Now the site that specializes in matching married people looking to cheat, AshleyMadison.com, has released its list of the most adulterous professions based on the 1.9 million people who are registered on the site. (via BoingBoing)

Here's the list:

For Men:
1. Physicians
2. Police Officers
3. Lawyers
4. Real Estate Agents
5. Engineers

For Women:
1. Teachers
2. Stay-at-home Moms
3. Nurses
4. Administrative Assistants
5. Real Estate Agents

This list looks mostly right to me. It is a list of men who like power but do not have access to a lot of women. Physicians, for example, would lose their license hitting on a patient, so it's nurses or drug company reps. (Not that physicians aren't notorious for hitting on drug reps.) There are other types of men who love power and are notorious for cheating–politicians and traveling sales guys come to mind–but they have such widespread access to women that they don't need the web site.

But the number five slot looks wrong to me. Engineers make the top 5 I think, only because it’s a trendy, online resource. I actually think that with more data we'd find that engineers cheat less (reasoning: Engineers generally skew toward Asperger's on the autism scale, which is why Microsoft is known for great insurance coverage for Autism spectrum disorders. Besides, people with Asperger's have a hard time lying.)

As for the list of women, it is, with the exception of the number five slot, filled with jobs that are about nurturing and care taking. Which makes me think that a) the life of a nurturer is not as fulfilling for women as the world thinks, and b) masseuse would be on the list too if it weren't that they probably fall under the category of people who cheat but do not need the site to have access to people to cheat with.

We can also use this list to reaffirm stuff we already know but choose to ignore:

1. Stay away from career paths with an end game of getting power or being famous. Because those careers  are largely unfulfilling. The goal of having regular sex is fulfilling. But, according to David Blanchflower, economist at Dartmouth, power and fame do not give you more regular sex, they give you more choices, and we know from Barry Schwartz's book, The Paradox of Choice, that more choices does not make us happy. Even for sex partners.

2. Taking care of people all day is unfulfilling. Few people can cope with being the caretaker all the time. We already knew, from a study by Pew, that most mothers would like part-time work rather than being at home with kids all day or having work outside the home all day. Now we also know that women do not feel fulfilled being the caretaker all day at work.

3. Work is most fulfilling when it is meaningful and engaging. Caretaking is meaningful, but not always challenging enough to be engaging. The fight for power is usually challenging and engaging but seldom is it inherently meaningful. So when you choose a career, try to get both.

And, beware, because not being honest about fulfillment is dangerous: if you end up lying to yourself about your career, you could end up on AshleyMadison.com, lying to yourself about your marriage as well.

Comment on: How to find the most fulfilling careers

Then I didn’t write the interview for a week.

Then I complained about the questions: I don’t really believe in triumph. Because the most triumphant moments are the days when I have no idea how I'm going to fix anything, but I get out of bed anyway. On the other hand, the moments of huge achievement are not actually that hard to get to. By the time you're close, you are so motivated to get there that it doesn't feel like work at all.

So I wrote that. And then I felt bad.  So I tried to give an example. People like examples. And  I like Psychology Today. And I didn’t want to disappoint them.

So I wrote that the moment when I was a freelance writer and a new mom and had post-partum depression but I knew I had to keep working so I had to get out of bed and write. Maybe there were fifty moments like that. Or five hundred. But those are the moments of triumph.  The thing is, I think it was probably messed up that I kept working and did not check myself into a hospital. And then I started thinking that all my moments of triumph came at the heels of me having done something totally terrible.

Like, let me tell you right now that before I could play volleyball professionally, I was literally starving. So I stole bagels at the bagel shop. I have had about ten editors take that out of my writing. Out of my Business 2.0 column, out of my book, and my editor will tell me now that this is not good to put in a post. Stealing is bad, right? But my point is that it’s very hard to do some extraordinary triumph without taking some extraordinary risk or making an odd judgment that other people would not make. That’s why the triumph is extraordinary.

Another thing about the bullshit of big triumphs: Our big moments — where we can change the world — come because so many other people have helped us, and luck has come to us. But our small moments, when no one is watching and no one cares and the only thing that makes us try again is an unreasonable belief that we can get what we want for ourselves — those are the triumphs that we do all by ourselves.

