Sunday nights at our house are dinner with me, the kids, the Farmer and the Ex. They are always fun dinners, and I always feel very lucky for that.

My six-year-old talked about his new baby cousin, Eva (who is pictured, in utero, above). "She has a terrible name," he said, "for Pig Latin. Its Vaeay. It doesn't work."

We all do the vowel arranging in our heads and agree, Eva is not a good Pig Latin name.

"Mom has a great name! It's Enelopepay."

The Farmer says, "It sounds like it could be the name of her next company."

The Ex says, "Yeah, emphasis on the pay."

The three adults laugh.

And then I get nervous. About what I'm going to do next. If you have had three companies, people assume you will have a fourth. So I assume that, too. Which makes me nervous.

When I was in the doctor's office with my son, he was playing his DS and I was looking for something to read to distract myself from the urge to rein in his video game time (I decided that parents who limit video games are delusional.) And I saw this pamphlet that looked like a food pyramid so I grabbed it to get some insight into how to use the food pyramid to make myself not want to eat and lose weight overnight.

What I thought was a food pyramid pamphlet was actually a mental health pamphlet. It was a pyramid that had taking care of life goals and meaning of life stuff on the bottom, and the middle part was daily routine mental health stuff like exercise and talking to friends—the stuff you already know you should do every day. And the top was the immediate stuff. Ways to calm yourself down in the moment. For the most part, the top part was positive self-talk.

I am good at the first two, but the immediate stuff I'm not good at. In fact, I eat when I am anxious. I found, actually, that drinking is more calming when I'm anxious, but eating is more socially acceptable. Xanax is always good, but only if I can sleep the rest of the day. And really, if I have a day where I can sleep then I'm probably not anxious. Not that I would ever know. Because I haven't had a day where I can sleep the whole day since I became a mother.

Anyway, I am trying to find good ways to calm myself down when I'm nervous. And I took the pamphlet home to make myself more conscious of what I do in the moment when anxiety arises. Mostly this means that I've started to tell myself, "Oh, look. I must be upset becacause I'm eating." But in this moment, at the dining room table, while the kids talked to the dads, I went into the kitchen to calm myself down. And I didn't eat. I practiced positive self-talk.

I had rehearsed it before, which is how to prepare for the moment of huge self-doubt. Here are the five points I've come up with:

1. Stay confident that I am making good choices based on good data.
When I started having kids I dropped out of the software industry and the startup world.

The moment was similar to me deciding that homeschooling is a non-negotiable. Everyone told me not to drop out and that I was crazy.

But I had read a lot about attachment theory—that kids need one, single primary caregiver for the first two years. I realized that it's common knowledge among child development experts that kids need a single caregiver for the first two years, but no one wants to be the bearer of this bad news. Because daycare means there are two primary caregivers, at least, which jeopardizes a baby's ability to attach. So sending a kid to daycare was out of the question for me.

And that's how I feel now, about homeschooling. Even though it's wreaking havoc on my career.

2. Remember the times I felt like a failure when it was not true at all.
This research made me intensely committed to finding work I could do from home to support the family. Which lead to temporary financial ruin. And I felt like a failure.

All my friends in the software industry disappeared because we had nothing to talk about. The writers I met earned so little money that I worried hanging out with them was bad for my career.

After a few years, I launched this blog. It got big enough that people who make a lot of money started paying attention to me again. And I didn’t feel like a failure anymore.

If I could go back to that time, I'd tell myself to stop worrying about failure.  The worry just makes the change harder, and no one is a failure in the middle of a big change. You can't fail if you're moving toward something. You fail only if you stop.

3. During big transitions, be clear on priorities.
I have a startup right now. I started pitching some top-tier VCs I'd like to work with and  they said the business idea would not grow big enough. So I showed how I can win at the whole online food business because the barrier to entry for selling meat and cheese online is huge and I have a way to get around that.

Everyone loved my marketing plan. Except that the business was too small to be funded. There would not be a big enough exit and I can’t get great business partners if I don’t have huge exit potential.

That's a problem because I want to work only with hotshots. I don’t want to work with moms who want jobs on the side. Please God do not strike me down for saying this, but as a mom who is trying to have a really exciting career, I don’t want to work with other moms. I want to work with twenty-something men who have no kids and have endless time to address their endless curiosity.

So I worked with an angel investor to craft a business plan that moves quickly from online food to online everything. I talk about the future of shopping . It used to be that shopping was exciting because you could find different stuff in different cities. Discovery and exploration are part of shopping. But online, everything is a commodity. People want discovery and they want to feel that what they are buying is special.

I say all this to show how my online food business will transform the consumer experience. You need to say that kind of stuff to get A-list partners and A-list funding.

4. Getting what you want means deciding what you'll give up.
So last month I got a great developer to agree to move forward with me. Last week there was no barrier to me launching my goat cheese business as step one to transforming the American consumer experience.

Except that I don’t think I can handle talking like this every day for five years. Which is what a startup is: talking like a manic dreamer with crazy ambitions that no one thinks you can really pull off, but some people will take a wild bet on. That’s what it would be.

It’s so fun. But not with kids. It’s so great to have an amazing business partner, but not if they have to chase you down in between playdates. They start to hate you.

So I have this business I’m not doing. And I'm banking on the advice I tell other people, that admitting what won't work to do right now is a step toward figure out what will work to do right now.

5. Keep moving forward and believe you'll go somewhere good.
I am at an in-between stage, and I’ve been here before, so I am going to have faith that I’ll come out okay. I am going to have faith that I am not going to wither away and lose my ability to earn a lot of money. I am going to have faith that when I am done with my current identity crisis there will be top-performers all around me.

