That’s appalling. Being a non-profit is no excuse for treating people poorly. And it’s not just benefits—It’s pay, too. Paying way below a living wage is elitist—as if working in a nonprofit is a rich kids’ playground that your parents fund.

Luckily, the non-profit world is changing. The difference between not-for-profit and for profit is becoming more and more artificial.

When a business is deciding whether to be for-profit or not-for-profit, they are thinking about what is the most efficient way to meet their goals. For example, the Gates Foundation was established to get the money out of the hands of one family and give it to people who can change the world with the money. They do not want to make a profit, so they put all the money they make back into the Foundation.

Merck, on the other hand, is changing the world by curing diseases, but they need to create a profit in order to keep their stock price up and pass money on to shareholders.

Both companies are solving huge health problems. Both companies have equal capacity to get you, an employee, very close or relatively far from the act of saving a life. The only difference between the organizations is the financial structure.

So, here is a new way to think about careers in the non-profit sector:

1. It’s small minded to think you can only do good in a non-profit.
It's really dangerous to think there are vastly different motivators in the non-profit world. You'll notice that in the for-profit world, in the new workplace, money is not a key motivator. You should not work where someone does not value you (and pay a living wage) and you should not work where you do not find meaning in your work.

I think we should all be careful of dividing the world into meaningful non-profits and soulless corporations. Caring for each other has more to do about the people who we report to and manage than the goals of the organization. If your boss comes to work every day genuinely looking to help you grow, and you do the same for the people you manage, then that's a great workplace. If your boss is a jerk, and you are a jerk, then it's a terrible place to be. It doesn't really whether your company is making tons of money or saving lives in Tibet. What we do ourselves—individually, with the people next to us each day—is what establishes meaning in our lives.

2. Some non-profits are doing less than some for-profits.
Just because a company is a non-profit doesn’t mean it’s not a wasteland. Example: United Way. We already know that grassroots organizations are most efficient at channeling aid to people who need it. Yet United Way persists with their umbrella model of taking money from the community, through a monopoly-type system with corporations, and then deciding themselves what smaller organizations will get money.

United Way actually does no good directly. They are middlemen, skimming off the top. And in the age of Internet, we can all decide where to give, and give directly. We don’t need United Way.

Salesforce.com, on the other hand, is raking in profits. And they give employees time off to serve the community directly. The employees choose what to do. There is no overhead because Salesforce.com is eating the costs themselves. It is totally efficient. There is no fundraising, there is no sucking the enthusiasm out of locals by telling them they need a middleman to connect with grassroots movements.

3. Choose your job by how direct you want to be.
Choose your job by what your skill set is and what your financial needs are. How direct do you want to be? You can be very direct and have little impact, and you can be very indirect and have massive impact. You can work with people you hate and save the world, or you can work with people you love, and donate money at night, on the Internet.

Being in a job you love allows you to generate income, and good will, and to cultivate a sense of gratitude to the world. Which means you’ll give back no matter what.

4. Consider that earning money is a direct path to doing good.
The Robin Hood Foundation is famous for inventing a more direct route to doing good. It’s a room full of people who are bidding to build things like a new shelter for the homeless ($470,000, raised in a few hours) . And 100% of their money goes directly to that project. It’s  the hedge fund industry’s way of giving back. And it’s just like their day job: brash, fast, high-flying, full of peer pressure, and extremely fun. It’s hard to say these guys are not doing good. They are making way more money than most foundations make in ten years. And they are putting it to work to do good immediately.

Or here’s another model. Earn money and buy board seats at companies that don’t respect the benefits of diversity, and then you can force diversity on them as a shareholder. That’s pretty direct. And if you didn’t have money on your side for this one, it would take you ten years of lobbying congress or flying on jets with CEOs. (Is there a difference?)

When you talk about your career, talk about doing good, for sure. But recognize that we are each capable of doing good from wherever we are. And each of us is capable of being fulfilled in a wide range of jobs. Grow your career with an open mind: you’ll find more opportunities to make a difference in the world.

Hat tip: The Non-Profit Discussion on Brazen Careerist, (where I might have been annoying to everyone, but still, I learned a lot from the conversation.)

I challenge you to think of a popular blogger who lacks focus on their blog.

In the history of writing, everything has a focus. It's a contract you have with the reader. You stay within the bounds of the reader's expectations, and if you do that, you can write surprises that seem to stray from your topic, and the reader stays with you. Because surprises are fun. But if there's no contract because there is no focus, then there are no surprises. Every great piece of writing works this way.

