I’m dying because I am following all the prescribed rules except one.

Here are things I’m doing well:

1. I clear my inbox.  I deal with each email the second I read it–by responding, deleting, or transferring to my to do list.

2. I have a single list. I have A’s, B’s, and C’s for my priorities, so I can tell what is most important to do on any given day.

3. I make sure I have long-term goals. And I put them in my list of A’s. I identify the items I must get done before the end of the day. But I also add at least one non-deadline-based item that helps me reach a bigger, life-changing goal.

4. I rewrite the list every day by hand. Because if something on the list is not worth taking the time to rewrite by hand, it’s not worth taking the time to do.

5. I make sure I get all the A’s done first. Only then do I move on to less important items. Just kidding. I don’t do this. But I should. Honestly, I can tell that it doesn’t really matter if I follow all the other rules when I’m not doing this one.

There’s a book by Michael Stainer titled, Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork. Start the Work That Matters.  I know I have a problem sticking to stuff that matters: as soon as I typed the title, I thought, “Why is the word that capitalized?” I checked back on Amazon twice to make sure. It doesn’t seem right to me.

Then I tell myself I need to look up the AP Stylebook to see what the rule is. I think the is never capitalized in a title and that is optional, but I think, in this case, it looks better as lower case.

Then I tell myself, look, I just really need to get this post done. If I look up the AP Stylebook, and find an answer, which is probably not going to be easy to find because honestly, I’m not the queen of Google searches. Even if I manage to do that, I will not feel like I have accomplished something important today. But if I finish this post, I will feel like I am meeting an important goal of writing a post each day.

Also, I tell myself that the best work I do is when I am not constantly distracted by randomly interesting searches. Like, the last time I remember doing this was, in fact, last night, when I got stuck looking up soporific. It means sleep inducing. But I thought maybe I was missing a nuance of the word because it was in a picture caption in a movie review. Who puts a word like that in a picture caption? So I thought it had another slang meaning or something. And then, when it turns out that it really does mean sleep inducing I didn’t feel accomplished. It was not on my to-do list. And I can’t even figure out how to slip it into my own writing. Unless you find my paragraph about soporific to be soporific.

Stainer's book has a chapter written by me. Which, I’m sure I wrote only because I put it on my A list 400 days in a row, sending it to him, finally, ten days late. Or something like that. And he has chapters by other luminaries who I am convinced do their A list before they even eat breakfast: Seth Godin, Chris Guillebeau, Leo Babauta. The important thing about reading a book like Stainer's is that if I read people telling me that I should not do bullshit work all day, then I am more likely to hold myself accountable to my A list.

This problem comes down to my struggle with self-discipline. I think everyone struggles. I think there’s a Maslow hierarchy of self-discipline. First you have to get out of bed in the morning. Then you have to write a to-do list every morning, and write a schedule to accommodate it. Then you have to have the self-discipline to start giving stuff up because you don’t have time for everything – the highest form of self-discipline is admitting that you will not be doing some things in the day.

I have done all that. So what I’m left with is stuff that is easy to do. But it’s usually B’s. And some stuff that’s hard to do. Those are the A’s.  Today I told myself no surfing. No staring at the wall. No reading my book. (I'm reading Bonk, by the way, which is scintillating, and thank you to Jens Fiederer who recommended the chapter about pig orgasms that last ten minutes.)

But then I saw a GChat link from Michael Roston about the Dutch parliament. I had to click. It turns out that there is a group trying to make sex with twelve-year-olds legal. So they formed a political party in order to get the laws changed. But the group dropped out of the election because they found they are spending so much time campaigning that they are losing focus of their main goal, which is to legalize pedophilia.

And I thought: Dutch pedophiles are more focused on their long-term goals than I am.

My problem is that I cannot write my own long-term goal in as clear a way as the pedophiles. I coach so many people who tell me they can’t move forward because they don’t know where they are going. And I tell them, make something up. I tell them to commit to a goal, any goal, and move toward it until you think of a better one. The act of moving toward something helps you crystallize where, exactly, you want to be moving.

