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 peaceful.

What you remember as really nice tells you something about where you belong. Whatever you thought of, learn something from that.

Where I belong is in nature. And in quiet. When I lived in New York City, I spent most of my time in Central Park and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Most people who live in New York City say they spend a lot of time in Central Park. I almost lived there. I thought I would die if I didn’t go there each day. (Wait. Here's a test to see if you belong in New York City. I definitely don't.)

When I drove up to the farm, the first time, I knew I belonged there. I think I fell in love with the farmer that second. And I saw my whole life as the process of coming to grips with the fact that I am not as fast and cool and cutting edge as I wish I were. I do not belong in a city.

So you’d think, now that I’m marrying the farmer, I’d finally get my farm. But I don’t. Farm land is not like any other possession in the world. Laws of marriage and property and value do not apply. We went to a lawyer to get a prenuptial agreement, and it turns out that it’s not marital property. Instead, it’s everyone’s security, and everyone’s life long dream, and everyone’s connection to the earth.

So maybe I will not get to live on this farm. It’s ironic, because when the farmer first started seeing me, he wouldn’t really do it unless I agreed that I could come live on the farm. And I said yes, I could, way before I really thought I could, because I wanted to be with him so badly.

Now I love the farm. But maybe, the farmer will have to buy different land. It’s not clear. Surely, I will love whatever land we live on, because it will always be a farm. But I really love this farm. It’s where I fell in love with the farmer, and the country, and where my kids looked happier than they have been in years.

I’ve never posted a photo of the farm because I am scared to want it. I’m scared to want to live there because I can’t really control if I live there. It’s between the farmer and his parents. But today, I’m posting a picture. Because part of coping with adult life is allowing yourself to want something even if you are not sure you’ll get it.

So many of the questions I get from people are questions they answer themselves, in the very email where they ask the question. They ask if it’s okay to want what they want because they’re so scared to want it: A book, a blog, a job change, lots of money, less money. It’s scary to want things in life. But if you don’t know what you want, you can’t even know which way to move.

The trick is to admit what we want, even if we are scared we won’t get it. We can only be who we are. And if we are disappointed, later on, well. I guess that’s just part of being a grown up and knowing what we want.

So. This is what I want. To live here, on this farm.

Because really, there is just so much interesting that a person can take. When the world becomes too unstable, that lack of stability consumes us.

Jeff Tweedy, from the band Wilco, describes the senselessness of living on the financial edge:  “Having a solid [fiscal] base allows you to look at darker things and actually think about them. I debate people about this suffering myth, this tortured artists stuff, and they almost never buy it.” Tweedy is a harbinger of the trend to come, where the demographic you would expect to be holding out against stability for its own sake are actually leading the push for more of it. Because too much instability can ruin anyone, at any age.

Here are five new ways to approach your career so you can create stability in an unstable workforce:

Treat your career like an investment portfolio.
Jobs are the new asset. Time magazine points out that a good job pays off way more than good investing. Especially if you’re not loaded with cash to invest. The way to make sure you always have a job when you want one is to make sure you are always job hunting. At first blush it might seem revolutionary to job hunt constantly, but it’s actually a way to make life more secure: You always feel like you can get a job if you need one, because you’re honing your skills for the hunt all the time.

Don’t frame career choices around fun versus not-fun jobs.
Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College who focuses on how people make choices. And when it comes to career choices, Schwartz recommends going a safe route, if you can find one. “I believe that security is more important to happiness than wealth,” he says.

In a flush economy, safe jobs look boring. For example event planning looks way more fun than accounting. But you need to reframe the choice, says Schwartz, because “it’s a false choice. There’s plenty of room for joy in a low-flying life.” The steady industries, like accounting, are actually a smarter choice because we don’t need a high-risk job to have a fun life. Fun comes from other things.

Volunteer, to create a safety net.
Volunteerism is increasing as Generation Y enters the workforce in a cash-strapped way.  Young people use volunteering as a way to instigate change.  But also, volunteering is a way to gain experience that you can apply to your workplace skill set to increase your earning power and make you more widely employable.

Also, since stable careers stem from solid networks, working with organizations like Cool People Care allow you to do good, meet other people doing good, and forge connections that will help you in the for-profit world as well. Collaborating around a good cause makes for stronger connections than the usual, routine networking opportunities.

