Here are ways to feel better in these situations if you are having a tough time right now.

1. Remember that most people have empathy.
The biggest shift in the workplace is that unemployment always looms, for everyone. It used to be that people who had “good careers” did not have to worry about being unemployed. These people had a ticket to retirement if they just stayed in one place and put in their hours. In those days, being unemployed was the equivalent of being a failure. Those days are over. Today everyone worries about being unemployed. Most people have been laid off more than once. Almost no one is so arrogant to think they are better than you because you can’t find a job right now. And if you do meet someone who snubs their nose: They are delusional and out of touch, and should probably be more worried than everyone else about their own employment.

2. Not everyone has good cheer.
The good cheer thing: It’s a consumerism thing. I mean, it’s one thing to have warm, fuzzy family stuff. But the hoop-la and happiness seems extreme. And I can’t be too far off on this because the post on this blog with the third most comments ever is along those lines: Five Things People Say about Christmas that Drive Me Nuts. So if you can remind yourself that the holiday good cheer thing is not a mandate, and certainly not ubiquitous, then you won’t feel so isolated when you do not feel the good cheer yourself.

3. Talking about something difficult with family is good for you.
Really. It will make you feel closer to your family if you can tell them what’s really going on with you. Your family doesn’t need to hear the sugar-coated version. They love you not matter what. Or, if they don’t, then it’s a good time to face that, right? The other thing is that handling tough career conversations with your family actually improves your career overall.

4. Your job hunt can go into high gear right now.
December and January are the most common times for people to get hired. I know it seems like no one is working in December. But actually, the companies that run on annual budgets (which is most companies) have a use-it-or-lose-it policy. So if people have extra money for hiring in December, they have to make the hire. And in January, there is fresh money and people go on hiring sprees. (That’s why we just published the Brazen Careerist Top 50 Companies for Gen Y to work at. Now is the time to check out large companies like those.)

5. Remember that you are the locus of control.
Your happiness cannot be dependent on economic indicators. Really. The difference between being someone who is generally happy and someone who is generally unhappy is whether or not you perceive that you can control your life. Happiness is about outlook. So start doing things that you can control instead of depending on a job to save you.

You can build skills to add to your resume whether or not someone pays you to do that. (You can build work skills with your significant other!) You can build your own network without having a job. And you can create structure in your life — a harbinger of a successful person – whether or not a job is dictating that. The best way to become a person who feels like they control their life is to talk about your life like you can create the life you want. So, do that, right now, and you might even feel cheery.

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To me, the most interesting thing about Top 50 lists like this is the assumptions behind them.  So here are the assumptions I think are interesting:

1. Salary negotiations are over.
In most polls, if you ask Gen Y what they care about when choosing a place to work, the top three things will be, in varying orders: flexibility, interesting work, and likable co-workers.

You will notice that salary is missing from the list. Many people assume this is because Gen Y doesn’t care about salary. In fact, they care a lot. No generation has more debt than Gen Y, and no generation is more financially knowledgeable so early on in their lives as Gen Y.

Gen Y doesn’t consider salary to be a huge factor in choosing a place to work because Gen Y knows that salary data is public. The days when a company can screw you by underpaying you are over. Anyone can go to a place like Payscale and find out what other people in a similar geographic location are getting paid for a similar job.

So for Gen Y, going to a company that pays fair wages is like going to a company that hires people who aren’t white. It’s so obvious that companies need to do that that we shouldn’t even be having a discussion about it.

So the Brazen Careerist Top 50 does not ignore salary. We do assume any decent company pays fair wages, but we give a slight reward to companies that pay extra high wages to young workers.

2. Social entrepreneurship is stupid.
It’s stupid because you don’t’ need to be calling yourself a social entrepreneur in order to save the world. We no longer divide the world into non-profit people who are do-gooders and for-profit people who are money-grubbers. We are all here to do good. After all, what else is worth living for?

So we all want to work at companies that enable us to be doing something good.  We gauge this by tracking which companies have green programs. Green programs aren’t the only way to do good, but it’s a decent indication of how companies see their place in the world.

If a company has a strong green initiative it’s because they understand the value of being a good corporate citizen. And companies like that know that employees want to feel good about the organization they work for, and the difference they make in the world.

3. Self-reported flexible workplaces are BS.
Flexibility is not something that Gen Y wants. It’s something everyone wants. The idea that we are going to run our lives around our work is ridiculous. It doesn’t work. We want to make each aspect of our life work well with the other aspects.