Think about it: Canterbury Tales. The topic is getting to the end of the trip.  Or Moby Dick. Melville can write about everything—God, the American dream, fishing boats, marriage, mental illness—and he gets away with it because his topic is totally solid: Nailing the whale.

I challenge you to find a great piece of writing with no topic.

Even columnists stick to their focus. It’s part of the fun. When you audition for a print-based column, you submit ten sample columns to show that you can be interesting in a variety of ways while still sticking to the main topic. Because it’s hard to do.

You can write about any topic, but you have to link it to your focus. Look at my how-to posts. Most of them are only tangentially about how to do some career thing. Most of them are actually about something else. That’s why they are interesting.

Look my blog: Do you need me to tell you to use bullets instead of paragraphs on your resume? No. Do you need me to tell you to stand up when you do a phone interview? No. Because there are 400 other writers who will tell you that. So I need to do something else.

But I can only get you to read me if you come knowing what you expect. So I always relate what I’m writing to careers. Sometimes, it’s easy. I knew I wanted to write about my bed bug trauma. And I knew, quickly, that it was also about financial stress, which is, of course, a topic that’s fair-game in the career world.

Sometimes you just need a little patience: I knew for years that I wanted to write about abortion. I listen to Brick, by Ben Folds 5 all the time, and I love his contribution to the discussion about abortion. I wanted to make a contribution like his, but I couldn’t relate it to careers. Until I could. And then I wrote it.

Please do not tell me that you are just going to write whatever you want and you don’t care who reads it, or if anyone reads it. You are lying to yourself. Of course you care. We each have a limited amount of time in our lives, and blogging takes some of that time. Your blog is not your journal. Believe me. I know. I‘ve been keeping a journal since I was five. I have seventy-five volumes of handwritten journals, and it is totally different than blogging because it’s not public. The nature of a blog is that you are choosing to write publicly, so it is, by definition, for other people to read.

So, show some respect for people and pick a topic.

Also, show some respect for yourself. There are so many benefits you earn from blogging that do not require tons of pageviews. Here’s a list of them. Mostly, the list is driven by being known for what you are good at. But for that to work you need to know what you’re aiming for. What do you want people to know you for? Where do you want to go next? Answering those two questions is what will inform your blog topic and give you the focus for your blog.

Don’t tell me you can’t decide. Everyone knows where they want to go next. Even if it’s probably wrong, you know, right now, where you’re leaning. So write to that. Sure, it might change, but you need to commit to something, right now. Each day you have to wake up and do something. So you have to guess where to aim. We are all just guessing. Make your best guess and keep going in that direction until you find something else. And your blog is an expression of that commitment to yourself to have direction, even as you doubt it.

So, anyway, the reason I’m good at giving career advice is because I had to learn things systematically, which helps me break it down for everyone else.

For example, I had to learn that a candy dish on someone’s desk means “I like to talk with people.” Other people read this cue instinctively. It makes for a good blog post but an annoying co-worker if I don’t teach myself stuff quickly.

I don’t really do career coaching. I don’t have patience. But often career coaches send people with Asperger’s to me, because mostly, these people are extremely difficult to coach.

They are difficult to coach because the biggest problem is that non-verbal cues that are obvious to everyone else are totally lost on people with Asperger’s. For example, you can tell when you are boring someone, but someone with Asperger’s cannot—we just keep talking.

Here is a link about how important it is to be well liked. I write about this need all the time. It’s obvious to people who are well liked, and impossible to understand if you are someone who is not well liked. That’s precisely why you’re not well liked. And this is the problem with Asperger’s.

Note that the person who sent me this link is Sarah Kunst, (event manager at guestofaguest.com). The biggest difference between men with Asperger’s and women is that women get help from other women, and men don’t. So women with Asperger’s are generally more high-functioning than men.

Sarah is a great example of a helper. I met her through my blog. Then I met her in NYC. She recognized me as someone who has trouble knowing what to wear, and what to do. So she gave me tips. Unsolicited, really. First makeup, then no cap sleeves, then a whole wardrobe. Men don’t get this kind of help unless it’s from a spouse who is desperate to keep the marriage together.

Note to parents: the most painful part of being an adult with Asperger’s is not the lack of relationships. Really. I have a lack and I want to care, but I don’t. And most people with Asperger’s will tell you that the painful part of having Asperger’s is not being able to work successfully.