I coach so many people in their 20s who are lost, and they are worried that their feeling lost will never end. And I tell them to just keep trying jobs until one sticks. Have patience and believe that you'll figure things out. This is true for me, too. Right now. The more times you live through that feeling of being lost, the more faith you have that you'll keep moving forward and come out fine.

You know what makes me happy right now? My sister-in-law had a baby after losing her first one. I'm really happy for her. And my small, odd family has fun dinners together. And focusing on the stuff that definitely feels good gives me faith to trust that eventually I can put the pay in Enelopepay.

I confess that I don’t feel like I’m working to my potential. And it makes me feel sick. I know the signs. It starts with me not being able to cope with my to-do list. It all looks too overwhelming. So I scale things back: I take out everything that has to do with starting a company.

The next stage of not living up to my potential is that I can’t read anything. I tried to read the New York Times magazine cover story about fixing a marriage. I can’t open it, though. The woman who is the author wrote about her own experience. Fuck. I should have posted about that.

I should have written the post about how our couples therapist fired us because neither of us seems to be capable of getting past our horrible childhoods long enough to connect with someone in a real way. He fired us but then I used my amazing negotiating skills to convince him to take us back and then I had a screaming fit in the therapist’s office and said he’s incompetent and doesn’t give us clear direction. It was a good moment, actually. Because now that I fired him, instead of him firing me, I am fulfilled in my need to ruin relationships with people all around me and I now I have space to let the Farmer get close to me.

Elizabeth Weil, from the New York Times magazine, will get a book deal from her piece. I will get a lot of comments from my paragraph. The comments will be: You should write more about that.

It’s true. I should. I should have a book deal, right? Don’t tell me that, okay? Because first of all I make way more from this blog than I would from a book, so why do I need a book? But I worry that maybe I should have another book because I won’t feel like I’m a real writer until I have a book New York Times book reviewers fawn over.

Should is a dangerous word. Someone once told me there is no word for should in Spanish. Is this right? Surely, though, there is a Spanish way to say I feel like crap because I’m not living up to my potential. After all, Spanish is the language of Catholic guilt. Should is the American way of putting ourselves down in the name of the need to impress other people.

I should be starting another company. Here’s why: I can’t stop thinking of companies. I have a community that is always receptive to my ventures, and I have tons of connections into mainstream media where I could market whatever I come up with.

Instead of all of that, I am homeschooling.

Oh. Please. Please God of Editorial Decisions stop me right now from writing about how sick I am of my kids. Let me write something poetic about the joys of parenting.

I am homeschooling because my job is to be a parent right now. It is such an incredibly boring job. As a whole, the job is enthralling and rewarding and full of joy. But day to day I could cry. Day to day I think, “All my interesting friends are sending interesting emails today and having interesting meetings.”

My kids have such fun days. They are my dream days. Private lessons in everything they are interested in. Reading for hours each day. Wake up with mooing cows, go to bed with star-filled skies.

Sometimes I think of taking skateboarding lessons while my son does. Or swimming while my kids learn racing dives.

If I really hated this life, I’d be changing it.

But all I want to do is write. I don’t feel like I should write, I feel like I have to write or I will die.

So the stuff I think I should do. I’m not doing it because I don’t need to, I guess. I guess I’m blogging because I need to.

I did an experiment last month. My traffic went down 50% because I didn’t do all the little things I usually do to keep traffic up (like write something to get on the homepage of CNN.com). I didn’t post very much. You know what happened? I made more money from my blog last month than I have in forever.

So my blog traffic is not that important. And it’s not that important to post regularly. Except that I have to.

So this is what I’m telling you: There is no should. There is no living up to your potential. There is just doing your life. You can’t do someone else’s life.

If we know our goal, and we know our life, and we are working toward it, then we never talk about our shoulds.

So maybe I can just focus on a single goal: being vulnerable enough with the Farmer to connect with him and get us back into couples therapy. Or maybe living up to my potential is giving my kids great days and giving my husband a good wife. And maybe all I need to do is write this.

This is a picture of me digging through our forty tomato plants.

When I was putting them in the ground, I never dreamed that forty would really grow. In the northern suburbs of Chicago, where I grew up, the vegetables we planted never came up. So I sort of planned for that. But instead, I have an incredible supply of tomatoes.

When I can find them. Because I didn’t stake the tomatoes. So every couple of days, I go out and hunt for them, in what has become a thick brush of tomato stems.

I thought what I wanted was a constant supply of vegetables, so I didn’t pay much attention to the tricks of the trade that my Amish neighbors exhibited when it comes to planting neat, perfect rows of vegetables. Now I’m thinking that what I wanted was neatness and order. I don’t need enough tomatoes to feed ten families. I need nice rows to wander through and vegetables that I can see before I pick.

I wish this weren’t true, but so much of knowing what we want comes from setting our lives up in a way where we don’t get it. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote a whole book based on the premise that we have no idea what makes us happy. He says that the emotional survival of the human race required us to guess terribly about what we’d like to be doing.

I am trying to get better at seeing what I need. One thing I notice is that people make the same mistakes over and over when they are identifying what they need.

1. Look at patterns.
It’s easier for other people to see what you need than for you to see it.

When I am coaching people, they always pay for an hour-long session, but it rarely takes more than fifteen minutes for me to know what they should be doing. This is because none of us is particularly unique in our career issues, but each of us thinks we are especially unique. So I see patterns while the person who is on the other end of the phone sees differences.