I wish I could tell you I'm doing that, but recently I've been writing about it more than doing it. Because I’m scared. It’s so scary to commit to a goal when you know it’s not the real goal. Success requires a leap of faith that goal setting is trial and error and the process of finding clarity — not the one-time process of immaculate conception of clarity.

When I was learning about to do lists, each step seemed too hard. And empty in box seemed impossible. Handwriting a to do list every morning felt absurd. But in each case, after I did it a while, it felt right and probably essential to me. So I guess I will just have to trust that if I force myself to choose a goal, my goals will get more and more clear, and the productivity piece will start falling into place.

Comment on: How to get unstuck in life

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

I realized this after spending two years reading what positive psychologists have discovered makes people happy. And, it turns out, that everything we know about what makes us happy comes down to having self-discipline to do what we know we want to be doing.

So of course making a New Year’s resolution doesn’t work, because it’s the act of saying, “I want to make a change, but I’m not going to do it now. I’m going to do it in January.” That’s not self-discipline, that’s procrastination, right?

If you want to make a change in your life, you can start right now, with something that is not that hard to change.

1. Start small.
Because the best way to make a change is to start with something small, relatively easy to do, and not necessarily related to what you want to change. Solving problems is a snowball thing, which might be the most transformative research I have come across in the last five years because it has given me the encouragement to get started on lots of personal changes that look very hard.

For example, if you go tell yourself you have to drive to the gym every day, you can change your life. You don’t need to force yourself to work out. You probably will, but you can tell yourself you just need to drive to the gym. And reorganize your day so you can do that. And if you actually go into the gym, then you will eat better. So you don’t need a goal of working out more or eating better. You just need to change your daily schedule so you drive to the gym and sit in the parking lot.

2. Think in increments of three weeks.
And, more good news:  Your New Year’s resolution really takes only three weeks to complete. Because if you force yourself to change your behavior for three weeks, your brain will start to develop more dopamine in response to the behavior that you are trying to change to, according to Monika Fleshner, a neuroimmuno-physiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For example, after three weeks, your brain will start to release dopamine when it thinks about going to the gym instead of when it thinks about ditching the gym.

3. Get the wording right.
Be careful about how you word your goals. If you say, “I need to go to the gym more,” just forget it. It’ll never happen. You need to break down the steps to defined tasks. You should say, “I need to drive to the gym at 4:30 every day and I cannot drive out of the parking lot until 5:30.”

The biggest source of poorly worded goals is the urge to do something to please someone else. It’s very hard to write a clearly worded goal if it does not come from inside you. “Live up to my potential.” That is a great example of a terrible goal. Besides the fact that living up to one’s potential is BS, it is not actually a goal, either. I mean, what is potential? How do you know it? How do you know if you are there? What does it look like?

4. Visualize what you will look like.
Research reveals lots of tricks for getting you to stay on your path to your goal – tying success to money, telling friends, etc..

But this is a trick I really like: There's a guy, Jim Fannin, who coaches professional athletes like Alex Rodriguez. He says that the key to making these guys great is visualization. He teaches them to visualize what success looks like.

If you can’t do that, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t apply to your goal. It means your goal is bad. Psychologists understand that people are very unlikely to reach any goal you can’t visualize. And university labs have applied this theory to just about everything – from throwing a fastball to having an orgasm.

5. Forget New Year's day. Start now.
Pick one, very reasonable thing you can change in your life for three weeks straight. Just to practice self-discipline. Don't even worry about the other, big stuff you want to change. Start off 2010 by creating a path to success.

Comment on: How to keep a New Year's resolution

I have said, every day for the past week, that today is the day I will go to the gym. But this is the day when my ex-husband sleeps over. It's the day I am supposed to be at the farm. I am supposed to wake up with the farmer’s arms around me, roosters crowing in my ears.

Instead, I wake up freezing, because the ex keeps my house much colder than I do. I wake up with the kids voices in the air downstairs, clamoring for breakfast. They sound so sweet and fun but I promised my ex I would hide in my bedroom until they kids go to school. It’s his time with them, and if I stop hiding, we would have to parent together, and if we could do that then we’d still be married.

