Make A Stranger Believe In You

I recently received an e-mail sent to my business address that began with the salutation "Dear Ms. Anne," — the kind of greeting that suggested that the rest of the note would offer me riches from some recently deceased Estonian cousin I didn't know I had. It continued, "I know you have no idea who I am, however, I will try to keep this as short and to the point as possible" — words destined to cause a further sinking feeling about what was to come. But in the seconds I skimmed the note, a few words jumped out at me and I was intrigued. In three short paragraphs, Zanele Mutepfa, a junior at Portland State University in Oregon, told me that she was an immigrant Zimbabwean-born orphan and youth advocate who aspired to be a television talk show host. With a bravado that might have been off-putting, she said, "I assure you, my dynamic life story will one day hit headlines...but most importantly change lives, it just needs to be shared with the perfect person." She was coming to New York City — might I have time to meet with her?I had moved from the hinterlands to New York myself, 35 years ago, with virtually no professional contacts, so when she closed her note by saying, "Some may think one of the strangest things to do is believe in a stranger, but if

not one stranger believed in us, once upon a time, where would we all be today?... someone did it for you."

Yes. Yes they did. So I Googled Zanele, found a link indicating she was who she said she was, and agreed to meet. And as I discovered, so did several other media professionals whom Zanele had e-mailed cold. In this challenging job market, I think it's worthwhile to explore why these busy professionals took the time to respond and help Zanele. I contacted a few of them to find out, and have come away with some ideas that might help other people looking for work — and not just those entering the workforce for the first time.

Have clear professional goals

Before she e-mailed anyone, Zanele sat down and wrote an outline for herself, articulating her several goals: to become a talk show host, establish a women's empowerment organization, become an author — and maybe become a plus-size fashion model as well. While these are crazily ambitious and at first glance unrealistically expansive goals for a college student, two unifying themes — to work in the media and be a catalyst for helping other women — helped her target her search.

Cast a wide but focused net

Zanele's focus on media professions (she wasn't exploring legal or financial positions, for instance) allowed her to channel her search towards those operations (Oprah Winfrey Network, Oxygen Network, Essence, Ebony, YWCA) whose missions seemed to align with her dreams. "It was important for me to truly believe in what they do," she told me, "in order for my letter to have truth." Like any modern day sleuth, she used every tool to find the right contacts, web-searching terms such as "corporate women authors," "women in magazines," scouring sites like LinkedIn, company websites, Twitter, and executive profiles. Since most companies have standard e-mail formats, she sent multiple emails in every conceivable format until she didn't get a "mail delivery error." Within her relatively narrowcast objective, she contacted as many people as possible — eventually writing to 2,000 people. Thirty responded to those e-mails and six agreed to meet with her in person. With that kind of a response rate, the benefits of going wide are obvious.

Be authentic — tell a personal story

Dina Gusovsky, a broadcast journalist and columnist, was one of the media professionals who responded. While most people would think that being as brief and to the point in their cover note as possible would be the most professional and likely to succeed approach, Dina's response indicates that the opposite may true. She told me that she agreed to meet with Zanele "because I think at one point we were all Zaneles. Sometimes I feel like I still am. For creative people...the journey never ends. Whatever success I have had so far is directly correlated to all the people who gave me a chance. Not just those who decided to put me on television, but those who listened, those who gave me advice, and those who mentored me." But as an emigre from the Soviet Union, for Dina it was Zanele's immigrant background that resonated most. Her meeting with Zanele was "probably less pay-it-forward and more pay-it-backward. I think all those people who had helped me and continue to help would be proud that I was in some way continuing this wonderful trend."

Offer a variety of connection points

Janice Huff, the chief meteorologist for WNBC TV in New York, responds to lots of inquiries from young people interested in becoming meteorologists, but rarely takes the extra step to meet with them. However, Zanele had susssed out that Janice was a fellow Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sister, and personalized her note referencing that shared connection. For Janice, "that's what made me decide I'd love to meet her and help her." Zanele took the time to find shared interests for about 20% of her targets and mentioned them in her notes. So before you reach out it pays to research, and determine where your connection points might lie.

Don't be afraid to show vulnerability

Ellianna Placas, a fashion consultant and another immigrant (from Australia), and the former Fashion Director for Essence Magazine, was impressed by Zanele's ability to "show honesty and vulnerability and risk, putting her faith in human nature first — a brave and open beginning. 'Believe in a stranger' was so romantic, yet realistically appealing to me. Maybe I am imbuing it with more than Zanele intended, but it held universal appeal. We should all be helping each other. Zanele came to me for advice, she left as a new friend."