Take a government job.
You’ve probably already thought of working for the government. So has everyone else: applications to government-based do-gooder organizations are up dramatically since the recession hit. Applications for Teach for America increased 45% and AmeriCorps is on track to triple its applicants pool this year.

The good news about government jobs is that they’re getting better. Obama is mandating that arcane, outdated hiring processes end. and, in a nod to the power of best-places-to-work lists (which are often BS, but let’s set aside that thought for a moment) the government has it’s own best-places-to-work list, with red-hot departments like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Surface Transportation Board.

History shows that these jobs will become more and more in demand, according to Jennifer Senior, writing in New York magazine:

“From Obama on down, people are initiating public discussion that reevaluates the purpose of work – as if trying to remind us, after a long bender of risk-taking and creative economics, that there’s dignity in secure generative labor. . . During the Great Depression, many men and women valued security over risk, pursuing careers in the civil service, teaching, and police departments. It was a time of very conservative choices about how to make a living.”

So if you’re considering a government job, find one now, before you get further behind and the competition gets tougher.

If you must be risky, mitigate.
Start-ups are super risky. And in this economy, even a smaller percentage of workers will be able to stomach the ups and downs of start-up life. But some people are just born to work at start-ups.

Saras Sarasvathy, professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, focuses her research on what makes entrepreneurs successful, and she finds that one of the universal traits is that successful entrepreneurs seek to avoid risk, even as they embark on risky ventures.

So if you must have a startup, make your startup life as stable as you can by picking a product offering that gives customers the same thing you want: stability.

A great example of a company like this is Alice. It’s an online store for buying essentials like toilet paper and toothpaste (and shampoo, which I actually blogged about at Alice). One cool thing about Alice is that there is a financial planning tool to go along with the purchasing tool. Which plays to a new, fiscally conservative lifestyle, yes? And when we talk about my own start-up, Brazen Careerist, we focus on career stability: People need to manage their identities online in order to create a stable career for themselves.

So I guess there are at least two ways to think about stability in your life: One is to create it, by thinking about your job as an asset, and investing conservatively. The other way to think about stability is to sell it. And if you sell it well enough, you just might accidentally stumble on stability yourself. That’s what I’m hoping for.

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.

Last night she sang in the semi-finals, and what struck me most while watching her is how much we can learn about our own careers from watching Susan Boyle’s. For example.

Everyone loves to be a shepherd of talent.

The act of finding a mentor is actually the act of showing someone you have talent and they can help you find it. It’s very, very hard to land in the limelight on your own. So many studies of success – from Fortune 500 executives to startup entrepreneurs – all show that a key factor is finding people to help you navigate a system that requires many more skills than any one, single person could have.

If you ever wonder what you bring to someone who is mentoring you, look at the faces of the three judges when they realize (after four or five notes) that Susan is phenomenal. The joy on their faces is contagious. That’s a big reason people like to watch that video clip: the moment when you see someone is very talented is so rewarding. It’s a moment full of excitement and promise and you get to be a part of it because the person is asking you for help.

This is why mentoring is magical and electrifying to both sides. And seeing the moment on Britain’s Got Talent reminds me that I should continuously seek out mentors and show them I perform well with the help they give me.

You can only shine if you set the bar high.

Susan sang a very hard song: I Dreamed a Dream, from Les Miserables. Not that I know anything about opera. But after watching the video of her at least 50 times, I got curious about how other people sing the song, I Dreamed a Dream. Then I started seeing all the places the song can trip up a singer.

If you watch the clip 50 times, you catch Simon Cowell saying, “That’s a big song.” It’s an important thing – that she picked a big song. Because if you want to be seen as someone doing something big, you have to pick something big to do.

Seth Godin writes about The Dip. It’s the time when things look too hard. It’s the time when you are trying to do something big, and it is not happening, because doing something big doesn’t happen right away, it takes work. And it’s very hard to do a lot of work if you don’t know what will come of it.

Most people quit. That’s Seth Godin’s point: That you have to try something big, and you have to accept that anything big and huge requires you to have a dip – a point when you are wondering if it is worth it. And that’s where most people quit. For the most part, you cannot do something big without going through this process.

