support network that keeps me going long term. I know so many library administrators who have mentored me or who I mentor, officially and unofficially. I can reach out to them and ask everything from how do I handle a particularly sticky situation with a faculty member, to recommendations for compressed shelving vendors, and beyond.

You need a support network and friends both within and outside of the profession, both within and outside of your particular specialty in librarianship. You need people who know exactly what you’re going through and doing, and people who have only vague knowledge. And this is the kind of work-life balance you need to achieve.

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And to bring this back to the metaphor I picked for the talk, gardening, again, support networks are like an ecosystem supporting multiple people just like a garden can support multiple kinds of life. Okay, I’ll admit it, I am beating the gardening analogy to death a bit here because I really wanted an excuse to use this picture, but you get my point.

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Anyway, I want to wrap this up, so let me remind you of my main points, things I wish someone had told me when I was new in this field and an early career information professional:

• You need to think long term and long distance. Hopefully you’ll all have long and fruitful careers, so you need to pace yourself and think beyond this moment.
• You need to take care of yourself. Have a life outside of your career, be still once in a while, and get some rest.
• And you need to have a support network as well as supporting others. Keep each other honest, Keep each other on task. And keep each other laughing.

Thanks again to the organizing committee and to all the conference attendees. I'm proud of how well this talk went, and I hope we all take my advice.

Embracing Librarianship, Warts and All: My ENY/ACRL Keynote

Note: This is as close as I can come to recreating the keynote I gave at the annual conference of the Eastern New York chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ENY/ACRL). This post is based on my notes and my memories of what I said, and is not an exact transcript. In a couple of cases, I've removed references to specific people and things that were part of the conference in the interests of making it more blog-y. I want to thank the organizing committee in general for giving me this opportunity, and Emily Thompson and Tarida Anantachai in particular for all their help.

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Before I get into my talk, I need to make a confession. The first thing I did after the organizing committee approached me and I said yes to giving this keynote... the first thing I did was to freak out.

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On an intellectual level, I got it. The theme of this conference ("Building Supportive Organization Cultures in Libraries," or more colloquially: "Librarians helping librarians.") is one of the driving forces in my professional life and it’s the reason I started blogging in the first place. But there’s still something a bit overwhelming about having your passion recognized. I've spent so much time kicking and screaming and shaking my fist at the profession, that when the world finally turned around and started paying attention, it was a moment of "Oh, [expletive deleted]!"

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I know it’s supposed to be bad form to share fears and insecurities about public speaking in an actual talk, but it feeds into the actual theme of my talk: owning that I’m human.

I’m not exaggerating, however. Letters to a Young Librarian has always felt like me shaking my fist at “the man.” Forget about how weird I feel now that I’m an administrator and therefore kind of “the man” myself, I wasn’t in charge of much of anything back when I started writing. So let me tell you about what led to the birth of my blog and why I’m so passionate about the theme of this conference. 

The first thing was that I finally, after years of meaning to, got around to reading Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke. If you’ve never read it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Ours is a creative profession, and anyone who is creative for a living needs to read this book. Next, I read something about a woman who started a blog that turned into her career, and I realize now that it planted a seed for me. 

Shortly after reading those two things, I was supervising a library science graduate student in his culminating experience - kind of a cross between an internship and a research project. I asked him one day about how his classes were going, as I often did, and this time he started complaining about having to learn an outdated piece of technology. It turned out it was a piece of tech I’d complained about when I was learning it a decade prior, and it had been outdated even then. I brought that conversation up with some coworkers over lunch later that week, and found out that library hand - the specific kind of handwriting librarians used for cards in the card catalog - had been taught in graduate programs as late as the thirties despite the invention and proliferation of typewriters. We were still teaching it, "just in case." Outdated curricula was not unheard of, in other words.

And that's when I got angry.

And that's when I started writing.

Something else has been making me angry lately, which brings me to my real topic today of owning our mistakes. That’s this: there are so many talented librarians who feel they don’t belong.

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I want to backtrack again for a moment and talk about my path to librarianship.

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I left college with a bachelor of arts in american history. I know that my liberal arts background prepared me better than almost any other experience for this profession. However, at the time, I had no idea what to do with my life. I bounced around to different jobs - residence counselor for an autistic teenager, bookstore clerk, assistant manager of a Roy Rogers, secretary… The last one was particularly miserable, and I realized I needed to find an actual direction. So I took one of those much maligned career aptitude tests. I don't know why those tests are so eschewed, because it worked for me. I don’t remember much about the test, but I do remember that librarianship was the top result. And it made so much sense. There was the fact that my favorite job I’d ever had was at that bookstore, mostly because of the kind of people who came into that store. Also, my godmother was a librarian and loved it. Finally, and I don't talk about this publicly very often, my very first kiss happened in my hometown public library. I’m not one to believe in fate, but there was a definite constellation of events that took the shape of me becoming a librarian. 

