The Beauty of Missed Notes: Why Imperfection Tells the Best Stories

  Most organizations hire the person to fit the job. There is a fixed slot, a rigid list of duties, and the search is for someone who can be poured into it. Kim E. Dooley tried the opposite, and in her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , she makes the case that it is the better way to build a team. When she was appointed an associate dean, she inherited something she had never managed before: staff. As a professor, she had always chosen collaborators whose skills complemented her own. Now she had a group of people already in place, and, as she puts it plainly, the team did not necessarily have all the skills it needed to run well. The obvious move was to push everyone to work harder in their assigned lanes. She did something stranger instead. Start with strengths, not slots Dooley asked every member of her staff to write down two things: their strengths and the tasks they actually enjoyed doing. Then she laid those lists next to the offic...

  Nobody sets out to reinvent themselves. It almost always starts with the floor falling out. Kim E. Dooley would not have chosen the disaster that remade her, and in her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , she is honest that at the time it felt like pure wreckage. But she makes a quietly radical case about that wreckage. Starting over is not chaos, and it is not luck. It has a structure, one that researchers have mapped, and once you can see the shape of it, the worst moment of your life starts to look less like falling and more like the first step of a build. The map she reaches for belongs to the adult-learning scholar Jack Mezirow, whose theory of transformation lays out the phases a person moves through when they truly change. Dooley walks through them not as an academic exercise but as a description of what actually happened to her. It begins with a disorienting dilemma. Mezirow's term for the starting point is the disorienting dile...

  Kim Dooley likes to say she almost died in Peru at the hands of a bottle of juice. It is the kind of sentence only she could deliver with a straight face. She and a close colleague had just wrapped a project in the Galapagos and, being sensible people, decided that flying all the way home only to fly back the next week made no sense. So they went to Machu Picchu instead. Somewhere along a path of dark brick pavement, glass bottle in hand, Kim missed a step. She felt herself falling. Her first thought, oddly practical, was to throw the bottle. She did not manage it in time, and her left hand came down directly on the broken glass. In her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , she describes the blood the way she describes most terrible things, with a movie reference and a joke. Think Kill Bill, she says. You know the scene. The clinic took one look and started saying "profundo," which she assumed meant profound and only later learned mea...

  Adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, the most prized possession aboard the Carnival Triumph was a toilet that still flushed. There were not many left. It had started as a celebration. A group of Kim Dooley's church friends had birthdays falling within a couple of weeks of each other, so they did the sensible thing and booked a weekend cruise out of Galveston. Then, a little after five in the morning, the intercom woke her in her balcony cabin on deck six. "Alpha team to the engine room." There was smoke. A calm British voice came over the speakers to deliver the news in two parts. The good news was that the fire had been contained. The bad news was that the engine was beyond repair. In her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , Kim describes the slow dawning of just how bad an idea it now was to be a passenger on a powerless ship in the middle of the Gulf. One backup grill still worked. One, for four thousand people. And then the part t...

  For most of your working life, "What do you do?" is an easy question. You give your title, and the room understands who you are. Then one day the title goes away, and the same question lands very differently. Kim E. Dooley knows that silence well. In her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , she admits that even after stepping back from her career, she still introduces herself as "Kim Dooley, Regents Professor Emerita," because the title feels like proof of who she is. Her conclusion is blunt and a little funny. Her whole generation, she writes, is having an identity crisis. The numbers behind the feeling This is not a handful of people struggling to fill their afternoons. According to the Pew Research Center, one in five Americans aged 65 and older is still working, roughly double the share of thirty-five years ago. With about 58 million adults over 65 in the United States, near 20 percent of the population, that is an en...

  When you were small, some adult almost certainly crouched down and asked what you wanted to be when you grew up. You said astronaut, or veterinarian, or whatever your big sister said. Nobody warned you the question would come back around. Kim E. Dooley got asked it again, in a manner of speaking, at sixty-five. She had spent decades as a professor, traveled to fifty countries, and built a career most people would call complete. Then she found herself standing at the far edge of all of it, wondering what came next. In her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, she gives that feeling a name that is equal parts joke and truth. What do you call a sixty-five-year-old who is just figuring out what they want to be? A late boomer. It is funnier than it sounds, and also more serious. Kim points out that her whole generation is quietly tangled up in this. Ask a recent retiree who they are, and they will almost always reach for the old title. "Hi, I...