Be open about where the path takes you

After several people in New York City had responded to her letter, Zanele decided she had reason enough to make the trip from Portland. And while she did not leave New York with a firm job offer, she will be returning to follow up on the leads developed in her first round of conversations. "I learned so much about myself and exactly what makes me tick," Zanele told me after her trip. "I believe it is so important to know or hold a conversation with people who have career positions you aspire to have someday. The value of relationships and conversation is incredibly important to me. Those conversations will not magically appear on my phone and g-mail, I have to go and get them. No, not everyone will respond and not everyone 'needs' to — only the people who are meant to."

Ellianna Placas put it best: "No one knows how we arrive in the places or jobs we do. We did not do it by ourselves, we were surrounded by people along the way who gave tiny bits of advice, who we watched, who helped us make and not make choices."

That's something we should all keep in mind, especially as we make the upward and sideways journeys in our own careers. To paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, at some point in our lives we have all stood on the shoulders of (seemingly gigantic) strangers, and there comes a time when we need to give others the chance to stand on ours.

A Room Of My Own

The day I moved into my new home office, my horoscope (hey, I take guidance wherever I can find it) declared that I had embarked on “a momentous process of entering the next phase of my future … one that would involve some farewells and some significant changes.” Wow, deep, I thought. And yet, weirdly accurate.

My new office was the old bedroom of my younger daughter, Lucy, now 23. I was working in a room that had been her private and carefully composed inner sanctum. This was a space vibrating with Lucy’s personal resonances: her infant cooings, her 6-year-old late-night forbidden encyclopedia readings, our nightly go-to-bed “You Are My Sunshine” songfests and all of the heartbreaks and secrets unknown to me yet shared with her friends. Until she left for college and later moved with her sister, Kate, into an apartment a few miles from our home, her entire life had unfolded within these four walls.

My husband and I had preserved first Kate’s room then Lucy’s throughout their college years, reveling in their holiday whirlwind returns while chafing under the chaos of their stuff upending our serene-while-they-were-at-school household order. I never gave much thought to this liminal place — kids not living at home but kids also not living with permanence anywhere else. It just was how things were.

Even with those college years of practice separations, though, I wasn’t prepared for the big, adult move out. I continued to keep their rooms as they were, although they’d become stagnant reliquaries for the stuff the girls were unwilling to deal with: clothes, old school papers, fading photographs, childish jewelry, souvenirs, years-old magazines and comics.

The occasional what-if-they-lose-their-job-or-break-up-with-their-boyfriend-and-need-to-come-home bolus of anxiety allowed me to indulge in the sense that I was keeping their rooms intact for the girls, rather than because I was engaging in magical thinking, choosing to believe the illusion (beds at the ready, stuffed animals waiting) that my kids weren’t really adults.

(MORE: The Art of Shedding Possessions)

Admitting the Kids Aren’t Moving Back Home

But one day, during my morning meditation, a transgressive thought bubbled up. And again and again I found myself imagining a Virginia Woolf-ish room of my own. I began to fixate on the fact that as an adult, indeed for 40 years, I’d never had any space that I could call my very own.

My kids had their rooms, and when my husband reinvented himself as a novelist he claimed as his office a room with a door he could shut. Yet when I’d transitioned from being a corporate worker to a freelance journalist, I’d been forced by the physical limitations of our Brooklyn house to use a makeshift Murphy desk sandwiched into the narrow pass-through between a sitting room and the living room.

It was wide-open to anyone who might pass through, and by default I was expected to answer every phone call or doorbell. I was up and down all day long and wore earplugs in a losing battle to concentrate. When Woolf wrote, “For women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a soundproof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the 19th century.” For decades, I realized, I’d been living like a 19th-century daughter: roomless.

After months of imagining my ideal office space (and how I could turn the other bedroom into a proper, grown-up guest room) and months of worry that the kids would feel like I was erasing their lives and history from our home, I took action. I told the family what I was planning.

My husband, unsurprisingly, couldn't have cared less, but I was right to have been concerned about the kids’ response. Intellectually, they understood that what I was proposing was reasonable; emotionally, it seemed they weren’t ready to let go either. We came to an agreement. I would leave the rooms the original colors the girls had chosen.

I would furthermore repurpose most of their furniture, keep some of their more precious objects in place, curate the important items for posterity — and they didn’t have to help with any of it. Passive aggressive as the non-helping bit might feel, I got it. This change was not their choice, it was mine. I should do the heavy lifting. And on the bright side, their non-involvement showed they trusted me to do the right thing. With resolve I plowed ahead.