When I have been on the cusp of huge success, there have always been people to help me. For example, my agent stayed with me when I was out of money but about to get a six-figure book deal.

But there was no one helping me get out of bed the day I knew I had to start writing my book proposal even though the odds of getting  a big book deal from it were terrible.  The daily task of believing things will improve when then things look bad. We do that on our own, and each time I do it I am thankful, in a deep, spiritual way. I'm not sure what keeps me going when everything looks terrible, but I know that each time I do it, it's a triumph. And it happens a lot.

Another thing. Everyone, please shut up about your biggest failures. I hate when people write about their failures because they always write about how they pulled themselves up, or what they learned. And really, then, it's not a failure, is it? It's a learning opportunity, or a chance to shine. Failure is something you did not overcome. You did not learn from. And most people are too embarrassed to write about it. High achievers don't have failures because they can learn from everything.

There is no finish line, there is no gold prize. There is only living with yourself, day after day. So each day needs to be a small triumph so you can pat yourself on the back before you go to sleep. I try to do that. Today's triumph is doing this interview with Psychology Today. Sure, I couldn’t quite do it, and I had to be quirky and weird, and it probably cost me getting into the article. But at least I wrote something.

Comment on: The biggest triumph is getting out of bed

This is my favorite blog post ever by Dave: The Thong is Dead. (Maybe not safe for work.) He does so many great things in that post. He has genuine social commentary about who decides what is fashionable underwear. He shows us a glimpse into his personal life because he has an underwear discussion with his wife. And he provides a great photo of a girls’s ass, in boyshorts. All this in 500 words.

For me to get all of that into one post would take about 1000 words. Seth Godin writes posts like that—dependably dense: really short but packed with value—but never as scintillatingly smutty as Dave. Where Seth makes a living as a high-paid speaker by republishing a compendium of blog posts every two years, Dave can make a living as the intelligentsia by repackaging other peoples’ soft porn.

Do you know the Approval Matrix in New York magazine? No? You have to look at it. New York magazine has perfected a way to showcase the thrill that is behind the brilliance of low-brow culture. Recent example:

Highbrow and despicable: Franco Zefferellis says the soprano in his opera is too fat.

Highbrow and brilliant: When the production goes to Rome, she quits.

Brilliant and highbrow: The book titled Benefits of Looking Up, which is a series of photographs of balloons that got stuck in trees.

Brilliant and lowbrow: An online video of some guys jumping off Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.

I am obsessed with the meshing of lowbrow and highbrow. I’m convinced that if you understand high brow well, then you are also a great judge of low brow, and you can get even more pleasure out of that.

This reminds me of when I used to hang out with a woman who was a Ralph Lauren model. Neither of us had very much money because I was playing professional beach volleyball which meant I was living off sponsors (I spent my days in a bagel shop that sponsored me with free  food), and she used to be a Ralph Lauren model, but she cut off her hair because she thought she might be gay and she was living off residuals (checks that comes in when ads run months or years later).

So we’d hang out in my bagel shop, usually with way too much food on our plates because I was bulimic and she was a hoarder, and the food was free. My friend’s clothes were always a little raggedy because she decided it was cheaper to get ten-cent shirts from the thrift shop than to pay to clean clothes at the laundromat. And I always had a little too much sand in my hair, and it fell onto the table, and since the only new clothes I had were from sponsors, I always looked like I was at the beach even when I was at the bagel shop.

We always sat in a corner because it was too much trouble to try to pass for regular. But still guys would come up to us and they would look at her and feel like they just discovered America. They were Christopher Columbus and she was the untouched new nation (and I was a native they might have to kill.) The guys loved thinking they discovered a street person who looks like a model. They thought they had an eye for lowbrow.

They were morons, of course, because every guy in the whole world was attracted to my friend, and every guy thought he was the only one. “Here’s my card. I could do so much for you,” guys would tell her. As if she wasn’t already under contract with a modeling agency, violating it with short hair.