One important thing to note, though: I’d never worked in a library a day in my life before I applied to library science graduate programs. 

Obviously that didn’t get in my way, not too much anyway, but that’s a story for another time. I’m telling you all of this to express that when I was the new kid, it took me a while to feel situated as well.

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I sometimes have a hard time believing I’ve been at this librarian thing for twelve years now, because I still remember how it took me a long time in my first professional position to be able to trust myself, even though my boss and coworkers seemed to trust me well before that.

The thing is, there are still sometimes when I feel like I’m playing a game of “fake it til you make it.”

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I’ve struggled with this feeling off and on throughout my entire career, truth be told. And I’m far from being the only one. Meredith Farkas wrote about it recently, too. If you don’t recognize that name, she writes a blog called Information Wants to be Free. Great stuff, that blog. Anyway, she recently wrote about her struggles with “gut churn” (a concept she got from Jad Abumrad's keynote at ACRL this year).

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"Gut churn" can loosely be defined as the specific way your stomach hurts when you try something new and scary. The whole post, which is titled “True confessions”, is worth your time. But one passage resonated with me:

"There are people who say they admire me. I’ve always been uncomfortable with that because I don’t think I deserve it. I’m also uncomfortable because I worry that it creates this false expert vs. novice dichotomy that might make them think they can’t achieve what I have. Anyone can do what I’ve done."

I don’t know if I agree that anyone can do what Meredith has done or what I’ve done or what any publicly successful librarian has done, but I do agree that most anybody can have career success. I’ll explain the caveat of “most” below, since I don’t want to lose the current point - the “false expert vs. novice” point. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why this is, why we have this false dichotomy. One thing I think might be contributing is rampant perfectionism. Between photoshop, romantic comedies, bootstrap myths, and a few other forces in our culture, we really do think we have to be perfect. I’m not immune to this feeling which, if left to fester, can lead to self-doubt and feelings of vulnerability and eventually shame.

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I can feel you shifting uncomfortably even if I can't see you. And I get it. Talking about shame, and it’s partner vulnerability, in a professional context feels taboo. But if we’re going to get to the heart of why so many people joining this profession or taking new steps in the field are feeling so alienated and out of place, then we need to talk about the emotions.

And to do this, I’m going to borrow wholesale from the work of someone who researched this stuff for years: Brené Brown. You may know that name because she’s given two hugely popular TedX talks or because she sometimes gets to hang out with Oprah Winfrey.

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I feel the need to explain that I’m not a member of the cult of Oprah, so I’m glad I didn’t let Brown’s association with Oprah stop me because I’ve come to embrace Brown's work. Her definition of shame has stuck with me and it is integral to my thoughts on helping other librarians: “shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that won’t be worthy of connection?” Let that sink in for a moment. Something that won’t be worthy of connection in this hyper-connected world? And yet we all know this feeling, this “I’m not good enough” feeling.

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I wasn’t sure if Stuart Smalley, a Saturday Night Live character portrayed by Senator Al Franken in the 90s, would work as a joke for everyone in the audience. For those of you who don’t know, the joke was a show about self affirmation and Stuart was known for saying “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me.”

I want to share a few more Brene Brown quotes with you before I go on. I’m sharing them because they are the things I hold to me when I’m feeling small and scared and vulnerable and weak.

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I think these quotes might help you, too. Brown says “This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world.” She also says “Vulnerability is not weakness.” and, more to the point of my discussion, “vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.”

This leads me to my main point. If we want innovation and progress and new strong leaders, we have to support vulnerability and we have to stop stigmatizing mistakes.

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Okay, I already brought one non-librarian into the mix. Next I want to talk to you about Joi Ito. Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab and is seen by many as a guru of innovation. He was interviewed a while back by Wired Magazine, and through the course of that piece, Ito ended up giving some rules of innovation. (My thoughts are in parenthesis, but the list otherwise comes straight from the article linked above.)

