Bonnie Spring is a Professor of Preventive Medicine, Psychology, and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Director of Behavioral Medicine, and Co-Program Leader for Cancer Prevention at Northwestern University. A Past President of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, she is board-certified in clinical health psychology. Dr. Spring’s most recent book is Smoking Cessation with Weight Gain Prevention, and in the original post below, she reflects on her own struggle with giving up cigarettes and maintaining her weight.
“You’ve given me new hope.” So read the e-mail that arrived shortly after Parade Magazine published a story about my research showing that trying to manage weight gain while stopping smoking can help rather than hurt successful quitting. A steady stream of similar messages flowed in, taking my mind back to the days when I first started to study weight gain after quitting smoking. I still flinch at the memories. Faculty colleagues asked when I would switch to studying a real health problem – one with serious medical consequences. The reception was about as chilly at the National Institutes of Health. The words of a usually supportive program officer float back to me, “Oh come on…There’s only an average six to eight pound weight gain after quitting. That’s not a health problem – that’s a cosmetic problem. We’re in the business of studying threats to health – not insults to personal vanity!”
The physicians I spoke with weren’t much more helpful. They said things like, “Look, there’s no question that the much greater health risk comes from the smoking rather than the weight gain. The average person would have to gain about 100 pounds to offset the health benefit of quitting.” Indeed, medical practice guidelines conveyed a similar message. The U.S. Public Health Service Guideline on Tobacco Treatment encouraged physicians to tell patients not to worry about weight gain until they were fully confident and secure as non-smokers. The fear was that trying to manage both things at once – smoking and weight – would be overwhelming and would undermine the success of the quit attempt. Yet even though that guidance seemed right-minded and conservative, I watched it prompt my friends to make a life-threatening decision. Nor did I watch detachedly, because I was one of the many smokers who responded by making the same bad decision. Having to choose between being smoke-free and being slender felt like being crushed between a rock and a hard place. Yes, I cared about my long-term health and wanted very badly to quit. However, maintaining a slender, attractive appearance felt essential to sustain the social reinforcers that were vital to my quality of life. We can call it vain, irrational or disordered till the cows come home, but my priorities were certainly not unusual then or now. I continued to smoke.
Living out the truism that “research is me-search,” I began a series of treatment studies to test different ways to help smokers quit smoking without gaining weight. We already knew that ex-smokers gain weight especially because they eat more, but al
People who follow my other online adventures may already know that I quit my library job, the automation project that I was so proud of. I didn’t really quit, I’ll still be helping, but I took myself off the project as “the person in charge of the project.”
It’s a not-entirely-long story but the upshot was that once we finished the obvious To Do list [getting books scanned and item and patron records into the catalog] the remainder of the work was muddy. The librarian and I had different opinions on what needed to happen next [in my mind: flip the switch and work out the bugs; in her mind: get the data clean and do staff training and write documentation and then flip the switch]. I realized that the quick and dirty automation project which I’d been doing for low pay, about 2-4 hours per week, that I was hoping to be finished with by early this year, was likely to go on sort of forever. I didn’t want a forever-job and couldn’t see a way to wrap it up with only my own toolkit.
I’m not entirely comfortable with the way everything worked out, unclearly and with an uncertain “what next” point. I’ve suggested someone who I think can pick up where I left off, but he’s not me and the library really seemed to like me. That said, after a lot of thinking on this, I realized that I was trying too hard to be the hero, the librarian that sweeps in and takes the tiny rural library and automates it in something akin to the rural electrification project. Cracking the whip, keeping the momentum up all the way to the end.
I really wanted to do this job, without thinking hard enough about whether the non-me aspects of this project were amenable to the task. As Alex Payne says in his “Don’t be a Hero” essay (about programming but it applies everywhere)
Heroes are damaging to a team because they become a crutch. As soon as you have someone who’s always willing to work at all hours, the motivation from the rest of the team to produce reliable, trouble-free software drops. The hero is a human patch. Sure, you might sit around talking about how reliability is a priority, but in the back of your mind you know that the hero will be there to fix what doesn’t work.
For whatever reason, I didn’t get the feeling that the library was learning to use the tools themselves, I got the feeling that they were getting used to me being available to solve problems and answer questions. I’m certain this problem is as much my responsibility, if not more, than theirs, but I’d gotten to a point where I literally could not see a way out of it. And I dreaded going to work. And I couldn’t see a solution.
The Koha consortium project in the state is doing well and I have no doubt the library will automate. The librarian wants it to happen, though her timeline is unclear. I vacillate back and forth between thinking that the work I did was uniquely valuable and integral to the library being able to automate at all, ever, and feeling like a bit of a quitter, leaving the project when it started to bog down and get tough. I’m lucky in that I have a lot of real-life and online friends who have been supportive of my decision, but it’s still one of the tougher ones I’ve made in the last few months. [rc3]
Wow. Just wow. Read it.
Technorati Tags: Acting, Never Stopping, Publishing, Quitting, Singing, Succeeding, Writing
Last year was my first year as a freelancer. I spent a good portion of that year wondering if I'd always be hoping the next phone call would be from a client that had more than $50 and wildly inventing ways in which I could try to sell my art work. Many days were spent preparing for and being at local events where I sold merchandise I had created that ranged from woodburnt art earrings to prints and cards. The hardest part of that year was not the worry that I had made the wrong decision but rather was in making the decision to quit my full time job in the first place. I knew in my heart for years that each day I went into work I was in the wrong place and I struggled to understand why my dream job wasn't turning out like I had always hoped it would be.
