This post is cross-posted at TechCrunch.

We need to get more guys who are running tech startups to decide instead to be stay-at-home dads.

What do you think of that? Stupid, right? That’s what it sounds like when anyone suggests that we need to get more women doing startups.

If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying. Women outperform men in school at such a huge rate that it’s easier to get into college as a male than a female. And women take that to the bank by earning more than men in their 20s. Women would probably continue out-earning men except that when men and women have kids, women choose to downshift way more often than men do.

Clearly, women have a choice. There are plenty of opportunities out there for women if the women would just continue working in their 30s the same way they did in their 20s. So clearly, women don’t want to. Women are choosing children over startups.

So it seems that women are making decisions for themselves just fine. It’s just that they are not the decisions that men make. This should not surprise anyone. Men and women are different. So what?

On top of that there is evidence that the members of the VC community go out of their way to attract women. Of course, this makes sense. VCs look for underserved markets. Women are likely to address different markets than men, and since there are so few women founders compared to men founders, it’s likely that women are addressing an underserved market. So VCs want to talk to women.

So VCs are definitely giving women a fair shake, it’s just that women don’t pitch. And women are definitely feeling that they can do whatever they want, it’s just that women aren’t choosing to create tech startups.

So what?

Let’s look at all the women writing articles saying that we need women to do startups. Here’s an article by Jean Bittingham. She says the world needs women entrepreneurs now more than ever. But what has she done? She’s an author and an academic. Of course. She has no idea what life is like running a startup, so she thinks it’s a good idea to tell other women to do that while she writes books. I’ve done both startups and book writing, and book writing is like a vacation compared to a startup.

Here’s a post by Tara Brown wondering why women don’t comment on VC blogs. Here’s the answer: Because women don’t care. Is that okay? I actually wonder why Tara cares, because she’s a web site producer. I don’t think she has ever raised money for a startup. But I can tell that all three times I’ve done it, raising money for a startup has been hell, so I think we should really be asking why anyone would want to try to convince someone to do it.

TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis has taken on the cause of women in tech. She writes about it a lot:  here’s a piece where she rips on how mainstream America identifies with women in tech. But the problem is Tsotsis has never said why women are personally suffering from not being involved in the tech startup life. Really, how is it making any woman’s life better to say that women should be doing startups? And hey, if startup life is so great then how about trading in the writer’s life for a founder’s life? It’s really different. Try that for a few years, and then tell all the other women you know, who are outearning the men they know, or taking care of kids, to trade their life for startup life.

The people trying to give solutions are as lame as the people pointing to a problem.

Whoever started the TED Women’s conference is pathetic. Which would you rather say you spoke at? TED? Or the TED Ghetto?

Fred Wilson says there aren’t enough women running startups. What does this mean, exactly? He acknowledges that women don’t want to do startups in their 30s. And he himself points out that by the time women are 40 and they want to go back to work full-time, these women are not going to relocate to Silicon Valley.  But the truth is that if there were really a problem with there not being enough women running startups, then people like Fred would fund startups in suburbia. He’d fund startups that run at half-speed to accommodate carpools. He’d fund startups that have part-time ambitions. He’s not doing that, though. So clearly there is not THAT big a problem that women are not running startups: The market for funding has spoken, and it is still funding mostly men.

Peter Thiel recommends that women start companies from age 20-25 so they have one under their belt before they have kids.  But why? Is he noticing that women who are 20- 25 are sad about where their life is going? Peter, here’s some news for you: Women are most happy, in their whole lives, at age 28. So I don’t think you are identifying a problem here. I don’t think women are lamenting at age 28 that they did not found a startup at age 20-25. (Something to think about: Men are most unhappy at age 28. Maybe it is because they are so obsessed with launching a startup.)

Sheryl Sandberg says that women need to “lean into their careers.” Sandberg runs Facebook. She’s doing a great job. She also has two young kids, and a husband who works at a startup. I think you’d be really hard-pressed to find a mom with two young kids who wants Sandberg’s life. Which is why women are not “leaning into their careers” like Sandberg says they need to in order to get to the top.

Pew Research shows that most women who have kids would rather have a part-time job than either work full time or stay at home with kids full time. This sheds a lot of light on why there are so few female founders, doesn’t it?

But now I have an idea: How about giving some respect to women who grew up in the 1970s, with feminist revolution baby boomer moms, and are still brave enough to say “I don’t want to work full time. I can work full time. But I don’t want to. “

Here is a Blueprint for a Woman’s Life which I published. It is full of recommendations for how to make choices based on what we know women really want for themselves. It does not involve getting VC funding.

Because women are earning more money than men in their 20s and underrepresented in the startup world in their 30s and 40s.  And I don’t hear a clamoring of women in the US who are saying “I want to do a startup and no one is letting me!” In fact, women are starting small businesses without VC help, at a very high rate.