  There is a moment, usually uninvited, when the life you built stops fitting. A career ends. A job goes to someone else. The house empties, or a diagnosis rearranges everything overnight. You look up and realize the person you have always been is not quite the person you are anymore, and you have no idea who comes next. Kim E. Dooley knows that moment well. In her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , she writes about reaching the edge of a long academic career, being passed over for a role she wanted, and facing her husband's illness, all in the same stretch of days. What she offers readers is not a tidy slogan but a process she actually used to find her footing again. She calls it reflect, renew, redefine, refocus. Reflect: Sit Still With the Hard Questions The work begins by sitting still with hard questions. What am I passionate about? What is my purpose now? Kim is honest that this stage is uncomfortable. She had to move through real ...

  The first time Kim Dooley was asked to speak about work-life balance, she felt like a fraud. Her own life was the cautionary tale. That small, funny admission sits at the heart of one of the most useful chapters in her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience . Here was a woman with a doctorate, a packed calendar, and a career that had carried her to fifty countries, asked to explain balance while privately knowing she had run her own life ragged for years. Rather than fake it, she did what she does best. She reflected, and she came back with something honest. She calls it the 4 Ps. The first is passion. Kim's rule is simple. The work you do should give you energy, not drain it. If you feel emptied out at the end of every day, the problem may not be the number of hours. It may be that the work itself has stopped meaning anything to you. The second is priorities. She suggests an exercise that sounds easy and is not. Name the five most importa...

  Old Enough to Be Wise, Young Enough to Keep Learning We treat the two words as if they mean the same thing. They do not, and the distance between them is where most of life actually gets lived. Kim E. Dooley spent a career as a professor and researcher, and her work carried her into 50 countries. If anyone had earned the right to feel knowledgeable walking into a new place, it was her. Yet in her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , she keeps drawing a clean line between what she knew and what she understood. Knowledge is what you can study, memorize, and be tested on. Wisdom is what you do with it when the situation in front of you refuses to match the textbook. She learns the difference, fittingly, by getting it slightly wrong. What Bali taught, and what Thailand corrected On an early project in Bali, Indonesia, almost everything surprised her. Black and white checked cloth draped across doorways, ornate monster masks for sale, tin...

  Somewhere in Texas, at a funeral reception, a chocolate pie nearly started a war. It belongs to one of the funnier and truer scenes in When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , the memoir by Kim E. Dooley. The family has just buried her father-in-law. Everyone is tired and sad in that complicated way you get when the person you lost had been slipping away for years. And there, in the refrigerator, sits a chocolate pie. Her favorite. Her husband cuts her a slice. Simple enough. Except a cousin appears to announce that the pie is spoken for, reserved for the sister's family, because someone had called ahead to ask what they needed and the sister had said a chocolate pie. When a second cousin asks for a piece, she is told to eat a cookie instead. Meanwhile, a sister-in-law floats through the room with a lime sherbet pie, sweetly offering everyone "key lime pie from the Florida Keys," which, Kim notes, having actually been to the Florida Keys, w...

  There is a moment most people recognize but rarely talk about. The moment when the life you spent decades building suddenly stops fitting. The job where you gave everything; the identity you wore so long it felt like skin. And then, without much warning, it's gone. When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience by Kim E. Dooley, PhD, is the book that sits with you in that moment and says, quietly, same. It Opens With Alligators and Only Gets Better Before there is any wisdom, there is a childhood in Orange, Texas, a brown alligator-filled river, and a little girl who absolutely refused to be left out of anything her older brother got to do. The book earns your trust early, not through credentials or grand statements, but through stories so specific and alive that you forget you are reading a memoir at all. By the time a shoe flies off mid-song at a funeral and someone tumbles down the altar stairs in front of a full congregation, you are completely inv...

  Most of us spend our lives trying to avoid getting it wrong. Wrong job, wrong decision, wrong turn. We plan, we prepare, we follow the map. And then life folds the map in half, tosses it out the window, and says good luck. Dr. Kim E. Dooley , PhD , has been there more times than she can count. And somewhere between a funeral, a cruise ship that lost power in the middle of the ocean, and an accidental engagement in Trinidad, she figured something out that most people spend a lifetime missing. The wrong turns were never wrong. They were just the scenic route to wisdom. In When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience , Kim takes you places most people only see in documentaries. She's a professor, a global traveler, and a water-skiing East Texas girl who figured out pretty early that the best lessons don't come from classrooms. This isn't your typical leadership book. It's the one your typical leadership book wishes it could be. Kim has worked ...