My company just launched, all-new, at BrazenCareerist.com. For those of you who have been asking for the past year: “What’s your business model?” You can read about it on TechCrunch. If you want the full pitch, you can read the press release, (and you should know that all last week, when I wasn’t blogging, …

I’m growing sour on travel. I have always disliked it. When I was a kid my parents took us all over Europe and the Caribbean, and it really exhausted me. Now that I’m a grown up, I am better able to articulate why I think travel is a waste of time. Here are four reasons …

I don’t usually write question and answer columns. (Although I have once or twice before.) I do read every single question that people send me. And these are three questions I’ve been answering a lot lately.
Q: Why do you pay $50,000 a year for a house manager?
A: The short answer is that I am buying …

There are some things about work that are difficult for even me to write about. These are the issues that I have not quite worked out for myself. I wonder if I am normal in these areas? Maybe no one is talking about them, but they are thinking still. And if no one else …

Most of us think of a dream career as one that affords us flexibility for personal relationships and high engagement for personal growth. And while flexible work used to be limited to women, USA Today reports that increasingly, men, too, feel stress from the personal impact of inflexible work. So the question for everyone is: …

This is about the farmer. The guy I met last year, and I drove through tornados, twice, to see. He dumped me. But I kept his toothbrush in my bathroom for five months while other men paraded through. And the way you can gauge if you love someone is if you keep the toothbrush even …

It's great fun to track trends to try to figure out what the future holds. The Generation after Gen Y is a mystery. Sort of. There are some things we know. And what we know, we know doesn't change much. For example, people thought Gen Y's sunny optimism would die down under the ardors of …

Most of us have a terrible time focusing on our work.
Left uninterrupted, we are likely to interrupt ourselves. The Internet, everyone's interrupter of choice, is the most tantalizing type of reward system to our brain: intermittent but unpredictable rewards, in the form of a randomly great video or a juicy email here or there. (This …

People ask me all the time how I can be so honest about my life in my blog. They want to know how I can write about marriage, sex, abortions, or running out of money over and over again. It's an endless list really, of the stuff I write about that people can’t believe I'm …

Now that we have a recession, and maybe not so much a recession but a new way of doing business, people are starting to look at their career goals differently. And while interesting was the big goal when we were flush with cash, security will be the brass ring of the near future.
Because really, there …

There are a million times we intuitively know what we should be doing in our careers, but the chatter around us makes us question ourselves. Too much. If I have one regret in my career it's that I didn't trust myself more, earlier.
Watching Sarah Palin resign from her governor post in Alaska inspires me to …

When I launched my company, Wired magazine contacted me to write a column about how to run a start-up. The editor, Dylan Tweney, blew me away with his offer. It wasn't just that he took me to lunch in the grown-local lunchroom at Wired. He also had this unbelievable faith in me that I knew …

For a while I have been fascinated by the research about happiness. Some of my favorite research is from Sonja Lyumbomirsky, psychology professor at University of California Riverside. (She’s great at listing really small things you can do to impact your happiness.) And from Dan Gilbert's Hedonic Psychology Lab at Harvard. (I follow PhD students …

The generation leading the revolution in divorce is, of course, Gen X. The biggest change is that there is a generation of people getting a divorce who were more or less equals in parenting and in work. Baby boomers talked about it, but when the women went to work, they did all the housework and …

People always ask me to answer questions on my blog. So I am sort of going to answer questions. Questions I hate (that I have edited to save people from the trauma I probably caused David Dellifield):
Email number one: The obnoxious reference check
[Name redacted] is applying for a position at our company and listed you …

I have had two abortions.
The first one was when I was twenty-seven. I was playing professional beach volleyball. I was playing volleyball eight hours a day and I spent two hours a day at the gym. I noticed that I was getting tired more easily, but I thought it meant I needed to train harder.
Then …

The Institute of Social and Economic Research recently published a study about the connection between popularity in high school and earning power later in life. New York magazine, information source to the rich and popular, summarized the study like this: “This study may seem to burst our Revenge of the Nerds fantasies, but it’s logical …

More than 80% of young people say they want to live in New York City, according to Time Out New York. I can understand that. I lived there for seven years. Of course, NYC is amazing. But I have also lived for about ten years each in Chicago, LA, and Boston. And now I live …

The cocktail party conversations I have about what I do for a living reveal so much about the world. For example, if I say I have an Internet startup, people generally think: She's unemployed. If I say I write a syndicated newspaper column that runs in 200 papers, people are impressed. If I tell people …

One way to understand the possibilities for solving the US health care crisis is to take a better look at how people make career decisions.
I have a lot of doctors in my family and lots of friends who are doctors, so I'm reasonably familiar with the careers of doctors, and I'm astounded that we're not …