For the most part, women are not complaining about the lack of VC funding in the world. They are complaining about the lack of jobs with flexible hours. And I don’t see anyone on TechCrunch addressing that when they address women.

Men could change the world by staying home with their kids and parenting them. Men would provide a totally different perspective as the lunchroom parent. They would ask for totally different after-school programming. Men would hire different babysitters and different SAT tutors. Because men are different than women.

This is the same argument people use for why more women should do startups: They will have a different perspective, think of different models, lend a different sensibility to the industry.

The problem is that people do not need to be told what they should choose. People are pretty good at making choices for themselves. Men can stay home. Women can do startups. The thing is, most don’t want to. And that’s okay.

It is the night of the new nanny. She is maybe a nanny or maybe a Spanish teacher. It is unclear. She is a blog reader who told me she could help me.

Lots of people offer to come to the farm and help me get that mythic work-life balance that no one really has. But this woman said good things in her emails — that she worked with autistic kids, her native language is Spanish, she loves my blog. I hesitated. She said she has done this before, gone to someone’s house for a short time to help get the things back on track. So I said yes.

I had Spanish-speaking nannies in New York City. They are so easy to find there. It should be easy here, too. Darlington has a relatively large Hispanic community. They come to rural areas so the police leave them alone.

Here’s an interesting thing about the Hispanic community here. We are one of the only counties in the whole US that has a Hispanic population that is more educated than the white population. The white families have been here for forever, and they don’t take big risks—they grow up here and do exactly what their parents did. The Hispanic people have huge ambition, they took huge risks so their kids could grow up in the US and do great things, and they look down on the white people as hicks.

We come into contact with Hispanic people when they buy animals from us. Once a bunch of Hispanic men came by to buy some pigs. But the Farmer and I were having a fight. I was screaming at him that he doesn’t ever talk to me and he was saying how he didn’t care and I should just take the kids and leave.

I said, "You never wanted a family! You should go live with your pigs! All you want is some woman who doesn’t talk to you and just gives you blow jobs!"

The guy who was trying to buy the pigs but couldn’t because I was in the way — he just sort of stood there, a little ahead of all his friends in the truck.

And the Farmer looked at me and looked at the guy, and the Farmer said, “How many of you guys understand English?”

And the guy said, “All of us.”

I’ve tried to hire someone locally who speaks Spanish to work for us. I can’t tell if no one is interested because the Hispanic community just doesn’t want to have anything to do with the white people or if it’s our family in particular that is scary, after the day of pigs.

So I thought maybe this woman could come and negotiate something with someone here who speaks Spanish. So I bought her a plane ticket for a week-long trip. As a try-it-out thing. Also, I did a background check on her. I have a friend who does those for me. I wanted to be careful.

To be honest, I did not talk with the person on the phone. Because I hate the phone. And I did not pick her up at the airport. Jeanenne did. And the person, who I will call S, got to our house at 9pm. The Farmer and I were sitting in the living room waiting.

She has three suitcases. One is full of gifts and Mexican food. She is prepared. She looks like she has diabetes, maybe. She is that kind of fat—the fat was oddly distributed in a too-even way.

She has to use the bathroom and she nearly pulls down the bannister going up the stairs and I am seriously worried that she will not be able to make it living in our house.

I tell S the schedule for the next day. I’m in Chicago for cello lessons and the Farmer is in Madison with the other son. I had sort of hoped that S would take the boys to Madison but it’s two hours away. She does not look mobile enough for taking care of the boys in Madison.

S says she will cook dinner for the Farmer and the son.  She is very excited to do that and it becomes clear to me that what she wants is to be our cook.

I say I will have to show her how to work the stove. She says she can figure it out, but I have spray-painted the whole thing with chalkboard paint so you can’t see the buttons, so really, she will not figure it out.

I show her tricks to finding the on button.

We sit back down in the living room.

She says she brought gifts.

I say, “Oh! Thank you.” I do not ask what because I hate gifts because I hate surprises. Actually, I like gifts that are surprises if the person is not there. I do not like having to be thankful and surprised and grateful all with the person right there. It’s a lot of required emotions for one moment.

I told her ahead of time not to bring gifts. The Farmer said she’d bring them anyway. He was right.

She says, “I brought you a copy of the book To Train Up a Child.”

For those of you who did not read my post about this book on my homeschooling blog, go read that right now. This book is about why people should beat their kids, and three kids have died from this way of parenting.

I say, “Oh, I’m so curious to see the book. How did you get a copy?”

“My friends buy it by the case. We love it.”

“What? Beating kids?”

“It’s not beating them unless they are very disobedient.”

“That’s crazy! This is crazy. Kids are dying.”

