11

EMBRACE DISCOVERY

In part 2, we began to give our dreams definition, to animate their barely visible contours. This process began with some prep work, of learning to claim a central place in our lives and making space for our dreams. We then identified our strengths—which spring from innate talents, acquired competencies, bedrock beliefs, and our identities as women—and examined how these strengths inform, and even direct, our dreams. We also talked about the importance of rightsizing our dreams by trusting our judgment.

DISCOVERY-DRIVEN DREAMING

Dreaming is a discovery-driven process. We envision something that’s not yet fully formed, and as we set short-term goals around that dream, our dream takes shape. We almost always think we know where we’re going, but in reality we don’t. Fortunately, we’re in good company.

According to Columbia University professor Amar V. Bhide, for 90 percent of all successful new businesses, the strategy the founders initially pursued didn’t lead to the business’s success. Rephrased for our purposes: in 90 percent of all successful dreams, our first plan of action will not achieve our dream. To take that point even further, consider that the dream we think will make us happy rarely does. Consider, for example, Jean Knight Pace, who holds an M.F.A. in creative writing and is a mother of four living in Indiana. She has discovered, to her surprise, that one of her deepest dreams is to become a maker of a home, including becoming a great cook (tastycheapskate.blogspot.com).

Jean Knight Pace: The Tasty Cheapskate

As a girl born a generation after the feminist revolution, it seemed I could dream any dream I wished. I could become a doctor, lawyer, singer, or writer. I could travel. I could teach. The world was wide open. Except in one small, candle-less corner: I could not develop domestic skills. They were out of vogue. To learn to cook or sew, to think or talk about having and caring for children, it just wasn’t something my girlfriends and I did. And it certainly wasn’t something our teachers or school counselors encouraged us to do. So even though I had a weird obsession with cooking shows, even though when I traveled it was the one thing I was willing to spend a little money on, I never learned to cook (or even really eat, always worrying about my figure).

Then, after two degrees, travel, work, and service in my church, I got married. And, sure enough, along came a baby in a baby carriage. And I really liked him. I loved him—unabashedly and desperately. Which surprised me just a touch. What surprised me even more were all the dreams that opened up for me when I quit my job to stay home with my wee and sleepy infant. Strangely, I felt I had more time than I had ever had in my life before—a life that had been filled with school and work and an unhealthy obsession with perfection and overachievement.

I didn’t start out trying to cook brains like Julia Child had. I kept it simple. I began with Hamburger Helper. I stood over the meat as it changed in color and aroma, and it struck something in me—something primal, homey, and lush. I had cooked it. I would feed us. It was quite similar to the feeling I had had when I first breast-fed my son. It was a young version of the feeling I would have when eventually I gardened and grew the things we would eat. And it was, frankly, crazy-intoxicating.

From that first simple meal, I moved on gradually (very gradually) to more complicated things. I made eggs, to which I added tomatoes, garlic powder, and onion powder, and which I served with a bit of salsa. I then made some mashed potatoes from scratch one day. And, oh, they were so much better than the instant ones.

And suddenly my dream was something that, in all my studying and working and worrying and degree-getting, I had never thought to dream. It applied to kids. It applied to our home, or our mini-homestead, as I liked to think of it. And it applied to cooking, to food. In time and with experience, my cooking became more experimental and more creative. My life, though seemingly narrower and more restrictive, felt fuller than it ever had.

I started e-mailing recipes to friends and family. I started finding advice and more recipes online. I couldn’t stop reading about food, gardening, animals, and the land. And with each pregnancy I learned to listen more to what my body had to say about food; I continually traded recipes back and forth with friends and family.

And then one night there was the perfect storm of ideas. I’d been trying to knock about $200 off our food budget—no simple task when you love to cook. I’d been thinking about comments politicians and journalists had made about how the poor could not possibly afford or have the time to prepare “good food.” At the same time, my husband, who is a paramedic, and I had been discussing the ill effects of smoking on people and society. I wondered if people could eat on the amount of money they spent on cigarettes. And then I wondered if my family of six could. It was an exciting, terrifying, mind-whirring sort of prospect. And I liked it.

Within six months, The Tasty Cheapskate was born. It contained recipes, commentary on food and home life, and a budgetary challenge: our family of six would try to eat on $6 a day. It’s an obsession, I admit, but one I try to keep in check. Because one thing I’ve learned in finding and living my most verdant dreams is that they might go unrealized if a person doesn’t have a little time to sit on the sidelines, preferably with some good food in hand and a chubby toddler on her lap.