My point here: there is a little-acknowledged thrill in uncovering low brow while seeing the high brow in it.  It’s why I love Barstool Sports. It’s also why I know that every job is creative. There are ideas that people dismiss as not right. Not intellectual enough. Not how we think. But there are gems. The creativity, in any job, is finding the gems among the discards. It’s thrilling to do. Even if you’re wrong sometimes. And the rewards are huge. After all, Barstool Sports is making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Comment on: How to be more creative at work

I have discovered that I would rather be interesting than happy. The good news is that even though I’m punting on the quest for happiness, I do have a good sense of how to know if you should be seeking happiness yourself, or if your quest for interesting makes happiness a lost cause.

Here’s the test:

1. Did you relocate away from family for a better job or another more interesting experience? Minus one

You would have to earn $150,000 more from a job if you were doing it far away from family, according to economist Nattavudh Powdthavee of University of York.

2. Did you relocate to be near family? Plus one

Happiness does not come from a job, or from being revered by your peers. It comes from personal relationships.

3. Are you nationally recognized as being great at doing something or do you have nationally-recognized expert knowledge in something? Or are you reorganizing your life in order to achieve this end? Minus one

Interesting people raise the bar on themselves. They are singularly focused because they recognize that in order to be great, you need to be focused. They will sacrifice other things in life for this obsession.

4. Were you a happy child? Plus one

Sixty percent of our ability to be happy is predetermined by our genes.

5. Do your friends pray? Plus one

People who pray are happier than people who do not pray, probably because having faith is fundamentally optimistic. (You can be any religion, and pray for anything.) Happiness is contagious, and we are more likely to be happy if our friends are happy.

6. Do you need your kids to go to a school that is recognized as excellent in national rankings? Minus one.

People who need the best of everything — maximizers — are not happy people.

7. Do you have fat friends? Plus one

Fat people are not generally maximizers. And if your friends are not maximizers than you probably aren’t either.

8. Do you have an opinion on Picasso? Minus one

People who focus on interesting are quicker to form opinions on subjective topics.

9. Do you have three friends who are a Jew,  a Muslim and a born-again Christian? Minus one

Diversity is interesting, but in small groups (like friends) it does not make for happiness, according to Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect.

10. Are you a Republican? Plus one

Republicans are happier than democrats. This dichotomy is based a lot on personality. Republicans tend to have personality traits that are uncomfortable with change, whereas people who lean democrat tend to have personality traits of change agents, according to personality research from Xyte.

11. Do you think Christmas is a national holiday? Plus one

Christmas is not a national holiday, because the US is not a Christian country. But regardless of what's true, homogenous thinking breeds happiness. It’s why countries like Sweden and Finland are so happy. They are homogenous.

12. Have you been to a therapist? Minus one

Peopel who are interesting but not happy have a point where they need to make sure they are okay. Also, they are interested in finding out about themselves even if they are fine.  The ratio of therapists to citizens is lowest in populations that skew to maximizers (like New York City and San Francisco).

13. Do you know the difference between $70 eyebrows and $20 eyebrows? Minus one

It doesn't matter if you spend that much for eyebrows. But if you know why people who must have good eyebrows cannot take chances, and why most people have terrible eyebrows, then you took the time to find out enough about eyebrows to know what is best and how yours could be better.

14. Can you tell the difference between real diamonds and fake diamonds. Plus one

Trick question. A maximizer will have tried to learn to figure it out and will have learned that even experts can’t without a special tool.

15. Have you tried on a pair of $200 jeans? Minus one

If you are not interested in seeing what they look like on you, you probably just want to be happy with how you are. People who are interested in new experiences are less likely to be happy, according to Psychology Today.

16. Do you think this test is BS? Plus one

People with interesting lives do not get offended that they cannot be happy. Happy people are offended that they cannot have interesting lives.

Scoring: (Note: I revised the scoring. I realized I made a mistake the first time.)

-8 to -3  You have a desire for interestingness over happiness

3 to 8     You have a desire for happiness over interestingness.

-2 to 2   You are suspiciously well balanced. Or lacking a self-identity. I'm not sure which.

Comment on: Test: Is your life happy or interesting?