2. Looking for a job should not be difficult.
If you can’t find the job you want it’s probably because you’re looking for the wrong job. It’s important to know what you’re looking for. Recruiters can tell in ten seconds  if you are a good fit for what you’re looking for, in a similar way that a girl from Match.com can tell in ten seconds if the blind date standing across from her is a good fit for what he said he’s looking for.

It’s so easy for someone else to tell if it’s a good fit. But it’s hard for us to judge for ourselves. A good rule of thumb, though, is that if you have been looking for a job for more than six months, you are not looking for the right job for you. Probably, you are in denial about where you are, who you are or what is going on around you. You need a coach, just for an hour, or maybe just fifteen minutes, to show you that you’re looking for the wrong job, and what the right job is.

3. Don’t look for a career, look for a life.
It’s normal to not know what career you’d want. Because there is no way to guess what career you’d be happy in without doing it. Gilbert says that only 5% of people guess right on the first try because it’s so impossible to know. The way to increase your odds of guessing right is to look at someone’s life. Choose a life you want and then pick the career that person used to get that life.

This means that if you want to be a surgeon and be home with your kids for dinner, you need to first find a surgeon that has that life. (And you won’t, of course.) It means that if you want to get rich from the Internet you need to recognize that the life people lead as they get rich from the Internet is a life where work is 24/7.

Here’s an audio clip of Steven Roy interviewing me on this topic. (If you ever wondered if I am nicer on the phone than I am on the blog, this will assure you: I’m not.)

4. Don’t look for connection, look for vulnerability.
This is a fascinating TED talk by Brene Brown. She studies how people feel connected, and she found that the world divides into people who feel connected and people who don’t. And the difference is shame. People who do not think they are worthy of connections do not have connections.

Brown says that in order to remedy this problem, you shouldn’t look for people to connect with but rather, you should look for shame. Because somewhere, inside yourself, there is a sense of shame, that you are not worth loving or being loved. And with shame comes an inability to be vulnerable.

I loved watching this video because it made the world so much more simple to me: People who cannot connect cannot be vulnerable. That makes sense to me. And vulnerability in myself is easier to look for than looking for someone else to connect with. I can control my own vulnerability.

5. Don't bother with structural barriers, the real barriers are emotional.
I really believe that deep down, we know what we should be doing next. We know what we should be looking for. I think it goes back to when we were kids, and we could figure out what felt good and what didn’t. And then we spent our childhoods trying to feel good about what other people wanted us to feel good about.

The real challenge after growing up that way is being able to look at ourselves honestly again. It is maybe the most difficult thing we must do.

The future of the Internet is design: from fine art galleries to the size of the box you type in name. So start figuring out how to rejigger things to make your career relevant.

Here's how I know what's coming:

First, a flurry of emails arrive in my in-box each day touting “free infographics.” After sniffing around, I discovered that infographics garner so many clicks that SEO mavens publish quick, cheesy infographics to hand out for free in exchange for links back to publisher sites. The infographics suck so much that I’m not even going to show you one, but there’s a lesson here: people love pictures.

This means that you will be more valuable and more relevant if you can think in terms of visuals. This makes sense. It’s clear that in the last twenty years, as emails became the norm, if you were great at communicating via text, you had an advantage.

Not that everything can be reduced to an infographic, but what can be reduced is made more interesting. Short is good, and concise is fun, and in a world where we have too many facts, we appreciate a quick picture that synthesizes facts into something meaningful rather than a summary of disjointed facts.

In the design world there is a sense that design is not so much about product or endpoint but rather the interaction one has with another person. Davin Stowell, of Smart Design says, “Companies used to come to us asking for products. More recently they have been asking us to help them understand their customers. It’s almost as if our role has transcended from design experts to relationship consultants.”

I just received the book Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little. I did not read it. I skimmed it. Because, as the author, Christopher Johnson writes, “We have a collective obsession with brevity in all media.” I’m not going to argue here if this is good or bad (although I think it’s good). I’m going to tell you that if you don’t get on the brevity bandwagon, no one will listen. And presenting information visually is one of the most reliable ways to present it with brevity.

A list does that as well, by the way. It’s sort of the stepping stone between text and infographic. Which is why lists are so popular online—you can skim them. So, here’s a list of things you can do to start thinking more visually:

1.     Read Tufte. He’s the king of information design. Every big thinker you admire has read Edward Tufte, trust me. The last time I read Tufte was in Seth Godin’s bathroom. No kidding. He keeps a Tufte book there.

2.     Think short. Short writing already rules the Internet. You get noticed with short big-ideas, 140-character quips, and a 20 minute summary of a career's worth of research.  Infographics take bunches of very short ideas, and create a single, consise idea on top of them. A good infographic is like a poem that ends at just the right time.

3.     Demand more meaning. It’s not enough to stack pictures of missiles to show an arms race. The information you put together needs to amount to something new. Statistics should not surprise people so much as the conclusion the infographic draws from the statistics.  Check out the arms race infographic in the book Diagrams: Innovative Solutions for Graphic Designers. It blew my mind how quickly it allowed me to synthesize tons of arms race data and feel smart about it. And then I realized that a good infographic is the visual of a good blog post with lots of links — a fresh and solid argument on the surface, and lots of small pieces of evidence underneath.

4.     Consider not only text-to-visual but also verbal-to-visual. Alexis Finch creates graphic renditions of speeches. She is able to go beyond a speaker’s outline to capture the most interesting ideas and how they relate to each other. Finch creates, in effect, her own version of the topic. Here is a sketch she did of a speech I gave at Tech Week.