(MORE: Make Your Home Office Work for You)

Old Kid Bedrooms Become New Grownup Rooms

Over the course of several weeks, I tackled the project, each day managing to go through bookcases, drawers and stacks of stuff — pruning the detritus from the kids’ lives, placing curated items into storage bins for the basement and other things into piles to relocate to their new place.

I relived so much of our lives together by myself. I felt a deep melancholy as I allowed myself to experience trips we’d taken, read letters they’d written or received, and mourn passions (anime, painting) abandoned. It was similar to what I’d shared with my sister when we’d closed up my parent’s house, but we had each other. This time only I walked down these wistful paths — saying goodbye to my babies and that life.

And then I was done.

I write this, finally, from a room of my own. As my horoscope predicted, the move involved some deep farewells and changes, but in the end, nothing was lost and an infinitude was gained. Every day I’m surrounded by the presence and love of my kids — all the treasures they’ve given me over the years that never before had a proper place.

I’m bathed in family and history and meaning: A painting of an Egyptian sloop my father gave me in college is displayed over my desk, my mother-in-law’s painting of wildflowers in a mountain pass that Lucy had in her room now hangs above sheep in a manger from the home of my maternal grandparents. Sunlight streams in, glinting off my mother’s cobalt and emerald perfume bottles beside Lucy’s cheerful stuffed animals. The first chair my husband and I bought beckons me to a corner to read. Beloved ghosts of the past support me as I stand at my hyper-modern electric standing desk.

The poet Anne Sexton called the place she worked “the room of her life.” So is this mine. This is a room I’m pretty sure Virginia Woolf would love. She wrote, when you “earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.”

Yes, this room is filled with invigorating life. Now to impart it.

Extremely Rare Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris

Although some of these images discovered by Curious Eggs looks like modern photography, all the images were taken using Autochrome Lumière technology. It's an early color photography process, patented in 1903 and invented by the famous French Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis.

All credits go to Albert Kahn museum.

To see more incredible photography visit Paris, 1914 and time travel to a different universe.

One Question for Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John's, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother.  In See Now Then, her first novel in ten years—a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters—a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England—as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future: for, as she writes, “the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then.” Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid’s attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end. Since the publication of her first short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In See Now Then, she envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling—creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

Jamaica:  You mean apart from being born? Of course, this means that I have to admit to having a profession and what would that be? Well, I am a writer. I never learned how to type properly. I failed that course. I also failed my shorthand courses. If I had known how to do those things, I would have most likely gotten jobs as somebody's secretary and when I was young that was a proper job for a young woman. Since I couldn't find anybody who would employ me to answer their correspondence efficiently, I continued in my attempt to be a writer. See how that worked out.

No More 9 to 5

Former Investment Banker, Christine Marchuska

At the height of the recession, Studio 360 interviewed scores of people transitioning from one career to another.  Many used the opportunity to follow their dreams.  Two former financial industry workers took the uninvited opportunity to reinvent themselves. Christine Marchuska, lived a real-life Up In The Air moment, getting pink-slipped in the conference room at her investment banking firm and immediately ushered off the premises.  Out but definitely now down, Marchuska went on to launch a thriving eco-friendly clothing line.  And Michael Terry, armed with a University of Pennsylvania MBA, became a full time comedian after years of work at Morgan Stanley.  Listen to more of their story here.

The Little Robot That Could

I wanted to share this gift from Studio360 and their science and creativity series. "When NASA first landed a man on the moon (which we do believe it happened), an estimated 500 million people worldwide watched on TV. Decades later, when the shuttle program was canceled, and manned space flight just about abandoned, a lot of Americans felt that NASA lost its mojo. Space is a great place to park communications satellites, but in an era of fiscal cliffs, budget cuts, and tax battles, the government expense of an interplanetary mission is a hard sell. So when the Mars rover Curiosity went to Mars last year, the journey was a PR opportunity as much as a scientific one. Curiosity had a Twitter feed, @MarsCuriosity, and announced its own entry into the Martian atmosphere. Meanwhile, millions of Americans watched that heart-stopping descent, or at least they believed they did.

NASA has used animation to explain missions since the 1960s, but it outdid itself for Curiosity, hiring an animation studio to produce a Hollywood-grade video of the spacecraft’s journey. The animators, Bohemian Grey, borrowed a few tips from Pixar’s WALL-E to make a robot lovable. Can YouTube mint NASA a new generation of space buffs?

