Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [106]
Ask Yourself at the End of Each Day, “Did I Do Anything to Break the Law Today?”
Even once you discover the rewards of rule breaking, it's easy to get out of the habit of doing it. In most work environments you find yourself lured into a routine of taking care of business and maintaining the status quo. It's important to reflect on your behavior regularly and be sure you haven't slipped back into being a Goody Two-Shoes.
One great way to slay active as a renegade is to allow yourself to be inspired by other people's rule breaking—it certainly beats being green with envy. I learned a profound lesson in this during my late twenties, just after I left Glamour magazine to seek my fortune elsewhere.
My years at Glamour had been terrific, but I had gotten off to a bumpy start. When I went to my first interview with Personnel, I was too embarrassed to admit that I wanted to be a writer (Good Girl Syndrome in overdrive). I mentioned that I'd just spent four months working as a coordinator in an election, and I was swiftly placed as an editorial assistant in the merchandising department. My main responsibility was assisting the merchandising editors in putting on fashion shows in the Glamour showroom, which meant that I arranged the chairs, set up the cookies and coffee, and washed—yes washed—the dishes afterwards. I was miserable beyond belief. One day the promotion director of Glamour, who worked several offices away, pulled me aside in the hallway. She was about sixty and very eccentric: She wore mostly fake-fur vests and wide pants, carried a cigarette holder, and often called out instructions to her staff as they trailed behind her like poodles. She had never said more than two words to me, so I assumed she was about to complain that I brewed the coffee too strong or wasn't putting out enough petite madeleines on the platter. But instead she said, “I hear you want to be a writer. Why don't you come and work for me? I can't believe we have a Glamour college winner washing dishes.”
Her name was Katie Gravett, and not only did she save my dishpan hands, but she was a fabulous boss who inspired me every step of the way. There was an aura about her that seemed left over from another era of magazine publishing. She'd known Condé Nast, the great publisher of Vanity Fair magazine, and there were photographs in her office of her at El Morocco, with the telltale zebra-print banquettes in the background. Though her basic responsibilities were simply to put on special events and create selling brochures for the advertising salespeople, she ran her department as if she was an empress and everyone treated her that way.
I worked for about six months as her assistant and then she made me one of her promotion copywriters. But she knew what I really wanted to do was write for the magazine and she was thrilled when I finally got offered a position in the feature department. We had lunch regularly, growing to be friends. When I decided, after six years, to leave Glamour, she was one of the first people I told.
A short time after I got settled at my new job, Katie and I had lunch at a fancy midtown Chinese restaurant, and to my astonishment she told me she was retiring from Glamour and moving with her husband to Rockport, Massachusetts, where she had discovered a wonderful house she hoped to buy. Granted, she was entitled to retire, but I, and everyone else, just assumed she'd be at Glamour until the absolute last moment. And then she said the thing that had such a profound effect on me. She told me that she had decided to leave Glamour partly because I had left. My departure had come as a surprise to her, she said, and it had inspired her to reflect on her own life and recognize that it was time for change. When she opened her fortune cookie at the end of the meal, it said, YOU WILL SOON LIVE IN A NEW HOME.
It was a little scary for me to consider that at twenty-eight I'd had such a major influence on someone's life choice, but since then I have used the lesson Katie taught me on many occasions. Rather than allowing other people's triumphs