Jean Knight Pace’s current dreams are not the ones she started with, but as she has dared to become the hero of her story, to nose her way toward what she finds herself happiest doing, Jean is living her “most verdant dreams.”

Professor Rita Gunther McGrath of Columbia University describes discovery-driven planning as follows: “When one is operating in arenas with significant amounts of uncertainty, a different approach than is normally used in conventional planning applies. In conventional planning, the correctness of a plan is generally judged by how close projections come to outcomes.”

Conventional planning is, in essence, about the checklist. On a school day, we may plan to wake up at 5:30 a.m., get our children ready for school, send them to school, organize a closet, do the laundry, exercise, spend a couple of hours on a project, pick up the children from school and shuttle them to after-school activities, prepare and eat dinner, do homework, read a book, go to bed. At the end of the day, we measure the correctness of our plan by how well we executed against this plan. With conventional planning, because we are pretty clear about what needs to be done and what will happen, we can allocate resources to the entire project or day in advance.

In contrast, discovery-driven planning isn’t, nor can it be, about the checklist. It’s assumed that the plan will change, because as new information comes to light, our plan will need to change to accommodate that information. Just think about life after having a baby. A new mother could write the book on discovery-driven planning. How can you plan with a newborn? You want to plan, and sometimes we amuse ourselves by thinking we can, but we just can’t predict how any given day or night will go. You might tell yourself, “If I get enough sleep tonight, I’ll be able to exercise tomorrow.” But you won’t know what your plan should be until you have more information (that is, how tired you are). When you have that information you can make a decision about how to allocate your resources, namely, your time. I use the example of having a newborn, but the reality is that being a parent is almost completely discovery-driven.

As we consider our lives, most of the really big questions that need to be answered involve the discovery-driven process. Take college, for instance. According to Dr. Fritz Grupe, founder of MyMajors (mymajors.com,) “80 percent of college-bound students have yet to choose a major, while 50 percent of those who do declare a major, change their majors—with many doing so two or three times during their college years.” There’s the 90 percent again.

My career has been discovery-driven. I was a music major who arrived in New York with no idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up, other than not a musician, and eventually a mother. Writing this book has been discovery-driven. I knew in sweeping terms what I wanted to say, but codifying how we discover and pursue our dreams came as I wrote. Most of us are quite capable of conventional planning. We’re less schooled in, and therefore less comfortable with, discovery-driven thinking, the kind of thinking that helps us successfully pursue our dreams. That’s not altogether surprising. Convention is control. Discovery is letting go.

A friend who is a psychology professor at a prestigious university in Boston recently related an experience she’d had while teaching a class of female graduating seniors. These young women had worked very hard to get into the university, and had spent more than $100,000 on their educations, but on the eve of graduation, the students were terrified. Several dissolved into tears as they pondered, “Now what?” My friend’s observation was that these students had learned to excel at meeting concrete, measurable, short-term, this is what I do goals. They weren’t quite as sure about how to ask and answer big, undefined questions, such as, “What am I meant to do?”

Graduating seniors aren’t alone in their uncertainty. Most of us occasionally succumb to the terror of wondering what we’re meant to do. On good days, however, we are reminded that discovery as a process to relish, and that we can trust that our intuition, and a higher power, will help us sift and sort our way to defining our life’s course.

Eva Koleva Timothy, born and reared in Bulgaria, is not only leading a discovery-driven life, through her work as a photographer, but also has chronicled the journey of discovery. Her monograph Lost in Learning (lostinlearning.com) was published in 2010.

Eva Koleva Timothy: Lost in Learning

When I was a young girl, my father’s stories whisked me off to lands of far away and long ago. Some of the stories were fantastic—fairy tales, stories of Arabian nights, Bulgarian folklore, and the like. Others based in European history were about Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, and other larger-than-life figures. Although the stories were from long ago, they didn’t seem so far away. Bulgaria has been at the crossroads of every major civilization for more than two millennia—and under a foreign yoke for most of that time, beginning with Alexander the Great, and then the Greeks, who were followed by the Ottoman Empire and finally the Soviet occupation.

Growing up under Communist rule, I yearned for freedom. When I told people of my dream to live in the United States, most laughed. At that time, the idea of leaving a country so tightly controlled by the Soviet bloc was ludicrous. The stories my parents told me about history’s great explorers and independent thinkers helped me remain hopeful that, someday, I would come to America.

