Voices
in my writing, I take a shower.
7. Sometimes you just have to do the
work. Or, as my grandmother used
to say, there’s a reason they call it
work. No job is free from the tasks
you hate. Complaining only makes
them take longer.
8. Sheryl Sandberg is right. Too many
women “leave before they leave,”
moving emotionally away from
work when they start to have families, failing to “raise their hands”
for promotions and big projects.
9. Anne-Marie Slaughter is right, too.
Women can raise their hands day
and night, but there are logistical
barriers in the current outdated
workplace, that are far higher
than any “ambition gap.” The
reason women are “leaning out,”
rather than “leaning in,” is largely
because they are overwhelmed by
the impossibility of “doing it all.”
10. They are both right because the
answer is somewhere in the middle. A
la Sandberg, women need to raise
their hands — but not only for
promotions. A la Slaughter, they
also need to demand workplaces
that are more flexible day to day
as well as year to year. All of us
need to slow down and speed up
on the career track, interspersing
times when work is all encompassing with times when it isn’t.
LISA
BELKIN
The solution is staring us in the
face: embracing the pauses rather
than writing off the workers who
take them.
11. I know more than an eager
20-something. I am wiser. I have
made more mistakes, hence
learned more lessons. I know that
what seems like a crisis, or a debacle, or a triumph, will probably
look far less dramatic by tomorrow, and it’s better to take the
long view of life rather than riding
the roller coaster day to day.
12. They know more than I. Every day
they teach me something about
technology, or pop culture, or optimism, or how things need not be
done the way they’ve always been
done. Mostly they have taught me
about balance. Everything I just
wrote I learned by trying to articulate it for the now-21-year-old who
once scribbled on a pad at breakfast. His generation deserves a better mix of what Freud called the
“cornerstones of our humanness,”
love and work. Mine can’t build
that for him, but we can take hardwon knowledge and point
the way.
Lisa Belkin is The Huffington
Post’s senior columnist on life,
work and family.
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13