So I am sitting my bedroom, I am hungry. Not hugely hungry because, in a stunning example of the unfairness of life, I lose my appetite when I have been dumped, so I am very thin with no one there to see it.

It’ll be another 45 minutes before I can go downstairs. I am hungry enough that I eat one of the chocolates the farmer gave me as a parting birthday gift. That’s right. He gave me presents while he was dumping me. I have to bite into seven before I find one I like, and I lay in bed in between bites in case I have to cry, and then I bite four more to find a second one of the kind I like, and then there are broken chocolates strewn across my bed.

I am not crying, though. I think I am past that. I am looking for solutions.

I tried reading but I realized that the book I’m reading, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, is not actually about Pakistan, but about how men choose land over women over and over again. How could I be in the middle of this book the week the farmer dumps me? The world aligns itself in shockingly horrible ways.

When the kids are gone, I traipse downstairs and take four showers. I think this might be an Asperger Syndrome thing (a sensory integration thing). I take scalding hot showers in order to organize my thinking.

A good consequence of not being with the farmer: I could never get the water hot enough at his house.

I put on clothes that are sort of clean. I use a baby wipe to clean off places on my jeans that might reveal that I have not washed them since Thanksgiving. I drive into work because this is what one does to resume a high-functioning life.

People at work do not say anything to me like, “Sorry you got dumped and seemed to have stopped working.”

I spend the day thinking of things that are totally inappropriate to write and then putting them in my Brazen Careerist group, because it's small enough that it feels like my living room.

Ryan Paugh, our community manager, calls me to say that he thinks I need to start having someone look at what I post in the group before I post it. Later he says, “I think you need to stop posting stuff in your group for today.”

I go to the coffee shop where I usually cannot stop eating bagels, and I am excited that I have lost my appetite. I play a game with myself. I stand in front of the bagels and ask myself if I want one. I don’t. It’s fun. I order a bagel and sniff it. Usually that’s enough to send me over the edge. Today it makes me nauseous. I bring the bagel to my table and tell myself that suffering is interesting.

I tell myself I need to make a plan to go to the gym. I look at my to do list and nothing looks pressing except that I am supposed to be redesigning my blog.

There is an email asking if I want to have a forum for people to talk about Asperger Syndrome. I reply that I want a forum for people to talk about how I am going to marry a farmer and move to a farm. Can you use a blog as a dating site?

Oh. Wait. That’s how I got in this mess.

I answer another email. About a business idea. I tell the person that the problem with most business ideas is not that they are bad, but that they are not big enough to be funded. You have to be able either to fund your own business, or to show that you can have $100 million in revenue in five years.

I send this email ten times a week. I tell myself that I need to write a detailed, clear email about this and copy and paste it every time someone asks me about getting funding.

I need a copy-and-paste speech to run through my head every time I think I’m going to the gym and then I tell myself maybe I’m not going to the gym.

I tell myself maybe one more day.

That feels bad. Like I’ll say that forever.

I tell myself in an hour.

But I’ve told myself that ten times.

I tell myself the gym will only work when it’s part of my new routine.

But I know that I will not get a new routine til I know I can get to the gym.

Everything is chicken and egg. And then I have to tell myself not to think about how the farmer helped me and the kids incubate chicks last summer. The farmer is so fun.

I go back to the office. There is a shower in our building. I consider stopping there and scalding myself before I go back to my cube. But then I’d have to reapply makeup.

At my cube I try to think of what I could do that would be sort of work but would not be too taxing. I remember that my favorite positive psychology Ph.D., who wants to remain anonymous on this blog, said I could call anytime.

I call her to ask what I should say to the kids.

I call her from the hallway of the office.  I have to do this because there are five offices with doors in our company, and I don’t have one of them. I am hoping that people think I’m going to the hallway to make a highly sensitive call about the funding for the company or something. But I’m pretty sure everyone knows that I’m making some sort of personal call.