5.     Market yourself visually. The limitations of a text-based resume are clear.  Solutions are not so clear. But Vizualize.me has a good start on solutions with their chart-based resume service. For example, text is too linear to describe today’s non-linear careers.  But a chart-based resume shows time in a more useful way to an employer:

 
6.     Steer your career visually. If you have a text-based resume, you need to always think in terms of bullets – is your project leading to a bullet on your resume, and if not, why are you doing it?  With resumes going visual, you will need to think in terms of visual accomplishments. Brazen Careerist (my company) just launched a visual self-assessment tool that combines thousands of  details about your activity on Facebook and LinkedIn to show a simple graphic of your strengths and weaknesses as a job candidate.

 
7.     Use photos with more intention. The number of photos we take is incredible. And I’m starting to think that the next generation will laugh at how many photos we have taken. What is the point? Who will look at them all?

At some point, when we are just clicking to click—with no visual intention—then the photo serves to put a wall between us and the experience rather than a window.

What are you doing behind the lens all the time? Raise the bar for yourself; allow only good photos. Melissa forced me to learn about good photos when she started taking them for my blog. Her photos are fantastic. Which served to show me how bad my own were. So she gave me lessons, and she edited. She rejects 90% of the photos I send her. But I learn a lot that way. See the photo at the top? I took 20 photos in the art gallery to get one good one.

But for most of us, photos are a good entry point to the next version of the Internet.  Because if you force yourself to publish only good photos, you force yourself to think more about images and what they communicate to the viewer. It’s the first step in transitioning your career to the visual Internet.

I used to feel sorry for Brad and Angelina because they had photographers trailing them all the time. Now I think they are lucky because if they had a blog, they’d have so many good photos to use.

I feel like the parent of a twenty-something who wants their kid to stop feeling lost, but wants that feeling of being unlost to happen a little closer to home. I know that’s selfish. And anyway, I’m not even Melissa's mom. But I think I want to be because I wonder where my place is in her life.

I have not told you this about Melissa: She is smarter than I am. There are not many people I think this about. And definitely not a lot of women. I know this is not politically correct for me to say, but look, Larry Summers, the ex-president of Harvard staked his whole academic career on the research that shows that at the very very tip of the spectrum of high intelligence, it’s mostly men. So it makes sense that only female I have ever met who lives on that tip is Melissa.

She has a photographic memory. I’m not sure what that gets her except the ability to talk endlessly about a wide range of topics to people who, for the most part, are not interested. She can’t really read whether or not it’s time to shut up, so sometimes I have to tell her.

Other times I am completely dumbfounded by her memory. She is like a Vaudeville act or something.

Her new boss, who I feared would ruin her life, has turned out to be great for her. He basically pays her to memorize stuff and hang out with him. I call Melissa ask if I can use his name.

“No," she says. And, "Can we talk later? I'm on my horse."

“But I'm going to write that he's great. I'm going to write that I love him for seeing you for who you are and creating a job for you around that. “

“Show me the post before you run it.”

So forget it. And who answers a phone when they are on a horse? I am not going to use his name because I have to confess that I’m a little worried that he is paying Melissa for companionship. He loves, for example, that she doesn’t have good work/home boundaries. And that she is a good sounding board for his ideas because he has to think out loud.

I can see why he would love that. I love hanging out with Melissa, too. She is very weird and very smart. It’s hard to stomach weird without smart, but with her they come together, with commensurate amounts of very.

The boss is very weird and very smart, too. Probably not as smart as Melissa. But whatever. Smart only goes so far.

In case you find yourself overvaluing your own IQ, there’s an investment banker in New York City who was recently getting a divorce and tried to convince the judge that he should get more than half of the assets because his IQ is so high that you can presume that his wife could never have earned her half.

The judge threw out the argument. And I’m sure that any goodwill the judge might have had for this guy went straight to the garbage with the argument.

I miss Melissa popping up in the middle of my day to say something like, “Have you heard of the term social skydiving? You should look into it. Even though you'd never do it.”

Sometimes I’d say, “Melissa, look: Can’t you see we’re in the middle of practicing violin?”

She’d look and say, “Oh. Sorry.”

But other times, I’d say, “Melissa, will you come talk to me while I cook?”

The New Yorker is fixated lately on distraction: in the early 1900s some company in Buffalo found that giving workers breaks made them more productive. Psychologist Roy Baumeister shows that asking people to regulate their behavior without interruption probably makes them less focused overall.

I am thinking that Melissa is like a coffee break for me. Or for her new boss. If you hire an assistant the top priority is not having him or her do the work you don’t want to do. The top priority should be to hire someone you want access to because their presence improves your day.

An assistant is the co-worker you have always wanted to make your workday great.

A great co-worker can change your job  and, in some cases, change your life. You can hire them or sign on to work next to them, but don't underestimate the importance of finding that someone who is a friend who you can take your breaks with. We each need someone who shows us new aspects of ourselves and opens doors we wouldn’t open ourselves.

I tell this to Melissa, and she says, “I know. That’s what my horse is like for me.”

It's reframing: When you feel like you're in the right place, you can reframe the bad stuff to feel like good stuff. I learned this from all the counseling I went through after being at the World Trade Center when it fell. Now that it's almost the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I field a phone call each week from a reporter writing a story about how 9/11 affected the survivors, and I always talk about reframing.

I'm starting to think where I fit, in terms of my career, is saying what none of us wants to hear, and then reframing it so it feels good.

