How Anne Frank shifted my viewpoint

At the beginning of this year, I decided to enter a challenge through Goodreads. I sifted through my ever-growing list of books that I want to read and pared it down to 85ish books that I felt I should've read by now, that looked interesting or a like light read, or that I thought they might have an impact on my life viewpoint. The most recent one that I read was Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. I'm almost ashamed to admit that it took me this long to get around to reading it.

Now that I've had a few days to mull it over, I think I'm finally ready to review this book.

Anne Frank wanted her diary to be published. She had dreams of being a writer. Her father, the only one of the Secret Annex group to survive, edited and published her diary for the world to read and I thank him for that. The diary is an open, honest, and sometimes harsh view of what life was like for Jews during the war. Anne doesn't hold back her strong opinions while writing in this diary.

As the book is a diary, the writing is somewhat disjointed at times but you can clearly see the development that Anne undergoes as a person during the two years while writing in the diary. You can really get a feel for the kind of person she would have become if she had survived.

This book made me question a lot of things; the reasons behind the war were the biggest ones, and to a lesser extent, the things going on in my own life. I teared up every time Anne referred to what she wanted to do in the future for her career or how she was going to raise her children. After seeing some of her hopes and dreams and realising just how short her life was cut, I started questioning things that were going on in my life and what I wanted to do. Although this wasn't what the book was designed to do, it made me up my rating to five stars. Any book that makes you question things in yourself has to be amazing.

Thank you Anne. I appreciate it. Rest in peace.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid!

I can't comment on the specifics for obvious reasons, but a recent crisis in my industry pointed out a few (often fatal) traps that PR professionals (myself included!) often fall into. The best example that I can think of is drinking your company/non-profit/charity's Kool-Aid.

As the voice of an organization, you have to believe wholeheartedly in what it is that your organization is doing. Unfortunately, it's all too easy for an organization to get sidetracked by projects or new and exciting prospects and stray from their mandate. If you're not doing regular evaluations of your activities to see how effective they are as well as how they relate to your organization as a whole, it's easy to start falling down a path different from the one you started on.

There are a few important things to remember here that will help you out immensely!


1. Don't rely on inside sources only! Reach out and talk to people other than your co-workers and fans of the brand, they can often give you some much-needed perspective

2. Regularly evaluate and adjust your strategy if it's not getting the results you started out to achieve

3. Ask your brand fans/members/target audience for feedback even if you're being successful. They might see something that you miss, or even come up with brilliant additions to any campaign.


What else do you do when organizing a campaign?

Being a comma

Disclosure: I bought the latest Coldplay album last weekend and haven't been able to stop playing it yet. Thankfully (for the husband's sake), I only really play it while I'm in the car and he's not usually with me.

There's this one lyric that just keeps playing over and over in my head and I'm not quite sure why but it's something that I've been mulling over the past few days.

"I'd rather be a comma than a full stop"



I never really thought about it too much when I first heard the song, but it's latched onto my cortex and won't let go. I guess the question that it raises is, what exactly does it mean to be a comma instead of a full stop?

Other than the huge life changes that went on last year for me, I'm planning a few more this year. I've been working at an amazing facility where I teach therapeutic riding and I love it so much that I'm working on my certification. It's not really a change, but it's moving me into a different career path than where I am currently.

So, back to my original question. What does it mean to be a comma instead of a full stop? I interpret it as being more in the moment and moving with the flow of life instead of trying to cling to things and force them to work the way you want them to.

Here's to living in the moment in 2012.