1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure. (I printed out "resilience instead of strength" typed in a pretty font and put it on the bulletin board behind my desk so I see it every day and it reminds me.)
2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them. (This is just as much about personnel and time as it is about money or physical resources.)
3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety. (No explanation necessary.)
4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects. (This is especially important in libraries. We’ve got to remember that it - whatever "it" is - may not look like what we expect.)
5. You want to have good compasses not maps. (It’s the future of libraries - and no, don’t worry, I’m not a library futurist - so there’s no way to know for sure what the future will look like.)
6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t know why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it. (This is another nother one that doesn’t need explanation.)
7. It's disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience. (I feel the need to add “within reason,” of course - I’m an administrator after all)
8. It’s the crowd instead of experts. (Odd for me to advocate this as I stand here giving a keynote, stand here being presented as some kind of expert.)
9. It’s a focus on learning instead of education. (Education too often is seen as having an end point, but learning is lifelong. Preaching to the converted by saying that to a room full of librarians taking time to travel to a conference, I know, but still, it needs to be said.)

Now it’s time for me to make another confession: even though these rules are a huge inspiration for me, I still have a hard time with letting go. The safety of doing things that we know work, even if new things might work better, is a bit of a siren song. The thing is, though, security is an illusion. Safety is an illusion. Colleges close. People get laid off. Budgets get slashed. With the current climate, whether we want to admit it or not, we all live in a state of precarity.

PRECARITY:

n. a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare.

I had this discussion recently with my friend Jake Berg, the author of the blog Beerbrarian and one of my librarian heroes and peer mentors. His response cracked me up. He told me to shut up with my Buddhism talk.

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And this is the point where I break one of those unspoken and mostly sound rules for talks like this - I’m going to talk to you a bit about my religion. I’m a practicing Buddhist, but I’m not going to start proselytizing. A lot of people adopt aspects of Buddhism as a life philosophy and I want to teach you a small part of it that helps me more than any other when I’m feeling like I don’t belong. Buddhism teaches us that attachment is the source of all suffering. More pertinent to this discussion is that our attachment to some image of who we are supposed to be as librarians and as professionals, some impossibly perfect image, will cause us suffering and pain and shame. But being who we are, and allowing the mistakes to happen, will lessen that. It’s not a surprise that I’ve seen Ito’s rules of innovation described in terms of eastern philosophies. His ideas sound very Buddhist to me.

I’m going to give you some practical ways to apply my ideas in just a moment, but I want to share two caveats first:

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First, we need to be careful not to confuse feeling out of our depths - which is something that goes away with time and effort and support - with impostor syndrome, which is a whole other thing. It’s a bit lighthearted, that image, to be used to introduce something so important. Sometimes you have to laugh at things, regardless. Anyway, impostor syndrome is feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing and like you don’t belong even when you do. Also, it is way more prevalent among minorities and women than anywhere else. There are lots of good resources available on this topic, but I recommend starting with Alicia Liu's piece: "You Don't Have Impostor Syndrome, And Neither Do I Anymore." Another well written consideration of the topic is Cate Huston's "The Trouble with Imposters," which has this perfect definition of Impostor Syndrome: “faced with a hostile and discriminatory environment, one we are unwelcome in, our perception of our skills, our chances, and our abilities to succeed - change and suffer.” It's also important to be on the look out for the Dunning-Kruger effect which is when people are super confident in their skills but have no basis for that confidence.

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Second, and more importantly, is the reason I said “most” earlier. All of us need to be careful of our own privilege. The drawing above this paragraph is the first panel of an amazing comic by Jamie Kapp that explains one kind of privilege, the kind that is afforded to Caucasians. Like me. Really, I look the part of a librarian - white, female, middle class, middle age - and that gives me access and opportunities I might not have otherwise. It gives me access to the biggest privilege of all: the privilege of making mistakes. Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I suggest you do some reading. (John Scalzi's "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is" and Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack" are good places to start, but go further. Learn about ableism and ageism and transphobia.) The next thing to do after that, to be frank, is to check your privilege.

Now I know this is a bit longer than what you're used to reading on LtaYL, so I’m going to wrap this up soon. I’ve beaten the drum and have set out a call to action to you all, so I want to tell you how to move forward.

First, to my fellow managers and administrators, reward sticktoitiveness. There’s all sorts research into the importance of grit and perseverance in the attainment of long term goals, and librarianship is definitely a long game. Mistakes are going to happen, but we need to keep going when we make mistakes and we need our staffs to keep going when they make mistakes. We need them to learn from their mistakes, too. So reward that gumption. So long as it doesn’t cross over into stubbornness.

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Second, to my fellow experienced librarians and other library professionals, be honest about your mistakes. Most of us were new professionals well before social media was a thing so our early career mistakes weren’t going to be on such broad display. I know we’re all so eager to share our successes, but like in high school math class, we need to be willing to show our work and the mistakes we make along the way.

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Finally, to those of you who are new to the field: be patient.

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And that leads me to my favorite quote from the book that inspired the name of my blog:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

~Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Thank you.