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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I 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 only missed the farmer more.

So I told myself that it’s okay to be with someone who has commitment issues, as long as I am having fun.

But my kids grew to love the farm, and the farmer, almost as quickly as I did. This makes sense. My oldest son was with me on my first visit to the farm,  and if you have ever been on a working farm you know that to kids, it’s like Disney World.

So my kids were constantly asking to go to the farm, and constantly trying to figure out, what is the farmer? A friend? An uncle? And why did I kiss him if he’s not in my family?

This is not a good path for kids if the relationship isn’t going toward marriage. So I waited until a day when the farmer and I were holding hands, walking between rows of corn higher than our heads. And I told him that I can’t keep bringing the kids to the farm because we’re not getting married and I’m scared the kids will get hurt.

The farmer didn’t say anything for five minutes. And then he said, “Okay. Let’s get married.”

It’s taken me months to tell people. It’s taken me months because I sort of don’t believe it.

I didn’t want to write that I’m worried. You will tell me, in the comments section, “Don’t get married if you are worried!” But I’m not sure I’d ever NOT worry.

How can I not worry about marrying a farmer? I will be moving, with my kids, to his farm. The farm is in the absolute middle of nowhere, outside the town of Darlington, WI. And now, I guess this will be my debut in Darlington, because I’m pretty sure there will be no blog outranking me for that search term.

But if I didn’t marry the farmer, I would be worried, forever, that I should have married him.

So it’s not a hard decision to marry him. I have been married before, and I don’t think I’m going to change much, so I know what I need, and I know what I have to offer, and we are a good fit.

And, I have Asperger Syndrome, which could be summarized as raging intellect and acute sensitivity to outside input. So the farm is a perfect spot for my mind to explore while outside-my-mind is calm.

But I worry about the farm for my kids. One of my kids also has Asperger Syndrome, and he is completely addicted to the farm and the animals, and the farmer’s calm, slow, sunny demeanor.  My other son does not have Asperger’s and probably does not need of the serenity of life on the farm.

Not that serenity is bad. And the family life that grows from farming is intimate and grounded and full of routine. All good things for kids.

But I grew up in a world where everything was open to me. Check out my high school: New Trier. It’s always ranked in the top twenty-five high schools in the country. I remember the principal telling us that the top 500 kids in our graduating class would go to colleges where most would be the valedictorians of their class.

At the time I didn’t understand how this could be. But now I understand that in order to compete at the top of the academic field, you need to be the number-one student in your small town.

Maybe not number one academically. But number one in soccer if you want to play soccer in college. And number-one in cello if you want to play in an orchestra in college.

Wait. No. It’s worse than that. Because in Darlington, there is no orchestra in high school. So where will my son play his cello in high school if he wants to play in college? And how will my boys learn to play soccer at a high enough level to play in college if all the kids on the coasts are getting private coaching? Where is the private coaching in Darlington?

It’s scary how limiting the choices are when you live in a place like Darlington. But competition is scary to me as well.

The reason I couldn’t keep playing professional beach volleyball is that I didn’t care enough about winning. To get to the very top of anything, you have to think you’re going to die if you don’t win.

That’s not me.

I belong on a farm, where life is slow, and rhythmic, and people are not breathing down my throat about getting the best of everything.

The farmer and I discuss this a lot. He went to graduate school for biology and hated it and went back to the farm. He thinks he could have done anything, so why won’t my kids be able to choose anything?

I am not sure. I am not sure if it’s my proximity to overachievers that gave me opportunities, or it’s my innate optimism and intelligence.

Then he tells me that what I really would have wanted from my childhood is to feel love and security, and why don’t we just focus on giving the kids that?

He’s right. But it’s hard for me to act on that. So I think this marriage and move are leaps of faith for me, hoping that love and security will trump opportunity and achievement. I hope I’m making a good decision for my sons.

The Story of the Farmer – From the First Day We  Met:

June 2008 New Way to Measure Blog ROI

June 2008 How I started taming my workaholic tendencies

Oct. 2008  Self-sabotage is never limited to just one part of your life

Nov. 2008  Think of networking as a lifestyle, not an event

July 2009  The sign of a great career is having great opportunities, and saying no

Sept. 2009 How to deal with an insane commute

Oct. 2009  How to deal with doubt: Take a leap

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 can’t figure out what to do with my kids on Yom Kippur, so I’m sending them to school. I never, once in eighteen years, went to school on Yom Kippur. So I know it’s going to feel crappy. I hope my family is not reading this.

