Magic in the Mundane

By Anthea C. Stratigos

"A beautiful, simply remarkable read on every dimension."
—Mike Lewis, author of When to Jump: If the Job You Have Isn't the Life You Want

How do you want to “do life”?

We are bombarded with messages to do more, be better, and live a life worth living, but how do we do this in an increasingly complicated and fast-paced world?
These are the questions Anthea Stratigos has been asking herself for more than twenty years. And the answers she provides here have fostered a way of living and working that’s led to an immensely satisfying result. Through ten guiding principles, her stories share simple changes you can start making today to follow your heart and find your opportunities to thrive.

From a humble upbringing, Anthea built a career and a business serving some of the Fortune 500’s most successful companies, all while raising a blended family and nurturing her relationships. The brightest minds across industries turn to Anthea for trusted advice and leadership, but she didn’t achieve this success by “doing it all,” as they say. She prioritized, set boundaries, and made choices that made magic from the ordinary aspects of life. Enhanced by her grandson’s illustrations that capture the essence of her advice, this book offers the same poignant stories and wisdom Anthea has shared with her friends and colleagues.

Where will you find your magic in the mundane?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthea C. Stratigos
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781733460415

Anthea C. Stratigos

Anthea C. Stratigos is a Silicon Valley–based CEO, wife, mother, grandmother, public speaker, writer, and dedicated dog rescuer devoted to supporting others to live lives that work.

Book preview

Preface

Women get pushed and pulled in many ways. We’re caregivers, life-makers, and collaborators. Each day we are inundated with messages about how to work, how to look, how to parent, how to marry, and how to be, in any of our 1,001 roles. We can be especially hard on each other and on ourselves. We waste our energy on things that are not our business.

As we juggle it all, we sometimes lose sight of the miracle and magic in the mundane—little life principles, what I call thriving tips, that keep us on course and add up to a well-lived life. I’ve come to rely on my thriving tips, each built by creating and finding a little miracle in life’s everyday mundane. They keep me sane and help my life flow better on the days I feel like I’m losing it. We can cope and live in harmony in a world increasingly riddled with sound bites and the constant message that we must hurry, hurry, do, do.

I’m not the first woman who has raised a family, built a company, and stayed happily married in the process. I am blessed with an amazing husband who is my best friend and life partner in every way and with children I adore. I have awesome siblings, girlfriends, and colleagues. Life is great.

Yet my life started out simply with simple means. I was raised in San Bruno, California, in a middle-class, bordering on blue-collar, family. Dad wasn’t college educated but came out of the military, worked in the airline industry briefly, and then ran a liquor store with his brother and began to invest in real estate. Eventually he moved into wholesale liquor sales. I remember a time he drove a bus for a living in order to make ends meet. He dabbled in odd investments, most of which didn’t make money, and retired when he was fifty-eight, tired of working for the man, with some small real estate purchases making it possible for him to afford that decision.

Mom went to college, became a high school art teacher, met my dad two years later, quit and married, then became pregnant with her firstborn. She never worked outside of the home again. There were hand-me-downs to wear, only a pair or two of new shoes a year, no vacations of any real meaning unless they were to go see relatives via a used station wagon, and pretty much no back to school spending. Mom and Dad were frugal. They never furnished their home well, never landscaped the backyard, never kept up with the Joneses.

We worked on Saturdays in the first two apartment buildings my parents purchased. My brother, sister, and I had various tasks to help advance our family’s circumstances. I was five when given the chore of razor-blading paint from around windows to give them a clean line. My second key task was to use turpentine to clean paint off light switches and electrical wall covers. My brother did repairs and painting. My sister got to clean stoves, refrigerators, and bathrooms. It was hard work, and we did it without complaining.

As offspring of parents who lived through the Great Depression, we learned the importance of practicing thrift and reusing things rather than buying needlessly. On most Sundays we went to church, a local Greek Orthodox parish that my parents helped found.

I went to the local high school, did my share of part-time jobs, and moved out when I was eighteen. I was the only one of my siblings who finished college, having earned entry to Stanford University as a sophomore transfer. We were not particularly encouraged to go to college. I stumbled into how and where to take SAT entrance exams. All my mother asked was that each of us give college a try for one year.

At Stanford, I paid part of my way, working the door on weekends at the nightclub in San Francisco where my brother was general manager, or typing term papers for fellow students at the going rate of a dollar a page. Mom and Dad paid tuition, which was a tremendous gift.

I was given a good foundation. I was raised by demanding parents who were pretty strict in their ways. Dad was a taskmaster, and Mom could get angry without us really knowing why. We lived in fear of getting in trouble; it was something to avoid at all costs. I figured out how to play with imaginary toys, had friends we’d play baseball with on the cul-de-sac on hot summer nights, and pretty much did my thing and stayed out of the way. I learned the importance of working hard and being productive from an early age. I was by no measure raised with a silver spoon in my mouth.

Fast-forward to ten or twelve years ago when I was in the thick of it, with two teenage sons prepping for college, two stepkids, the passing of our family dog, eldercare, and ultimately the passing of my in-laws. On top of all this, the company I had cofounded earlier with my husband was going through growing pains. There was need for a lot of travel, most of which we chose to do separately so someone was home.

In the maelstrom, several of my best friends asked me, How do you do it? I’d never thought about it. I was simply trying my best to do life when everything felt out of control. But I realized that, around the little things in life, there were things I did and didn’t do and ways of being and not being that all added up to a life that works.

We created a pretty amazing life. We lack for nothing, have four beautiful, healthy offspring, and run a stable small company that does great work for the industry we serve. When I look back, what I believe has made my life pretty magical—blessed, really—are the little things I call the mundane, the things that, strung together, create magic and miracles or an extraordinary life out of the ordinary. Despite hardship, struggle, and the loss of loved ones, we have managed to thrive.

