Tania Katan’s new book offers innovative ways to approach your job By Tom Reardon
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e’ve all been there before. The clock on the wall seems to be going in the wrong direction and whatever time your shift is scheduled to end seems to be getting farther away, rather than closer by the minute. If there was only some way to make the time go by faster, and even better yet, enjoy the remaining minutes or hours while being productive and doing something that actually makes you look good to your boss. This is a job for “Creative Trespassing” and Tania Katan, who may very well be the human equivalent of an everlasting pyrotechnics display, can show you how to do it. For the unenlightened, Katan is most certainly explosive and something of a national treasure. In her late 40s, she is both survivor and disruptor, a writer, an ambassador for technology, a lesbian, a playwright, and possibly one of the most inspiring people you could hope to meet. There is a fitting a line in “A To Z” from British pop band ABC’s 1985 album, How To Be A Zillionaire album where their bass player, David Yarritu sings, “I may be tiny, but I’m strong.” Katan is both tiny and strong, surviving two bouts with breast cancer, and in the past decade becoming a soughtafter public speaker with a TEDx Talk under her belt, as well as being one of the masterminds behind the #ItWasNeverADress campaign for her former employer, Axosoft. 24
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To say Katan is busy is an understatement, but after speaking with her it is easy to see why she prefers to keep moving all the time and quite possibly wears a cape: There is work to be done! As she discusses throughout her new book, Creative Trespassing: How to Put the Spark and Joy Back Into Your Work and Life (Currency), which makes its debut in mid-February, there most certainly is work to be done and the best person to do that work is you. Luckily for us, Katan is there to guide us along the way, sharing her successes and failures, as well as a fair amount of input from her friends, colleagues, and mentors, but this is not your typical “how-to” book. Creative Trespassing offers the reader something more and feels as if you are receiving a gift from the author in each chapter. Perhaps this is because Katan grew up feeling like an outsider, which may explain why her book feels more inclusive than other way-to-success tomes. “I thought I was just kind of destined to be an outsider never to fit in. And I didn’t realize that that was actually, that those were the best places to be,” shares Katan. The depth in her writing makes it feel like a shared experience — as if she’s shoulder to shoulder with the reader. For many outsiders, there is often crippling doubt or fear that creeps in when there is an opportunity to step beyond the comfort zone into a new
job or relationship. Katan teaches us to embrace our fears and doubts in Creative Trespassing by “turning into them” rather than avoiding them, much in the way drivers are taught to turn into a skid. In her eyes, there is often an opportunity to be wildly successful in areas where you may not have been able to see yourself succeeding because of attitude and willingness to think outside of the box. She talks with affection about her time honing her creative trespassing skills while working with the Scottsdale Museum Of Contemporary Art (SMOCA). “When I first arrived (at SMOCA), I hadn’t worked in a large organization that was pretty corporate in its structure and its roles. And so, one thing they were saying, they were telling me about this thing called ‘employee of the month’ and I’m like, ‘Well, how do I win it?’ Then they were like, ‘You don’t win employee of the month, you earn it.’ And I’m like, ‘Well then I’m going to earn your votes and win.’ And so, I launched a full-scale campaign to, you know, like a political campaign to win employee of the month,” says Katan, who used her campaign to get to know her co-workers. It should be noted that during her time at SMOCA, Katan revised her own job title and declared herself to be the Director of Shenanigans. While this did not make all of her co-workers happy, Katan recalls that it made her memorable to the people she met as FEATURE STORY