Well, of course they are not, because they are in synagogue today.

I wish I could make my religion problems go away. I wish I could not care about religion because I’m an intellectual. Or I wish I could not care about religion because I am fine doing it however I do it.

One thing that nags at me is that I know for sure is that religion is great preparation for being able to get what you want out of your work life. And, if you read this blog regularly, you know that I think the purpose of work is to get you what you want out of your whole life, not just the work part.

So what I’m thinking, while I’m being a bad Jew on Yom Kippur, is that all career questions are really: “What is my purpose in life?” It’s very hard to understand what our career problems are, because we never really understand what we are doing here, in our life.

Wondering if you should relocate is really “What’s most important to you in life?” And wondering if you should change careers is really “What is my telos?” And where do you learn to find answers to these extremely difficult questions? I think from religion.

All of adult life is about facing terrible choices.

Why do people tell you you can do anything? You can’t. I mean, you can. But it’s harder to decide what you’re not doing. We make enormous sacrifices everytime we want to get anything: You get no alone time when you have a newborn. You get no more sex partners if you get married. You do not get to live in a small city for some careers. You don’t get to live in a big city for some marriages. Adult life is often about making horrible choices that feel like blood letting.

Where else do you hear about this except in religion? Adam and Eve face this problem and that’s what the history of humankind is built on. That’s the narrative of religion. And it’s more helpful than the narrative that you can have everything. Because you can’t. And you need some preparation for that.

The most important thing to do at work is good deeds.

So many people tell me that Gen Y is difficult to manage. Gen Y wants constant feedback, top-tier mentoring, and they want someone to help them build the right skills for where they want to go.

So what Gen Y really wants is people to care about other people at work.

What are you doing at work that is more important than helping people? Sure, you need to earn a paycheck, but, people don't get promoted for doing their job. People get promoted for doing good deeds, which cynics call office politics. But the truth is that if you are well-liked at work it is because you care about people and connect with people and look for ways to help them.

People get promoted for office politics, and office politics is about doing good deeds, and I know you know that the people who are talking, week after week, day after day, about the importance of doing good deeds are the religious people.

Good work is about good rhythms.

We need rhythm in life to successfully reach our goals. Whatever they are. We need to have some things we do that are simply not a decision: Make school lunches for the kids. Say no to fried food. And, when you’re really rocking, going to the gym. No decision: You have it on your schedule, at the same time each day, and you do it. Because it makes your life better.

And then sometimes, you stop everything, and you shake things up, and then you see the world differently. Like, this is why you need to take an extra long lunch, or a short vacation.

You know what is great training for establishing these rhythms in life? Religion. As a Jew, I can tell you that morning prayers, and evening prayers, and Shabbat, give order to my days and weeks. And interruptions to that order, Rosh Hashannah, or Yom Kippur, for example, shake things up for me. I am used to this sort of rhythm. I’ve been doing it for a long time. (Religious zealots don't get giddy: I do this in my own, customized way. I’m the bad Jew of my family.)

Personal responsibility is the most important trait of a successful career.

In order to succeed you do not need more luck. We each have the same amount of luck. It’s how you use your luck that differentiates you. Because everyone faces adversity, and the people who are the most resilient to adversity are the one’s who succeed. Makes sense, right? Everyone succeeds when things are going great.

So if the differentiator is resilience, the people who are the most resilient are the optimists. The optimists can face adversity and turn luck into a ladder to get past adversity. Do you want to know how optimistic you are? Here are some ways to test yourself.  But the big difference between pessimists and optimists is explanatory styles — pessimists blame external factors for circumstances, optimists think circumstances are within their control.

People who think their lives are within their control can overcome obstacles more effectively. And this is personal responsibility. Religion teaches us to take responsibility for being good, and honest, and rectifying things we have done wrong. Religion teaches personal responsibility which could explain why religious people are more optimistic than less religious people.

(A plea for civility in the comments section.)

It's ironic that I'm looking for a conversation about religion on a day when religious Jews won't even read this post. But there is a wide range of religious beliefs represented among the readers of this blog, and I don't think these observations are religion-specific. Also, for the atheists who might want to eat me alive in the comments section: Instead of saying you don't need religion to get taught these values, which of course is true, why not think about, instead, how interesting it is that the teachings of religion seem to be exactly what we need to face our most common and most difficult career issues?

I have written before about how insane it is to have a long commute.  In case you're wondering, the average commute in the US is 25 minutes each way. Newsweek describes the population of people who travel at least 90 minutes each way as "extreme commuters". That is me, twice a week, on farm days.