From Desktop to Stovetop

Thinking about reinventing yourself?  This Studio360 radio essay about  Marc Matsumoto's journey from being a tech industry marketing executive who, "basically lived at the company seven days a week, often until as late as 3:00 in the morning" to the founder of a website, No Recipes, might be just the inspiration you've been looking for.  Matsumoto's enthusiasm as he roams the earth seeking out good company, novel ideas, and delicious food to inspire his next kitchen adventure is contagious. Interested in experimenting with some fresh cooking?  Try an easy chicken teriyaki.  You never know where it might lead you.

My video of Ann Hamilton's dreamlike billowing sheet installation: The Event of a Thread

New Year's Day, our national liminal pause between what was and what will be, was the perfect day for my family to immerse in the transportive experience created by Ann Hamilton's The Event of a Thread installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

White sheets made to billow by Lily Tomlinesque oversized swings transformed the basketball court-like drill hall into a whimsical agnostic cathedral.  I took the video below while lying on my back beneath the sheets.

Here's an excerpt from Roberta Smith's review in the New York Times.  "Anyone who liked swings as a child — and that should include quite a few of us — will probably feel a surprisingly visceral attraction toAnn Hamilton’s installation “the event of a thread” at the Park Avenue Armory.The work is the latest from one of the more self-effacing orchestrators of installation-performance art, and her first new piece in New York in more than a decade. It centers on an immense, diaphanous white curtain strung across the center of the armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Dispersed on either side are 42 large wood-plank swings, suspended from the hall’s elaborately trussed ceiling beams by heavy chains that are also tied to the rope-and-pulley system that holds up the curtain.

The swings are there for us, to swing on. “The people formerly known as the audience,” in the memorable wordsof the media critic Jay Rosen, form a crucial ingredient of the work as never before in Ms. Hamilton’s art. The piece has other components, about which more in a minute, but if people are not using the swings, “the event of a thread” does not fully exist. When they are in action, the curtain, made of a lightweight silk twill, rises and dips, and the air is stirred, causing further billowing and fluttering."

One Question for Jim Cramer

Jim Cramer is host of CNBC's "Mad Money," featuring lively guest interviews, viewer calls and, most importantly, the unmatched, fiery opinions of Cramer himself. He serves as the viewer's personal guide through the confusing jungle of Wall Street investing, navigating through both opportunities and pitfalls with one goal in mind — to help them make money. He's also co-anchor of the 9 a.m. ET hour of CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" (M-F: 9 a.m.-12 p.m. ET). Cramer is the founder of TheStreet, a multimedia provider of financial commentary.

He graduated from Harvard College where he was President and Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious daily, The Harvard Crimson. After graduation he became a reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat and later for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner where he covered stories ranging from homicides to sporting events.

Cramer is a former hedge fund manager and founder/owner and Senior Partner of Cramer Berkowitz. His compounded rate of return was 24 percent after all fees for 15 years at Cramer Berkowitz. He retired from his hedge fund in 2001, where he finished with one of the best records in the business, including having a plus 36 percent year in 2000.

Jim Cramer of Mad Money

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

Jim:  

You want risk? Walk away from a job that you worked years to get, walk away from a job that paid you more your first month than you had made your whole life. Walk away from Goldman Sachs.

Yet, that’s what I did in February of 1987 because I always wanted

to work for myself and even though I loved the place, I knew that if I didn’t make a move I might never do so.

I first tried to get a job at Goldman in 1981, the year I enrolled in Harvard Law School. I loved the stock market and while I wanted to be a prosecutor, I knew that the summer between your first and your second year at law school tended not to impact where you ultimately worked.

I figured if you want to go to work in stocks, you might as well go for Goldman Sachs, the best there was and the best there still is.

There was a huge problem, though. They didn’t want law school kids. They wanted business school students. So began what amounted to a two year odyssey to prove that I deserved a slot, one of the coveted 25 or so positions that they granted to those who graduated business school every year.

In the next two years I interviewed with Goldman Sachs ten times, got turned down three times and simply didn’t take no for an answer.

And when I got hired for Securities Sales, advising high net worth individuals and smaller institutions on what to do with their money, I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

The payoff was immediate; the commissions bountiful, the people terrific, the excitement non-stop.

Yet, somehow, it wasn’t enough. Somehow I wanted to work for myself. So I made the most stupid and the most brilliant move of my life, I quit. Four years into it I walked away to start my own hedge fund.