So, this is an introduction post to this week’s series: How to succeed at work with Asperger Syndrome. Stay tuned tomorrow for the next installment.

(And, hat tip to Virginia, another friend who helps me navigate the world, and emails me good links!)

Because really, there is just so much interesting that a person can take. When the world becomes too unstable, that lack of stability consumes us.

Jeff Tweedy, from the band Wilco, describes the senselessness of living on the financial edge:  “Having a solid [fiscal] base allows you to look at darker things and actually think about them. I debate people about this suffering myth, this tortured artists stuff, and they almost never buy it.” Tweedy is a harbinger of the trend to come, where the demographic you would expect to be holding out against stability for its own sake are actually leading the push for more of it. Because too much instability can ruin anyone, at any age.

Here are five new ways to approach your career so you can create stability in an unstable workforce:

Treat your career like an investment portfolio.
Jobs are the new asset. Time magazine points out that a good job pays off way more than good investing. Especially if you’re not loaded with cash to invest. The way to make sure you always have a job when you want one is to make sure you are always job hunting. At first blush it might seem revolutionary to job hunt constantly, but it’s actually a way to make life more secure: You always feel like you can get a job if you need one, because you’re honing your skills for the hunt all the time.

Don’t frame career choices around fun versus not-fun jobs.
Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College who focuses on how people make choices. And when it comes to career choices, Schwartz recommends going a safe route, if you can find one. “I believe that security is more important to happiness than wealth,” he says.

In a flush economy, safe jobs look boring. For example event planning looks way more fun than accounting. But you need to reframe the choice, says Schwartz, because “it’s a false choice. There’s plenty of room for joy in a low-flying life.” The steady industries, like accounting, are actually a smarter choice because we don’t need a high-risk job to have a fun life. Fun comes from other things.

Volunteer, to create a safety net.
Volunteerism is increasing as Generation Y enters the workforce in a cash-strapped way.  Young people use volunteering as a way to instigate change.  But also, volunteering is a way to gain experience that you can apply to your workplace skill set to increase your earning power and make you more widely employable.

Also, since stable careers stem from solid networks, working with organizations like Cool People Care allow you to do good, meet other people doing good, and forge connections that will help you in the for-profit world as well. Collaborating around a good cause makes for stronger connections than the usual, routine networking opportunities.

Take a government job.
You’ve probably already thought of working for the government. So has everyone else: applications to government-based do-gooder organizations are up dramatically since the recession hit. Applications for Teach for America increased 45% and AmeriCorps is on track to triple its applicants pool this year.

The good news about government jobs is that they’re getting better. Obama is mandating that arcane, outdated hiring processes end. and, in a nod to the power of best-places-to-work lists (which are often BS, but let’s set aside that thought for a moment) the government has it’s own best-places-to-work list, with red-hot departments like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Surface Transportation Board.

History shows that these jobs will become more and more in demand, according to Jennifer Senior, writing in New York magazine:

“From Obama on down, people are initiating public discussion that reevaluates the purpose of work – as if trying to remind us, after a long bender of risk-taking and creative economics, that there’s dignity in secure generative labor. . . During the Great Depression, many men and women valued security over risk, pursuing careers in the civil service, teaching, and police departments. It was a time of very conservative choices about how to make a living.”

So if you’re considering a government job, find one now, before you get further behind and the competition gets tougher.

If you must be risky, mitigate.
Start-ups are super risky. And in this economy, even a smaller percentage of workers will be able to stomach the ups and downs of start-up life. But some people are just born to work at start-ups.

Saras Sarasvathy, professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, focuses her research on what makes entrepreneurs successful, and she finds that one of the universal traits is that successful entrepreneurs seek to avoid risk, even as they embark on risky ventures.

So if you must have a startup, make your startup life as stable as you can by picking a product offering that gives customers the same thing you want: stability.

A great example of a company like this is Alice. It’s an online store for buying essentials like toilet paper and toothpaste (and shampoo, which I actually blogged about at Alice). One cool thing about Alice is that there is a financial planning tool to go along with the purchasing tool. Which plays to a new, fiscally conservative lifestyle, yes? And when we talk about my own start-up, Brazen Careerist, we focus on career stability: People need to manage their identities online in order to create a stable career for themselves.

So I guess there are at least two ways to think about stability in your life: One is to create it, by thinking about your job as an asset, and investing conservatively. The other way to think about stability is to sell it. And if you sell it well enough, you just might accidentally stumble on stability yourself. That’s what I’m hoping for.