Perhaps the expectations and dreams of fresh eyed students entering the work force should be given a more realistic perspective? Most likely though, I think the beautiful passion and hope that I was granted via my parents and the instructors I studied under at school are to blame for me not throwing in the towel when I felt illustration was a ridiculous industry. Students entering the work force this year will need a healthy dose of optimism in the face of our global economic downward slope so that no matter how long they are forced to sit in the moonlight working and gathering overtime hours under employers who give care only about their bottom line will still make it through and not trade in their diplomas for something that seems more promising.
But here I am, not even two years later, swamped in work that I feel so blessed to be a part of that I could cry with happiness and managing to make money in the process. Sure, I've traded in a few benefits - maternity leave (in Canada, this is a full year), a steady pay check and co-workers but my list of newly acquired benefits would make that list seem quite silly now... anyone else feel the same way?
As this is my 199 post my next post will be a "giveaway" post - so stay tuned!
I'm very excited. I was emailed that my submissions--one art journal page from The Fairy Field Guide, and a page from my Emma Lou drawings--were accepted to be included in Rockport's next addition of 1000 journals. Wahoo! Ordinarily I would just smile and move on, but my Following my Passions class suggested I celebrate each of my victories, so break out the wine, folks! Let's face it, I love books and I especially love being published. So, last night after class, I treated myself to a huge canvas to paint. I am realizing that painting is for me, my outlet, my expression, hands-off kind of expression.
I posted two of my prints of the Emma Lou series at my etsy store:
“The hero is a human patch.” Ouch, I think you just described the role I’ve been given in my library. We’re small and rural also and over the years I’ve been the one to do it all—bring in computers, get local Internet access to come in, networking, automation, website, getting grants to pay for it all, maintaining & repairing said computers, etc., etc. All for my low, barely above minimum wage salary. Should I decide to retire or just plain quit I seriously doubt the Board could find any one person to replace what I do for the salary I get. Have I done them any favor? It had occurred to me I haven’t and your post just backs that up. Now I’m getting sucked into a similar position with the Fire Dept. It’s hard to get out once you’re in. Your post has provided some enlightenment.
I don’t know if you have read this post by Chris Brogan (www.chrisbrogan.com/never-give-up-no-give-up/)but it may give you another perspective on “quitting”. It’s a good take on what it means to quit.
Good luck with your future endeavors. Stay warm up there.
Thanks for that Matt. I just met Brogan’s co-author Julien Smith and I’ve been enjoying some of their lessons.
ah, “I didn’t get the feeling that the library was learning to use the tools themselves, I got the feeling that they were getting used to me being available to solve problems and answer questions”… I am stuck in this same frame where it seems people are quick to “call it a technology problem” and set it aside and quit trying. I was asking just this morning if they would do the same with history research or business reference, they are not historian or MBAs but they still help patrons with that type of questions. They (not all of them, but many) do however have no problem with telling someone who just got an ebook for christmas that “they just can’t help them with that…”
sad.
we have to recognize that having separate tech teams, tech plans, Tech budgets and often even tech directors; has created the perfect climate for that.
it’s just that it’s time for everyone to see tech as part of everyone’s job.
a few days ago, michael casey blogged about a HBR article that stated satisfaction at work comes not from praise, not from money but from PROGRESS. Good luck and go forth.
“Flip the switch and work out the bugs” is a perfect description of our switch to Koha, and we were doing it ourselves with a much less mature version. I think your instinct is correct with regard to what a small library is capable of (at least in the abstract). Willingness is another matter.
We chatted about this, and I think you did the right thing — and the library will flip the switch to automating, even if it waits until the consortium version is ready. I’m nothing about persistent.
Plus, don’t be so hard on yourself. We think you’re awesome.
Jessamyn.
Sometimes it is hard to let go. It is also hard to know when to let go. I admire that not only did you let go, but that you reflected on the “whys” of what was going on.
As someone who has gone from “let’s make it perfect before we switch it on” to one who says “that’s good enough, we can fix it later” I can understand both where you are, and where the librarian is.
That being said, I am glad that you did what is right for you.
Jessamyn,
That must have been a difficult choice to make. Ultimately, it seems like making a change is often harder than continuing to do the same thing. Strategies aside, it sounds like you were careful to consider the future impacts on the project, something we should all try to do.
Seems like a good move. The tricky thing is that you can still feel like a hero FOR bowing out, because in doing so you give them what they _really_ need.
rambleonsylvie said: “it’s just that it’s time for everyone to see tech as part of everyone’s job”
I hope you’re not suggesting that the role of “technology librarian” is already obsolete. It’s true that tech is “part of everyone’s job,” in the sense that learning how to use the phone system, search the databases, and gracefully shutdown a computer are everyone’s job, but there’s much more to the job, and there will always be people who don’t have the inclination or desire to learn any more than that. And that’s okay. Should we not have a “business librarian” or a “science librarian” or an “associate director,” either, because it should be everybody’s job? I can do all those things–after a fashion–but maybe I’m not going to give the best answer or find the best solution. I know how to change the oil in my car, too–I did it all the time when I was in my 20s–but that might not be the best use of my time anymore.
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sharon, i just meant not to set all the questions/problems aside without even trying (at least a graceful shutdown ;)
I commend you for your willingness to let go. Realize that the fact that you CAN let go of this one project is because you have other work waiting for you, and you have other work waiting for you because of all the projects you have followed through to their ends throughout your career. Having been a “human patch” myself (not in library work), I can understand some of what you were going through.
Quitting is probably good for all concerned. Particularly for the person who will eventually manage and use the new ILS. There’s nothing like being put in the position of actually having to do a task yourself to understand what the task is.
Oh, so true. You want to save a project/group/place, you know you can do it, but in the end, only they can save themselves. A hard choice, but I think you’ve done the right thing.