Stupid? Yes, because two months after I started I was already down ten percent for the year. I had lost almost everything I had made in the time I worked at Goldman. Then, after clawing back to plus 3%, I ran smack into the 1987 crash. Fortunately, I had been able to cash out ahead of it, one of those moves that in hindsight looks like genius but at the time was just total self-preservation because the market before the crash had been horrendous.

And that’s where the brilliant came in. Because I had cashed out ahead of the crash, I managed to have a positive return, something that almost no hedge fund manager was able to claim.

In fact, almost everyone else I knew who struck out on his own to run a hedge fund during that period ended up blown to bits.

That meant tens of millions of dollars came my way to manage. Fortunately, I got back in close to the bottom, and the rest was pretty much history as I managed to rack up a return of 24% after all fees over a 14 year period and then retired to move on to full time writing and television.

When I look back at what I did, I still can’t believe that I took that risk. I would have been happy if I stayed at Goldman Sachs, I know that for certain. By my goal had always been to work for myself and when I had enough capital to make a go for it, I jumped at the chance. Even as it was catastrophic at first, I would do it over again in a heartbeat.

But, and this is the big but, I was single at the time, I had no kids, I wasn’t fearful. I didn’t have responsibilities beyond my own rental apartment and share in a place in the Hamptons. So while it was the riskiest move I ever made in my professional life, I knew I did have the rest of life to make it back if I failed.

Looking back 25 years later, that’s certainly not the case anymore.

One Question for Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash has recorded eleven No. 1 singles, blurring the genres of country, rock, roots, and pop. She has received one grammy and twelve grammy nominations, among other awards and accolades, including an honorary doctorate from Memphis College of Art. A prolific writer, Cash has written Bodies of Water (Hyperion, 1996),Penelope Jane: A Fairy’s Tale (Harper-Collins, 2006), edited the book Songs Without Rhyme (Hyperion, 2001), and recently penned her memoir Composed (Viking, 2010). Rosanne’s prose and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Oxford-American, New York Magazine, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Martha Stewart Living and various other publications. Her last record album, The List, won the Americana Music award for Best Album of the year and was a critical and commercial success.

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

Rosanne:  

There are series of small risks in my work every day-- going for a different note, improvising, trying out a new song in concert for the first time or working with a new musician. Just walking on stage sometimes feels like a risk. I performed at the Rolling Stones tribute earlier this year at Carnegie Hall and when they asked what song I wanted to do, I immediately said

'Gimme Shelter', because I've always thought it was one of the top five greatest rock and roll songs of all time. There couldn't have been a riskier choice for me. It was thrilling.

Those are the fun risks.

I've taken two really big career risks. In 1989, I had a hugely successful album that had four number one singles on it, and I had some leverage with my label, Sony, so I asked if I could produce a record myself. I made a small, dark, acoustic record called "Interiors". It was something of a mission statement for me. It was authentic and personal and kind of rough around the edges. I thought I had done the best work of my life. My record label heard it and said 'We can't do anything with this.' They put out a single, but didn't do any promotion for it, and clearly wanted to let the record disappear. I was devastated. About three months after the release I was on a plane, staring out the window, and it came to me that I had to ask to be released from the label or at least transferred to the New York division from Nashville.  I called my dad and asked his advice (something I rarely did). He said 'screw 'em. You belong in New York.' I called a meeting with the head of the label and went in alone-- no manager or lawyer. I asked them to let me go. I had been there 12 years. Basically, they said 'we'll miss you', and the meeting was over in 20 minutes. I walked out and had to lean against the wall, I was so dizzy. I was scared I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

It was the best thing I've ever done for myself. I moved to New York in 1991, I got divorced, I met the love of my life, and that dark little record was nominated for a Grammy in the Contemporary Folk category. It gave me a new set of bona fides in the industry. Things didn't go easier after that-- in fact, they became much more difficult for quite some time. The divorce was excruciating, I was broke, I was the subject of a lot of vicious rumors, and I had no more chart hits after that. But my life opened up and I started relying more on my own instincts. Four years later, I took another risk when I asked to be released from the label entirely, even though my contract wasn't up, because it just wasn't working. Again, I went in alone, even though my manager thought it was a bad idea. They let me go, and I started from scratch again. Those career risks are like chess, in a way. There is an element of instinct, but it's mostly logic and planning and creating a new vision for the future. The other risks-- the artistic risks-- are the ones that infuse my soul with inspiration and propel me forward and refine my skills and intuition. Those are the risks that connect me with my own authenticity. The career risks are a First World Problem, and anecdotal in retrospect. The artistic risks make me who I am.