This blog is about career advice. And about me.

My career never had a straight path, but I am always learning and trying new things, and that’s what makes my career fun. And sometimes scary.

I had a crisis in college when I realized that all entry-level jobs sucked, so I decided to play professional beach volleyball instead. Then I went to graduate school for creative writing and had a boyfriend who taught me HTML. This miraculously made me qualified to run an online marketing department for a Fortune 500 company in the mid-90’s. I stayed in software marketing for a while and then founded three internet companies. I’m at the third one today: Brazen Careerist.

Throughout my career, I have always been a writer. Often unpaid, always obsessively interested in which media is best for which writing. As an entrepreneur I got a column in a national magazine and started spewing advice in places like Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the London Times. Then I got a six-figure book deal. Today, my column runs in more than 200 newspapers, but my blog is where my heart is, because I’m enthralled with the idea of managing careers through a community.

What I think my life is about is figuring out how to find success at the intersection of work and life—one happy, synchronized adventure. It’s a difficult task, and I don’t want to do it alone. My blog is a community where we all do it together. (And my company is community career management on a much larger scale.)

Why do 60,000 people subscribe to this blog?
Some days I wonder that myself. And every day I feel lucky to have them. Readers come here for career advice first, probably. That’s what I’m known for. But I’m also known for writing on the edges of my topic, so most of my long-term readers have come to expect career advice from wildly varying angles. And from plenty of examples from my personal life, which often become my favorite posts. Here are a few of them.

My Marriage
My first day of marriage counseling
My own marriage and the myth of the stay-at-home dad
My 9/11 day. My husband. The meaning of my to-do list.

The End of My Marriage
A case study in staying resilient: My divorce
The entrepreneur’s guide to a good divorce settlement

The beginning of my dating life: The Farmer
New way to measure blog ROI
How I started taming my workaholic tendencies
Self-sabotage is never limited to just one part of your life

Favorite career advice—Yes, I really do write career advice
The connection between a good job and happiness is overrated
Social skills matter more than ever, so here’s how to get them
Bad career advice: Do what you love

Ancillary Terribleness
5 steps to taming materialism, from an accidental expert
4 Weight-loss tips from my month in the mental ward
Lessons from a French chicken farm
My financial history, and stop whining about your job