I think I’m in a dip right now. With my company. I am lucky, because I have Ryan Healy reminding me that we’re in the dip, doing something big, and we can’t quit. And I’m lucky because I have been in the dip twice before – when I struggled to get on the professional beach volleyball tour, and when I was trying to finish my novel and still did not know that I would eventually get a publisher.

So this is what I know about the dip. There is no big win if you don’t suffer through it. And the first part of the process is to pick a big song.

Settling for a day job does not destroy you.

We all love stories of early success. Child actors discovered in Mumbai, three-year-old girls whose singing makes you cry. In the tech industry, being a young founder is so legendary that founders have lied about how old they are. And in mathematics, it’s always news if someone discovers something later than age 30 because it so seldom happens.

We love the stories of early, magical success. So when we find ourselves having to take a day job we don’t love in order to do what we do love on the side – this is not the narrative we hope for in life.

But Susan Boyle is evidence that this narrative works as well. Huge talent can shine through at any age, and the world will respond. Susan Boyle did what so many people do who are not getting paid to do what they love. She kept singing, while she worked day jobs. She sang because she loved singing, and she got better and better and better.

A hallmark of talent is loving to practice. And Susan Boyle’s story is the narrative of the hard work that talent takes. Our lives are first, and foremost, about getting up every day and practicing what we love. What you get paid for, what you get honored for, that is secondary. And success comes for those who work hard.

]]> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/05/26/career-lessons-from-susan-boyles-success/feed/ 66 http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/05/12/how-to-recognize-bad-advice-about-work/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/05/12/how-to-recognize-bad-advice-about-work/#comments Tue, 12 May 2009 15:54:06 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/?p=2548 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 people who are using old language to talk about contemporary careers are thinking in terms that will pull you off track.

Here are three examples of topics your parents talk about all the time in their careers, but these topics will not be a part of new millennium careers. Watch out for these three terms — they probably come with outdated advice.

1. Career change
When Baby Boomers change careers, they stand on mountaintops. They announce that career change is a new trend, and they are doing it, of course, to save the world. The Baby Boomer specialty is saving the world by screaming from mountaintops, and then borrowing some more money to support that habit.

The other thing about Baby Boomers and career change is that they didn’t really do it before now. I mean, they did, but it was cataclysmic and often seen as reckless. For example, it’s what men did in their 40s after a midlife crises. Or what people did when they got to middle management and realized they were sub-par at their chosen career. (Note: It’s very easy to delude yourself that you’re competent until you get to your mid-30s. Around then, the less competent end up competing with people in their late 20s and losing.)

Gen Y will change careers at least five times. And, if they’re smart, the job hopping they do – which happens every 18 months in their 20s – will span a wide range of jobs. Which means that the idea of career change is outdated. People do it all the time. But they don’t call it career change, they call it finding a job.

The best way to find a job is to hone your skills, update your ideas, and adjust yourself as the workplace changes. Which means that you are not likely to have a single career for more than a few years. Or, more likely, it becomes semantic: is this a change or a shift? And really, who cares? Just keep your skills up, know what you like and what you’re good at, and stay employable. All the time. Not just the year you want to scream from mountaintops.

2. Networking
Do you know who is using social media? Gen X. The average Twitter user is in their 30s. The median age of LinkedIn is 40. The majority of people who are joining Facebook right now are over 35. This is because Gen X wants to meet new people online and reconnect with all the friends they lost along the way. Gen X is using social media to network.

Gen Y doesn’t need to. They never lost their connections because they’ve been online since they were ten. They do not need to meet more people online to expand their network because they are native networkers – they have had the tools and the predisposition to use them since before Gen X even knew what Facebook was.

So while Gen X is busy using Twitter to let people know what they are up to and promote the hell out of whatever they are doing, Gen Y is using Twitter for tweetups – meetups set up via Twitter. Which is a way of making genuine friends offline.

Even though Baby Boomers have been telling their kids forever to network. Networking is a dirty word to Gen Y. (Think about it: A Boomer says, "I'm going to a networking event." A Gen-Yer says, "I'm going to a party.") To young people, networking is sort of like job hunting: Both are for people who don’t have a grip, because if you’re smart, networking and job hunting are like breathing. You do it all the time, so you don’t need to talk about it. It only comes up if you stop and want to start again.

