My ex-husband worked in the nonprofit sector for a while. And you know what? He rarely got health insurance. At one point, we were completely stressed out about not being insured, and he asked his boss what everyone else was doing, and she said, “Can’t you get insurance from your spouse? That’s what we do.”
That’s [...]

The farmer broke up with me five times the first five months we were together, last year. So I learned that he had huge commitment issues.
I tried to do the advisable thing to do when you’re with someone who has commitment issues. I tried to fall in love with someone else. But I didn’t. I [...]

I starting to think that the most effective preparation for a good career is religion.
I am writing this post on the eve of Yom Kippur. I am constantly trying to figure out how religion fits in my life. Sometimes I think it doesn’t fit. I mean, I’m a Jew dating a pig farmer. And I [...]

I usually leave work at 2:30 to pick up my kids. But on days when I ditch the kids and work to go to the farm, I allay my guilt by staying at work well after 2:30 so everyone will think I stayed late. I call the farmer when I’m on the road because I [...]

A good manager is someone who makes everyone feel like he or she is creative in their work. Because creative work is the most fulfilling work, and we are each capable of that kind of work.
My favorite research on this topic is from John Mirowsky, professor of sociology at University of Texas, Austin.
Mirowsky finds that [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

This past week was Spring Break and toward the end, somehow my ex and my nanny fell out of the picture, and I was doing a lot of taking care of the kids, which, I have said before, is not what I’m great at. I wish I were. I tried for four years to be [...]

It’s a big day, and I’m excited to take a pause from work with the rest of the country to watch Barack Obama give his inagural speech.
In the meantime, I’m thinking about the day of service. How Obama wants the country to come together in the name of service. And I heard MTV declare, [...]

It is well known in the sex research arena that the more educated a woman is the more often she will receive oral sex.
I have always wondered if this is true for salary as well. For example, if your salary goes up by $50,000, how much more likely are you to receive oral sex?
I cannot [...]

In the middle of 2007, I was interviewed by Stephane Grenier for his book, Blog Blazers. The book came out this week, and it's a nice resource for understanding the approach top bloggers take to their trade. (Examples of interviews include Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, and JD Roth.)
I am publishing my own interview here, [...]

New evidence from famed happiness researcher Richard Easterlin shows that women are happier than men in early adulthood, but at age 41, this switches, and men are happier later in life. Easterlin says this gap comes from frustration over an inability to get married. Because most people want to be married, and if you want [...]

The idea that we somehow have a certain amount of potential that we must live up to is a complete crock. People who say they are not living up to their potential do not understand what living means.
Life is very hard. We each probably have some fundamental goals, even if we don't think of them [...]

Maybe the reason we're so bad at saving for retirement is that retirement seems so ridiculous today. The workplace no longer demands that we put off our hopes and dreams until we've worked 40 years. And Baby Boomers aren't exactly retiring in droves either, which makes younger people think that maybe they won't want to [...]

My husband and I are getting a divorce. It's really hard to write this for a lot of reasons, but the one that comes to mind this moment is that it's so crappy to be in the middle of a divorce when I make a living telling people how to run their lives.
Fortunately I also [...]

Happiness is not really different in each person. In fact, science shows us happiness is basically the same for all of us. And our roadblocks to happiness are all basically the same as well — that we each think we are special and the research doesn't apply to us, so we just keep trying to [...]