The article that I’m attached to is The Making of an Expert by Anders Ericsson, Michael Prietula and Edward Cokely. I would not normally bother to tell you all three authors for one article in my blog. This is not a medical journal. But I love the article so much, that I want you to know all of them.

The article changed how I think about what I am doing here. In my life. I think I am trying to be an expert.

Being an expert is not what you think, probably. For one thing, the article explains that “there is no correlation between IQ and expert performance in fields such as chess, music, sports, and medicine. The only innate differences that turn out to be significant—and they matter primarily in sports – are height and body size. “

So what factor does correlate with success? One thing emerges very clearly is that successful performers “had practiced intensively, had studied with devoted teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically by their families throughout their developing years.”

There are a few things about the article that really make me nervous. The first is that you need to work every single day at being great at that one thing if you want to be great. This is true of pitching, painting, parenting, everything. And if you think management in corporate life is an exception, you’re wrong. I mean, the article is in the Harvard Business Review for a reason.

It used to be, more than 100 years ago, that you could be a prodigy and come out of nowhere and be great. There are stories like that, ones we hang onto when we do things like watch the Olympics and allow ourselves to think, “Maybe I’ll be on the luge team in 2014.”

Today the standard for being an international success at anything is so high that the authors say you need to spend at least ten years working in a very focused, everyday way on the thing you want to be great at. Evidence: high schools swimmers today would beat Olympic records from years ago. (And in fact, the importance of hard work over raw talent is the subject of the most popular Freakonomics column ever in the New York Times.)

This part of the research worries me because there is not a lot I have invested this much time in. Maybe the only thing is writing. I’m not sure.

Well, there are other things, but I’m not sure I could be great. Figure skating is a good example. I figure skated for ten years. I was good, until I went through puberty and then was clearly the wrong body type to be doing double flips. I should have been a basketball player. Maybe.

A lot of being great at something is having the right coaching, and part of the right coaching is someone telling you where you’re not gonna make it and where you are. I’m not sure I have this right now.

But the coaching that successful experts get is special. According to the article, usually someone starts with a local coach, for anything, and then the person moves on to a coach who has achieved huge success himself.  And people who practice very hard every day start to have a sense of who can be a coach who is capable of helping them succeed, and who is a coach they have outgrown.

An example the authors use is Mozart. Yes, he had innate ability, but also, his father was a professional violinist, skilled composer and wrote the first book ever on violin instruction.

I am panicking that maybe I am just figure skating again. Maybe I am doing something I’ll never be great at. I worry about this because I don’t actually know what I’m doing. Am I getting good at bringing a startup from fruition to exit? Am I getting good at writing career advice?

I am thinking, maybe, the thing I’m getting good at is living my life out in the open. But I’m starting to worry that it’s like figure skating. Because I have a natural limit: I don’t want my kids to be psycho from overexposure. The farmer doesn’t like being on my blog, and I am not getting good coaching right now. I mean, I’m not getting any coaching, I don’t think.

This reminds me of the day I realized that my figure skating coach was an alcoholic. My dad picked me up at the rink. He asked why my skate guards were on. I said I never went skating. I said, “I think Ivar is sick.”

My dad said, “Yeah. I’ve been thinking that for a while.”

I said, “I don’t think he really can teach me any more.”

My dad said, “I’ve been thinking that for a while.”

I remember the heartbreak I felt knowing that I didn’t have a teacher. I remember also realizing that it’s important to know who can teach and who can’t. If you are a person who wants to be an expert, the thing you want most is a teacher. I think that’s why I carry the magazine with me everywhere I go. To remind me to look.  Like my life depends on it.

But I've recently started reading research beyond the article, and it turns out that the teacher isn't the important per se, but rather, what you need is immediate, helpful feedback. And this is what you get when you have a blog. So maybe I am still on my path to being an expert, and I'm just crowdsourcing my coaching.

Comment on: Being an expert takes time, not talent

The first thing I have to grapple with, besides having spent the last three years of my life completely enthralled and ensconced in the happiness research from positive psychologists, is if I don’t want a happy life, what sort of life do I want?