3. Midlife crisis
It’s not that you won’t have crises. But they’ll be earlier. The midlife crisis is a result of people getting on a path that someone else paved before them. If you see that you have a limited range of choices and you have to make one, then you don’t need to know very much about yourself in order to move forward. That’s what Baby Boomers did – they chose a path. Even the women chose a path that men laid out before them. The women fought to be able to take those paths, too.

So when the Boomers hit their 40s, they realized that the paths they chose from were all wrong, and to find a good path, they would actually need to know who they are. The crisis point is that it’s pretty hard to focus on yourself when you have kids, a mortgage and a marriage that is probably faltering because what marriage doesn’t need a lot of attention after ten years? There is not a lot of space for you to be retooling your idea of yourself. That’s the crisis. You need time and space that you don’t have.

Now, though, people take that time and space in their 20s. Gen X did it instinctively, and weathered belittling from Baby Boomers with labels like slackers. So Gen X is not having midlife crises. We had our crises in our 20s. And Gen Y is doing the same thing, but with more optimism (they always have that) and more support (their parents would do anything for them.)

Today the crisis happens earlier. The people at risk of having a crises are those who do not give themselves a chance to explore and falter in their 20s. Beware of the lives that look too perfect in their 20s. Those are the people who will be a mess in their 30s. And it will be a quarterlife crisis.

Here are five trends that are emerging in the face of the largest job-loss numbers in the last four decades.

1. Being cost-conscious is cool.

These days, for the wives of the few investment bankers who still have jobs, shopping couture is something to do in secret. Hermes gives unmarked bags for customers who request it. The Obama girls showed up to the inauguration wearing J. Crew. And they looked adorable, which should inspire the reasonably-priced shopper in all of us.

And cost-cutting isn't just about fashion. Michelle Obama has to overhaul the White House décor. (Great quote from Barack : "I'm not a plates-on-the-walls kind of guy.") And she's heading toward Pottery Barn. I love that!

This trend is very freeing to me because my favorite dress for this winter is from Target. It is velvet but not really velvet – sort of crap, cheap velvet. And when I bought it, in September, I worried that it was over-the-top-cheap. But now, I feel more uncomfortable wearing my $400 boots than I do wearing the $20 dress.

2. An increasing backlash against baby boomers.

Newsflash: The baby boomers got us into this mess. They borrowed against future generations. They mishandled SEC regulations. They ignored the environment. They set up a social security system that is going to break as soon as they’re done taking from it. And they took the best education this country had to offer, and then depleted the education system for the next generation.

Obama is the first Gen-X president. And, to the surprise of all the baby boomers who have been trash-talking Gen-X forever, it’s Gen-X that will bail this country out of the mess the baby boomers got us into.

In the meantime, Generation X is the first generation in the US ever that will earn less than their parents. And Generation Y has an incredible amount of debt due to baby boomers pushing up college costs and housing costs while real wages went down.

The under-45's are stunned by the selfishness of the baby boomer era.

3. More Sex.

When I was a Boston Globe reporter, one of my best interviews was with David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth , who has analyzed the relationship between money and sex.

He says that more money does not get people more sex, it merely gets them more choices of people to have sex with. This makes sense. I've never heard of someone abstaining from sex until they make enough money to date a model. And anyway, we know from Dan Airley's research that if someone has too many choices, they don't do anything. Sure, this research applies to jam samples in grocery stores, but maybe someone should investigate if people actually have less sex when they earn so much money that they can choose from anyone.

Okay. But back to the recession. Amazingly, it turns out that less money equals more sex. I am not totally sure why this is, because the research comes from what is now one of my most favorite resources, Durex condoms, a site that does provide a lot of qualitative analysis for their statistics.

Still, Durex reports that drugstore sales of their condoms were up 6% during the time Lehman went under. And sales in the New York City sex toy emporium Babeland increased 25% in that same time period. So the deeper the recession, the more sex people are having.