Companies know that everyone wants a flexible workplace, so every company says they offer that. No kidding. Even a company like Deloitte, known for insane hours and heavy, heavy travel, has a whole initiative to promote a flexible workplace.

Okay. So if everyone is touting flexibility, how do you really judge? In our Top 50 list we judge by how close a company gets to hiring 50% women. This is not scientifically proven, but it is true that while all demographics complain about inflexible hours, women will leave the company over it.

Caveat: I have said in the past that there is an underlying level of BS to every Top 50 list. You already knew that, though (and here's a forum to talk about that). What you might not know, though, is that if you take the time to evaluate a top 50 list, it forces you to think about what values and programs you rank when you look at companies, and what top three things you would care most about. There might not be a list for what you want, but there is an inner compass, and the more you use it, the more quickly you get where you need to go.

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But many of you are making lots of social media mistakes. I know because so many people tell me that social media is a waste of their time. They’re wasting their time, and continuing to make mistakes, because there’s a set of common lies that people believe about social media. Here are those lies:

Lie #1: LinkedIn is for networking.

LinkedIn is great. I’m on LinkedIn. I have 650 connections. At first I wondered, why do I need this list of connections published on LinkedIn? What was the purpose of it? But now I get it. With LinkedIn, people can tell that I am a very connected person.

Most of you already know I’m well connected—I’m a print journalist, blogger, and startup founder, which are all very network-intensive jobs. But if you’re someone who doesn’t know how to tell whether someone is connected, LinkedIn is a great scorecard.

Potential employers like LinkedIn because they can glance at your LinkedIn profile and get a sense of how connected you are and how much money you make. (Yes, large networks correlate to large salaries.) That's the utility of the scorecard.

But what you cannot do on LinkedIn is build a network. Networks are built on relationships, which grow from conversation. LinkedIn is not for conversations. So you need to go somewhere else to build your network, and then, when it’s big, display it on LinkedIn so you’ll look great.

Lie #2: Twitter is for conversation.

So if you need conversation to grow relationships into a network, then you look for the social media tools that are for conversation. Right? Twitter seems easy. It’s only 140 characters, so it’s appealing to someone who is weary of spending every waking minute using social media.

The problem with using Twitter for conversation is that we need more than 140 characters to make a genuine connection with someone. So you’re not going to have a whole conversation there; Twitter is great for finding people who have similar ideas, and for keeping track of them in a superficial way.

But you still need to go elsewhere—offline or online—to solidify the relationship to the point where you would actually care about each other in the way a solid network connection does, but Twitter is a good start.

Lie #3: Blogs are personal journals.

Your blog is a record of what you’re thinking, and that record will represent you online, as a high-ranking search result when someone googles your name. So if you care about building a network, you’ll stop using your blog as a diary.

Your blog is intellectual exercise for you—to keep yourself thinking in a disciplined way about things that interest you. And it’s an intellectual exercise for other people—to follow your thought process and decide if they’d like to engage you in conversation. The blogosphere is a cocktail party for the intelligentsia without J Brand jeans or Jimmy Choo shoes. It’s just ideas, bouncing back and forth, and you’re deciding who to talk to.

I know I’m always telling people to stop worrying about what their blog is going to be and to just start blogging. I say this assuming that you understand that a blog is a networking tool. It’s one of the most important ways you can create career stability, by being who you are and connecting with people who like you for who you are. Your blog is a career-management dream-come-true.

Lie #4: Social media is no place for business.

The most common thing idiots say to me about my company is that we are never going to make money. But, we already do. Because companies definitely understand the need to leverage social media to meet their bottom-line goals. And my company helps them do that.

Companies understand they need to participate in conversation, and they are looking a professional places to do it. If you want to be known to companies, you will use social media to allow them to get to know you. (Wait. This just in. Government agencies get it as well! Check out the TSA's stellar use of social media.  A mommy blogger wrote a post accusing airport security of taking her son from her during a security check. TSA disputed her claim by posting video of woman and her son on the TSA blog. The mommy blogger published an apology.)

Which brings me to the seven-second rule. Someone who just met you for the first time, in person, will give you about three seconds to impress them. So you are very careful to show your best first impression in this situation. You already know this.

The same is true online. You probably get ten seconds instead of seven seconds, but the person will google your name, looking for something relevant in the top results, and click. If they are not impressed in the first ten seconds, they won’t keep reading about you.