I have said about ten million times that there is no more glass ceiling, there is no more salary gap between men and women, and there is no reason to keep bitching about sexual harassment because it's merely a legal issue, not a men-are-evil issue.
Okay. So if the gender gaps are not around these feminist …

Why is anyone concerned that I tell you who is paying me when I write about something?
Every time I write about a person or a company it's a conflict of interest. Because I want to be on their radar. It's good for me. And the same is true for every other intelligent blogger because that …

I never watch American Idol, or other talent shows. I think I got my fill of them in the 1970s, watching year after year of the mind-numbing Miss American pageant. But there was too much hoop-la with Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent, so I had to see what I was missing. I ended up …

Three years ago, I made a decision to move from New York City to Madison, WI based purely on research. I put economic development research together with positive psychology research. Then I combed the Internet for city statistics, and I moved. (If you want to read the research I used, I linked to it all …

I love grammar. I can remember in sixth grade when we spent weeks parsing sentences. There was a moment of self-awareness when I thought to myself, “If I let anyone see how much I like this, I’ll never get invited to good parties.”
So I know I love grammar and I know it's not normal.
My first …

My company is running out of money again. Well, really, it already happened. But it's happened so many times that I am sort of used to it. It’s a routine. You may recall that part of the routine is not paying my electric bill. But there is more.
1. Focus on something you can control.
You might …

One of the biggest mistakes you can make going into an interview is thinking you'll do well because you're perfect for the job.
Everyone who got an interview is a potential perfect fit for the job. That's how they got through the resume screen. The interview is about something else: how you think, how you solve …

People always ask me why I have an editor for my blog posts. The big reason is that I don’t want my posts to suck. But what he does more than anything else, is make sure that my posts adhere to a set of five rules. And if the post does not adhere, he …

Be careful who you take career advice from. Knowing who to take advice from is a really good skill for any aspect of your life, but especially in the field of work, because work is changing very fast right now. A lot of advice that was good ten years ago is not good now. And …

Everyone thinks transparency and authenticity are great. But sometimes you need to rein them in. I've talked about how I do this with my blog, which is really an example of how I rein myself in at work. There are times we each have to do this at work, and in some cases, we need …

The best way to get control of your career and stability in your life is to be great at what you do. Superstars are not out of work right now. Really. Even in finance. If you have an amazing track record in your field of work, you'll have a job. And if you need to …

Pick who you work with very carefully. Because you are likely to become like them. So the first thing is to know what's important to you about you — what you want to become. What you like about yourself. And then, surround yourself with people who match your aspirations for yourself.
Here are some ideas:
Choose people …

I get questions all the time about how I manage having kids and a startup at the same time. After trying to answer the question a few times, I realized that there’s the pretty-much-BS answer about how it’s all about being clear on your values. Or there's the complicated, too-long-for-interviews answer.
To really get tips for …

Reference checks used to matter a lot. Fifty years ago. When people only changed jobs twice in their life, and they didn't know anyone outside of their company, it made sense that the second company called the first company.
Then, when it became clear that the first company could say one, tiny bad thing and then …

What you know the most about is what you can offer the most insight about. And you probably know that telling stories is always more compelling than talking in generalities. But if you tell stories, you need people to be in the stories. So if you want to write insightfully, then using stories about people …

I met D at a party. I was there with Ryan Paugh and a few bloggers from the Brazen Careerist network, and because it was SXSW and it was all parties all the time, I was pretty partied out. But the party was for Kirtsy, and I love the women who run Kirtsy, so I …

It's time to admit that Take Your Child to Work Day is an outdated relic of 1970s feminism, and we can put the whole thing to rest.
Do you remember that the day started as Take Our Daughters to Work? It was the 70s, and women wanted their daughters to know that they could do anything. …

I do a lot of public speaking, mostly on the topic of how to bridge generational differences in the workplace. And I field tons of questions from corporate audiences. Here are four of the most common questions:
How can you tell if a member of Gen Y hates his or her boss?
You can't. This is a …

The guy I'm sort of dating asks me, “Do you know Glenda Bautista?”
I say, “No.”
He says, “We're trying to hire her.”
So I check out her blog and dis her and he says, “She was dating Matt Mullenweg.”
I say, “Really.”
He says, “Yeah. I was talking with my business partner and we both thought it must really …

It used to be that the best post-college jobs were the ones that gave you a sense of security (law, medicine) or financial windfall (banking). But the finance industry and grad-school route are both dead ends at this point.
The New York Times reports that we're experiencing a sea change in the career department because the …

This is a guest post from Dan Schawbel. He is 25 years old and already, the New York Times has called him a “personal branding guru.” Dan’s book is Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, and it just came out today.
Personal branding describes a process where individuals differentiate themselves …