4. Women are earning all the money.

We already knew that in big cities women earn more than men. The trend is probably going to spread to smaller cities because the men comprise the majority of people being laid off during this recession: finance, manufacturing, construction, all men.

What will this mean for social fabric? If the pitches I receive from publicists are any indicator of what's coming, things will be very bad at home. More than one press release has instructed women to use the fact that they are earning the money to force the guy to do more around the house.

Here's a pitch for the book, Breakdown, Breakthrough: The Professional Woman's Guide to Claiming a Life of Passion, Power, and Purpose. She encourages women to use their earning power to "commit to breaking the female pattern of overfunctioninig." Presumably this means getting the guy to do more cleaning even though we know that men absolutely do not think the toilet needs cleaning as soon as the woman does.

So basically, women are being encouraged to use the fact that their husbands were laid off as a way to get the men to act like women at home. Bad. Very bad.

5.Companies are finding more cost-effective ways to recruit.

Business Week reports that the recruiting models are broken, and in the downturn, companies aren't spending money on stuff that doesn't work. Instead, companies are turning to online networks. And pundits are declaring that 2009 will be the year that corporations understand how cost-effective it is to leverage social media for corporate messaging.

What this all adds up to is a shift in recruiting. Candidates have known for years that sending a resume to Monster is like sending it into a black hole. Online networks are finally giving recruiters an alternative to the old ways of doing business.

And really, that's the silver lining of the whole recession, right? It's an opportunity for each of us to look at what we've been doing before that wasn't working anyway. Because in a bad economy the stuff that we could sort of get by ignoring will kill us if we don't take action. And taking action to do things better is what we'd want for ourselves in any economy.

The more desperate you are for a job, the more likely you are to take a job that doesn’t teach you what you want to learn. And then you get to that job and you think, “Grad school could solve this problem.” But in fact, grad school creates larger, and more insurmountable problems. And some the problems you’re trying to solve with grad school might not be problems at all.

1. Grad school pointlessly delays adulthood.
The best thing you can do for yourself is take time to figure out who you are and where you fit in the world. No one teaches you that in school. You need to do it yourself. Grad school is a way to delay this process, rather than move you forward, according to Thomas Benton of the Chronicle of Higher Education. So instead of dodging tough questions by going back to school, try being lost. It’s normal, and honest, and you will end up with more self-knowledge and less debt than your grad-school counterparts, and in many cases, you will be similarly qualified for your next big job.

2. PhD programs are pyramid schemes
It’s very hard to get a job teaching at a university. And if you are not going to teach, why are you getting a degree? You don’t need a piece of paper to show that you are learning. Go read books after work. Because look: In the arts, you would have a better chance of surviving the Titanic than getting a tenure-track position; and once you adjust for IQ, education, and working hours, post-PhD science jobs are among the most low-paying jobs you could get.

3. Business school is not going to help 90% of the people who go.
Here’s the problem with business school. Most people want to work for themselves, but you can’t learn entrepreneurship in school – you have to learn by doing. And a business degree that is not from a top school is not going to get you very much at all, according to recruiting firm Challenger & Gray. Finally, Harvard Business School has acknowleged that if you are planning to downshift for kids around the time you are 30, your ability to leverage an MBA is drastically compromised.

4. Law school is a factory for depressives.
It used to be that if you had a law degree it was a ticket to a high salary and a safe career. Today many people go to law school and cannot find a job. This is, in a large part, because law school selects for people who are good with details and pass tests and law firms select for people who are good at marketing themselves and can drum up business. Law firms are in a transition phase, and they have many unfair labor practices leftover from older generations, for example, hourly billing and making young lawyers pay dues for what is, today, a largely uncertain future. Which might explain why the American Bar Association reports that the majority of lawyers would recommend that people not to go into law.

5. The medical school model assumes that health care spending is not a mess.
Medical school is extremely expensive, and our health care system does not pay enough to doctors for them to sanely accept the risk of taking $200,000 in debt to serve as doctors. Specialists like opthalmologists have great hours, and plastic surgeons have great salaries, but most doctors will be stuck in a system that is largely broken, and could easily break them financially – like OBGYNs who cannot afford to deliver babies in New York because they can’t afford the malpractice insurance with their salary.

