Top editor’s advice? Women can have it all

Join the "why not?" club
In college I had a hard time silencing my "You can't do it" inner voices. At my alma mater, the University of Toronto, there was a highly professional newspaper on campus, The Varsity, which came out three times a week. It wasn't until my junior year that I could even summon the nerve to volunteer to do some reporting for it. Though my goal in life at this point was to become a newspaper reporter, I was not at all sure I was a talented writer; it wasn't until I saw an ad in the paper itself advertising its desperate need for reporters that I finally gave it a shot. If they're that desperate, I thought, maybe even I will have a chance.

At the first meeting I attended, the sports editor sounded the most desperate of all. After volunteering to write for him and receiving positive feedback, I was thrilled to discover that I actually did have an aptitude for writing. I started to take on weekly assignments. Then a man named Doug Bassett, the owner at the time of a string of local newspapers as well as a major Toronto daily, spoke at a career seminar on campus. If any of us were really serious about working as a reporter, he suggested, we should call him for a summer job. He answered his own phone.

Not sure whether he was serious, I gathered up my courage and introduced myself to him after his talk. Then I followed through with a phone call a few weeks later: again, I was thinking, why not? True to his word, he did pick up his phone, and after receiving my resume and a few sample stories, he wound up giving me a real job at the Markham Economist and Sun, the local weekly newspaper in a small town about twenty miles outside Toronto. I bought a junk heap of a car and drove myself there every day.

If I had stopped to evaluate the fact that there were about seventy-five equally interested students at Doug Bassett's lecture, many of whom were surely smarter, better-looking, and more talented than I was, I wouldn't be sitting where I am today. Any employer will tell you that the number of people who actually follow up on initial inquiries or expressions of interest in a job is shockingly low.

Score one for the "I can't do it" brigade. It's large enough without having you in its ranks! Join the "Why not?" club, and stay there.

Think of the great achievers who never would have accomplished anything if they had spent too much time thinking about the perfectly sensible reasons why they shouldn't have done something. Why did Ted Turner think we needed another network, CNN, when the Big Three networks served up news just fine? Why did Ben and Jerry think people would buy ice cream with those groovy names, when we already had so many other choices?

Or consider the story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the geniuses behind Google, who quit graduate school to start their own company. Their lack of business savvy was a plus. They went live on the Internet, for instance, before hiring a Web master; so while giant competitors like Yahoo were filling their home pages with stock quotes and sports scores, Google had nothing but a search box and a logo at the start. Some people would have been terrified by this lack of bells and whistles. But asking themselves, "Why not?" Page and Brin went ahead in their quest to help people get information as quickly as possible. Now Google sees 200 million searches a day and has entered our vocabulary as a verb. Their focus paid off in creating one of the most successful companies of the dot-com era.

Are there ideas to be explored, resumes to be written, phone calls to be made that could lead you where you want to go? Get on the phone, on e-mail, or to the post office. If you ask, somebody might say, "Yes, come on board." If you ask with enough conviction and frequency, someone will definitely answer in the affirmative sooner or later.

By now you've turned your inner fear into your most potent weapon. You're afraid not to succeed, so you keep trying until you do.

Excerpted from “The Joys of Much Too Much: Go for the Big Life — The Great Career, The Perfect Guy, and Everything Else You've Ever Wanted,” by Bonnie Fuller. Copyright © 2006 by Bonnie Fuller. Excerpted by permission of Fireside, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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