Before I leave work, I line up five calls at twenty minute intervals because if I don’t get a lot done on the drive then I question whether it is responsible for a woman who struggles to find time for her kids and career to also have a boyfriend ninety minutes from civilization.

I wonder a lot if the guys at work know how often I go to the farm.

When I lived in Los Angeles, I had a 50 minute commute each way, and I had a panic attack on the 405. So I know a bit about long commutes. Mostly, that they are impossible. So I try to pretend I'm not actually doing a commute. I make a list of stuff to think about and tell myself it's thinking time. I do Kegel exercises and tell myself it's Pilates time. (Because most of Pilates is Kegel-based anyway. Really.)

At the one-hour point there’s a gas station. It used to be, when my company was out of funding, I wouldn’t buy gas until the last minute. And I worried that I’d run out of money before I got myself home.

That actually happened once, I took the farmer’s credit card to get home. And he didn’t blink. Because we both know that I take home 25 times his salary but he always has more money than I do.

I used to stop at the gas station to put on makeup, when I was nervous and trying to win him over and showering extra, because farmers are nuts about being clean. (Way more than city people because, let’s face it, city people never get dirty if the standard for dirty is working knee-deep in pig manure for a day.) At the beginning I was clean and fresh-faced and stopped at the hour point to put on makeup.

After a while, I just touched up makeup from earlier in the day. And now we're close enough that he takes me to the free dinner from the seed manufacturer on farmer appreciation night.  So now I just stop at the gas station to buy staples, like Power Bars, which I need to eat for breakfast when I need comfort food. The farmer says I’m addicted to carbs, but I noticed that when he has to deal with anything beyond the farm—like my kids, or me having a crisis —then he eats carbs, too.

So I pick up three Power Bars, in case he wants one, and the woman at the counter asks me again, “Where is your farm?” I know she knows. She’s already asked once. So I give her more information, which I know she’s looking for because the farmer has told me that people in the country don’t ask directly for what they want.

“I have my own company in Madison,” I say. “I come here to see my boyfriend.”

“Oh. What kind of company?”

“Internet.”

“Oooohhh.”

I check myself out in the bathroom. I want to look hot. I just don’t want to do a lot to get there. And I pee. Because what if the farmer wants to have sex right away when I get there?

He rarely does. But peeing at the gas station is my expression of my hope.

I get back in the car and listen to music. The transition is important. If you have a bad commute, your bad mood permeates your whole mood after the commute. I am determined to not let that happen. So the gas station stop is a separator. I have to rest there so the last 30 minutes is all that counts toward the post-commute mood.

The last 30 minutes to his house is through rolling hills hiding large corn fields and small vegetable gardens, and every driver who passes by me waves like I'm a neighbor.

I have been talking all day. The farmer has been quiet all day. So when I pull up the dirt road, I go straight to the porch, lay my head on his lap, and I listen. I listen to his voice above the wrestling wind through the tall corn stalks. He reports chicken and cows and hay for thirty minutes while I rest.

And then Moby Dick. He’s reading that. He tells me about Ahab’s antics from the three nights since I have been there. I am stuck on the fact that Ahab got crazier and crazier chasing his whale and he spent his whole life in transit, looking for it.

I tell him my commute is insane.

We go running in the hay field. He serves steaks as finger food. We sleep on his bed on the porch, sort of under the stars.

In the morning I tell him again that the commute will never work.

He tells me he sees we're at a big decision point in the relationship and he needs time to think. Alone.

Alone?

Yes.

How long?

Just a week.

Silence.

How about six days?

We make a plan. And I set off for the commute to work, wondering what will happen next.

He leaves me with two dozen eggs, some just-ripe squash, and a bite mark on the inside of my thigh.

My favorite research on this topic is from John Mirowsky, professor of sociology at University of Texas, Austin.

Mirowsky finds that people who work are happier than people who don't because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative. This was true regardless of age and race and the amount of creativity that a given job had.

He concludes that people make choices to be more creative if they are gainfully employed. But also that we have more control than we realize over how creative we make our worklife. He says, "One thing that surprised us was that the daily activities of employed persons are more creative than those of non-employed persons of the same sex, age and level of education."

How can you tell if you are creative at work? You could just ask yourself if you like your job. It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging. And if you are doing that, well, that is creative.

For a more scientific gauge, you can look at your cell phone call log. If you routinely call your friends from work, you're probably not happy at work, according to research from Nathan Eagle, at the Santa Fe Institute.

