Business Time

As much as I wish it were, this post is not a musing on the Flight of the Conchords masterpiece, "Business Time." Although, if you'd like a little bit of that in your life (and when wouldn't you?), you can click here.
The real point of this post focuses on the 40+ hours we all spend at work each week. I'm currently in the middle of a very smart book given to me on Easter - Women, Work and the Art of Savoir Faire by Mirielle Guiliano, of French Women Don't Get Fat fame. Before this book, I only thought of this woman as author of a book that prescribes a two-week regimen of nothing but leek soup to drop pounds quickly. I love leeks, but, gross.

However, as I quickly learned, she is kind of a rock star. She was brought in to run Veuve Clicquot's US operations back in the 80s and took the champagne brand from owning 1% of the US sparkling wine market to 25%. Plus, I love a strong woman who can write refreshingly about both working hard and relishing the finer things in life (like a bottle of Veuve, an affordable luxury).

Anyway, one the favorite little tips I've come across thus far is the SWOT test, which stands for

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

These four categories are guidelines to use when assessing where you are professionally (or in general), and where you might want to go in the future. In the midst of my spring cleaning and reexamination after the Paris trip, I'm so glad this little book has come into my life to offer a blueprint that is fun to read and also helps me to think about my future - something that seems so vast and overwhelming that it's difficult to wrap my head around most of the time.
For those of us who have (somewhat) recently graduated from college, the "new normal", at least as I've found it, has been life without a predetermined or even clear next step, the way there is when you're in school or any type of program working towards a clear goal. When the goals are things like happiness and fulfillment, the steps to get there can seem murky or easy to miss.
I've been giving these kinds of things a lot of thought recently. One of the things that became so clear to me in Paris, talking to all the different sorts of people we met, is that there are so many different and diverse paths to leading full, satisfying, interesting, happy lives. There's no right answer for how to live - kind of wonderful and overwhelming at the same time, right?
Ok, I'm going to finish ranting and clean some more. Sigh. Look forward to a Spring Cleaning update soon - complete with embarassing "before" photos and hopefully less embarassing "after" ones. Xo.