Here are five steps to follow:

1. Aim to be great at something that matters in the world.
The process of being great is long and hard. It requires you to try a lot of stuff to figure out the intersection of your gifts and what the world will pay for.

It’s hard to be great at something you have to stop doing. But that’s the reality you face if you are going to be a star performer. It’s about self-discipline. When I was in graduate school, my writing professor was reviewing my writing, and he announced to the class, “She writes the best sex scenes I have ever read. Week after week she surprises me with her wry, funny, salacious approach.”

I had to look up the word salacious to make sure it was good.

Then I had to stop writing about sex. Because it was clear to me that being great at writing literary sex is too narrow. The greatness is so small it doesn’t matter. Greatness needs context that has value.

2. Expect that being great will entail many levels of disappointment.
So I got a job in a marketing department in a Fortune 100 company where we spent lots of time talking about whether HTML accommodates a proper em dash.

I felt sad, for sure, that I had given up the process of novelizing my sex life. But at that point, I had also given up some other stuff that I was really good at but could not achieve greatness: Beach volleyball, for example. I was good enough to have games against the US Olympic team. But I was never going to be good enough to save myself from getting my butt kicked.

Since then, I have tried a lot of stuff that I’m good at, but not great. I wrote a book. It got great reviews, but you know what? I’m not going to write a New York Times bestseller. I don’t have the patience for the long format or the long-term investment in promoting a book. (Warning to the uninitiated: It takes, literally, a year of preparation to promote a book properly.)

3. Try starting and stopping; we feel desperate to do what we're great at.
I think what makes me great is something at the intersection of blogging and entrepreneurship. Both are time-consuming and most people fail at both, and because of that, I have tried to stop doing both. I can’t stop.

But I still have to figure out: At this intersection of blogging and entrepreneurship, where am I special? Where am I a star? I am always searching and trying new things.

4. When you know what's special about you, refuse work outside of that.
Some things fail. Like the polls on my sidebar. I wish it were working. Because I think that part of what makes me great is that I love hearing what other people think about the topics I’m thinking about. But the poll strikes me as disingenuous. The choices are limiting so I don’t really find out what people are thinking. And then I feel like a fake running a poll. And I am certain that whatever I am great at will include authenticity of some kind. So the poll is a distraction from me figuring out how to be great. I need to get rid of that poll.

Another thing I’ve done is public speaking. I would say that I’m in the top 10% of all speakers. This is not scientific. It’s my instinct. I get a lot of feedback. Including my fee. And my fee is high and my feedback tells me that I’m special. This doesn’t mean that I am perfect, but it means that the greatness I already have in the field of public speaking, and the synergy it has with other things I’m great at, like, blogging (ideas) and entrepreneurship (sales) means that I should keep working on it. I need to speak slower. I need to stop using the F word. But working on that is a good investment for me. (Look. Here's a speech I gave at Cornell University.)

5. Quit quickly if you won't be great. You don’t have time for mediocrity.
I thought that because I’m great at speaking and great at ideas, I’d be great at radio. So I agreed to do a radio show with Webmaster Radio. But here’s something I didn’t realize about radio: It’s actually about social skills. You need to be a great conversationalist, and you need to be able to read what someone will do next in conversation.

You know why I write so much about social skills on this blog? Because mine are so sub-par and I have to work so hard at learning how to make myself less awkward socially. So radio is never going to be my strength.

And here’s another reason I know: because people are, at their core, honest, caring, and supportive. And people will tell you, effusively, if you have exceptional talent at something. Because it’s fun to see great talent, and fun to be a part of watching it bloom. And people do not say that with me and radio. They say they like the show, but I know what it is like when people think I have huge talent. So I am not doing my radio show anymore. Because maybe I’m good, but I won’t be great. And I don’t have time in my life to not be great.

Not too long ago, I started a new job, in which I moved my self from point A (college town) to point B (Bay Area). This was supposed to be my career launch. It took me about two weeks to admit to myself that I was unhappy. So I quit.

I had the security of knowing I could go back to my parents’ house to live. (Which, by the way, is such a good idea that 65% of new grads do it.) Here are five reasons why I am sure it was a smart decision to quit my job after just two weeks:

1. Your job performance will be terrible if you hate your job.

If you hate your job from the beginning, then you will never fully dedicate yourself. In fact, you'll resent both the company and yourself for staying at a job that you knew you didn't like early on.

