resetting your brain
Benchmarks are a remarkable thing. Whether we realize it or not, it’s how we judge everything in our lives. A job is good or bad based on our last job. An office is big or small depending on our last one. Benchmarking is powerful. It’s why in some states it’s illegal for a recruiter to ask what your current salary is. If you’re benchmarked at your current salary, you might not get a fair offer.
This is easy enough to talk about, but I really internalized the message recently when I went on a week-long trip to New Orleans with my husband and toddler. Parenting is hard. My partner and I love our little girl and find her overwhelming at the same time. Daycare keeps us sane. The weekends are full of wonder and incredibly exhausting. You get the picture. Needless to say, I was nervous about the trip. The packing, the flight, the drive to the hotel, meal times in restaurants, bath times in a new tub, bed times in a different crib—every single thing stressed me out.
Long story short, we got through it and also managed to really enjoy ourselves. It was—dare I say it—rejuvenating. That’s not to say it wasn’t hard. The tot decided this was the time to stand her ground against high chairs and refused to sit in one for the duration of the trip. We ended up eating at the same restaurant four or five times because the only thing she was willing to eat on the trip was asparagus, grapes, and beignets and this was the only place we found that served asparagus. It was so hot and humid my glasses fogged up when I stepped outside the first time.
Because we went through all this, suddenly our day to day routine felt a lot more doable. It was almost easy in comparison. We had so much more control. We had all the right gear and toys instead of just the gear we packed and the one ball we caved and bought at a random Walgreens. Something about having to wrangle a flailing toddler three hours into a flight just makes the ordinary things seem, well, ordinary. Our benchmark for what was difficult shifted and with it, our daily life got easier.
When I think about it, this change in perspective has been helpful at work, too. My job is basically a mix of three things: meeting with students about their career, curating professional development resources, and planning events. My metric of success for events used to be attendance. I cared about the content of course, but nothing mattered more to me than the number of butts in seats. In a way, that made sense. The point of many events is about reach. How do you reach as many students as possible given that it’s impossible to meet with all of them?
That used to be true. Now that I’m housed in an academic department and have only about 200 students to serve, it’s actually quite feasible to meet one on one with them all. But for some reason, I kept the benchmark. I wanted 40-70 students at every event and when I wasn’t hitting those numbers, I was disappointed in myself. Then someone noticed I was mopey and pointed out to me that getting 20 students at an event was 10% of the entire student population I was working with. That’s… not bad!
These benchmarks were good ones to change up. Another one, I think, is the frequency of this little newsletter. I haven’t written in a while. The afore mentioned trip sparked that. The ensuing thoughts on benchmarks led to the multi-week silence. Why did I feel pressure to dash something off once a week? My drive to send something out into the world at a regular clip led me to send out posts that were shorter or less developed than I had initially envisioned. The whole point of this exercise was to write—with clarity—stuff I’ve been mulling over without the pressure of getting clicks or meeting deadlines. Then I went and set an arbitrary benchmark! Why?
So, I’ve decided to get back to basics and send out articles when I’m done with them. Hopefully, it’ll be around one a week, but more likely it’ll be one a month. :)
interesting reads
cool jobs
Harvard Career Services has two Assistant Director openings, one of them is focused on science and tech. Apply here.
The Muse is looking for an Assistant Editor and a Senior Editor!