The genesis of this book started in 2001 when our business was in its early years. I wrote an email to our team under the subject line Thriving Tips. The internet had just taken off, and life was speeding up. We were in the throes of a pretty staggering recession (not yet envisioning the Great Recession) and just holding the business together. My team needed a boost, so I crafted some thoughts and shared them. The ideas resonated.

I then reflected on the question my friends had asked me and the tips I shared with my team and realized that it was time to share my thoughts about how I did it more broadly. My children are raised, my marriage is lasting, my business is sound. It is time to give back by answering the question my girlfriends raised. It is time to thank the generation of women who came before me, appreciate the lessons they imparted, and pay them forward to the next generation, who are doing their best to cope in an incredibly complicated world.

In a complex society moving faster and faster, with demands accelerating with that pace, I’ve decided it’s time to slow down to speed up (as we like to say in the business world) and share some of what’s worked for me. My miracles won’t work for everyone, and not all of them apply universally. They are not all unique to me. But they’ve helped me create a richly satisfying life, despite the realities that go with nurturing a marriage; raising four children from blended households; burying parents, in-laws, and a brother after long illnesses; founding and growing a company; and serving employees and clients around the globe.

There have been hurts along the way, painful lessons and experiences, and times I wished I could pull the sheet over my head and never get out of bed. But I have walked a good path and created a successful life. And so, with gratitude, I send these ideas out into the universe so that you can take what might work for you as you create your own journey.

As you read this book, pick a section that works for you. I have organized these miracles into themes. Some are organizing principles, some are life principles, and some are healthy reminders. They can be read in order or no order, as life can be random. Just pick what resonates and read on.

Each miracle reminds us of the simpler things in life that are within our reach and within the power of our choices. I’m sharing each idea in the form of a simple vignette, followed by the essence of the principle as I’ve experienced it, to keep it real. Each miracle ends with a little mantra as a gentle reminder of how you might bring this miracle into your own life. The essays are grouped into ten themes. After each theme you’ll find blank pages with some open questions for you to reflect on, and an area to write down your own Miracle Musings as you consider where you find magic in the mundane.

Let this book be a map that travels alongside you in life. Each of our paths is different. Each of our journeys is a personal one. May yours be full of love, abundance, good health, and ease.

Anthea C. Stratigos signature

Release

Give Up Busy

Ask people how they’re doing these days, and they’ll say, Oh, you know, busy. People call and say, I know you’ve been so busy before they get to the matter at hand or ask how I’m doing. Suddenly, instead of people saying they’re well, they have an ailment, they are anything, the word du jour is busy.

I listen to that word, and the image that comes to mind is one of buzzing bees bumbling away and being productive, pollinating the plants that bring us food, or flowers that bring us beauty. Or I envision ants, marching along by the millions as they accomplish herculean tasks that belie their size. I see hummingbirds whirling from plant to flowering plant, a flurry of activity. But we are not bees, and we are not ants, and we are not hummingbirds. And if we are going to use the word busy to bring to mind these amazing creatures, let’s please think about being productive and achieving greatness during demanding times. It’s the very best we can do to honor them.

The straw that broke the camel’s back with the overuse of busy came in a visit to my masseuse. I try to give my body some hands-on healing once a month, and in her sanctuary, with Zen-like music playing, the smell of incense calming me, and relaxation starting to take over, I asked her how she was doing. Out of her mouth came, I’ve been so busy!

In that moment I removed the word from my life, from my lexicon, from my company. It implies we have no choice. It implies it’s done to us. It implies mindlessness.

Now when people ask me how I am, I respond, Fine, thank you. If someone says, I know you are busy, I gently correct them: Actually, I am not. I am fine, thank you, and how are you? I refuse to let technology, the pace of everyday life, or the Busy Brigade corral me into a state of unawareness, buzzing along, marching along. I love bees. I love ants. But I am neither. I respect what they do, but they are not who I am. Listen for how often you hear this word in today’s lexicon. Gently respond in a way that gives up busy.

In demanding times, instead of being frenetic, focus on being productive.

Drop Devices

Technology devices are tools. Like a chisel or a hammer, a spatula or a cheese grater, a rake or a hoe, they are here to help us perform tasks better. Maybe they are here to help us perform life better. But it doesn’t mean we now must be slaves to them. Until a family emergency that included extended illness, I did not take my iPhone to bed with me. Then I did for two years and had to undo the habit. It no longer sits on my nightstand. It is not the first thing I check in the morning or the last thing at night.

My husband, Greg, and I don’t have a TV in our bedroom and haven’t for nearly thirty years. Our sons, Mark and Gregory, could not have a TV in the bedroom they shared. They came of age just as mobile and smartphones arrived on the scene, and they received them in late junior high. The phones were not a right but a privilege.

I only use one email address. I run my own company, so my email address at work is the same as my personal email. (I recognize many may not have that latitude, so for them I recommend having only two—one for work, one for personal. Period.)

I check email in the morning. I check it later in the day. I try not to check it every waking moment, though with smartphones in our purses and hip pockets it’s harder and harder to do that. But I try. And if I do email during working hours between my a.m. and p.m. checks, it’s because I’m engaging with clients or engaging with my team about clients—meaning it’s revenue producing or I’m responding to client matters as much as possible. Recently we introduced Slack and Zoom at work, two tools that are great for collaboration and video calls and that keep email to more of a minimum.

When we go on vacation, email stays off, smartphones stay in the safe, or cellular data is turned off (at least mine is). Greg likes his for directions and being able to Google places to see.