I get it: You have this desire to prove to yourself that you are capable of sticking it out. Or you're worried that this makes you a complete failure and you have given up. So what? You learn from your failure. You learn from that mistake. You’ll end up quitting at some point soon, so why draw it out?

2. You'll have more respect for yourself if you respond to your needs.

Once I admitted to myself that I hated my job, I worried that if I didn't quit this job immediately, even if I had no backup plan, that I would be setting myself up to allow negative situations into my life. If you know that going to your job will make you stressed, unhappy, and angry, every single day, then continuing to go is being disrespectful to your well-being. The more you continue to disregard your own feelings, the further away you get from happiness.

When we're in our twenties we need to learn about who we are and what we like, so that we can find a work life we are passionate about. Staying in a job you hate doesn’t help.

3. You'll prove your commitment to passion and engagement at work.

Quitting that job after two weeks is actually one of my proudest moments. I think it shows that I have integrity and passion. I understand the fact that productivity comes more easily in the face of happiness. Quitting quickly is showing impatience for a meaningful work life. Everyone should be impatient for that.

Also, people who switching jobs regularly makes people more engaged in their work. This makes sense. If you stay in a job for a long stretch of time, your learning curve goes down and things do not feel as new and stimulating.

4. You'll do the company a favor.

If you stay unhappy at a job and then quit after, say, six months, the company will probably never know that you had hated your stint there. When you quit a job after two weeks, the company will notice and question what they had done to push you away so quickly. (A smart company, at least.)

Employees at, Apple, for example, produce the best products in the world because they are passionate about the company's mission. You are not helping the company by staying at a position you hate when someone else may be better suited for it who will, no doubt, excel, while you are just getting by. Do the company a favor and quit so they can reevaluate their training, that position, and their hiring strategy, so the next person doesn't want to jump ship after a week.

5. You'll set yourself up for success.

High performing employees in companies like GE, Proctor & Gamble and UBS all get to rotate through a wide range of jobs at the beginning of their career. This is because job-hopping is a great way to build skills early in one’s career. We should all have that chance. There are no rules that say you need to stay at a job that is not teaching you enough.

And there are no rules that say how long it takes a person to know a job is not right. But there is a rule for who succeeds and who doesn’t: People who have self-confidence, respect, good teamwork instincts, and a sense of when it’s time to cut their losses; these are the people who succeed. That’s why high-performers leave bad jobs after just two weeks at work.

This is a guest post from Jamie Varon. She's 23 years old. Her blog is called intersected.

]]> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/03/11/twentysomething-why-its-smart-to-quit-a-job-after-just-two-weeks-of-work/feed/ 297 http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/06/how-to-build-a-career-as-an-artist/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/06/how-to-build-a-career-as-an-artist/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:24:31 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/?p=2099 Here's a post for all the people who are trying to be artists. It is not a friendly post. I do not think that people who want to create art need to get paid to do it. Do you get paid to have sex? No. Same thing. You love it, but you just do it after work. And sometimes, if you are driven mad by it, you leave work in the middle of the day for it.

Treat art the same way, and you will stay sane. Really. Here are five things I would nag you about if you were talking with me about your burgeoning career as an artist:

1. You cannot do art if you are starving.
The starving artist routine is total bullshit. I know because I did it. Once you know that you are not going to make rent, you can't really make art. Because your sense of self-preservation insists that your brain focus on the possibility that you will be out on the street. Your brain cannot stop solving that problem long enough to solve the problem of what is truth and beauty.

Here are some things I did while I was becoming a writer: I ate only bagels because I didn't have enough money for anything else and then I got anemic and had to go to the doctor but I didn't have health insurance so I had to lie and say I did in order to get the iron pills I needed so that I didn't pass out from exhaustion the moment I woke up in the morning. Believe me, I was not making great art during this period.

2. Art emanating from a black hole is a choice.
There's a reason that Jean-Michel Basquiat's paintings look like horror films: Because his life was a crack-house horror film. And there's a reason that Picasso is tearing apart voluptuous women in gorgeous surroundings: That's what he did in real life.

So don't kid yourself: Your art reflects your surroundings, and you can live like a pauper, but that limits the range of your art.

During my art days, I did not go out with friends. Ever. Because I didn't even have enough money to go to a coffee shop. And I was always cold because I lived in Boston and didn't have a winter coat. At many points I did not have a home, so I just sort of carried my laptop around and wrote and hoped that something would come up by the end of the day. And I almost never had clean clothes because I didn't have money to buy detergent.

