168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam

Author:Laura Vanderkam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

Be Ready to Ride the Wave

Of course, if you follow all these steps, there’s a reasonable chance you may achieve your breakthrough. Then what?

This is a question Leanne Shear, in particular, has grappled with. She wanted to be a writer, and while she’s thrilled to get the chance—“Tracey and I didn’t have to pay dues,” she says—she freely admits that The Perfect Manhattan is not Proust. And while she doesn’t want to be Proust, she doesn’t want to be a flash in the pan, either. She wants to be taken seriously. So, after a flurry of publicity for The Perfect Manhattan and some follow-on work (such as a nonfiction book called Cocktail Therapy prescribing a drink for every woe), she and Toomey have slowed down before crashing the market with other chick-lit books. Shear’s been spending some of her 168 hours working with established writers to hone her craft, and figuring out ways to turn her early success into a “slow burn career,” rather than one that flames out.

This is worth keeping in mind. After the champagne goes flat, the balloons deflate, and the confetti gets swept into the trash, you still have to get out of bed the next morning. You still have to know what you want your 168 hours to look like. You will have to figure out how to spend your time as you’re managing a $1 million company rather than a $100,000 company, or after the Nobel Prize ceremony, or after you return home from living underwater for two weeks.

That last one was a major career breakthrough for Sylvia Earle, the ocean explorer we met in Chapter 3. Back in 1970, she was chosen as one of fifty scientists given the opportunity to live in underwater habitats dubbed the “Tektite Hiltons” amid the coral reefs of Lameshur Bay near the Virgin Islands. She led an all-female team; in 1970 the project directors thought a coed team would invite too much speculation. It’s not clear anyone would have had much interest in shenanigans, though. After 21 hours in a decompression chamber, Earle was able to spend 336 hours underwater, exploring the ocean “not just as passing-through visitors, but as day to day residents,” she wrote in Sea Change. She got to know specific barracudas, and five gray angelfish who, every morning, began “their slow waltz around the mounds of coral, pausing now and then to nibble a bit of sponge or nose at a lump of algal debris.”

She loved the peacefulness of being underwater. She returned to the surface, though, to media coverage resembling a shark feeding frenzy. She and her fellow female aquanauts were whisked to Chicago for a ticker-tape parade, and were invited to join Pat Nixon (not Richard, she notes) for a lunch at the White House. She was interviewed by Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs, and wrote a piece for National Geographic about her experiences. She had to figure out what to do with this sudden fame. “It quickly became apparent to

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