The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: success

  • Please Like Me

    I work with someone who doesn’t hide the fact that she doesn’t like me at all. Her perception of who I am is so far from my actual motivations that it baffles me. It’s as if when she looks at me she sees someone else entirely, and that person is despicable. It’s a shame, too,…

  • Is a Puzzlement

    I tend to spend an embarrassingly substantial chunk of my life doing jigsaw puzzles on my laptop. Even when I’m watching movies. I have to be doing something. For some reason puzzles bring me a great deal of comfort and reduce my stress. But why is that? After thinking about it for a day or…

  • The Thing About IQ

    I know a boy who despairs because his IQ isn’t as high as he’d like it to be. He thinks he’s doomed to failure. He thinks he’s stupid. I heard in passing on NPR today (sorry, couldn’t tell you who said it or on which program) that IQ is not as good an indicator of…

  • Sibling Estrangement

    I was just reading about Drew Barrymore’s reaction to her half-sister being found dead near San Diego. “Although I only met her briefly, I wish her and her loved ones as much peace as possible and I’m so incredibly sorry for their loss.” I just love Drew. She has always struck me as a decent,…

  • How “Little Mary Sunshine” Looks from the Darkside

    A friend of mine recently posted a meme on her Facebook page that said “Slow progress is better than no progress.” My first thought was, “Great. That would be comforting if I were making slow progress.” The fact is, I have felt as though I haven’t moved forward in years. If anything, I’ve been sliding…

  • The Dark Side of Achievement

    I’ve always been a huge success in the academic world. Top of my class. The envy of my peers. So everyone, including me, assumed I’d be a huge success in the real world as well. I’m fairly certain my mother believed I’d be the CEO of a fortune 500 company by the time I was…

  • The Man Who Has Everything

    I know a millionaire. He’s a good businessman; in fact, he’s hyper-successful. He came from humble beginnings and has had to hustle to get to the top, but hustle he did. No one can say he hasn’t worked very hard to get where he is. He knows how to read people. A charming fellow, he’s…

  • “Even Cheerleaders get Pimples on their Behinds.”

    Those words of wisdom came from my mother on a day when the teenaged me was lamenting the fact that I wasn’t popular, and also complaining about a pimple on my posterior. When insight is put forth so colorfully, it tends to stick with you for life. And while it was meant to apply to…

  • Ospreys as Analogies

    We’ve heard the expressions “stubborn as a mule”, “dogged resistance”, markets that are “bullish” and “bearish”, and I really, REALLY would love an explanation for this one: “happy as a clam”. We often use the qualities of various animals to better describe our world. In the past couple of months, I have come to realize…

  • One of a Kind

    I intended to start this blog entry by writing about snowflakes, a subject near and dear to any fractal artist’s heart. I was going to say that we’ve always been told that no two of them are alike, but then I thought about the absurdity of that statement. How the heck can anyone really know…