“No. It’s saving lives. It really works. There is proof.”

“What? Tell me the proof.”

“When the author of the book had his kids in a truck, and the truck caught on fire, he yelled ‘Get out of the truck!’ and they all ran. Being obedient saved their lives.”

Before I could say anything, before I could even move, the Farmer said, “We’re going to bed now. Goodnight.” And he as he stood up he grabbed my hand so that I had to leave with him.

I said goodnight.

Then, in the bedroom, we laughed. For a second. And then he told me that I absolutely cannot have another person visit the house that I have not met for coffee first. He reminded me of the last family. Who I ripped apart on the homeschooling blog. It’s amazing, really, that anyone will come visit.

So the next day S makes breakfast. She makes cactus. The boys ask for cornflakes, but they are interested to see the Farmer try cactus. The thing is that we don’t want to have all new food. We want stability and predictability. So this breakfast makes no one happy.

It also does not make S happy. She thinks we need to be more strict with the kids and this means the Farmer should sit at the head of the table. She is disturbed that we have her at the head of the table. She does not understand that it’s an expression of how little we care about who is at the head. Or maybe she does understand that. Maybe that is the way she is planning to help us.

We do not find out because while I’m driving to Chicago and back, Jeanenne is buying a plane ticket for S to go back early.

The next morning, when I tell S, she seems to not care. She says, “Well, I’ll still read your blog.”

All in all, with the plane tickets, and Jeanenne driving to and from the airport, and the $500 I promised to pay S for the week, it cost me about $2000.

But it’s a good lesson, because I realized that I am pretty good at having a fun job and a fun family at the same time. I like cooking for the family.  I like having a cozy family, just the four of us, on the quiet winter farm. I like our meals together, and I like the dance of driving that I have composed between me and Jeanenne and the Farmer. I am actually doing pretty well at getting my job done and taking care of kids. Having S come tell me that she will fix my life makes me realize that I like my life.

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.

Take a look at Steve Martin's business card. I love it because it brings to light the lack of meaning we often feel during the daily routine of work life.

When I was new to the workforce, I saw two ends of a spectrum. On one end, risking one's life to save dying children, and on the other end, hedge-fund banking to make millions.

If you see the work world that way, then you feel compelled to choose between making good money or doing good deeds. But at this point, I don’t think the world breaks down like that. I think all jobs are meaningful.

1. Meaningfulness comes from relationships.
My introduction to this way of thinking was Sonja Lyubomirsky’s research about happiness and work (compiled into a book I like: The How of Happiness.) She found that janitors are happier than lawyers and the discrepancy arises from the amount of meaningfulness they perceived in their work.

The janitors felt that they were helping people by keeping the school running well. They knew the students and the teachers and they had a nice relationship with them: people asked for help, the janitor gave help, the person thanked the janitor.

With the lawyers, it’s the opposite. People hate having to ask a lawyer for help. They want the lawyer to solve their problems, but in general, you only call a lawyer when you have a problem you will not be able to get out of without one. So the lawyer can’t really make people feel good. On top of that, a lawyer charges by the hour so there is almost never a thank you in exchange for a small piece of work. (More rationale for ditching your dreams of law school.)

2. Meaningfulness comes from feeling some control.
Having control over one’s job and an ability to make a difference — through meeting goals, saving lives, solving problems — is what enables people to enjoy their work, according to research published in The Economist. The prestige of the given job is not nearly as important as being able to have an effect. If jobs are not challenging enough, then people are not happy because they don’t have a feeling of affecting someone else. People like being part of a group, they like being able to contribute.

Relative to the rest of life, work is predictable. Kids are totally unpredictable, health is unpredictable, friends and family are wild cards, but there are rules for work that people follow. Those generally accepted rules are what makes work a safe place to be.

3. Management creates meaning
The relationship between a boss and an employee should be very meaningful. Good management is actually about being nice. A manager’s job is to make people shine, to show them they can do more than they ever imagined and to make employees excited to come to work. Management’s job is to create meaningful work.

In the same vein, an employee’s job is to make their boss’s life better. Whatever you were hired for, whatever that job description said, the bottom line is that you are there to solve your boss’s problems. You will feel good at work if you are making your boss happy–it’s a symbiotic relationship.

4. Creating meaning yourself is empowering.
To be clear, a job does not give your life meaning. How you treat people and how you relate to communities and society is where you get your meaning. Work is just a great platform to create that meaning. You can choose whether or not you make your work meaningful. You can wait for someone else to magically anoint your job with meaning. But you will be waiting a long time. Instead, make work meaningful yourself. It’s an act of freedom, taking your life into your own hands.  