I used to get upset about people thinking I'm an idiot. For example, when I was writing on Yahoo Finance, I wrote along side Suze Orman. And people would write such hateful stuff about me and Suze (imagine the most offensive gay slurs you can think of) that it was part of someone's daily tasks to delete awful comments. I used to think I got those comments because I was writing for the wrong audience, or not connecting with people, or something that signaled I was not in my right place.

But I'm thinking that the job of annoying people is actually a good fit for me.

Last week I wrote a post for BNET about how diversity is bad at the beginning of a startup. I did not think this was particularly controversial topic because I am talking, in this article, about a very short period in a very specific type of company: the time between the seed round and the A round of a startup.  Those companies are mostly founded by men, and men would increase their company's chances of survival by not partnering with a women.

Really, this is not news: Diversity is bad for small companies. I published this research four years ago, with not much fanfare. But now, when I apply the research to a specific type of company, I get killed in feminist diatribes on blogs like Jezebel and Built in Chicago.

But so what? I think I'm right. And I think I'm right that most women don't even want to be a part of the founding team of those startups because those companies are high-risk ventures that ruin your personal life. (I blogged about that — originally for Tech Crunch– here.) And guess what? Tons of men and women told me I was wrong. But I did not get one criticism from one woman who is CEO of a venture-funded startup while she has young kids at home.

I got tons of complaints from women who are pregnant and say their passion for startups will be undaunted by having kids. But really, this is what they wish. These women wish they fit in everywhere. Women wish they were being pushed out instead of just stepping to the side. Women want to feel they can do everything, but we can't.

Look, we know the baby boomers failed at work-life balance. We know it doesn't exist. So let's just start talking about things that are real. You can have a rip-roaring career in a great big city or you can have a goat on your driveway climbing on your car. You can't have both. You can have kid-centered days or you can have  career-centered days. You can't have both. Let's just stop lying to ourselves because it's not helping anyone.

All we can do is reframe. We can say that we are so lucky to have all these choices. We can choose what we want, we just can't choose everything.

It is real that twentysomething women need to worry more about having kids than a career if they want kids. It's not pleasant or nice or encouraging to say, but it's true. It's true that reporting sexual harassment is old-school and stupid. It would be great if we could take down every lecherous boss, but we simply cannot.  It's true that  everyone would rather have a miscarriage than an abortion. Someone has to talk about this, and I like that it's me.

I think I fit where people want to hear the truth.

I am settling into my role of the bearer of bad news. I have found, in my personal life, that if I face everything, even if it's bad, then at least I have a chance at making it better. This is true for women at work, too. So let's get going.

I can see why she wouldn't want to have to deal with me. But, if I am not a reliable reference then I'm probably also, in her eyes, not a reliable person for assessing whether the job that Melissa took is totally stupid for her to take. So maybe she is just ignoring my blog anyway. Or maybe she is printing out each post and putting it on she office wall and throwing darts at it.

The second-to-last day Melissa was here, we went berry picking.

The farm is full of little pockets of wild blackberries. And we set out to pick enough for me to make a pie.

We sort of stick together, but it's fun to search the sides of the hayfields til you find your own bush full of berries.

We each took our own bucket and, did you ever read that book Blueberries for Sal? In the book, the little kid eats more berries than she puts in her bucket. It's best to do that when you think no one's looking.

After a while, it starts to feel like you have picked everything. And you don't want to go back where someone else has picked, but as you walk toward that place where they have already picked, invariably, you find plenty that they missed.

If you approach a bush from the left, you end up missing the berries you'd find if you approached the bush from the right. And, really, the angles of approach are infinite. For example, my son specializes in the berries growing closer to the ground.

The same variety of approach exists for career coaching as well. I, for one, have given bad career advice (like, for example, to my brother's college roommate,) and most of the time that I've given bad career advice it's been because I have a perspective that just doesn't shift in that instance. For example, I have very little patience for people who won't leave a terrible career because they need to earn six-figures.

So–back to Melissa. I have told her before that I think she is a phenomenal photographer. I think she should earn a living doing that. Melissa has a problem that is really, really common for people with Asperger Syndrome. She is almost always the smartest person in the room, but she can't last in a job.

She is not alone. People think they would like to hire me, but really, I'm a nightmare. And really, at this point in my life, I don't think I would try to do life without an assistant. I'm just not good enough at the day-to-day life that non-Asperger's people find manageable. Like, going to the DMV, sitting through a long, loud dinner , or navigating an airport.

The issue here is executive function. People with Asperger's have terrible executive function. We cannot stay focused on the thing that is most important. We are easily distracted by what is most interesting. This is a low-level problem for everyone. But for someone with Asperger's it means forgetting to respond to someone who says, "Hi, how are you?" or, literally, burning down the house.

You won't believe what I am about to tell you. Melissa's new job is an executive assistant. I asked her, "What? How can someone with terrible executive function take a job with the word executive in it?"

"Shut up," she says. "You were a CEO. That's executive."

We have this fight all the time. I think she should work at Forever 21, which is her favorite store, and do photography on the side. Today, retail is a totally respectable career path, and the trend to do a day job while you get the real job up and running is so mainstream that Jon Acuff just published a book called Quitter: Closing the Gap Between Your Day Job and Your Dream Job.

Melissa does not want to work at Forever 21. She is making way more money at the job which I am not going to name because maybe if I don't name the company then Melissa won't be mad that I'm writing this post.

Yesterday, Melissa packed up her life. She is great at packing. She changes countries every year, so Wisconsin to Texas is nothing for her. It's not a move so much as a hop, skip, and jump. She wheels and deals frequent flier miles until she lines up her international miles to coincide with her local miles and her premier flier perks and soon she's flying six suitcases for free with a seat upgrade to boot.

