When the kids and I moved to the farm, last Spring, the first thing we did was plant seeds. The farmer took the kids out to an open patch next to a corn field, and he planted ten pumpkin seeds with them.
I took the kids next to a rhubarb patch that has been growing for [...]

It’s time for the farmer to check to see how many of his cows are pregnant.
Here’s what he does:  He puts five bulls in a field with 130 cows. And the bulls have been waiting all summer to breed, so they can pretty much get all the cows pregnant quickly and then all the calves [...]

Book snobbery takes many forms in my life. For example, when I worked in bookstores, thinking my life was over because all my friends were lawyers, I spent a lot of time mumbling “Philistines!” as I reshelved A Hundred Years of Solitude under G instead of M.
But the truth is that if you reshelve a [...]

I’m deciding if I should take a sleeping pill.
I know tons of people who take them. I never understood the need, to be honest. I remember when I was in a mental ward. My group therapy was a bunch of eating disorder girls (which I was part of, but a little old for) and a [...]

It’s amazing that people admit to being perfectionists. To me, it’s a disorder, not unlike obsessive-compulsive disorder. And like obsessive-compulsive disorder, perfectionism messes you up. It also messes up the people around you, because perfectionists lose perspective as they get more and more mired in details.
We can never achieve perfection — any of us. Yet so [...]

I think each person struggles with one, singular thing. I learned this when I was a graduate student in English. Each writer we studied actually wrote the same book over and over again. We each have a primary question in our lives.
Rob Toomey, a friend who is an expert in personality type, coaches executives. He [...]

I have been waking up at 4am to work. And I like it. Not only have I been writing more regularly, but also, as soon as I became committed to waking up at 4am, I became committed to going to bed at 8:30pm. And then I got a routine. And all that research about how [...]

For those of you who missed it, Karen Owen, a student at Duke University, sent a  summary of her sex life to some friends, via email. The content is not safe for work, but it looks safe because it's in PowerPoint. She has bullet points, charts, and graphs. How can you not admire a [...]

This was originally posted on TechCrunch.
My company, Brazen Careerist, is moving from Madison, WI, to Washington, DC, where our new CEO lives.
Running the company has been absolute hell. Not that I didn’t know it would be hell. It’s my third startup. Each has had its own hell before we were solidly funded, but this one [...]

Brazen Careerist is opening offices in Washington, DC.  Our CEO lives in DC, so Ryan Healy is moving there – along with Photis, the developer (who I convinced to move from Philadelpia to Madison by telling him that his life would suck and he would die a slow, painful career death if he did not [...]

This is what the farm looks like when you drive up to it.

For a while, I thought that the farm is really what I fell in love with. I felt an overwhelming sense that I belonged on this farm from the moment I got out of my car.
But also, the moment I got out of [...]

One of the hardest things about being unemployed is worrying that you will not end up in a good job. People want to be picky, but that’s a mistake. You should take any job. It really doesn’t matter. You’re better off taking any job and then start trading up.
Here’s why:
1) Structure leads to achievement
People who [...]