Add one to the end of a sentence and watch your issue vanish. Or at least seem less “win or lose.” A well-placed “and” or “or” invites us through a creative door we would likely have missed, if not for the question these little words force us to ponder.
My sister is always late… AND she does so much for other people, she has trouble putting her own needs first.
I don’t have time to write my book… OR I could get my book written if I made a writing schedule and stuck with it.
I hate cooking… AND I love taking care of my family.
I could never go on a cruise by myself… OR maybe I could try a short weekend cruise by myself to see how it feels.
My kids are driving me nuts... AND they will only be this young for a very short while, so I should cherish these moments.
The “Power of And” has been a popular catchphrase from third-wave feminists in the 1970s insisting women can “have it all” to organizational leaders in the 1990s suggesting that, with the right levers in place, everything can be done, and thus should be done… well. This attitude, coupled with the tools that we were handed during the tech boom of the last 20 years had many of us believing, and even trying, to do it all.
Until we couldn’t. In his new book, “The Power of Or: Choosing and Doing What Matters Most,” Joe Robert Thornton examines our having-itall, doing-it-all culture, and concludes that not only can we not do it ALL, but we shouldn’t even try. He focuses on the benefits of saying “no,” and makes a great case for eliminating multitasking from our lives.
Yes please.
Readers of my work might remember a column I posted when my kids were schoolaged and I was an exhausted working mom. (Update: the kids are now 30 and 27; one is in Seattle writing code and solving the world’s problems, and the other is in the Navy, solving the rest of the world’s problems).
The column was a rant against Rachael Ray called “Wonder Woman Has Left the Building” (here is a link https://tinyurl.com/JonnaHHww).
Don’t get me wrong, Rachael is a super fun, ubercreative and fabulously talented individual who has taken her initial vision of making dinner easy for moms in suburban Albany, NY to multi-billion-dollar franchised heights. My hat is off to that powerhouse entrepreneur. But her “30-Minute Meals” show on the Cooking Channel was almost the death of me.
She made pulled pork with candied pineapple on a Tuesday seem like a reasonable ask. My Mickey-D drive-throughs on the way to practice no longer qualified, if it was only supposed to take me 30 minutes to create a homemade, gastro-pub quality sit down for the 40 minutes we had between aftercare and basketball.
Needless to say, I am a big fan of OR and intend to use it often.