6. Going to grad school is like going into the military.
Applications to the military increase in a bad economy in a disturbingly similar way that applications to graduate school do. For the most part, both alternatives are bad. They limit your future in ways you can’t even imagine, and they are not likely to open the kind of doors you really want. Military is the terrible escape hatch for poor kids, and grad school is the terrible escape hatch for rich kids.

7. Most jobs are better than they seem: You can learn from any job.
When I worked on a French chicken farm, I thought I’d learn French, but I didn’t, because I was so foreign to the French farm family that they couldn’t talk to me. However I did learn a lot of other things, like how to bargain to get the best job in the chicken coop, and how to get out of killing the bunnies. You don’t need to be learning the perfect thing in your job. You just need to be learning. Don’t tell yourself you need a job that gives your life meaning. Jobs don’t do that; doesn’t that make you feel better? Suddenly being in the workplace doesn’t seem so bad.

8. Graduate school forces you to overinvest: It’s too high risk.
In a world where people did not change careers, grad school made sense. Today, grad school is antiquated. You invest three to six extra years in school in order to get your dream career. But the problem is that not only are the old dream careers deteriorating, but even if you have a dream career, it won’t last. You’ll want to change because you can. Because that’s normal for today’s workplace. People who are in their twenties today will change careers about four times in their life. Which means that grad school is a steep investment for such a short period of time. The grad school model needs to change to adapt to the new workplace. Until then. Stay away.

Anyway, for most of last year, I struggled to blog regularly and run the company and be around for my kids. Finally, this month, when the company has been more difficult than ever, I managed to start blogging four times a week again. This is the result of trying a new time management trick every week, for months and months, until I figured out a system for getting the blog posts done. What finally worked was examining the other problems I was having in my life, and solving those first.

That shouldn’t surprise you. Because the research about problem solving is that if you start targeting any problem in your life, and nail it, all the other problems become easier. There are problem solvers and problem sufferers. And most problems are not unique, so you need to just start tackling them to fall into the first category.

So I started tackling. First, I fixed my company. Instead of stressing that we won't get funding, we decided to fund ourselves with profits from consulting. We have a consulting business that helps companies attract and retain top young talent. That strategy has allowed us to continue to grow our network of bloggers, which is now about 700.

Next problem—yelling at my kids. I'm sure other people have this problem, but no one is blogging about it. Of course no one is, because it feels so crappy to admit. And my kids are young, so when I yell, it is really heartbreaking to see the reaction on the kids' faces, especially my three-year-old. But this month I've been able to stop. It's an especially big accomplishment because I'm sure my yelling is actually me taking my stress out on them, and there’s been plenty of stress on me lately.

Once I stopped yelling, I felt more able to tackle the blogging problem. So now I'm on a roll. And I'm thinking about the next problem to solve. I think it's going to be listening. I'm a terrible listener. I've been noticing myself not listening. And I’ve been noticing that it's painful to have to wait until someone finishes a sentence. To make sure this problem should be next, I asked Ryan Healy, "Do you notice that I go on and on talking way after someone has lost interest?" He looked at me, to make sure I was really asking, and then he said, "Yeah."

So I'm happy to have a day to toot my own horn. It's been a month of success in ways that have surprised and pleased me. And I’m on a roll. Hooray.

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, I have a lot of questions in my head that I have not found research to address.

Today's poll is one of them. I know the research about who is bulimic and what happens to them. Mostly because I was bulimic all through college and I thought becoming an expert on the topic would help me stop throwing up. (That didn't work, but the mental ward did). But there is no workplace research. And I'm curious. So I wrote the poll question because I genuinely want to know the answer: What percentage of women in corporate America are bulimic? I think the answer is higher than anyone would expect.

I know that my poll would not pass scientific muster. But I like that we are at least going to start talking about my question. Well, that's what I was thinking. But then I realized that my poll idea—while a grand opportunity for snark, and also an opportunity to fulfill my dreams of writing quizzes for Cosmo—is not the depth of conversation I am hoping for.

So maybe, I am thinking, I will write a post about the poll each week, to hear what you all think of the topic. I still want you to vote on the poll. Who doesn't love a good statistic about sex (last week) or bulimia (this week) or the intersection of sex/bulimia/work (maybe every week)? So you all should love the poll archive.