I think I want an interesting life. Not that I want to be interesting, but I want to be interested. I'm talking about what I think is interesting to me. I want to choose things that are interesting to me over things that would make me happy. For example, this post. I am not sure if I'm right on this, and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of telling me I'm an idiot in the comments. But it's going to be interesting.

I think choosing a life that is interesting to us and choosing a life that makes us feel happy are probably very different choices.

For one thing, people who are happy do not look for a lot of choices, according to Barry Schwartz, in his book, The Paradox of Choice. People who want to have an interesting life are always looking for more choices and better choices, and they make decisions for their life based on maximizing choices.

I think this because I’ve lived in NYC, where people value having a wide range of choices and opportunities over having a life that makes them feel happy. When it comes to self-reporting happiness, New Yorkers report being less happy than everyone else, and they don't care. And I’ve lived in Wisconsin, where, I’m not kidding about this, almost everyone will tell you they are happy. But you can trust me on this, Wisconsin does not offer a lot of choices and opportunities.

Now I’m going to preemptively rip on everyone who thinks they are going to comment here about Wisconsin. Wisconsin does have things that are world-class: Football, beer, cheese, PETA-inflaming bioscience departments. And there is nothing wrong with being fine with what is here. I think it is a nice life, and that’s why I moved to Wisconsin.

But on balance, Wisconsin is not a place you go to get the best of everything, which is what optimizers do. New Yorkers love that they can get the best of everything - they want that more than they want to be happy. And if you can’t understand this you merely reveal how little you know about the world. I have no more patience for people telling me I can get great eyebrows in Wisconsin, there is great shopping in Wisconsin, etc. There simply isn’t. And it’s okay. People don’t live in Wisconsin because of that. People live in Wisconsin because the lifestyle is easy – family is here, personal history is here, things generally are fine. Nothing is fine in NYC. It’s very challenging. Every single day.

The fact that I feel compelled to have a tirade about Wisconsin in the middle of this post is interesting to me: People who value choices over happiness never argue about it. They are proud of it. People who value happiness over having a life full of interesting opportunities get indignant over being accused that they made that choice.

I wish I could tell you I am a person who picks interesting over complacency, but problem for me is that life in NYC is so interesting to me, but it's just plain too hard for me. When I lived in NYC with two kids the year I had $200,000 coming in, I felt like I was living at the edge of poverty. Whenever I write this, people who have lived in NYC with kids are not surprised at all, and people who have not lived in NYC think I’m crazy. So please, if you have not raised kids in NYC, do not comment that you could easily do it on $200,000, okay?

What this illustrates, though is how different the world of lots of choices is. People will pay a ton of money to have a lot of choices, which is what they perceive as an interesting life. (See the average rent per square foot in NYC) but people will not pay a ton of money for a life with relatively few choices. (See the average rent per square foot in Madison). This makes me think that people put a higher premium on choices, because choices make life more interesting.

I recently spoke to Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University. His book, Create Your Own Economy, is about how the information flow of the Internet allows us to manage our careers differently than before. For example, people who are focused on information (infovores, as Tyler calls them) but not on face-to-face social interaction can flourish in an information economy.

I suggested to Tyler that it’s messed up to value information processing over social interaction because I want to believe that it’s social interaction that actually makes us happy.

Tyler says that people who are infovores feel fulfilled by processing information. And he thinks that happiness is an elusive, amorphous goal. Tyler says feeling fulfilled actually gives us a feeling of happiness, and some people gain that fulfilled feeling through interaction with information rather than social interaction (makes sense from Tyler – he writes a great blog, full of fun information.)

But it scares me that this also seems true for me. I don't want it to be true for me because I want to be as complacent as the people I live with, in Wisconsin. And I want to be a socially skilled as the non-Asperger's people I try to pass for in regular life.

Tyler's ideas will resonate in the Asperger community. There is a large contingency that sees Asperger Syndrome not as a deficit but as merely a difference, and these are the people who would love to hear that the idea of happiness is myopic and that fulfillment is a more real goal, and people with Asperger’s can feel fulfilled through information processing.

I’m not sure I buy that. I want to buy it. Because I have Asperger’s and so do many people in my family, and I want to believe there is fulfillment out there for all of us.

Comment on: Do you overemphasize happiness?