She throws out fashion souvenirs of Milan and Hong Kong and Shanghai and other places where the clothes don't work on a farm, or in Austin, Texas.

As she moves her clothes out of the cupboard, I move my books back in.

I'm a grouch that Melissa is moving, but I am happy to have a place for my books. I lift up the old wooden door we used as a makeshift desk, and I forgot she raised the door to the right height by putting books underneath.

I find Picture This, by Molly Bang. It is one of my favorite books ever. Every designer in the world should read this book, and anyone who wants to give criticism to designers should read this book. In fact–Wait. I have an idea. Designers: pass this book out to everyone you have to work with, and tell them, "You cannot give me input about my design until you have read this book." This is a great strategy because smart people will read the book and understand that design is way too hard for them to be telling you they don't like the color blue. And dumb people mostly don't read books so most of them won't read the book and you will never have to talk to them.

Melissa is packing and I am unpacking and we are both sad. I will miss Melissa and anyway, I really think if the Farmer was going to cheat, he'd find someone to cheat with without my help. It's not like men are dependent on their wives supplying resources for cheating. (If they were though, wouldn't it be a great world?)

Melissa wants me to understand why she is leaving. I don't want to be overbearing. I know the kinds of parents who want you to do what they want you to do. I think half of my coaching business is giving people in their 20s confidence to choose a life that their parents think is totally stupid. I don't want to play the role of that limiting parental influence.

Then the phone rings, and I hear Melissa talking to her friend Missa. Melissa sounds like a college girl. She talks about things I don't care about like Facebook status updates, straightening hair, new stores in Austin. I realize that Melissa is a twentysomething who has adjusted to my family life in order to get stability. But now she needs to go back to her twentysomething life.

Of course I think the choices she is making are lame. Everyone thought the choices I made in my twenties were lame. I stuck with them, but I wish I had had more confidence doing that. I wish I had believed more in my ability to steer my own life.

So I hug Melissa. I don't like touching anyone besides the Farmer and my kids, so it's a big deal that I'm hugging Melissa. She knows that. I tell her, "You need to go be a 27 year old, right? That's what you're doing. I get it."

The next day, we try the berries again. It's absurd that we are doing it the day she is leaving. But I think it's normal to cope with a very sad goodbye by ignoring it. Besides, the berries are only ripe for a few days each summer and I don't want to miss them.

We go back to where we were the day before. We each go to places we didn't go yesterday, and I find myself watching everyone else find berries that the other people missed. I want to be the person who can see answers from many perspectives.

I want to help people by seeing past my own experience to a place where the number-one value is people making their own decisions—good or bad. I want to help my children do that, too. But I think the first step is for me to work on helping myself to have faith in my ability to make my own decisions.

I watched gunslinger movies with him when he was groggy and I made sure to talk only about innocuous topics like the state of world politics, something that we’d never fight about.

I can’t tell you everything went smoothly. I forgot to let the chickens out a few days. I lost the new bag of Cat Chow and served ground beef for two days of heaven on earth for the cats. And, there were a few times the goats got into the house. But we figured out how to handle everything.

Until the Farmer felt better: His back didn’t hurt so he wanted to work. So, he just stopped taking the Percocet. Cold turkey. And because we live in the country, the doctor gave the Farmer sixty Percocet pills with no instructions for how to go off narcotics.

For those of you who know nothing about Percocet, first of all, if you ever get that many pills prescribed, sell them on the streets of New York City to fund your child’s education. That’s how hard they are to come by.

And there’s a reason: They are highly addictive. I’m linking to some stuff about getting off high dosages of Percocet, but I’m summarizing: You can’t go cold turkey. You have to go slowly or you make yourself crazy.

So the Farmer was crazy and I had to have a drug intervention to tell him he was a total jerk and having withdrawal and he couldn’t tell and he needed to do it more systematically.

I convinced him. But he is not a guy who lays in bed all day. And he had already done it for five days. He wanted to work. On Percocet. I told him we agreed no machinery on Percocet. He told me how it’s not fair that I want him to taper and I want him to not work.

Then we have a screaming match about how life is not fair. That is the first topic. Which slides into:

Me: Don’t scream at me—

The Farmer: No you’re screaming at me—

No. Fuck you.

I told you I don’t like swearing.

I told you I don’t like you being mean.

This did not happen. I mean it did. It has happened so many times that it’s like the bass beat in the background of our everyday life.

So we did that and then he told me he had to work. It was a work emergency.

Here’s what he said: “I have to check cows.”

You might think I know nothing about farming, but I have actually learned a lot precisely for figuring out if the Farmer is BSing me or not.

Me: Your dad can check them.

The Farmer: I don’t want to call him. It’s a masculinity thing.

I swear to God. He said this.

Then he told me he had to be off Percocet on Monday because he’s shipping hogs and cattle.

This is farmer-speak for putting them in a truck and sending them to the butcher to be killed.

I tell him he can taper off the Percocet like he is supposed to, and his parents can ship pigs and cows.

Then we have a huge fight. About what really needs to happen: how his parents don’t need him to ship the cows and pigs.

He says he wants to be in charge of it.

I tell him he’s 40 and he’s too old to show up at work just to make sure people know he’s in charge.

So he has to tell me that I make his life hell.

Now that I’ve been with him three years, I know this is his way of telling me he doesn’t want to talk.

When I tell you what I did next, you will think I’m a bitch. But so what? I’m going to tell you anyway. I told him he had to talk to me all day. I told him I was going to follow him around the farm nonstop, how I would even drive off-road to check the cows in the forest.