5. Look for opportunities.
My step-mom had cancer for more than a decade. She had a breast removed, she went into remission, then back to the hospital, then remission. At first I thought her life was becoming crazy and how could she cope? But then I saw that the best thing for her was that she kept going to work. The stability in her life was her job. She couldn’t control the cancer, or the treatments, or her energy, but she could control her workload and she could meet her goals when she was there.

When she couldn’t be at the office, her co-workers took over her workload so her job would be there for her when she returned. Every time.

When an office comes together to support someone in crisis the whole office is infused with meaning. The strength they gave my step-mom by enabling her to come to work, in turn gave strength to the family members trying to help take care of her.

Work has meaning because it provides stability in our lives, and we create meaning by helping co-workers to use that stability to be brave and strong in the rest of life.

Look around you, all the time — look for people at work who need help with their work.  Caring for your co-workers might be the most meaningful part of work for all of us.

When things got really bad — me trying to do everything, and me having marriage trouble — Melissa said, "You need a vacation." So the boys and Melissa and I went to Hermosa Beach. We stayed at a hotel called The Beach House. It's right on the ocean, and it's in front of volleyball courts I used to play on when I was on the pro circuit and too poor to stay in hotels as nice as this one.

I thought the best part of the vacation would be the hotel. It's dreamy – with a perfect balcony and a fireplace, and soft thick towels that I never had to wash.

But it turned out that the best part was watching the kids learn. The hotel was the facilitator.

The first thing the kids did was line up their Pokemon everywhere so the place felt like home.

Then we went to the ocean. I taught them about the undertow, and the way the water rises when a wave comes. And I told them that one kid dies every day in the dangers of the ocean. I made up the statistic, but I think it must be true, in some way.

I had this idea that I was not going to go in the water. I had this idea that the kids would be intimidated by the waves. But every time they got knocked over, they loved the waves more. And then I found, so did I.

When people talk about their job, they are really talking about their learning. When we say, "What do you do?" we really mean what do you learn? Because that's what makes a person interesting – what they are learning. No one wants to answer the question what do you do if they have a job where they  are not learning. That's how you know it's the learning that matters.

I've noticed that when I coach people, they are really looking for a job that will allow them to learn in the area they are most suited to learn. So, for example, an ENTJ (me) learns best while leading people. And an INFP learns best by talking one-on-one to other people. An ISTP (the Farmer) learns best using their hands. (Wondering what your personality type is? Take this free test.)

I'm also fascinated by the impact our surroundings have on our ability to learn. So often people blame their surroundings for the fact that they are not learning, and in this case, I think the calm, peaceful surroundings made us our best learning selves. That night, Melissa edited photos, and I sorted links to research I like, and the boys read themselves to sleep, sand still spilling from their hair.

The next morning, the kids took ownership of the vacation. I thought we should go back to the beach. "We are never at the beach," I told the kids. But my youngest son noticed the bike rental place next door to the hotel. There is such great research about how if you leave kids alone, they will learn what is best for them to learn right at that moment. And I realized, I was seeing that research in action, right now, so I gave up on my idea of going to the beach.

We moved to the farm at the time in my son's life when he would have learned to ride a two-wheeler. But we have no roads to ride on at the farm. So he learned on the boardwalk in front of our hotel.

He fell 100 times.

It was amazing to watch him get back up on the bike, over and over again. It was also amazing to watch people watch him. People passing said, "Pedal! Pedal! That's it!" And when he gathered some speed, people clapped and cheered.

We all love to learn and we love to watch it. We just have to find our best spot to do it. If you don't know what job you should do next, ask yourself what you'd like to learn next. And if you don't know that, ask yourself how you feel most comfortable learning.

You were born knowing what you'd like to learn at any given moment. When you get stuck, it's the shoulds that hold you back — what you should be when you grow up, what you should earn, what potential you should fill — all the shoulds get in the way of you being who you really are.

We are all bike riders falling 100 times in a day.

This is probably where the drama should be: The Farmer is essentially starting a new business. I have always thought he would do a great job on his own and it's been fun to watch him.

He is experimenting, trying to figure out what he wants. This summer, for example, he let the pigs graze in our field of sweet corn after the season was done.

It's hard for me to understand how revolutionary this is. Knowing very little about pigs or sweet corn, it seems logical to me that the pigs are next to the field, so why not let them eat what they want? But the Farmer keeps telling me that other farmers would think he's crazy.

Then I think, "What? More crazy than you living out here with me and the kids?"

The Farmer will earn less money farming his smaller farm instead of combining it with his parents' farm. But it's a no-brainer. The pay cut is a small price to pay to get emotional independence.

To me and the Farmer it's obvious that he's making a good move for himself. Yet I see lots of other people in this situation: start over and take a pay cut or keep finances stable. The majority of people choose stability, even thought they shouldn't.

