Nonfiction / Entrepreneur / Business Memoir
Date Published: October 25, 2023
Publisher: MindStir Media
Observe Possibilities.
Entangle Possibilities.
Create Possibilities.
Throw spaghetti against the wall of life and see what sticks.
Multi-business entrepreneur Linda Rawlings is perhaps best-known as co-creator of California-based Otis Spunkmeyer, Inc. Her debut book "Improbable Possibilities", reveals other entrepreneurial quests through childhood, a business career, a dance career, and three marriages--in twenty episodes of you-can't-make-this-up and you-can't-put-this-down true stories.
Diverse San Francisco entrepreneurial adventures include Robert C. Brown and Company, investment advisors; Triple 888 Manufacturing, the sheet metal company purchased created to manufacture ovens for baking Otis Spunkmeyer cookies; and Sentimental Journeys, the DC3 airline that promoted Otis Spunkmeyer Cookies. Her other entrepreneurial activities include founding and producing New Shoes Old Souls Dance Company, producing Yoga Garden Dancers, and working with Heterodoxy Magazine and George Magazine. Rawlings helped develop MANA!, a food brand in Hong Kong.
Praise for Improbably Possibilities
Reading "Improbable Possibilities", is like catching up with your most adventurous and entertaining friend.
Carolyn Wyman, author: "The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book"
"The author, who describes herself as a baby boomer with an old soul, opens with an account of her youth in Connecticut, and in a series of chapters filled with quotes from rock music . . . these chronological self-portraits unfold with a wonderfully readable combination of inner exploration . . . A lively, colorful memoir of corporate and personal growth."
KIRKUS REVIEWS
I like this—I can’t decide where to cut it:
Particles of sunlit dust ethereally floated just outside
my window seat. The atmosphere that
entangled these sparkling flecks emitted a light, soft, gentle glow—a glow that
had never enveloped me in New England.
Feeling suddenly uncomfortable, and somewhat disoriented, I didn’t know
whether I was coming down to meet the ground, or the ground was coming up to
meet me. Ascending or descending. Floating above the Bay. Mired in the past, anticipating the future,
currently in a limbo, floating and suspended in time through a space
of—neither. Neither “then”, or “when”.
Looking out my window—first— I witnessed the flat azure
water below, reflecting the sky above.
Dropping closer. Blues mixing
with beiges. Dropping further. Water turning into waves. Waves wearing diaphanous froth. Seafoam.
For an instant, I am the seafoam.
I could hear the echo of a long-dead Einstein influencer from Ancient
Greece—Anaximander, c. 500 BC:
“That which you see beneath your feet,
is
only the same sky you see above your head.”
I was clutching my past and emerging into my future. Ready to leave my limbo, shimmying through a
space between. Rather like that
seafoam. Not completely water, not completely air—just a unity of
bubbles. Floating in a netherworld. Neither and either. Aether.
My thoughts were propagating through Einstein’s aether.
My anxiety detached.
I kept watching the waves as the jet’s wheels dropped. They would soon touch the tarmac, and—the
waves would be behind me. I knew those
waves would still be there, although I wouldn’t be able to see them. But I could not shake my mental image of that seafoam.
I still can’t.
About the Author
Linda’s entrepreneurial endeavors include the improbable creations of a start-up investment firm, Robert C. Brown & Co., Inc.; a cookie company, Otis Spunkmeyer, Inc.; a sheet metal company, Triple 888 Manufacturing; a DC3 airline, Sentimental Journeys; two dance companies, Express Dance Company and New Shoes Old Souls Dance Company; and--producing the Yoga Garden Dancers and two daughters.
Linda has a BA in Mathematics and a BFA from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and an MBA and an MA in Journalism from UC Berkeley. Past board memberships include Bates College, Mark Morris Dance Group, UC Berkeley Cal Performances, Yoga Journal, and she has been a member of the Young Presidents' Organization and Dancers' Group in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in Heterodoxy, the Oakland Tribune and Newport Life Magazine. This is her first book, inspired by theoretical physics.
She believes in "observing, entangling, and creating possibilities, and throwing them against the wall of life to see what sticks". Linda lives life as a quest, not as an algorithm.
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