So I wrote stories, every day, about not seeing anyone, and my mentor would say things like, "How about adding a character so that the narrator can have a conversation?" And that would strike me as a revolutionary idea.

3. Real artists will make art no matter what.
You do not need a studio, or a desk, or peace and quiet. Really. Because making art comes from a place that you cannot stop. People who need to make art make art no matter what.

Do you know how many blog posts I throw out? Maybe two a week. Because sometimes something happens and I absolutely have to write about it, and I see, from the beginning, that there's no way I'll be able to relate it to careers, so it's going to end up in the blogging trash can. But I write it anyway.

Do you know Christo and Jeanne-Claude? Wait. Here, look at some photos. The guy is nuts. He thinks so big that it makes him crazy. He's been making plans to put up cloth all over Central Park for 26 years. He can't stop himself. Finally, he did it. But who knew if it would ever happen? This is what I mean. If you need to do art, you just go there. Nothing stops you.

So if you think you're an artist and you are not making art now, but you think that in the right circumstance you'd make art, you are lying to yourself. I'm sorry. But it's true. Unless you are starving. If you are starving, see point number one: You need to get a job.

4. You do not need to quit your day job.
Are you making money and you're wondering if you should quit your job to do art full time? Take this test: Did you marry rich? Do you have a trust fund? Do you have reliable buyers for almost everything you produce? If you did not answer yes to any of these, then keep your day job.

Don't tell me it's crushing your soul. This whole blog is about how your soul does not depend on your job or your boss or your paycheck. Click on some links and read them.

Also, most corporate jobs can be creative outlets because businesses solve problems. So if you are an inherently creative thinker, you probably bring that to whatever job you have. You can't stop yourself.

5. You are not a better artist if you can do it full time.
I don't want to see snooty comments on this post about how great you are for being able to support yourself with your art. Because I can do that too. And you know what? I was not a worse writer when I could not support myself. The only difference between artists making money and artists not making money is that the first group is better at business. And there is no evidence that artists who are better at business make better art.

Do you want to know if you're going to be good at earning money from art? Take this test about networking from UpMo and Pepperdine University. The test will tell you how good you are at networking. And if you are not good at this test, you are not going to be good at selling your art, because the days of discovering someone with a sawed-off ear in an insane asylum are over. You need to market yourself. Do you want to know why there are so many crappy films in the world? Because there are so many great networkers who want to direct.

So everyone can stop being a snob about asking people how much money they make from their art. And everyone can stop thinking that the be-all-end-all is to quit the day job and do art full time.

Do you want to know how to be an artist? Make art. Do it because you need to do it. Because you think you will die if you don't do it. Stop making it a career problem. It's not. And, I leave you with one of my favorite posts, that I never get to link to, about me making myself crazy being an artist.

The more desperate you are for a job, the more likely you are to take a job that doesn’t teach you what you want to learn. And then you get to that job and you think, “Grad school could solve this problem.” But in fact, grad school creates larger, and more insurmountable problems. And some the problems you’re trying to solve with grad school might not be problems at all.

1. Grad school pointlessly delays adulthood.
The best thing you can do for yourself is take time to figure out who you are and where you fit in the world. No one teaches you that in school. You need to do it yourself. Grad school is a way to delay this process, rather than move you forward, according to Thomas Benton of the Chronicle of Higher Education. So instead of dodging tough questions by going back to school, try being lost. It’s normal, and honest, and you will end up with more self-knowledge and less debt than your grad-school counterparts, and in many cases, you will be similarly qualified for your next big job.

2. PhD programs are pyramid schemes
It’s very hard to get a job teaching at a university. And if you are not going to teach, why are you getting a degree? You don’t need a piece of paper to show that you are learning. Go read books after work. Because look: In the arts, you would have a better chance of surviving the Titanic than getting a tenure-track position; and once you adjust for IQ, education, and working hours, post-PhD science jobs are among the most low-paying jobs you could get.

3. Business school is not going to help 90% of the people who go.
Here’s the problem with business school. Most people want to work for themselves, but you can’t learn entrepreneurship in school – you have to learn by doing. And a business degree that is not from a top school is not going to get you very much at all, according to recruiting firm Challenger & Gray. Finally, Harvard Business School has acknowleged that if you are planning to downshift for kids around the time you are 30, your ability to leverage an MBA is drastically compromised.