If you’re wondering, some of the posts that brought in more than 400 comments are:

• Five time management tricks I learned from Tim Ferriss
• I hate David Dellifield. The one from Ada, Ohio.
• What’s the connection between abortion and careers?
• Miscarriage is a workplace event.

But whatever. I feel like I've been talking about those posts all year. What about some other posts? One's that are so well researched and I love what I learned from writing them:

• Will taking drugs help your career? And maybe you need Adderall.
• High-income women get more oral sex. Maybe.
• Do you belong in NYC? Take the test.

Here are some firsts for me during the past year:

• First (mis)use of alcohol as a career tool: Try to give more hugs to more people at work.
• First fake tan: Consistently successful careers stem from consistent personal decisions.

Here are two topics that have been in my head for years. And I finally figured out how to address them in my blog.

• How to decide how much to tell about yourself on your blog.
• Asperger's at work: Why I need a sick day to register my car.

A big deal for me this year is that I started a few story lines that pop up repeatedly, and I sort of like it. If nothing else, it makes career advice more interesting.

A good story line is that I brought my company from almost bankrupt, to funded, stable, and growing, and while I was doing that, my kids were basically okay, and I was able to keep giving career advice, even if I got a little impatient at times.

A not-as-chirpy story line is the one about the farmer: Back from a breakup, engaged, ensuing mess, and breakup. All in one year.

I want to say something upbeat about 2010. You know, start on a good note. But it seems so artificial. I don't think we need to magically be in a great place at the end of a year. Or magically know our goals to start off a new year. I think, sometimes, that it's already magical that every day we wake up with the strong belief that we can make things better.

Comment on: Popular posts of 2009. Sort of.

The absurdity of the workplace being set up for extroverts is that 57% percent of the world are introverts, according to Laurie Helgoe, a psychologist and the author of the book Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life is Your Hidden Strength.

A lot of people tell me that my posts about how to approach social situations if you have Asperger Syndrome are helpful to people who are introverts. That might be true, in that both types of people need to limit their exposure to social situations. But the difference is that people with Asperger’s are disabled socially. People who are introverts could be great in social situations.

So you can’t judge yourself by whether or not you are socially competent. Rather, if you have the choice to be in a social situation or be alone, which would you choose more often? An introvert has more energy for doing life if he or she gets time alone, to recharge. An extrovert gets recharged from being around people. (Here’s a test to take if you’re not sure what you are.)

I am not an introvert. (I’m an ENTJ.) But I have sensory integration dysfunction, which gives me a similar feeling to introverts when they are overwhelmed with outside input. So unlike most ENTJs, I have a soft spot for introverts. And I am realizing that introversion is an important thing to have in a workplace – the trick is having introverts that understand why they’re so valuable.

Here are five ways to leverage the advantages of introversion:

1. Work in the world of ideas.
Introverts generally love to talk about ideas, according to Helgoe. She says that in conversation, introverts are stronger if you talk about “what are you thinking?” instead of “what are you doing?” And at work, you are stronger if you are helping people with ideas rather than sticking to a routine pattern of work.

2. Give ten minutes and then go.
Make a  connection, really contribute to the conversation, and then ten minutes is enough. Also, Helgoe says extroverts often have anxiety that they cannot get access to the introverts in their life – because they are always leaving to be alone. Introverts can alleviate this problem by being fully attentive for a short time and then leaving.

3. Have confidence in your self-knowledge.
Do you know the personality type that has the longest Wikipedia page? INTJ. Because the combination of being an introvert and being idea-driven makes one very interested in learning about oneself. INTJs are extreme cases, but all introverts have this combination to some extent, and the self-knowledge will help you to put yourself in situations where you’ll have the most positive impact. For example, Helgoe has a great chapter on how to get out of going to a party – a key skill for an introvert, who does better in very small groups.  But the bottom line is that you have to say that you’d rather be alone, which, Helgoe points out, “requires a real grounding in who you are."

