πβ Hey there! Weβve had some good subscriber growth over the summer, so we thought this might be a great time to reintroduce ourselves and share our philosophy and some of our favorite posts from the archives.
Mind The Beet is about sharing our slice of life as two working parents raising two young kids. π¨βπ©βπ§βπ§ We explore what it means to be 21st-century grown-ups:
We try for human and vulnerable writing that breaks through the barriers put up by our digital screens. So we might share some top 10 lists, product recs, and thought-provoking ideas that you can put into your everyday life (hey, itβs good to be practical and useful! π ), but even more important, we try to share our own stories and lived experience across parenting, career, leadership, and life. π
We publish once a week every Sunday. π Itβs free to subscribe.
A few of our favorite posts from our archives:
βοΈβ Work Travel and Mom Guilt: Helenβs tips for traveling as a working parent.
π Finding Purpose in Tech Careers: Adamβs journey to becoming a purpose maximizer.
π€ Building strong relationships at work: Helenβs story through multiple careers.
ποΈβ Adam's Field Guide to Happiness: The Secret to Amazing Paid Time Off
π¨βπΌ My First Year of Fatherhood: Adamβs polished memories from that crazy, sleep-deprived first year.
π The Gifts We Hope to Give: Learn a bit about how we approach parenting and leadership
π₯± Burnout & Boredom: A Managerβs Pandemic Retrospective on Mental Health: Learn about Flow and other tips for managing burnout
πΆ Advice on Hiring a Nanny: Practical tips for working parents
π The Studio: A product guide to building a custom telepresence room
π Information Diet: Recommendations for news outlets, analysis, podcasts, and newsletter subscriptions from an information junkie
π¨βπ©βπ§βπ§ Brave Parenting: Itβs OK to not be perfect. Itβs OK to be scared as a parent - even in the everyday moments.
πββοΈ Why New Grads Should Surf, Not Climb: The #1 piece of advice for new grads.
For the product managers out there, here are posts specifically on the art and science of building product:
β How does a product leader manage their time? Thoughts on time & task management and whatβs worked for Adam
π From Product Manager to Product Leader: A career guide with a focus on the most important inflection point.
π οΈβ Honing my skills as a product manager: Helenβs journey to transfer into the profession.
βπ£β My 10 Favorite Productisms: Pithy sayings with pearls of product wisdom behind them
πβ The People Angle: How to build x-team products
π° Celebrating 16 Years at Microsoft: Adamβs mondo advice post
If you are looking for parenting product recs, try our recs on π books, π² games, and πΊ TV.
Who We Are
π Hi there! We are Helen and Adam - weβve been married for 11 years, have two young children, and both work demanding and fulfilling careers. As we both approach 40 and our kids enter school full time, we have a passion to talk authentically about how weβve created a true partnership in our marriage, career, and household and whatβs next in our lives. We live in Kirkland, Washington.
Hereβs a few posts weβve done that show our own slice of life:
πΆβπ«οΈ Adam's May Mood Board
π Getting to π me: Adamβs favorite smells
π¨βπ» Defrag.exe: Adam on Sabbatical
βπβ Our Donations and Most Meaningful Causes
How You Can Help
We want to grow by word of mouth. We arenβt striving for mega-scale with the newsletter: We want hundreds of subscribers who are genuinely curious about our slice of life and eager to engage with us and share a good post with their friends.
One of the biggest gifts you can give us is to take a favorite post and share your own thoughts about it on social media while tagging us.
Whatβs Up With The Beet?
Reading is a great passion of ours and for a slice of life blog like this one, coming of age and character development focused novels seem very appropriate. As such, we were struck by Tom Robbinβs Jitterbug Perfume which includes this quote:
The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity.Β The onion has as many pages as War and Peace, every one of which is poignant enough to make a strong man weep, but the various ivory parchments of the onion are quickly charred by belly juices and bowel bacteria. Only the beet departs the body the same color as it went in.
Beets consumed at dinner will, come morning, stock a toilet bowl of crimson fish, their hue attesting to beet's chromatic immunity to the powerful digestive acids and microbes that can turn the reddest pimento, the orangest carrot, the yellowest squash into a single disgusting shade of brown.
At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits and gnawed by age and by the time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown.
The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown.
So we decided to name this space Mind the Beet. Whether itβs wielding complex systems so they serve you not consume you or finding the balance we want not what society dictates in a marriage - we aspire to maintain our own way of doing things even as we fully embrace the systems that surround us.