4. Law school is a factory for depressives.
It used to be that if you had a law degree it was a ticket to a high salary and a safe career. Today many people go to law school and cannot find a job. This is, in a large part, because law school selects for people who are good with details and pass tests and law firms select for people who are good at marketing themselves and can drum up business. Law firms are in a transition phase, and they have many unfair labor practices leftover from older generations, for example, hourly billing and making young lawyers pay dues for what is, today, a largely uncertain future. Which might explain why the American Bar Association reports that the majority of lawyers would recommend that people not to go into law.

5. The medical school model assumes that health care spending is not a mess.
Medical school is extremely expensive, and our health care system does not pay enough to doctors for them to sanely accept the risk of taking $200,000 in debt to serve as doctors. Specialists like opthalmologists have great hours, and plastic surgeons have great salaries, but most doctors will be stuck in a system that is largely broken, and could easily break them financially – like OBGYNs who cannot afford to deliver babies in New York because they can’t afford the malpractice insurance with their salary.

6. Going to grad school is like going into the military.
Applications to the military increase in a bad economy in a disturbingly similar way that applications to graduate school do. For the most part, both alternatives are bad. They limit your future in ways you can’t even imagine, and they are not likely to open the kind of doors you really want. Military is the terrible escape hatch for poor kids, and grad school is the terrible escape hatch for rich kids.

7. Most jobs are better than they seem: You can learn from any job.
When I worked on a French chicken farm, I thought I’d learn French, but I didn’t, because I was so foreign to the French farm family that they couldn’t talk to me. However I did learn a lot of other things, like how to bargain to get the best job in the chicken coop, and how to get out of killing the bunnies. You don’t need to be learning the perfect thing in your job. You just need to be learning. Don’t tell yourself you need a job that gives your life meaning. Jobs don’t do that; doesn’t that make you feel better? Suddenly being in the workplace doesn’t seem so bad.

8. Graduate school forces you to overinvest: It’s too high risk.
In a world where people did not change careers, grad school made sense. Today, grad school is antiquated. You invest three to six extra years in school in order to get your dream career. But the problem is that not only are the old dream careers deteriorating, but even if you have a dream career, it won’t last. You’ll want to change because you can. Because that’s normal for today’s workplace. People who are in their twenties today will change careers about four times in their life. Which means that grad school is a steep investment for such a short period of time. The grad school model needs to change to adapt to the new workplace. Until then. Stay away.

1. Take time to figure out what you love to do.

When I graduated from college, I was shocked to find out that I just spent 18 years getting an education and the only jobs offered to me sucked. Everything was some version of creating a new filing system for someone who is important.

Often bad situations bring on our most creative solutions. And this was one of those times: I asked myself, “What do I want to do most in the world, if I could do anything?” I decided it was to play volleyball, so I went to Los Angeles to figure out how to play on the professional beach circuit.

I spent my days on the courts, and late nights at the gym, and in between, I worked odd jobs in bookstores. And then I realized that the other thing I wanted to do was read. I had been so stifled in school being told what to read all the time. It was thrilling to be able to read whatever I wanted.

I wasn't making very much money. Sometimes I couldn't pay rent, and my landlord hated me. And sometimes I couldn't afford to wash my clothes and I pretended that bikinis never get dirty. But, in fact, you really don't need much money to figure out what you love to do, you just need time and space and a willingness to keep yourself busy until something sticks.

2. Take time to figure out what you can get paid for.

It took me a few years to navigate the arcane hierarchy of Southern California beach volleyball, but I finally played on the professional tour. For a summer. And what I found was that I am not nearly as competitive as the top players. I was, at one point, ranked 17, but I can tell you that I never cared as much about my rank as the other women.

What I did excel at, though, was winning sponsors, which, on some level, is what professional sports is all about anyway. I always had better sponsors even than women higher than me in the ranks, and I won partners and trainers by dint of my ability to attract sponsors.

But the truth about professional volleyball is that it is a really tough life. The eight hours a day on the beach starts getting old, and so do the Budweiser commercials I did (totally not fun) to manage to scrape together enough money to support myself.

So I thought to myself: Who is using the skills I have to make money? And I landed on marketing. And I had this boyfriend who was going to hire someone to do marketing at his Internet startup, so I volunteered to do it for free, to get something on my resume. And then I got a job.

3. Watch people around you to figure out who is happy.

I ended up having a pretty big job at a Fortune 500 company running their web site. Don't get me wrong. It was the earliest days of the Internet, and it actually took more people to redesign my blog recently than it did to launch that Fortune 500 site in the early 90’s.