Here are five ways to make a job more creative. And if you want to be good at managing creative people tell these tips to everyone who reports to you:

1. Change your mindset. So much of solving our own problems is fixing our outlook. Bad situations breed creativity, but only if you feel responsible for fixing your own problems. So stop blaming your job or your boss or your work, and start looking to yourself to make your life more creative.

Also, you should know that it's as misguided to divide the world into creative and non-creative jobs as it is to divide the world into creative and non-creative people. All jobs have opportunities for creativity. Some have more and some have less, but you usually get more opportunities to be creative by demonstrating that you are a creative problem solver over and over again.

This usually means solving problems no one asks you to solve. That's right: Creativity at work is often about finding your own work, finding and solving your own problems. So most of you should blame yourself, not your job, for lack of creativity in your work.

2. Change your response to stress. We tend to respond to stress with routine responses – almost all of them bad for us in some way. Natalie Angier writes in the New York Times about our predisposed type of response to stress: “Regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed…Rodents were cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers." So when you have stress, try a new response and see what happens. No job prevents you from doing that.

3. Change the pace of what you do. John Freeman points out in the Wall Street Journal that changing the pace changes what it's like to do that task. You know this intuitively from dancing or sex. But it's also true of workplace tasks like writing email or cleaning our desk—both of which we often do quickly with no examination of whether or not that is a good pace for that task.

4. Try job hopping. This is a way to change your level of creativity on a larger scale. A big reason that job hopping helps your career is that people who job hop are more engaged in their work. Mirowsky explains this further: "People with a wide variety of jobs manage to find ways to make them creative."

5. Get in a long-term, intimate relationship. Be careful putting too much burden on a job. You need to be creative in order to feel fulfilled, yes. But there are infinite ways to be creative, and they don't necessarily have to relate to your job. Which is why the connection between a job and happiness is totally overrated. Intimate, long-term, intimate relationships matter most – and, not surprisingly, the act of putting two lives into one life requires creativity, always.

(Hat tip: Emily, Caitlin and Jay)

1. There are more effective ways to try new things.

While it's true that learning and broadening your experience is important, doing that one time is quite different from consistently integrating something new into your life. It's low risk to try something for a week. Which will make more impact on your life: going to Africa for a week and seeing wildlife and living in the jungle, or retooling your weekly schedule so that you take a walk through your local forest preserve once a week? You will have a stronger connection to the forest preserve than the jungle, and you will have a deeper sense of how it grows and changes and how you respond. So if you hope that travel will change how you see the world, doing something each week to see the world differently will have more impact than doing it one time, seven days in a row.

2. Cultural differences are superficial. Economic differences matter.

Don't tell yourself you travel to learn about different cultures. Because you don't necessarily learn from people in other cultures. And you don't need to leave the US to find cultures different from your own.

Frans Johansson writes about diversity, and he says that race is not a indicator of diversity any more—background is. And the most diverse backgrounds come from economic disparity. So a rich white person and a poor white person are more different than a rich white person and a rich black person.

I think this is true across cultures as well. I had a South African roommate in college. But she was just like me: rich, white, Jewish. But when I lived on a French farm for a summer, the big difference between me and the farm family wasn't that they were French. It was that they were living on a farm. I know this because when they figured out I was unhappy, they sent me to live with their cousins in Lyon—a large city in France—and the cousins were just like me.

3. People who love their lives don't leave.

Imagine if you were excited to get out of bed every day because you had structured your life so that every day was full of what you have always dreamed of doing. And you were in love with your boyfriend, and your job, and your new handstand in yoga. You love it all—imagine that. Would you want to leave all that behind for two weeks? What would be the point? You'd have more fun at home than away from home. So instead of traveling somewhere, how about figuring out what you'd really love to be doing with your time, and do that? In your real, day-to-day life.

4. Travel is not the time to do deep thinking.

People who need an escape so they can think deeply actually need to add that to their daily life. How about setting aside time to think deeply every few days? Sam Anderson suggests in his article in New York magazine that meditation is so important that people are going to start making time for it in the same way we make time for exercise now. So maybe that travel bug you are feeling is actually a give-me-headspace bug, and if you think you need it only for a couple of weeks, you're wrong. You need time to think each day. Re-craft your days to honor that need, instead of running away for what can only be a temporary respite.

My guess is that the things you are aiming to accomplish while you travel are generally things you could accomplish on a deeper level if you stayed home and made changes to your life instead of running away. Routine and practice are the keys to giving deeper meaning to your life. Sure, disrupting routine is important for gaining new perspective. But you certainly don't need to travel to the next country. There is plenty that is new right where you are now. Just look closely.