4. Teach other people to interact with you.
A lot of the conflict Ryan Healy and I used to have is that I had no idea how to communicate with an introvert. The biggest difference is that I think out loud, so I never stop talking to think. Ryan thinks and then talks. But if I never shut up, he can’t actually think long enough to have a response. He did a bunch of research about communication styles and he taught me this difference between us. It helped me a lot to make space so that we could have a productive conversation.  (Here’s a book that can help you teach people how to approach introversion, and here's a summary of the book.)

5. Take control of your work.
One of the most popular professions for introverts is being a writer. What this means is that there is a lot of information written about what work is well-suited for an introvert.  Here is a list of ways to make an office that will help introverts excel.

And, I’m going to end by telling you to check out the book I recommend more than any other book in the world: Do What You Are by Paul Tieger. This book does not provide a single list of jobs suitable to introverts because there are so many different types of introverts. But this book can tell you what sort of introvert you are (for example, an artist or an activist?) and what sort of work you will thrive in.

As for you extroverts, stop assuming everyone is like you, and start tailoring conversation to introverts when it's appropriate. Once I understood the different types of personalities, I started doing much better at work.

Comment on: Leverage the advantages of being an introvert at work

Yesterday I was trolling for posts, and I remembered this one, about hiring a babysitter. I never link to it because I can't read it. I get physically ill. It was a short, stinging moment during an absolutely terrible time in my life. But a part of me likes that sting. I'm the kind of girl that picks scabs off just to feel like I'm alive.

So you can imagine that a blog post about how to sell is not rocking my world. It's true that I've been thinking a lot about creating more stability in my life. But it's also true that in the recent post about what I learned from sales guys, I should have told you that when I met one of those sales guys on a plane, I went to a hotel and had sex with him. I had never had a one-night stand and I thought I should know what it's like. And it was terrible. I like picking scabs, but it's very controlled. It's hard to control a one-night stand, and it was, actually, very scary and not fun at all.

I want this blog to be somewhere in between a one-night stand with a sales guy and a five-point list of sales tips. In fact, I want my life to be that way as well.

A few days ago I flew to LA to get my haircut. I know that sounds crazy, but remember that I live in the middle of Wisconsin. Also, my best friend, Sharon, is in LA, and she owns a hair salon, and she's been cutting my hair for 15 years. Before I was her free-haircut-friend, a cut and color with her was about $300. So I feel like the plane ticket, together with the free haircut, is somehow still a bargain.

I go there on a day the salon is closed, and we do my hair and then spend the day hanging out in Santa Monica talking.

At lunch, outside, with cars driving by, I tell Sharon I need a break. I need a vacation. I have been working absolutely insane hours for the last five years. I traveled so much that when I get on a plane now, I have panic attacks.

She said, "What would you do on vacation?"

Me: "I'd probably wake up, take the kids to school, go to the gym, write a blog post, and then work on whatever company I was percolating. And then pick the kids up at school."

So I don't really want a vacation. I want breathing room. But not a vacation. To be honest, I still work at night. I am not sure why. I think because I'm interested in what people are doing. In what I'm doing. I don't want to miss anything because everything is still fun.

I think working at night is like picking scabs. It feels lively to solve some problems before I go to bed. Or create some. (Same way with pulling a scab, right?)

After lunch, Sharon and I drove to Culver City, to get my eyebrows done. I usually go to NYC for eyebrows. But I don't want to travel anymore, so I don't want to have a hair person in LA and an eyebrow person in NY. So, as a step toward simplifying my life, I did my eyebrows in LA.

I liked the place immediately because there was a whole display of gray nail polish and I know gray is the it-color for fall, and I know no one is wearing it yet in Madison, so I had high hopes for my eyebrows.

But they are uneven. Sharon tried to tell me they were okay, but good friends, really, don't do that. So in the end, she didn't. And I'm going back to NY next time.

I know you'll say, "Just find someone else in LA." It's not bad advice. In fact, this is what Sharon said.

But I'm upset about the eyebrows, about how it turned out. It's hard to make changes, even if the changes could make my life more calm. It's so easy to convince ourselves that the change is too difficult to make. For eyebrows, for a blog, for a career.

Comment on: This is what it looks like to have a hard time making a change

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.)

Comment on: We overestimate the gap between nonprofit and for-profit jobs