After the Berlin Wall fell, there really was a chance I could come and live in America. There was one minor obstacle: I didn’t speak English and I needed to pass an English test. I was fourteen years old and had never wanted to learn anything so much in my life. I took index cards to the movie theater so that, when watching subtitled American films, I could write down the phrases I picked up from the actors. When I was caught reading Shakespeare during my Russian class, I got sent to the headmaster’s office. I spoke with every American I could find, and while books had never been a favorite birthday gift, I fell in love with the huge English–Bulgarian dictionary my parents had given me for my fifteenth birthday.

I passed the exam, and, thanks to the generosity of Richard and Linda Eyre, well-regarded authorities on parenting, and the friendship of their daughter Saren, I was given the opportunity to realize my dream and study in the United States.

Twenty years later, I’ve embarked on another voyage of discovery, one that involves my photography. In many ways, my work today is a continuation of what I began as a teenager.

Several years ago I read The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin, an historian and former head of the Library of Congress. As I read about Columbus’s preparation for his journey across the ocean, and how he wrote copious notes in the margins of one of his geography books, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to see the book with his actual handwriting!”

At the time, I had been photographing a series of old books I had from the year our family lived in Oxford. Thinking about Columbus’s geography books, I had the idea to photograph manuscripts, instruments, and artifacts in a way that would tell the story of the amazing men and women I was reading about.

And so I began. I found a copy of the Imago Mundi, a fourteenth-century map of the world, with Columbus’ notes. I put that document together with an old compass, and the project was born. From there I visited the Harvard Collection of Scientific Instruments to photograph Renaissance-era artifacts. I acquired copies of manuscripts by Galileo, da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Georg Friedrich Handel, and others. I visited antique shops to find period spectacles, prisms, a miniature spyglass, and a beautiful magnifying glass.

These lenses, which granted sight, focused light, and enabled learning during those long-ago eras, became a symbol of the project. The items also reminded me that the discoveries we now celebrate and teach were made possible because those who came before us opened their eyes to see the world with curiosity, imagination, and a desire to explore.

The wonder of a voyage of discovery is that you don’t know where it will lead. How could Eva have known as a young girl that one day she really would live in the United States, have three children, and eventually photograph artifacts of the greatest discoverers of all time and compile them into an award-winning book?

Certainly, as I consider my career since I left Wall Street in 2005, it has been a journey toward something entirely different than what I had originally envisioned. In leaving, I had some idea of what I wanted to do, such as produce a television show. I pursued several ideas, none of which worked. I also became involved in two start-ups. One business failed almost immediately, the other achieved some success before ultimately failing. I wrote a business proposal for a mixed-use real estate development, which included hiring an architect to provide renderings. That project didn’t go anywhere. I also dabbled at writing children’s books. One of them is fully illustrated and ready to print, for another I have just the text. Concurrently, I had conversations with several of Wall Street’s largest firms about returning. I thought I was serious about returning to sell-side equity research. But, in retrospect, given that I hadn’t retained digital copies of my spreadsheets, my departure wasn’t just a lark.

Those two years of discovery were important. I spent more time with my children, really getting to know them as I worked more deliberately at being a mother. I started my blog, Dare to Dream, to encourage women to dream. I became involved in public affairs for my church, which included launching the Know Your Neighbor website, meant to encourage members of my church to be more civic-minded. Through that initiative I became acquainted with Clayton and Matt Christensen, with whom I would eventually establish the investment firm Rose Park Advisors.

In 2007, I also realized it wasn’t time for me to leave Wall Street, but rather to step into a different role. Sometimes when we leave one thing, we want to leave it completely. Yet I had spent fifteen years working very, very hard to become a competent analyst. Was it really logical that none of that would matter as I dreamed my next dream? The answer was no. So even as I blogged, and wrote yet another business proposal that didn’t quite work, I gradually moved into one of my current dreams, cofounding an investment firm. Where I am today is a very different place than where I thought I was going when I left Merrill Lynch. Yet it’s a much more logical dream, one that builds on my various strengths, innate talents, and acquired competencies.

Sometimes we need to jumpstart our discoveries. One tool for calculating next steps is to make a list of people we admire, and to interview them. Sometimes an actual interview is possible, often it isn’t. It doesn’t matter. As we formulate the questions we would ask, we clarify what we need to know. In asking, we can discover our next steps. This is exactly what Janika Dillon (see chapter 6) did when she began to explore the possibility of pursuing a PhD in history. She made a list of questions she had, and then was fortunate to interview Harvard University history professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize for A Midwife’s Tale and authoring Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, Ulrich has also managed to rear five children.