So it was a big day in May when he sent me an email inviting me to Burgers and Brew.  It took only one email for me to let myself be obsessed with him again. (The great thing about a Blackberry is that if you spend the day at the office  reading a romantic email fifty-five times, you don't look obsessed; you look like a hard worker.)

The festival is a big deal. Restaurants here in Madison, WI understand the draw of the grown local movement, and the Farmer’s pork is the meat of choice for the most picky chefs in the city and also the best pizza places. 

Last year, when I had not met the farmer, his first invitation to me was for Burgers and Brew, and I declined. It struck me as one of the moronic, provincial invitations I get for Wisconsin stuff every day.

But somehow, somewhere, I became a Wisconsin girl. I’m not sure when it happened. But I remember last year, when the farmer introduced me in his town of 500 people, he’d say, “She’s from Madison.”  And I thought it was ridiculous, because I felt like I was from New York. I don’t even know what “from Madison” means, because it seems to me that everyone from Madison is not actually from Madison but from a farm and thinking they just moved into a big city.

When I came out of my giddy stupor from his email, I realized that Burgers and Brew was the same weekend as maybe the biggest schmoozing event of my life: Guy Kawasaki invited me to spend a weekend on the USS Nimitz with Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and others.

I said yes to the weekend, of course. Because how can hanging out with these guys not be great for me? It’s probably what I’ve been working up to my whole career: a weekend like that.

People always talk about how you need to give stuff up in order to have a fulfilling career and a fulfilling personal life. What people don’t realize is that the better you get at your career, the more amazing are the opportunities that you give up. But this is a hard reality to swallow. So I said yes to the farmer and yes to Guy and lived in an alternate reality where there are no hard choices in life and I was doing both events.

Until finally I told Guy that I couldn't go on the trip. Right after that, I was besieged by the greatness of the people going on the trip. For example, Charlene Li ended up being the source for a quarter of the statistics in my investor pitch. And someone asked, “Do you know her personally?” And I thought, well, I could. If I hadn’t fallen for the farmer. Again.

And then I went to the airport for one last trip before Burgers and Brew. And I saw Pam Slim’s book there. And first I thought, “She’s amazing to have gotten her book such good placement." And then I thought, "She’s amazing to have such passionate views on the workplace." And then I started to think that my career is going totally downhill, when I could have spent a weekend with her and I’m not.

But you know what? Burgers and Brew was great. And there does not seem to be fallout from my decision to pass up the USS Nimitz. And, in maybe a little message from God that the farmer is more important than my career, Michael Arrington cancelled as well. And then I felt like I had this great self-knowledge about myself, that somehow I know how to balance a boyfriend and a career. Like, one good decision begets many more.

So for our second date this time around, I cut out of work early, and we go to a state park. I don't say, “This is ridiculous. I can go to a state park with a city guy and I want to be on your farm.” I don't say that because I want him to know that I’m the new, agreeable me. And I know it’s going to be hard to be agreeable on the tough stuff, so the state park seems like a nonnegotiable. I have to say yes.

I am nervous. I knew I would have to change in the car from my work clothes to hiking clothes, but it was a rushed morning and I couldn’t make important decisions, so I brought every bra I own. I have to make the decision if I should wear a padded, looks-great-under-a-t-shirt bra, or a soft, lacy, your-hands-will-feel-good-here bra.

I go with the second one, but I tell myself not to be too optimistic. I tell myself that the key to keeping him is to let him do things at his own pace, and I need to not just say I’m okay with that. He’ll see through it. I need to really truly be okay with it.

He doesn't watch me change in the car, which is funny since we’ve been together for seven months before. And it’s not funny because I think to myself, "Where are we now? What are we doing? We are not at the beginning but where is the middle and are we there?" I’m not sure.

We start hiking and I am nervous. I just want things to go well. I am not sure if he knows what I’ve been up to. He doesn’t have an internet connection at his house, and he always has to be careful what he reads at his parents' house, but somehow he always managed to read my posts anyway.

Now I wonder, did he read my post about the 25-year-old?

It turns out he did because he says, “Why do you need to write about oral sex in every post?”

I say, “I don’t put it in every post. But it seems to just come up.”

“I think you force it.”

I am quiet. I think there is no right answer.

Then he says,“What’s your goal with all that? Why do people need to know how much oral sex you’re getting?”

I am quiet.

And he says, “What do you want to be known for?”