So he says, “Don’t threaten me.”

I say, “I am telling you what I need. I need you to talk with me.”

"All day?"

"Yes. All day."

"It’s past my comfort zone."

"Talking to me for one second is past your comfort zone."

He laughs. He says, "Fine."

We are talking. He wants to wander… past the corn…past the hay…through the vegetable garden…

We talk about nothing. I bitch to him about how he’s dishonest to himself about the farm, and he says things like, “Okay, you win. I'm not as honest as you.” Or, “You’re right, I’m never going to be able to make you happy.”

These are ways to avoid having to have a conversation with me, so I don’t relent. I know he’s exhausted from talking, but look, you have to trust me on this that he has to talk for two hours before he actually says anything besides how he would rather be single than have a hard conversation.

I tell him that the real reason he’s trying to kick the Percocet so fast is because he’s scared his parents don’t need him. He wants to be needed.

Then I tell him, "Look, your parents just wrote you out of their will. They obviously don’t think they need you."

This hits hard. Though not as hard as it’s hitting you now, when you read it, because I’ve said this to the Farmer a lot of times. Ever since the parents wrote him out of the will.

The next part of the conversation is deleted. I had to—the Farmer was too upset. But here is some background material so you can follow along.

As you know, from my Thanksgiving Drama post, the Farmer has three sisters, all of whom have kids. I am not allowed to tell you who the Farmer's parents are giving the farm to. We have to keep that a secret. You might know from the post about why I do not do family secrets that keeping another family secret is eventually going to make me physically ill. I am positive that keeping family secrets only serves to protect people who treat family members like shit.

(That is the end of the deleted, secret part. The good news about me having to write about the deletion is that I got to link to two of the most popular posts on the blog. Maybe you missed them. They are good to read.)

So, suffice it to say that the farmer asked his parents why they aren't leaving any of the land to his children, and his parents said that they are not his real children.

I think the farmer is devastated and he needs to stop farming with them because he’s devastated.

He tells me he is not devastated and he is happy farming with them.

I tell him he’s lying to himself and he’s taking it out on me, like when he tells me I am unreasonable about Percocet and he has to ship hogs. It’s really not that I’m reasonable but that he’s scared to miss a day of shipping hogs and won’t admit it.

I don't care specifically about the farm. I mean, I didn’t grow up expecting I’d have farm land. But I do care about feeling like the Farmer is losing his self-respect over this and taking it out on me.

Okay. So I refuse to let the Farmer stop talking.

He says he’ll talk if we can go somewhere comfortable.

We can’t go in the house. My ex is there with the kids. We do our best fighting when my ex is distracting the kids.

The Farmer wants to go to the pig building.

The pig building: I tried to get him to throw out his gross furniture that he had had since college and he couldn’t do it, so he put it in the pig building.

Now he wants to sit on his sofa. There are two. I sit across from him.

He has nothing to say, of course. This is how a Farmer talks to his wife. By saying nothing. So I look around. My son’s 4H pig project pigs are in the building, so by pig farm standards, the place is clean.

Where we are sitting looks kind of like an island in the middle of pig blood, but the Farmer told me it’s really just muddy water.

The Farmer says, “What do you think of the pigs?”

I tell him that does not count as conversation.

I tell him I’m going to last a lot longer on the sofa than he is because I can sit still and he can’t. I take off my boots and sort of make myself comfortable, like it’s the living room.

Finally he tells me he wants to transition to a smaller farm operation, on just the 125 acres he owns outright. But he’s scared. He doesn’t know for sure how to do it. He’s making a plan.

Then we are talking. I tell him I’d be scared, too. I tell him I know he’s built up a great business and it’s hard to walk away.

I am not one with extra empathy, but I have plenty for career changes. And I think that’s what he’s really going through. He’s worked on the same farm for 40 years, and now he has to switch. He has to make operations work on his own farm, he has to figure out all new animal and crop logistics and all new cash flow planning, and it is scary.

I think about the article in Fortune magazine this week titled, "Reinvent Your Career." about who can succeed in changing careers. Fortune reports that the people who can do it "are all people who love learning by doing. They are not victims. At a time when many people react passively to career bumps, reinventors took control."

I know the Farmer can succeed. He can be like the reinventors profiled in Fortune magazine. But I know that after two hours of pressing him, the most he can possibly say is that he’s really disappointed by his parents' choices and he’s scared about farming on his own. It’s huge for him to say that.

I tell him he doesn’t have to talk anymore. I thank him for talking for so long. And I thank him for sharing his feelings.

We leave. But not before we have make-up sex in the pig barn.

Ten years ago, when I was pitching my book to publishers, one publisher leaned back in his chair and said, "I don't get it, she's never worked in Human Resources, she's not part of Generation Y, and we can't even figure out what her career is. So how is she qualified to give career advice to young people?"

I got sweaty. I had pretty much run out of money, and I had spent my last dollar on getting clothes that would hide that I was pregnant. Every time I thought about this book deal falling through, I felt sick.

My agent said, "She is great at seeing trends. She sees trends before everyone else. Generation Y is going to be huge in the workplace. Alternative careers are going to be huge. She is the only person talking about it. She is a franchise. She will be writing books about trendspotting for the rest of her life."

I could have hugged my agent. I had never thought of myself the way she described me. I mostly just thought of myself as someone who couldn't even handle playing on the professional beach volleyball tour for more than a year.