So this post is about when it's okay to take a pay cut.

If you want to change careers. Look, you are stopping doing something that you know how to do, and you are going to start doing something you have not done before. Why would you think you will not take a pay cut? Don't be a brat. Take the cut.

If you are over 40 years old. Pay peaks about age 40 for everyone except surgeons and lawyers. So if you are 40 and job hunting, take a pay cut. It's not going to kill you, but holding out for a raise might lead to fears of starvation.

If you have been unemployed for six months. Statistically speaking, you will have to take a pay cut to re-enter the workforce. So instead of holding out to be a superhero of job hunts, just take a job. So much of our self-worth comes from working that ditching unemployment far outweighs avoiding a pay cut.

If you're relocating back to family. Research from Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London shows that to make up for the decrease in happiness that you experience when you leave family and friends, you would need to make $133,000 more than you were earning before the relocation. So it stands to reason that you can take a substantial pay cut to move closer to family and still gain a net happiness benefit because close relationships are so important to one's happiness.

If you will get a great boss. When it comes to the job hunt, getting a boss who will be a great mentor matters more than the job you'll be doing for that boss. The number-one factor that determines your earning power is your schooling. The number-two factor is the quality of mentoring you get. Since most of you are out of school, mentoring should be your number-one concern, and you'll more than make up for a pay cut by gaining a good mentor.

If you are having mental health problems from not working. Work provides a lot of things:  a sense of belonging, sense of purpose, structure and balance to a day, as well as financial security. You can get all these things by short-circuiting your job hunt and taking a lower-paying job. Wondering if you are having problems big enough to qualify for this one? Are you gaining weight during unemployment? That's a sign that you're masking new emotional problems. Get a job.

If you need better insurance. Taking a pay cut to get better insurance is like buying peace of mind. And at a bargain rate, really. If all you need to do is take a pay cut to know that you will not go bankrupt from medical bills (the most common cause of bankruptcy, by the way) then it's worth it. Also, I often contemplate becoming a customer service rep at Microsoft so I can get to their amazing health coverage for kids with Autism. (Asperger's is genetic, and Microsoft knows their employee pool, you've gotta give them that.)

Okay. Look. Can you tell by now that a pay cut is always fine? Really, the only exception would be when you have a job you love. Because we are all looking for a career that provides stability, engagement and a way to support us financially, and often that comes in the form of a pay cut.

You are not your salary. You are not worth less in the world because you are paid less in your job. Get your self-worth from a wide range of things and a pay cut won't matter to you. Focus on the components of a good job: learning, personal growth, friends at work, and a good family life. All those things are worth a lot more than a pay cut.

So I have been telling my story for ten years. I am lucky to have a blog, and an amazing community to tell my story to. And recently, as the 10^th anniversary has been approaching, I’ve been telling my story again, to many news outlets.

I was there when the first tower fell. I was so close to it that I could not even see what had happened. I didn’t run. I ducked for cover. I got trampled. By the time I could stand up, everything was completely dark.

I remember the moment I realized I should close my mouth and stop breathing. Time got so slow. I remember thinking that if I had stopped breathing sooner, I would have had a few extra breaths right now. I remember thinking don't swallow, because there was too much stuff in my mouth.

I thought to myself that I had no idea what to do to save my life. I was in the dark and couldn’t breathe. I thought I’ll only be alive for maybe a minute longer, so I only have to keep trying to figure out how to save my life for one more minute. I told myself I can’t give up until I pass out. I remember that I hoped for a fast death.

Then something switched in me. I was okay dying. I felt okay with whatever level of pain I had before I died. I thought of my two brothers.  I wanted them to be okay. To be fine. And I hoped someone would help them deal with my death. I thought of my husband, and I was so disappointed to not see our life unfold together.

That evening, after I had been to the hospital, after I had both eyes patched up, my husband finally told me both towers fell. That evening, I still thought the time that I was in the dark was maybe ten minutes. Now I realize that the time when I could not breathe was probably less than a minute. I had accepted the pain and my death after only 30 seconds.

The first time I told that story was when I wrote it for Time magazine on the evening of 9/11. I can’t believe how much my story has changed. How much more I know.

Here’s what I know. I know that leaving New York City is really hard to do. I spent my whole life being a high achiever. I was a high achiever in high school, even as the police were taking me out of my parents house for abuse. I was a high achiever in college, even while I was in a mental ward. I was a high achiever in my 20s, even as I was doing the hard work of taking care of my two youngest brothers.

Here’s my life story: Top figure skater, professional beach volleyball player, syndicated journalist in 200 newspapers, author of three books, founder of three startups.

Here’s my World Trade Center story: Learning to give up everything. I am not a person who waited until the end of my life to slow down. I’m someone who stopped competing. When you leave New York City to move to Wisconsin it’s like a formal announcement that you are out of the competition.