I can tell that this is his real question. So I had better have a good answer for him. I pause. Then I say, “I want to be known for being honest in my pursuit of a good life.”

Then we are quiet, while we hike through the forest.

Then we get to some rocks, but they are uneven, and I end up being taller than the farmer. Not by a lot. Maybe an inch or two. In this case, most guys would subtly move me over to the spot that is a little shorter and then go over to the spot that is a little taller. But he doesn’t care. And he kisses me.

We hike to the end of the rocky part and he tells me he doesn’t think I should write about our relationship because maybe it won’t last.

I tell him if it doesn’t last then I will write about being sad.

I tell him that I have to write to make sense of everything. But, to be honest, it’s not making that much sense to me now why I was so critical of him before, yet I’m not now.

Here’s an example: He’s really erratic about touching me in public. Sometimes he will and sometimes he won’t. Initially I told him he was totally immature and that this is the problem when a guy has almost no girlfriend experience and spends all his time eating meals with his parents.

This time around, though, I am more observant. For example, we went to the county fair, and I reached for his hand and he said, “We can’t hold hands here. I’ll look whipped.”

I laughed. I told him that’s hilarious, but he didn’t think it was funny. He told me to look around and see who else was holding hands. And honestly, he was right. It was dark, people were drinking, most people were with a date, and no one was touching. Really, I did not see one couple touching each other.

And then, in the dark, he put his hand on my back.

Me: Are you happy?

Him: Yes. Can’t you tell?

Me: No.

Him: Well, I have a nice tone of voice to you. And I’m touching you in a nice way.

Me: Oh. Yeah.

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 is also why kids love to whine to get what they want. Parents give in only when they are at their wit’s end, creating, from a child’s perspective, a similar, randomly yummy reward system.)

Each time we interrupt ourselves at work, the process to get us back to that point of focus takes twenty-five minutes.  So we spend nearly a third of our work day recovering from interruptions, trying to recover our focus.

The time management gurus are all over this problem.

Winifred Gallagher is the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The thesis of the book is that the ability to positively wield your attention is the key to your quality of life.  Gallagher says (in either her book or in the article that I am liberally quoting from – I’m not sure which, but I am distracted enough by the issue that I feel compelled to distract you as well) “You can’t be happy all the time but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.”

That sounds true to me. We each have a certain amount of attention, and our quality of life depends on how wisely we invest our attention. I have written about how self-discipline is the key to happiness. And then I have written about how knowing that has not helped me much because self-discipline is not an easy nut to crack.

Now I am wondering if attentiveness is the way to achieve self-discipline. You find your goal—the stuff that is really super important—and you focus on it. That focus creates enough self-discipline to do what you need to achieve the goal.

But that isn’t just my idea. There are others thinking the same thing.

Merlin Mann has one of the most popular productivity blogs, and he’s raking in money teaching executives (who surely are too focused to have time to read blogs) to be more productive in their workday. Merlin Mann says that the key to productivity is attention, not lifehacks.

Here’s a gem from Mann’s interview with Anderson in New York magazine: “On the web there’s a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need. But when I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There’s very little advice right now to tell people that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit.”

Okay. So notice this about focus: You are not actually able to be productive without focus. So we can stop looking for the ultimate moleskin notebook or the perfect Firefox extension because those are actually productivity distractions. The hardest thing about productivity is figuring out what is the number one thing on your to do list.  After that, you need to focus on doing that one thing.

Mann says, “There’s no shell script, there’s no fancy pen, there’s no notebook or nap or Firefox extension or hack that’s gonna help you figure out why the fuck you’re here.”
Maybe what you need instead is Adderall.

Officially, Adderall is prescribed to treat ADHD. Unofficially, it is the drug of choice for Gen Y.  Adderall, or other drugs that treat ADHD, give a typical brain an intense ability to focus for long periods of time.

I got most of my Adderall information from a great article in the New Yorker by Margaret Talbot titled Brain Gain: The underground world of neuroenhancing drugs. In it, Sean Esteban McCabe, from the University of Michigan’s Substance Abuse Research Center says that at some universities, up to 20% of the population is using these drugs: “White male undergraduates at highly competitive schools—especially in the Northeast—are the most frequent collegiate users of neuro-enhancers.”

Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania , coined the term “cosmetic neurology” to describe the trend of taking drugs to enhance ordinary cognition. He says, “Many sectors of society have winner-take-all conditions in which small advantages produce disproportionate rewards.”