My favorite positive psychologist tells me that I have to frame it for the kids that I make the decision. She explains that people who are optimistic in life perceive that the locus of control is with them. “Show your kids that you decide. That you are deciding what’s best for you and the kids.”

I do not go to the gym. I know myself well enough to know that eventually, I’ll get myself back to the gym. I have been going to the gym since I was fifteen. That’s just who I am.

Then I pick up my seven-year-old at school. I give him a donut so he will associate taking control of your life with sweetness. And I tell him that I have decided we will not be moving to the farm any time soon. We can still see the farmer. We can still visit the farm. But we need to decide what’s best for us. And what’s best for us is to continue our fun family life in our house.

He says okay. He has frosting on his lips.

I feel like I am believing what I’m saying and I start to say it again. Reinforcement.

He says, “I know, Mom. Did you bring me milk?"

Comment on: How to bounce back

Like most goals in life, my definition of blogging success has shifted as the circumstances of my life have shifted.

1. Post regularly without messing anything up.
My first goal was simply to understand how to get my writing onto the Internet. All the buzzwords overwhelmed me: feeds, trackbacks, SEO. I understood none of it, and it took weeks to get up the nerve to blog before I actually started. My first goal was to post regularly and avoid basic publishing mistakes like posting a draft before it was ready. (Reality check: There are much easier ways to start a blog than the method I chose.)

2. Create traffic.
I started measuring my success by traffic. But after a few months, I was totally overwhelmed and had to rethink what I was doing. Suddenly I couldn’t answer all the comments, I couldn’t even answer all my email at the beginning—it started coming in faster than I ever imagined. (Reality check: Traffic metrics are addictive.)

3. Grow conversations.
I started getting a handle on my email and the comments and the general influx of blog-related information from all the readers. And in the process, I realized that what I really cared about was the conversation. I wanted to meet new people and learn new things about topics I’m interested in. So I wanted the conversation to be good. I started measuring my success by the number of comments, and then, in turn, by how much I was learning from the comments. (Note: Here's a lovely post from Problogger about encouraging comments.)

4. Make money.
I realized that I loved blogging more than any other writing I had ever done. I knew I wanted this to be my job, so I needed to be able to support my family doing it. I started measuring my success by how much income I could generate. I hit my target of $100,000 a year pretty easily (thanks to Yahoo) so I realized that I could aim higher. (Reality check: Money is not a good blog goal for most people.)

5. Build a company.
So I decided to sell equity in my blog and spin off a company. I gauged my success on how quickly I could get the company launched and funded. And, once I did that, I gauged my success on how well I could leverage my blog to drive traffic to my company, Brazen Careerist. You might be sick of hearing about my company here, but, you might also be happy to know that I’ve accomplished that goal, too. (Reality check: I nearly died from the stress of doing this.)

6. Regain my sanity.
So, here I am, asking myself, what is my goal with the blog now? Right now, what I want for myself is to be calm and peaceful. I have had a really wild ride in the last five years. I have gone from being nearly broke in NYC, moving to Wisconsin, starting a company,  getting a divorce, traveling every week, while I’m trying to raise kids. Life has been chaotic and erratic and I’m sick of that. I want a break. I want to feel grounded, stable and I want routine.

Part of that, of course, is why I’m with a farmer. It’s the farmer stereotype: grounded, stable, waking up every day to do chores. But I need to find that stuff from inside myself, as well.

On days when I post, I feel grounded and stable and connected. On days I don’t post, I don’t feel that. Which is why I should be posting every day. I see people who have very busy lives who are able to post every day.

So this will be a test for me. For now, my definition of successful blogging is using my blog to give myself a sense of stability and connectedness.

Each blogger starts for some reason. A good test for whether a goal is really meaningful to you is, do you keep at it? Do you keep striving to meet the goal? Sometimes I wonder, do I really want stability and a sense of being grounded, or do I just talk about it? The only way to find out is this: committing to it here, in a very public way, and seeing if it sticks.

Comment on: What makes a blog successful?

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.

Comment on: First, be honest about what you want

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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