In New York City, anyone who can manage living there with kids is doing something great in their career. For those who have kids, there is only room for high achievers in that city. And I am not there.

I live on a farm outside Darlington, WI, a very, very small rural community where most people are happy. Most people grew up here. Most people do not expect to leave. Most people do not expect to be the greatest at what they do. They just want to have a nice life.  I do not fit here, to be honest. I find myself continually obsessed with being great, making my kids great, finding the best opportunities.

Like gymnastics camp. Top schools. Big vacations.

What I learned from the World Trade Center, ten years later, is that it’s okay to pull back. It’s okay to stop competing. It’s the scariest thing I’ve done in my life. And I’m not great at it. I still drive eight hours round-trip so my son has a great cello teacher.

That 30 seconds when I thought I was dying gave me the strength to cut back on my fast-track life even though nothing else tells me that is a good idea. I have no friends who are on as slow a track as I am. I don’t know anyone who left New York City with kids to a rural farm.

It’s scary. What if I am giving up an interesting life for merely a peaceful life? What if the payoff for being together for three meals a day is not enough to compensate for the opportunities my kids miss?

The legacy of the World Trade Center is the stories of people who survived. And in those stories, I hear a symphony of assurances that it’s okay to get off the fast track. Because you can still feel fulfilled. It’s okay to earn half of what you’re earning now. It’s okay to put your kids in a bad school. It’s okay to have a mediocre career or a mediocre house. It’s okay even if you just rent forever.

All these things are okay. You would know that if you thought you had 30 more seconds to live.

It turned out that he also had no idea how to use the Internet. He had a secretary, Laura, who printed out his emails for him to read and then he dictated responses to her.

He hid this from me until one day I needed to dig through his emails to find correspondences from investors. I said, “Give me your password.”

“I don’t know it.”

“Okay. I’ll get it from Laura.”

“No. Okay. I’ll give it to you.”

“What is it?”

“Hold on.  There is stuff about sex sites in there and I want you to know I don’t know how it got there. “

“I know. Everyone gets spam from sex sites. It’s not just you.”

“Oh.”

This is funny now, right? It’s funny that he thought typing was not in his job description. It’s funny that he thought he could get by without learning how to use the Internet.

But that was 1996. The corollary to that today is people who think they do not need to be good at using social media.

The whole Internet is going to be social media: shopping will be social, your resume will be social, your whole career will be built on social media, and your kids’ education will be built on social media. (And if you think you don’t want kids, then the way you are going to get to a place where people don’t bug you about that decision is through social media).

I wrote very early that social media is the key to a good career. It seemed so crazy when I wrote it, but I was sure it was true. And now that I am running a vibrant tech career from a rural farm, I thank god every day that I’m great at social media.

Do you think social media is too much work, and you have a life to live? This is what social media gets you:

Social media gives you control over your life and your career so you can prioritize however you want. You can achieve what you want. And you can ignore what you want. That's why I get to post photos of basketball on my career blog.

Being great at social media makes the odds better that I'll be where I want to be when I want to be there.

But watch out. Because social media isn’t a skill you list on your resume. That would be like putting "Internet" on your resume. (Yes, I swear. There are people who still put that in the skills section of their resume. We should gather those resumes for the Smithsonian collection while we still can.)

So then the question is, "How are you going to learn about social media?" You could do what I’ve done: I’ve spent the last five years of my life doing nothing but social media. Trying everything, making mistakes, working 100-hour weeks.

I do not recommend that.

So what do you do? The first thing is, start rewriting your resume to show that social media is a part of your life. It’s just what you do to get the job done. Think of this as similar to what people had to do in 1998 when it was too late to put as your job title, “Internet Manager.”

The next thing is that you need to start learning from experts. And here’s where Brazen Careerist comes in. My company. For those of you who have forgotten, even amid farm fights and pig sales I still own a large share of Brazen Careerist.

I will love Brazen Careerist the most when it sells for millions of dollars and I can be a farm princess. But until then, I love Brazen Careerist for its amazing track record for using social media tools. That’s just what we do to run the business, and we are totally great at it.

So we have decided to offer a Social Media Bootcamp. And honestly, I think every one of you should take it.  First of all, I’m teaching part of the course. But each of us needs to learn from a range of people so we can figure out what’s best for us, and the course will be taught by a collection of people that even I am excited to learn from.

So. Here’s the link. Sign up. It’s $245. And I'll see you there!

I keep thinking I want to put this picture online. And then I think, I can’t. I’m too sad. I need a picture of me moping.

This feeling reminds me of  when I was younger, it was very hard for me to get a job, and also hard for me to keep one. I was job hunting all the time.