That resonates with me. I have already decided that cosmetic surgery is a must-have career tool for the high performers. So why not consider cosmetic neurology as well?

Joshua Foer wrote about his own Adderall experiment in Slate, and it sounds glorious: “The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new emails in my in box apparently shut down.”

So I decided that maybe I should give the Adderall a whirl.

But then I started getting worried. Because I read research from Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse that shows Adderall is addictive. Not addictive like crystal meth. But addictive like, if you have a proclivity to addictive behaviors, you are a sitting duck for this one. “Because drugs that increase dopamine have the potential for abuse, these results suggest that risk for addiction in vulnerable persons merits heightened awareness.”

That scared me.

But what really scared me is that the cost of gaining extreme focus is often losing extreme creativity. A good example is Paul Philips, a professional poker player who won more than a million dollars after taking Adderall to help him. The scary thing about the Philips example is that Adderall also helped him resist the impulse to keep playing losing hands out of boredom.

I think we have some of our most creative moments when we are doing odd stuff to quell boredom. That is, when we are not focused at all.

“Cognitive psychologists have found that there is a trade-off between attentional focus and creativity,” says Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. “There is evidence that individuals who are better able to focus on one thing and filter out distractions tend to be less creative.”

Maybe it’s better just to do lots of things at once without great focus but with natural creativity.

Focusing on focus seems to distract from the real issue, which is knowing what you value most. Do we know that? And if we did know that, maybe our focus would come naturally from that. And our lack of time management comes from a lack of self-discipline which comes from a lack of focus which comes from a lack of knowing the meaning of life.

And we’ll never know that. So maybe we should just be happy that we have our lack of focus because that enables our creativity. And we don’t know the meaning of life, but we do know that we each get to create our own life, and that, in the end, may be the only guarantee we have.

Watching Sarah Palin resign from her governor post in Alaska inspires me to be more brave in my own career. She’s running her career in ways I intuitively think we should all be running our careers. And she’s reflecting my own experience back to me in a positive way: That breaking new ground is difficult but it pays off.

Here are four new career management ideas that Sarah Palin's modeling, in an inspiring way, right now:

1. Get out of a job when you're done doing it

We know that the old ways of managing a career aren’t working. But it’s so scary to try something new. For example, you know you should job hop, but it’s not what careers used to be. And it’s scary. People are constantly telling you you’ll destroy your career if you job hop.

But Palin is refusing to waste her time in the Alaska governor’s office. Who can blame her? It’s a lot of small-issue local politics that take away from her establishing big, national-level ideas. Of course quitting a local job is a good idea if you want to run for national office.

But most people who run for national office pretend to still be in their local-level office. When McCain announced he paused his presidential campaign to go back to Congress, he was widely mocked, because really, if you are running for President, you can’t be in Congress. But for some reason we have been embracing the bullshit value that it’s more important to stay in your job and perform badly than to admit you want to change jobs.

I like that Palin refuses to kowtow to the idea that you have to finish a job just because you started it. There is always someone else who would love the job that you're leaving out of boredom. This is true of Palin, and all of us as well.

2. Ideas matter, not your resume

We don’t need to elect someone based on their resume because the world changes too fast for experience to be a huge factor. On top of that, the internet makes most information available to everyone, so putting in long hours gathering knowledge is not as valuable anymore. Authority isn't what it used to be — it's based on what idea you have right now, not what you've done in the past.

We should judge people for their ideas, not their experience. I think we know this intuitively, especially young people: At my company, Brazen Careerist, we talk all the time about how your ideas are your resume – and you should aim to be known for your online conversation rather than for your resume.

If you put a resume online, the older people look better than the younger people. But the resume gives a false sense that older means wiser. Palin knows this, so she’s not afraid to break resume rules – like leaving a job in the middle, and aiming for a job largely outside of her experience.

3. Careers are built on teams and networks

Today Palin announced that she’s building a right-of-center coalition. This should not surprise anyone who uses social media to manage their career, because the career of the new millennium is about connections. A resume of experience is only valuable if the experience creates a network of people who genuinely care about you.  Building your personal brand only matters if your brand stands for helping people create value in their lives. And online connections are only good if you are able to translate that to an offline life.

Palin knows all this instinctively. She is ditching the governor’s job, which, by nature, is about helping people in Alaska, and she is making herself available to help a wider range of people. So smart. She is campaigning across to help people she respects.

And she’s building a team, which makes sense because the best way to sidestep the need for experience is with teams. Entrepreneurs overcome their lack of skills by taking on partners. Middle managers overcome their lack of authority in the hierarchy by building internal coalitions. Palin is doing what we should all do: form teams in order to fast-track our lives beyond our limited experience.

