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

I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. We know that people keep less than 5% of New Year's resolutions, and I think a big reason for this is that anything we are trying to change in our lives is really about self-discipline.
I realized this after spending two years reading what positive psychologists have discovered [...]

This is what I thought yesterday: I thought, today is the day I’m going to start going to the gym again. I am certain that no one recovers from sadness until they go back to the gym: Endorphins, routine, self-control, these are all the pieces of getting back to normal.
I have said, every day for [...]

I have always thought that blogging is a way to reach your career goals. It’s hard to write a blog if you don’t have a goal. You need to know what blogging success looks like to you, so you know what you're aiming for.
Like most goals in life, my definition of blogging success has shifted [...]

Someone once asked me to think of a moment in my childhood that was really nice. I thought of one.
Wait. You think of one, now. Quick. Just any one…
So I thought of a time:  it was in my grandparents’ huge yard with fruit trees and flower gardens and grass for running. And it was so [...]

Now that we have a recession, and maybe not so much a recession but a new way of doing business, people are starting to look at their career goals differently. And while interesting was the big goal when we were flush with cash, security will be the brass ring of the near future.
Because really, there [...]

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

I never watch American Idol, or other talent shows. I think I got my fill of them in the 1970s, watching year after year of the mind-numbing Miss American pageant. But there was too much hoop-la with Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent, so I had to see what I was missing. I ended up [...]

Be careful who you take career advice from. Knowing who to take advice from is a really good skill for any aspect of your life, but especially in the field of work, because work is changing very fast right now. A lot of advice that was good ten years ago is not good now. And [...]

As the recession persists, we can watch social shifts and cultural trends. Some are good, some are bad. But in either case, one way to control how the recession affects you is to watch the larger trends and decide where you want to fit.
Here are five trends that are emerging in the face of the [...]

A recession is typically a good time for graduate schools. Their application pool goes up because people see them as safe shelter from the storm. The scariest part of a down economy is the idea of having no income. Of course, graduate school does not solve for that. But graduate school does solve the second [...]

This month I broke my record for the most traffic to my blog. Ever. About 375,000 page views. Hooray. Ironically, I spent most of the month garnering high-traffic by writing about what a hard time I've been having. So I want to take a day to pat myself on the back, because if I only [...]

I announced last week that I'll be running a poll on my sidebar each week. I’m aiming for a new one every Tuesday.
The poll is a fun way for me to think about career topics. A new format always gets me going. But it's also fun because even after writing about careers for ten years, [...]

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

I have been derailed for the last year by a fungus growing on my foot. I've actually had the fungus since my days as a volleyball player. All that time, and the few years after, I was uninsured, and I only went to the doctor if I felt my life was at risk.
So I learned [...]

I recently mentioned a new book about happiness: The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky. The premise of the book is that we each have a setpoint for happiness—we are born with a proclivity toward being happy or not. But we can affect that proclivity to become happier. And Lyubomirsky tells us how.
There are snooty [...]

Last week I wrote about how important it is to pick the right goal for yourself so that you are not banging your head against the wall trying to meet an impossible or insignificant goal. I actually think the reason we don't meet our goals is mostly because the goals suck. But if you have [...]

The way to keep a New Year's resolution is to pick a good goal and then overhaul your life to in order to meet it. Duh.
But some of you are saying, hold it, my goal isn't big enough to require an overhaul of my life. Maybe your goal is to, say, clean out your closet. [...]

Don't jump so fast for that promotion or raise you're about to win. Today's workplace is largely unstable — people get laid off and job hop constantly, and in general, staying anywhere more than five years is a career liability. Your learning curve flattens out so much that you're not gaining skills fast enough to [...]

For those of you who graduated from college before happiness courses were available, you've got some reading to do. But luckily, almost all of the books I have seen on this topic are very interesting.
One of these books is Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment by Gregory Burns, a professor of psychology at Emory. His [...]