Job hunting is an insane way to live. You are a depressed, scared, unemployed person and the key to getting out of it is to make yourself into a happy, confident, go-getter.

When I was job hunting, I had tricks for giving myself confidence. I’d try to schedule interviews in the late morning. This would give me time to get my spririts up, but it would not require me holding them up for too long — for say, an end-of-the-day interview.

Other stuff I would do that works:

Go to the gym. The emotional boost you get from the gym can last a few hours if you work out hard enough. When I’m at the gym to change my mood, I do intervals.

Shower and put on makeup right away so that I know the day is serious and there’s no crying.

Don’t eat. If you don’t eat, you are happier. This is not true for people who are starving and dragging themselves across the desert in search of a refugee camp. You know that. But you might not have known that being hungry helps you focus and connect with other people. It’s probably a survival instinct. If you don’t have berries you have to get someone in the group to give you berries. (Which, come to think of it, is not far from the workplace interview situation.)

I am trying to remind myself that I am great at turning things around. Every time I thought my life was hopeless and I’d never get a job and I’d never be happy again, I'd always get a job. Eventually. And things would turn around. At least for a little.

Today, when work isn’t going well, I have this magic place I can go in my head where I just trust that things will work out. I will figure out a better way to make money, I will find someone I want as a business partner. People will forget that I did something stupid.  These are things I tell myself.

The most powerful career tool I have is faith in myself. It allows me to move through ups and downs with the grace I did not have when I was younger.

But I don’t have that with my personal life. You know that feeling you have that you are going to die if you don’t get a job? That’s what I have almost every day living with the Farmer.

Some days are good. And I try to write about those days. I want to show you the same optimism with my personal life that I have with my career.

But I actually feel hopeless. I have that feeling I used to have when I was unemployed. Like I wished the world would end. I think I am not alone — other people have this feeling when they are unemployed. But people do not talk like this when they are unemployed because they’ll never get hired.

I know that if I don't do anything to make a change, then nothing will change. So today I decide that we should talk. He is in the field. Baling hay.

So I walk out there, a few feet onto the field, which is the universal signal on a farm for "I want to talk to you when you come around to this side of the field."

The Farmer gets out of the tractor to talk with me. But after a couple of minutes he realizes he doesn’t want to talk with me. (We have this problem a lot.) So he  walks away, gets back on the tractor and starts to drive off.

I walk in front of the tractor so he will stop and talk to me. He drives it into me, so I jump on top of the front. He keeps driving. It is very hard for me to keep from falling off.

I am screaming, "Stop driving!" and he is ignoring me.

I think that’s the picture of our relationship, right there. I want to talk, he doesn’t, so we do terrible stuff together. I put myself in danger, and he goes along with it by saying that I’m crazy.

We repeat this cycle over and over again. (Here's another example.) And the people who are suffering the most are the kids. They did not see the field today. But I'm not kidding myself: There is no way we are hiding the larger problem from them.

It’s insane that I just opened up a huge discussion about homeschooling when I don’t feel like this is the right home for the kids. It’s insane that I’m starting a company when I know the company will take time away from my marriage when marriage is already sucking.

I feel insane right now. The only thing that grounds me is my ability to earn money. I know I can do fun, meaningful things in my career, and even though I'm not great at money management, I can support my kids.

The person I want to be is the person who believes in the strength of my family no matter what confronts us. I want to feel, in my heart, that things will be fine, and then it'll show in my face all the time. But I am only that way about my career.  I wish the skills were transferable, but I don’t think they are.

The question is, how do we get this lifelong learning bug now, as adults, so we can compete with the young people when they enter the workforce. I thought about this question a lot last week, while I was at cello camp with my son.

1. When it comes to learning, keep your bar very high.
At cello camp my son’s classes are about 80% Asian. It’s like being a Jew in NYC – sort of  a demographic optical illusion. We are at ground zero for the Tiger Mom. We are at a camp where six-year-olds play cello for five hours a day.

I am used to being the crazy, overbearing mom in the rural farm community where we live. I'm asked, “Why do you have to drive two hours to a music lesson? There's a piano teacher in Darlington!” because I ignore the advice of my neighbors and I drive four hours round trip so my son can take lessons from a music professor at the University of Wisconsin.

And I think I'm on the right track, because Lisa Nielsen, an education reformer working in the New York City public schools, says that lifelong learners are great at creating their own networks of experts.

2. Walk a narrow path so you can keep learning to jump off the path.
But at cello camp I find that I'm the laid back, bar-is-low mom. My son played ping-pong with little white girls in between classes. There was one soccer ball in the whole camp, and my son joined the other kid. Who was white, of course. And in group class, my son is the one who wants to try his own rhythms "just once I promise please please mom."

At first I was thinking I am in a race to keep up with the Asian parents.

