By Lindsay Bell
Welcome to the 79th – indeed the farewell – edition of The Three Things, which is our regular Sunday weekly update of three links, podcasts, videos, or books you can’t miss – from Howie Goldfarb (Blue Star Strategic Marketing), Joe Cardillo (Visual.ly), and yours truly.
Yes, it is coming to an end.
It has been a great run these past 79 weeks – 79 weeks!! That’s a year…and….um…oh, never mind, I don’t like math and don’t have my calculator handy.
This week, we wanted to release our incredible contributors early, and instead feature some of our staff members who haven’t had the chance to share their interests on The Three Things yet.
Ok, Clay Morgan did once. But still.
So, for today’s swan song edition, we present you with some fascinating content from our social media manager, Eleanor Pierce, our director of earned media, Mary Anne Keane, and the aforementioned Clay Morgan, our vice president of operations.
Today we explore life changing literary experiences, humans becoming redundant, and searching for your roots.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
Clay on A Wrinkle in Life. We are at the end of The Three Things and having been asked to contribute, I thought long and hard about what to include. I finally decided to include a title that changed it all.
I’ve always been into military history and, in second or third grade, I had the typical little boy dreams of growing up to join the army, or be a firefighter, or something like that. Certainly, my reading, which was quite voracious, gravitated in those directions. That was my career path, if you can have one at that age. Until fifth grade and Mrs. Laurenzi.
She announced she would be reading a book to the class – one chapter each week. She read about two chapters and stopped, but I had to know what happened and convinced mom to buy me the book. She did and I read the whole thing in one night, mostly under covers with a flashlight.
It wasn’t a silly children’s story, which I avoided like the plague, and it wasn’t a childish book, though it featured children. I felt for the first time I was reading a book for kids, but a book that took kids very seriously.
The book was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle. When I finished it, I decided I’d spend the rest of my life writing, and I’ve never regretted that decision.
That, my friends, is my final “thing.”
Don’t Let Your Career Become Outdated
Eleanor on The Robots Are Coming! An introduction: I don’t always agree with Penelope Trunk, but she always gets me thinking.
About business and careers, about the modern lives of women, about education … she has a really interesting approach to so many topics, which she in part credits to having Aspergers (another topic she has really interesting thoughts on)—she’s very data driven, and she’s sometimes jarringly frank, including about very personal (and traumatic) aspects of her personal life.
One of her most recent blog posts, Don’t let your career become outdated, looks at the fear that we will all become irrelevant as Generation Z—the generation after the Millennials, moves into the workplace.
Some of her predictions and suggestions for staying relevant include:
- Forget about collaborative leadership
- Forget about female leadership (as I’ve already said, she drives me insane sometimes).
- Forget about dispersed media.
As she says, “The age of the big blog is over.”
She also says that, in the future, the content we now get through blogs will be written by algorithms.
Mary Anne on Finding Family. I have been working on my family’s genealogy for more than four years and have uncovered several unbelievable stories. I have found this research to be very cathartic after a long, hard work week. I liken it to my own version of CSI, without the crime scene.
When I first started, genealogy was just becoming popular and information wasn’t readily accessible. Today, there is so much information at the click of a button it is much easier to track down your family’s ancestral home.
While I have a subscription to ancestry.com, I’ve used dozens of other means in which to find information. For instance, if you’re looking for immigration information on a relative, and can’t find it on the Ellis Island website (Ellis Island didn’t open until 1892), try CastleGarden.org. This site has information for early immigrants beginning in 1820.
The hard part is taking that first step. But trust me, when you find that first piece of information you will be hooked! Warning: Proceed at your own risk.
Lindsay on The End. So, my friends, in closing I want to say a special thank you.
To all of you who have shared and commented on The Three Things each week (I’m looking at you, Paula Kiger!), to Laura Petrolino for stepping into the breach more times than you know to help with last minute Saturday evening changes.
To Michael Schechter for being one of the founding contributors for the first year of TTT’s existence, to Joe Cardillo for stepping in when Michael had to leave us, to the rowdy and rebellious Howie Goldfarb for going the distance, and especially to the indefatigable Gini Dietrich, for launching The Three Things all those weeks ago.
It’s been a slice. Peace out.