Janika Dillon: An Interview with One of My Heroes

JANIKA DILLON: Your life’s work has been to study the daily lives of women in history. What do you think is the benefit to women today in looking back?

LAUREL ULRICH: The biggest benefit is exemplified by author Christine de Pizan, who wrote in 1405, in The Book of the City of Ladies, “There is nothing in the world that women can’t do.”

There’s a classic narrative that “Women have been confined to the home and then maybe twenty years ago there was a woman’s movement and all these opportunities opened up. Or conversely, all these terrible things started to happen,” depending on your point of view. What we learn from Christine’s book is the variety of things women have been: inventors, leaders, gardeners, religious heroines, and queens. If you look at the long view, women have always contributed to the economy of their society—always!

DILLON: What were some of the obstacles you faced in becoming the kind of writer you wanted to become?

ULRICH: Time. Finding time to write and forcing myself to use the small amounts of time that I had. When I was doing Beginner’s Boston, a guide to the Boston area, when my kids went down for a nap, I had to choose between trying to write and taking a nap myself. It was a hard choice.

I continue to face this same challenge every day of my life. Shall I sit down and be miserable for a little while until I can make it work or not? Writing is very, very hard for me, and it has to happen daily. It’s hard to produce more than one paragraph a day. Sometimes I let my students see my really rotten initial drafts. It’s comforting for them to realize, “Oh, she has trouble, too!”

DILLON: Who helped you along this path and what kind of help did you need?

ULRICH: The number-one help and support has been my husband. He often recognized better than I did what really made me happy. He was also a great practical help by doing his share with the children and he had a good income. Let’s face it. That helped. I didn’t have to work for money. My first paying job was when I was in my forties.

Second to my husband was my network of Latter-Day Saint women in the greater Boston area and New Hampshire: they believed in me.

DILLON: So, how did your kids fit into the picture?

ULRICH: I did my graduate degrees one course at a time. My oldest was in elementary school when I began and he was in college when I finished. I got my bachelor’s degree in 1960, my master’s degree in 1971, and my PhD in 1980, when I was forty-two. My oldest child is fifteen years older than my youngest. My kids were good sports. They grew up with me boiling things over, destroying pots; they joke about my absentmindedness.

DILLON: Did you ever dream you’d go from a small-town Idaho girl to Pulitzer Prize–winning author and professor at Harvard? What advice might you have for women pursuing their dreams?

ULRICH: Well, first, no. I never imagined that I’d be doing the kind of work I’m doing now or be in the place I’m now in. So, I didn’t plan my life. The advice I’d give people is that old cliché, “Bloom where you’re planted.” Do whatever you do wholeheartedly and with joy: the joy really is in the doing. I don’t think we can expect or plan or attempt to win the prizes. What I attempted to do was write with passion and in a way that would be accessible to other people. I didn’t ever want to just write books for other historians.

I really didn’t think I had achieved that accessibility with A Midwife’s Tale, so it was a surprise to me that it had the kind of success it did. But the book was a joy to do. It was a transforming experience, really. The fifteen minutes of fame are exciting, but that’s not what sustains any of us. If you don’t enjoy the small pieces of whatever it is that your job is, you’re probably not going to enjoy the end product when you get there. The best predictor of happiness in the future is, in fact, enjoying what you are doing right now.

There are so many nuggets here for any of us looking to pursue our dreams. Laurel Ulrich loved to write. She loved history, and she discovered her way to her dream over several decades. To illustrate my point about how our questions point us toward next steps, let’s restate what Janika Dillon asked Laurel Ulrich:

Dillon was able to interview someone she greatly admires. It’s unlikely that many of us will be able to do the same. Still, there’s enormous value in simply knowing whom we admire, and what we’d ask him or her. When we admire someone, it’s almost always because we see a piece of ourselves mirrored in that person. If we will articulate what we admire and what we’d like to learn from that person, we are in effect saying, “This is a piece of my ‘self’ I want to develop, that I have in me to develop. My gut tells me that you—person-I-admire—hold some clues.”