4. No one controls your career except you

She could do what she’s supposed to – finish up her job, focus on state-level politics, and talk to the press about ethics problems. But that’s not what she wants to do. She isn’t complaining that other people are thwarting her. She’s not letting them.

So many people complain about being controlled by sexual harassment, unfair treatment, bad bosses, etc. But we each have power to control our own career. We can go where we can do what we want, how we want. We have to take risks to do that, though. We have to believe in ourselves and our own vision for what’s best.

Palin does this. She does not make it look easy. She makes it look smart, though. And that might be just what we need to inspire the same bravery in our own careers.

NYC has the most extreme benefits to it, but it also requires the most extreme concessions in order to get those benefits. This makes sense. It’s how most of life is. So in order to understand how good a fit you’d be in NYC, you don’t need to look at the benefits – we all want the benefits of NYC. What you need to look at is what you give up.

Here are three questions to ask yourself. You need to answer yes to at least two in order to be a good fit in NYC.

1. Are you a maximizer?

Optimizers are people who are always looking for the best of everything. You know if you are this kind of person because you are never complacent. You are always trying to find if there is something better. It could be a someone who cuts bangs better, a better pickup basketball game, you keep trading up boyfriends, maximizers are always looking for something better, and they usually get greatness in their lives in many aspects. Non-maximizers can be satisfied with what they have. Each of us falls somewhere on this spectrum. New Yorkers skew heavily to strong maximizers.

This is because you can find pretty much the best of everything in NYC. (Yes, maybe there are some things, like the best ski slope, that you cannot find there, but if that’s what you want most, you probably shouldn’t be in NYC.)

I know you have heard that NYC is expensive. But you will never really know how insanely expensive it is until you live there.It’s like having children. Everyone will tell you having kids is really, really hard. Harder than anything they’ve ever done. And everyone will also say that after all those warnings, they still were not prepared for how hard it was when the baby came. This is what money is like in NYC – you absolutely cannot imagine how expensive it is there until you are there, living day to day.

So New Yorkers constantly have to ask themselves: What am I paying so much for? What am I suffering so much for? Life in NYC is very hard (here's funny commentary on that), and if you go to any city in the US, there is a bond that ex-New Yorkers have because they know they each understand how hard life was.

I say this to tell you that the only way to justify the cost and hardship of NYC is because you’re an optimizer. You appreciate having access to the best of things. Not everything – you probably have a few things that are really important to you. And you’re willing to trade off a lot of comforts to get it.

2. Do you want to be at the top of your field (or marry someone like that)?

In many cases, people have to work in NYC in order to rise to the top in their field. (Or, they want to marry someone like this – NYC is a very competitive place to find a husband but only because women recognize that the pickings are superior: Maximizing knows no bounds.)

Wanting to be at the top of your field is not for everyone. Business Week reports that eighty percent of generation Y thinks they are in the top ten percent of all workers. So a bunch of you are overestimating your capabilities, right? But the truth is that NYC is very, very competitive, because it's a magnet for ambitious, strong performers, and if you are not in the top, you will probably not do very well there. So if you do not go to NYC thinking you will work your way to the top of your field, you probably don’t need to be going there for your work.

And, of course, you do not necessarily have to live in NYC to work in NYC, but in order to get a substantially lower cost of living, you would have to move pretty far from the city. This is why New York has the longest commute times of anywhere in the country. This is a fine line to walk, though, because long commutes do a lot of damage to one’s ability to be happy. So you are probably better off paying to high price to live closer to work if you want to get to the top of your field.

3. Do you value an interesting life over happy life?

New Yorkers are not known for being happy. In fact, they are known for being unhappy, and they don’t care.

On balance, New Yorkers understand that most people who are happy are complacent – they like the status quo. And people who like what they have do not do innovative things to change the world. They like the world just fine how it is. This is probably why 95% of New Yorkers voted democrat in the last presidential election. Republicans are typically happier with their lives than democrats. And most New Yorkers are maximizers, and maximizers are almost never happy.

New Yorkers think an interesting life is more important than a happy life. What you really pay for with the exorbitant cost of living and the hard lifestyle is to be surrounded by strong performers, huge ambitions, and constant need for change and innovation. To live in New York City, you have to trade happiness for this. To most New Yorkers, it’s a no-brainer. They would take that trade any day. To most people outside of New York City the trade-off is crazy.

Hat tip: Time Out New York