Building Successful Careers

Christmas Memories My Mom was the Queen of Christmas. To this day, I remember the beautiful decorations, wonderful foods, joyous music and, of course, the gifts. Although money was never plentiful in our home, she found ways to make memories that linger in her daughters’ minds forever. All four of us have tried to pick up from where she left off. We made red and green chains out of construction paper and homemade paste. She hung these in the doorways to decorate the house. She hung the wonderful Christmas cards received from loved ones around the doorways. We all joined in the decorating of the tree. Favorite ornaments would be hung in a prominent place. Mom liked each piece of tinsel hung separately not flung at the tree. This is the season of love and family. Mom would bake cookies while we were at school. When we came home, the whole family would frost and decorate them. We felt so proud when she served our “works of art” to friends and relatives or when we took a tray of o

When we were at college, money was the most important element of my life. We needed it to pay bills and buy things we liked.  Many of us worked many not so glamor jobs, exchanged time for money.  We learned tremendously from that life experience. We treasured money. After a few years of stable jobs, we earned more money. But money was never enough for us to feel secure.  We work more. We work day and night.   Some of us have to make appointments with our spouses just to spend some time alone.  We became smarter over time,  we now use money to buy time:  we pay for cooks, cleaning services, baby sitters; we pay drivers to drive our kids around, we get 1-1 private classes for our children at home. When we sit next to our children, we check our messages, reply to our boss’ emails at all hours.  One of my friend’s son one day yelled at her: “ You love your phone more than your love me!”  We are physically with our family but our minds drift away to our work.  We are never with our famil

I heard the term “location, location, location” for the very first time when I was hunting for my first house. No surprise at all, because I didn’t grow up in the United States and had no clue about how to select a house. What does this expression using three “locations” really mean? A curious person as I have always been, asked many realtors and got many interesting answers. Most of them told me that three repeating locations mean that location is very important. My interpretation from my house hunting experience is: 1) Location: which city you want to grow your family and what kind of life style it provides 2) Location: What street you want to live on, small court close to highway or close to school, what kind of convenience it provides to your daily life 3) Location: the orientation/direction of your house, facing east, south, floor plan, size of the lot, plus some other consideration depending on your culture and the comfort level it provides When I had these three locations in

John came to me at noon time. He opened our meeting with serious business topics talking professionally about projects and resources. After our discussion, he relaxed and smiled at me: “Elizabeth, would you please give me some feedback?” I smiled back at John, “I would like to pass on feedback I once received from one of my mentors.” Harry, the Executive Chairman I worked for, had a productive meeting about software global resource strategy with me. At end of the meeting, I asked for his feedback. Harry looked at me with a serious face: “Elizabeth, you are too serious, and you are too scary!” Then he laughed. What an astonishing remark! I was too serious and too scary! I viewed myself as a nice, flexible and resourceful professional. I knew for fact that I was not outwardly humorous. However, I was not boring either! What could I do to correct that impression? Solutions appeared. A few days later, my husband came home with a tip on effective communication with executives.

WSP 229 Registration at Stanford University starts on Aug 22, 2011 Here is the link https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/course.php?cid=20111_WSP+229 Stanford Class WSP 229: Ten Steps to a Successful Career: Elizabeth Xu and her mentor of 20+ years Ms. Pat Zimmerman, Jefferson Award and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Award winner, (bio at: http://www.blogger.com/profile/12719189363354248427) will co-teach this class at Stanford. We will provide you with tools and practical steps to help you build a solid successful career. We will help you go through a paradigm shift in how you see yourself and how you approach your career and life. We will help you to discover your burning desire and goals, and help you to build attitude and plans to realize these goals, build a sound professional brand and broad network and support system. WSP 229 Course Description: Your career development has become your own responsibility in this ever-changing talent mar

When you stop learning, you start dying. Pat Zimmerman

It has been at least seven years since I last met Wayne in person. Seven years of time washed away many sandy grinds between us and left only sparkling gold. I could not help to thank Wayne for one of my most important career paradigm shifts. Without his advice, I could not grow from a first line manager to a director. Wayne looked at me with his signature smile, “Let me tell you my version of the story .” My heart was racing; did I remember our meeting total differently? Wayne was an architect at a large software company 20 years ago. He once talked to a Sr. VP and his mentor at this large company. His mentor said: “Wayne, there are three bodies of knowledge for each person: 1. The knowledge you are aware of, and you know it very well and apply it in your life daily 2. The knowledge that you are aware of, but you don’t know it well because you have no interest, desire or capability to acquire it 3. The knowledge that you are not aware of, you never knew such knowledge existed. You wi

We either leisurely or are forced to make decisions or choices each day. Each decision or choice points to a different path, defines our future and influences people around us, subtlety or profoundly. Using programming language, life presents us with sets after sets of “if else" statements. We could very well come from the same place in our lives (i.e. classmates from the same school). Each outcome of the “if else” sets us apart. Over a long period of time , we become vastly different people. Therefore, some of us become restless when it is time to make decisions, others are afraid of the consequences of their choices. Recently, I had an enlightening conversation with Dan Pritchett, EBay Fellow and CTO of Rearden Commerce. He was the first person ever who clearly separated decisions and choices for me. He said, “Choices are made based on pure facts, based on adequate supportive information; it is a purely analytical result. Decisions are made based on partial facts, partia