As we move through our process of discovery, let’s again consider Psyche’s first task: the sorting of the seeds. There’s another ancient story, an allegory really, from a prophet named Alma that teaches how we can know which seeds are good seeds (or in the parlance of this book, which dreams are the right ones for us), and which steps are the right steps to take toward our dream. First, we have to plant the seed. This is an a priori assumption. We do have to dabble in some dreams, but once we begin to dabble, we can know if that dream and the course we are pursuing to achieve that dream makes sense because:

OPENING OURSELVES TO SERENDIPITY

When we are open to the process of discovering how to achieve our dreams, we open ourselves to serendipity, as photographer Saydi Shumway (saydiphotography.blogspot.com), a mother who also holds a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley college and a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University, found.

Saydi Shumway: The Snapshot That Changed My Life

I expected I’d go to college, maybe attend graduate school, and then get married, work for a while, and have kids. That all happened. Perhaps not in the same way or as quickly as I thought it would, but it happened. What happened after that was unexpected.

I had my first two children just sixteen months apart, by choice. My thought was, I’m devoting my life to this motherhood career right now, might as well pack it in, like I do with everything else. It seemed to be a sensible plan, but living through that plan has been harder than I had anticipated.

I thought the first eighteen months with two small children would be killer, but after that, things would get better. But even when my second child was well over two years old I felt far from having things under control. I didn’t see myself as the mom I’d always wanted to be. I had envisioned myself cheerfully discovering life with my kids: devouring books with them, taking them out to bask in the wonders of nature, crafting, cooking, and helping others. I thought I’d be that cool mom who enjoys spontaneity but also runs a tight ship, teaching my kids to be polite, make good decisions, be obedient, and to work hard.

The reality was that I was tired and disorganized most of the time. I didn’t have a structured discipline strategy. I “lost it” more often than I’d like to admit, and I could barely get through the piles of laundry, let alone take that weekly trip to the library. Instead, I made a monthly library trip, mostly to lug back an ambitious bagful of unread, overdue books.

Around that time a dear friend snapped a picture of my son Charlie and me at the beach. She e-mailed it to me and I printed it out. I looked at it, and looked at it, and looked at it. Because after I got past how I didn’t like my hair and my nose (sometimes that’s all we see in pictures of ourselves), I saw for the first time the beautiful, authentic reality of my mothering revealed in the image.

Looking in on that scene felt vastly different from living it. The image did not present the haggard, disorganized failure of a mother I had felt I was at points throughout that day, week, and month. Instead, this photograph depicted a happy, fulfilled mom, one who was drinking in her delighted little boy sitting securely on her lap. This photograph had captured the tiny bit of perfection that exists in my life.

I subsequently put the photograph on my refrigerator so I could look at it every day to remind me that I do love mothering—and perhaps more importantly, because I treasure this tangible representation of the mom I want to be, and how I want my kids to feel: comfortable, happy, secure, and delighted.

The thirteenth-century German philosopher Meister Eckhart said, “When the soul wishes to experience something, she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image.” The picture of Charlie and me on the beach is the image that my soul wants to experience.

I’ve always enjoyed photography, but it wasn’t until the epiphany with a particular photograph that I realized how powerful photography can be. I started taking my camera to work with me so I could take pictures of my social work clients while they interacted with their babies. I was amazed to see that these photos did the same thing for them that the beach snapshot did for me.

These images have also changed my philosophy as a photographer. I now view photography as a tool to reveal emotion and connections, one that captures true pieces of relationships, rather than just the right smile or pose. I hope my work helps people create images that their souls long to experience. Images so tangible they can jump right in and be the person they want to be.

In her head, Saydi felt like her dream of ideal motherhood wasn’t happening, but through the serendipity of a casual photo snapped and shared by a friend, she experienced a new vision of her dream. Her new vision then helped Saydi share the power of photography with others, influencing the way those women engage in their own dreams of motherhood. If we are open to serendipity, we may find that our dreams are shaped, molded, and changed by these seemingly random moments of discovery.

DREAMING AND DISCOVERING

Conventional planning, at which many of us excel, will hold us in good stead as we dream, but dreaming is ultimately about feeling our way toward what we were meant to do. As we embark on the process of discovery, the odds are very high that the dreams we think we want or need to pursue will be very different from what we actually pursue. Similarly, the means for achieving those dreams will be different than anticipated. As we seek to discover our dreams, interviewing people who have done what we think we want to do can be a way to jumpstart the process.

As we experiment and sort through different possibilities (that is, make mistakes), we discover whether we want to stay the course or move in a different direction. As with the planting of seeds, when we hit upon the right dreams for us they will become delicious.

SIFTING, SORTING, SOWING . . .

When the soul wishes to experience something, she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image.

—Meister Eckhart, thirteenth-century philosopher