So, with my agent's endorsement (sort of—I think she has fired me because of my insolence when it comes to not following publishing industry conventions) I present my three favorite trends of this year:

1. Cheating on your company will be okay. Companies will allow employees to do start-ups while they are full-time as a way of keeping top talent. Right now entrepreneurship is totally hot. A lot of people quit their job so they can do a start-up. Microsoft has officially allowed people to do a start-up while they work full-time.  Other companies will follow.

2. Thieves will have to change tactics as people will leverage social media to track down and punish thieves. This is actually already happening. Check out this guy who snapped photos of someone using his stolen Macbook via his stolen Macbook. But the trend will become so big that people will have to resort to new tactics of thievery to avoid the public embarrassment of social media.

3. We will live in an era of  eccentric collections. A few trends are converging right now. First, materialism is not cool. Gen X hates it, but also, post-crash America has revealed a new, credit-weary consumer. Second, content curation is a huge online right now –  companies launching products that help people make sense of too much stuff. The convergence of these two situations will be that people shift their natural, human tendency to collect from the physical world to the virtual world, which means what we collect will expand.

Paul Hassing is a guy who sends me great links about collections. He's the person who first told me about Pinterest, and he sent me a link to The Puddle Blog, which is a great collection of puddles.

I like that I got to spot three trends in one post. I notice this stuff and it starts burning in my head until I have the chance to tell someone. I can't tell if I'm on target until I start telling someone. An audience makes a difference. Are you wondering if you have trends in your head that you're right about?

How do you know if you're working hard enough at it? Melissa is great at spotting trends for social media and for fashion (two areas I'm not good at). She is pretty difficult to work with, but she gets hired by random people to do random stuff, like tell them what social media tools will be best for attracting renters in rural areas in the next three years. Are you wondering what Melissa does with her days? She reads. She mostly reads off her iPhone, which she sleeps with. She reads so much that she has to have a stack of magazines wherever she is. Just in case. Here is what she was doing two hours ago:

Do you know what she's doing right now? She's thinking. She is staring at the wall. Probably processing all the stuff in her head. This is what most trendspotters do: look, listen, process. Of course other trendspotters get paid for doing it, but Melissa illustrates the point that it might be something you're born with—the ability to spot trends. Because that kind of stuff that you're born with is the stuff you do whether you are paid or not. (Would-be novelists please take note.)

I was talking to Tyler Cowen last year. Or the year before. Whenever it was that his book, Create Your Own Economy, came out. Before Business Week named him the world's hottest economist, which, of course, makes me feel hot because I have spoken with the hottest economist in the world.

In fact, I have argued with him. Tyler was telling me that happiness is not that important to people—that some people just find pleasure in consuming information and ideas and they don't need the trappings of happiness. First I told him he was crazy and maybe a sociopath and then I stole his idea and made it my own in my wildly popular post which I never acknowledged as perhaps a little bit stolen: Is your life happy or interesting? Anyway, Tyler is great at spotting trends, which makes him the world's most interesting (is that what famous means?) economist and also a totally fun blogger. (Here's his blog.)

Bottom line: you can bet that if you do not process information as a way to feel like you are alive, then you are probably not a trend spotter.

How do you know if you're on to something? Remember that picture at the top of the post? Did you know what it was for? If  you've had a baby, the answer is yes. The idea of a parent rocking next to a sleeping baby is so incredibly obvious that it's amazing this chair has not been invented before. Parents get sick of holding a baby. You do not know this until you've had a baby of your own. So the chair is an absolute yes. It's got great craftsmanship and it's a great idea. Everyone will say yes to this chair. (And then people will say, how much? )

The way you know if you're right or not is that you hear peoples' reactions. Good ideas get two reactions:

One reaction is like when the proverbial light bulb goes on when the person hears or sees the idea. The idea is so on-target that it's a pleasurable moment for the person who sees a piece in the jigsaw puzzle of life fitting into place.

The other reaction you can get to a good idea is shock: This is terrible, awful, upsetting, offensive. You know you're on target with that reaction as well. Because you think it might be right, but it's so counter-intuitive that people cannot see it's right because they would have to switch their world view. I experienced this when I started saying that women should not report sexual harassment.

How do you know if what you're saying is not new? You see confirmation that you're right. It's the kind of confirmation where you can tell for sure that the world agrees with you and you are right smack dab in the middle of a trend. Because if you're right there with everyone else, then you're not doing anything new.

I had that feeling when I looked at the New Yorker cover a few weeks ago. Just when I was settling into the idea of me being a city girl with a farmer's wife life, I see that I'm a Park Slope cliche:

And then there's the be-careful-what-you-wish-for syndrome. Because it's hard to know what you'd like to do for eight hours a day til you try it.

I used to think I wanted to be a sex writer. My master's thesis from graduate school was about my sex life. But when I tried to support myself writing about sex, when I started pitching stories to Cosmo, I found that no one wanted to hire me; magazines hire people to write about officially important sex research. I wanted to write about me.

So I looked for that magic intersection of things I'm good at and things I like to do and things people will pay me for. And I ended up being a career writer. Fortunately, though, I was able to be a career writer writing about me.

Which is probably what I wanted to do all along. So this is a great argument for the advice I give all the time which is to shut up about not having your dream job and just take any job so you can learn about what people will pay you to do that you might like to do.

Still, I am very excited to tell you that finally, someone offered to pay me to write about my sex life. I had a great time, but surprise, I discovered that I couldn't resist slipping in some career advice anyway. So I guess I have my dream job, right here. If there were such thing as a dream job.

Anyway, here's the piece I wrote, for The Daily Beast.