Some of you will ask, "Why are we talking about bulimia and sex on a career blog?" Here is some career advice for you: The best thing to do in a recession is make your focus on keeping your learning curve high. Forget about rank —it's going to be hard to get internal raises or big jumps from job hopping. But eventually the recession will end, and you want to make sure you're in a good position to take advantage of that.

People who are always curious and always learning are keeping the recession from killing their career trajectory. You don't need to have a job to be learning, you don't need to have a great title to be stretching your skills. And really, really, you don't need to go to graduate school and earn a degree to prove that you are learning.  In fact, maybe you need to take a job you're not thrilled with, but remember that no one can dictate your learning curve. You control that.

My curiosity about bulimics at work is a reflection of the curiosity that got me through the recession that existed when I entered the workforce. When I was unemployed, I worked in interesting jobs for free. When I was employed, I read outside my expertise at night. When I was out with a group of people, I looked for the people who could teach me something new.

So, some of you will go for the bulimia poll, and some won't. But regardless, each of us should ask engaging questions each day. It's a lifestyle, and it's cheap, and it keeps our learning curve steep, so it's a great way to face down a tanking economy.

Life is very hard. We each probably have some fundamental goals, even if we don't think of them consciously. First of all, getting up in the morning is very hard. It is fundamentally an act of optimism. Because surely you have already realized that most days are not full of happiness. They are full, but with something else. Yet we still get out of bed every day, thinking that the day is going to be good. That's a big deal. A huge leap of faith. I spend a lot of time wondering why more of us don't kill ourselves, and I never come up with a great answer.

The next big goals we have are the spiritual kind: Be good, be kind, treat people with respect. You probably don't write these on your to do list, but now that you read them, surely you are thinking to yourself, "Oh yeah, I want to remember to do that."

So already, life is very full. For example, I just took the red eye home from San Francisco. But if you live in a little town like Madison, Wisconsin, there is, really, no red eye. There is only half a red eye to Chicago, a traumatic awakening at 5am, and then an 8am flight to Wisconsin. By the time I get to my gate, treating people with respect takes pretty much everything that is left of my potential.

Living up to your potential is not crossing off everything on your to do list on time, under budget. Or canonizing your ideas in a book deal. Really, no one cares. You are not on this earth to do that. Trust me. No one is. You are on this earth to be kind. That is your only potential.

And then you have to earn a living.

It's no coincidence that everyone who is walking around bitching that they are not living up to their potential is talking about how they should be more successful at work. Because "living up to potential" is really just code for "not being recognized as the talented genius that I am."

How about this? How about saying, "I was so good at getting high marks in school. Why am I not catapulting up the corporate ladder?"  The answer, of course, is that most of getting what you want at work is about having social skills, and school doesn't measure that. So there you go—if you insist on talking about living up to your amorphous potential, the reason you're not doing it, most likely, is that you are not being kind enough at your work.

If you want to live up to your potential, be as nice as you can be. Be as respectful as you can be. Be as honest with yourself as you can be. Because you can't be honest with other people if you are not honest with yourself.

What can you do if you think you are living below your potential?

1. Recognize that it's delusional. You are who you are, and you should just be you. Have realistic, meaningful goals for your life, like: Be kind. Be engaged. Be optimistic. Be connected. Most people who say they are not living up to their potential are not talking about this most-important stuff.

2. Recognize that the world isn't a race. A race assumes that everyone has an inborn ability to reach a personal best. If you stop racing, you stop wondering what that inborn ability is. I mean, really, "living up to one's potential" is always relative. You are really talking about your ability to kick everyone else's butt at something. And it's not a pleasant thing to say. When you stop looking at the world as a competition, then you can stop wondering why you're not coming in first place.

3. Recognize that you sound like your mother. "Living up to your potential" is a phrase from a grade-school report card. It is elementary-school speak. It is your parents saying you need to do more homework. It is your mother saying "Joey, you're a genius. Why don’t you get straight A's? Look what you do to your mother!" In almost every case when someone says, "You are not living up to your potential," the proper answer is, "So what?" Because it's always someone trying to tell you that the thing you should contribute to this world is something other than kindness.