But anyway, I started climbing the ladder and tons of people wanted to mentor me, to help me get to where they were. And they told me they were happy, but when I watched them, day in and day out, I realized that the people at the top of the ladder were not nearly as happy as I had expected them to be. They tucked their kids into bed from their phones at their desk. They were overdressed constantly and they had hair-trigger tempers for topics that seemed inconsequential to me.

So I went to where coolness seemed to be: At startups.

Now that I'm on my third startup, I can tell you with certainty that if you looked at my life you would not see that I am happy. Running a startup is really high risk and really difficult, and entrepreneurs work longer hours than anyone else. But I'm almost always there to eat diner with my kids, because I control my own hours.

So the final step of finding out where you should be is looking at everyone's life with a clear lens. Adult life is really hard. Finding out who we are, and finding someone to share our life with, and having kids and still having a life, and being able to pay for all of that: Impossible, really.

So you look around and see who is doing what part of that well. And you pick the sacrifices that they made. Because no life is perfect, but all lives have some things to offer. Be clear on what you're choosing and what you're giving up, and don't pick anyone's life if they tell you they have everything: they're lying.

1. Graduate school is an extreme investment for a fluid workplace. If you are graduating from college today, you will change careers about five times over the course of your life. So going to graduate school for four years—investing maybe $80,000—is probably over-investing in one of those careers. If you stayed in one career for your whole life, the idea is more reasonable. But we don't do that anymore, so graduate school needs to change before it is reasonable again.

2. Graduate school is no longer a ticket to play. It used to be that you couldn't go into business without an MBA. But recently, the only reason you need an MBA is to climb a corporate ladder. And, as Paul Graham says, "corporate ladders are obsolete." That's because if you try to climb one, you are likely to lose your footing due to downsizing, layoffs, de-equitization, or lack of respect for your personal life. So imagine where you want to go, and notice all the people who got there already without having an MBA. Because you can do that, too, in a wide range of fields, including finance.

3. Graduate school requires you to know what will make you happy before you try it. But we are notoriously bad at knowing what will make us happy. The positive psychology movement has shown us that our brains are actually fine-tuned to trick us into thinking we know about our own happiness. And then we make mistakes. So the best route to happiness is one of trial and error. Otherwise, you could over-commit to a terrible path. For example, today most lawyers do not like being lawyers: more than 55% of members of the American Bar Association say they would not recommend getting a law degree today.

4. Graduate degrees shut doors rather than open them. You better be really certain you know what you're going to do with that degree because you're going to need to earn a lot of money to pay it back. Law school opens doors only to careers that pay enough to repay your loans. Likewise, your loan payments from an MBA program mean that you cannot have a scrappy start-up without starving. Medical school opens doors to careers with such bad work-life balance that the most popular specialty right now is ophthalmology because it has good hours.

5. If you don't actually use your graduate degree, you look unemployable. Let's say you spend years in graduate school (and maybe boatloads of money), but then you don't work in that field. Instead, you start applying for jobs that are, at best, only tangentially related. What it looks like is that you are asking people to give you a job even though you didn't really want to be doing that job. You wanted another job but you couldn't get it. No employer likes to hire from the reject pile, and no employer wants to be second choice.

6. Graduate school is an extension of childhood. Thomas Benton, columnist at the Chronicle of Higher Education, says that some students are addicted to the immediate feedback and constant praise teachers give, but the work world doesn't provide that. Also, kids know how to do what teachers assign. But they have little idea of how to create their own assignments—which is what adult life is, really. So Benton says students go back to school more for comfort than because they have a clear idea of what they want to do with their life.

7. Early adult life is best if you are lost. It used to be that you graduated from college and got on a path. The smart kids got themselves on a safe path fast. Today there are no more safe paths, there is only emerging adulthood, where you have to figure out who you are and where you fit, and the quarter-life crisis, which is a premature midlife crisis that comes when people try to skip over the being lost part of early adult life. Being lost is a great path for today's graduates. And for most people, graduate school undermines that process with very little reward at the end.

Dan Ariely, economist at MIT, found that when people have a complicated choice to make—and there is a default choice—they pick the default nearly every time. So if your parents or friends went to graduate school, you are likely to do the same, not because it's good for you personally, but because choosing the alternatives seem more difficult. But making exactly that kind of difficult choice is what your early adult life is all about. So don't skip it.