What better day to explore some interesting facts about some badass womyn (yup, I see you feminists) than today. For if you didn’t know, today is International Women’s Day!!! At this very moment, womanhood is being rejoiced and the power of femininity is being acknowledged across the globe…I can almost feel it in the air.

 

All of the women mentioned below, whether they were aiming for it or not, are only a few amongst the millions of women who have made a social, economic, cultural and/or political achievement for women. The last one is just for fun and also mind-blowing. 

 

- Marie Sklodowska Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, and today remains the only person in history to be awarded two Nobel Prizes in two different fields of science…she was once denied admission to a university because she was a woman.

- Victoria Woodhull, an American stockbroker, was the first woman to run for U.S. President in 1872 - before women even had the right to vote!

- Sally Kristen Ride was an American physicist and astronaut. Ride joined NASA in 1978, and, at the age of 32, became the first American woman in space. Ride remains the youngest American astronaut to be launched into space.

- Edith Wilson, Woodrow Wilson’s wife, ran the Oval Office for 17 months. Nobody voted for her, and she never actually referred to herself as president, but she did take charge of many executive duties after her husband was left incapacitated by a massive stroke.

- Helen Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. Many of her speeches and writings were about women’s right to vote and the impacts of war.

- Emma Watson opened the door to a new way of thinking about gender inequality, which affects both men and women within our society during her UN speech on December 20, 2014. 

- Mrs. Vassilyev gave birth to a total of 69 children - sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets – between 1725 and 1765, in a total of 27 births. 

 

Because I can't keep you here reading all day about all the numerous women that have made a difference in accelerating gender equality, I leave you with a quote that sums up what today means to me. 

 

“A woman is human. She is not better, wiser, stronger, more intelligent, more creative, or more responsible than a man. Likewise, she is never less." -Vera Nezarian 

Why is it so hard for many of us to want to work on big problems or projects?  Here are some common reasons:

(1) You may not get any reward in the foreseeable future whereas if you work on a smaller undertaking, that you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon.  A reward that is indefinitely far in the future makes it seem less real. 

(2) Fear of wasting time.  What if you fail, and all that time you invested on it is wasted?

(3) Big problems can be terrifying and there’s an almost physical pain in facing them. Paul Graham’s metaphor is it’s like a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination and all your initial ideas get sucked out immediately and you don’t have any more, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking. 

Paul recommends that you shouldn’t look at a big problem directly in the eye.  You have to adjust your angle and approach in a way that you are facing it directly enough to feel some of the excitement from it, but not so much that it paralyzes you.  Once you get going, you can tighten the angle.  Alternatively, you can try to trick yourself into tackling a sizable problem or project by working on small things that could grow into big things or work on successively larger ones.  

Paul wraps up his essay by saying “the way to “solve” the problem of procrastination is to let the delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.  Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and you’ll leave the right things undone.”