But then I think about Wesley Yang, the Asian guy who recently wrote an extremely controversial article in New York magazine. The article is about why Asian families are obsessed with childhood achievement at the expense of social skills and creativity.

Yang writes about the famously merit-based magnet high school, Stuyvesant, in New York City. There is no way to get in except to have high test scores. And while the Asian population in NYC is only 12%, the Asian student population at Stuyvesant is 72%.  At Stuyvesant, the white kids who actually get in do less homework than the Asian kids do, but white kids do as well in school. But when those kids graduate from college, the Asians don’t do well in corporate America. Because Asians are generally taught to follow rules, learn what's on the test, and don't make a scene: The exact wrong stuff to learn if you want to succeed in corporate America.

So then what traits create a lifelong learner? I think it has to do with knowing oneself and knowing how to ask creative questions in areas of personal interest. And then I get scared being surrounded by Tiger moms. My kid has great social skills. No small feat in a family full of Aspergers. I want my son to be creative and fun. But I want him to have the self-discipline to reach goals he sets for himself.

There's a great TED speech from Sir Ken Robinson that addresses just this topic:  how to protect creative thinking from being squashed by adult institutions.  I tell myself that my challenge at cello camp is the same challenge that I tell people they have at work:  follow enough rules to be relevant, and foster enough creativity to bring joy and surprise to the things you do.

3. Learn by way of discovering what you care about, and not the other way around.
"Learning doesn't happen insides a box — schooling does — and these are two very different things," says Nielsen. Her subversive opus The Teenagers Guide to Opting Out Not Dropping Out explains why education ideas like unschooling and natural learning are great because they are student-directed. And she says we should not divide learning by subject or location. Rather, the whole world is a learning environment and the student learns by doing whatever he or she is interested in.

I wonder, "Is my son becoming a robot when I drag him to Suzuki camp for hours on end?" Certainly he'd rather be playing video games. But he is developing opinions about his learning, which is part of the process of asking good questions. For example he wants to play Witch's Dance instead of Minuet 1. I let him. It's against the rules to skip around, but I sneak it. And, anyway, his teacher at University of Wisconsin is not such a stickler for Suzuki rules.

But what I'm saying is that you can follow your passion within constraints. I don't think lifelong learning is about turning on a dime, switching on a whim. I think it's following old paths and layering them with new, internally generated questions. But you need to be on some sort of path to have a stable place to form a question.

4. Cater to your learning style.
By the third day of camp, we are the only ones who lost our nametags. This is probably better because we are also the only ones who are late. So maybe no one will know who we are.

But they do. Because I have a kid who is an EFJ. That's not a typo – there are only three Myers-Briggs letters for kids under 12. (You can be obsessive with your kids, too. Here's the test.) My kid is my personality type opposite. He loves people and people love him. (This is such an unlikely outcome from my Ex and me that my ex has accused me of having had an affair.)

So my regular way of coping with lots of people is disappearing into the background, but that doesn’t work with him. His favorite way to learn is to be in a room full of people. Charming everyone.

I threw a (minor) fit that his private lesson is not actually private – it's with three other kids. In a group class like it, I would tune out because I don't like groups. But he is totally happy, and I realize that as adults, we seldom learn by watching other people learn. We watch and judge instead of watch and learn.

5. Accept that lifelong learning is a huge time investment.
In school, kids do not see their parents investing in lifelong learning. In fact, school teaches kids that adults do not belong in learning environments. In the Suzuki method, where the parent is the music teacher, I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't play an instrument, I don't read music, and my musical knowledge is about one month ahead of where my son is. So my son sees me in every single class, learning right alongside him.

The payoff is being able to get through the song without getting lost.

Which, like all good learning, is not really an end goal but rather just one more step down the path  - in this case, the path to learning how to play in an orchestra.

6. Spend as much time unlearning as you do learning.
I think a lot about what our adult learning needs to look like in order to succeed at work in the next ten years. We will be competing with Generation Z. We will have to learn as effectively as they learn.  Alvin Toffler, a futurist, has the answer: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn and unlearn and relearn." (via learningdoorway.com).

Starting over is a key to lifelong learning. Starting from that feeling of knowing nothing, over and over again, will eventually yield learning on a grand scale.

There’s a teacher institute within our camp program. I can't help wondering: Why are the students mostly Asian but the teachers in training are mostly white?

Maybe my lifelong learning will include unlearning stereotypes I am peppering throughout this post. It's difficult to know what to unlearn. If you have a teacher who can tell you: she's a keeper.

One of my son's teachers at camp was the inimitable Amy Barston. She spent the first two days of class making him sit differently, hold the cello differently, and place his feet in a new spot. At the end of that second day, he wrote a note on the chalkboard: