Thanks to dating sites, we have a great way to gather data about the human condition without having to write grant proposals to the National Science Foundation. I first became aware of this bastion of data when OK Cupid announced that older women benefit from showing cleavage in their photos, but younger women don't. I immediately [...]

Psychology Today did an interview with me. It was about my most triumphant moments in my life, and how I overcame obstacles to get there. I knew immediately that the interview was going to be a disaster, so I told them I wanted to do the interview written, rather than on the phone.
Then I didn’t [...]

My current favorite blogger is Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports. (Not safe for work.) His topic, as far as I can tell, is smut and snobbery. I think that even though my blog is pointed at the intersection of life and work, I wish it were at the intersection of smut and snobbery. Because I am [...]

The culmination of my four-year obsession with happiness research is that I think people need to choose between an interesting life or happy life. (Note: This does not mean you are interesting or not interesting. I am talking about what values guide your decision making.) I think the things that make life happy have to do [...]

I've been walking around with the July/August 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review constantly, for close to three years. Sometimes, if I’m getting on a plane, I’ll put it with the other heavy stuff into my luggage, and then get it out later. When my last car broke down in the middle of an [...]

I think I’m over the happiness thing. I think I am thinking that the pursuit of happiness is, well, vacuous. I don’t think people are happy or unhappy. Because I think knowing if we are happy would require knowing the meaning of life, or the ultimate goal, or the key to the world, or something [...]

It’s the time of year when I list my top posts of 2009. When I first started doing this top-posts-of-the-year thing, I felt obligated to actually give you the real version of what was most popular. Now I don’t feel so obligated.
If you’re wondering, some of the posts that brought in more than 400 comments [...]

The workplace is set up to reward extroverts. For example, ENTJs make up only 3% of the population but they comprise a wide majority of the world's CEOs. The bias against introverts in American society is well documented, including research that shows that a spot on the cheerleading team foreshadows career success much more reliably [...]

Some days I look through old posts, reminding myself of posts that I've written that I like and that I should link to. Often, this process serves to let me procrastinate writing while pretending to be engaged in writing. If I were a body builder, this would be me looking in the mirror instead of [...]

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 [...]