If they go to Facebook, you have no idea what they’ll find out about you because so many people write on your wall about unprofessional things. If they end up at LinkedIn and you have a relatively shallow level of experience, you will not look good next to the typical LinkedIn user who is 40 years old, earning more than $100K, and has 15 years of experience.

So where do you want people to meet you for the first time online? Somewhere they can hear you talking about ideas. For bloggers, this is often a blog URL. Others could try Brazen Careerist, where your profile is comprised of your thoughts and ideas—you, being you.

Comment on: 4 Lies about social media

1. Pitch yourself as specialized.
Most people are relocating from a city that is in low demand to a city that is high demand. For example: Tucson to San Francisco. There are not a lot of skill sets that someone has to look outside San Francisco to get. If you want to get a job from Tucson, you need to have one of those skill sets that people do not think they can hire for in San Francisco. Usually this means that you're very specialized. So, the first thing about getting a job in a city you don't live in is that you need to be very specialized or in high demand.

The idea behind being a specialist is that you are so good at a very specific thing that people are unlikely to find someone as good as you locally. Sometimes a good career coach can help you rewrite your resume to focus on a specialty. If you don't have one, a good primer for finding a specialty is reading about the funeral industry, where you have to specialize in something (sometimes weird) in order to survive.

2. Pitch yourself as a big-city catch.
Some of you are trying to move the opposite direction: New York City to Tuscaloosa. In that case, you can pitch yourself as having big-city know-how that you can bring to a smaller city. I know from having a company in Madison that when we hear a star performer from a big city is relocating to Madison, we automatically consider interviewing that person. It's a bias that the competition is so much tougher in big cities that people who have risen to the top are probably worth looking at because we don't see a lot of those people.

3. Get a reality check.
If you can't pitch yourself in either of those ways, then you're going to have to relocate before you get a job. Think about it: Why would someone fly you in for an interview when there are plenty of local people who could do the job? It makes no sense.

4. Be amazing at building local networks.
If you are still determined to get a job before you move, you should commit a lot of time to building a network. You know that most jobs come from networking. So you need to have a strong network on the ground where you want to relocate. This does not mean inviting forty people in that city to connect with you on LinkedIn. Those are not the type of connections where the person goes to bat for you. You need a network of people you have real conversations with, and share real ideas with. After awhile, these people will care about you and want to help you. This is one of the reasons that among the professional groups on Brazen Careerist, location-based groups are the most popular.

5. Choose a city since you can't choose a job.
Most of you are simply going to have to relocate before you get the job. And, since you are going to have to move before you have a job, why not make sure you are going to the right place? You can read about the research I used. (For all my complaining about Madison, I have to say that the research I used turned out to be true, and Madison is probably the right place for me.)

Another resource for figuring out where you belong is Richard Florida's book, Who's Your City, which he has conveniently broken up into web-friendly widgets for your relocating pleasure. Try this one, for example.

And, once you decide on a city, you can use Florida's analysis to double check your conclusion. Check out these best places lists. (Note: More than 80% of gen y wants to move to New York City, but, frankly, most of people don't belong there. Here's a test to find out about you.)

6. Consider your friends and family.
Before you relocate for money, consider that the number-one factor for whether or not your next job will improve your happiness is whether you'll be moving closer to friends and family. Because, you already know this, but money does not buy happiness. And, you might not know this, but a job does not make you happy, either. A job can make you unhappy, but once you have the basics of a good job, it's your relationships that make you happy .

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Email number one: The obnoxious reference check

[Name redacted] is applying for a position at our company and listed you as a reference. I was hoping that you could complete the brief questionnaire attached to this email to provide your feedback. Thank you in advance for your help, and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

This email is from InvestorGuide.com. Let me tell you something: That questionnaire was not brief. It was about ten essay questions and then insanely inapplicable multiple choice questions.

This company is ridiculous for sending an onerous questionnaire to references. For one thing, it puts me in a bad spot because I loved working with the guy who gave my name as a reference, so I want to give him a good report, so I have no choice but to fill out the BS questions and try to have a good attitude.

The other reason the company should not send a form like this is they look incompetent. Not just for destroying the relationships potential new hires have with their references, but also for not being able to make hiring decisions without asking a third-party if the candidate is professional. Seriously. Open your eyes in the interview, guys.

Email number two: The annoying request from mainstream media

I write for BusinessWeek Magazine and I am putting together a special report for Businessweek.com called “Managing Gen Y”. We are inviting a few experts such as yourself to contribute articles. I thought you might have some great thoughts on some aspect of managing gen y and I wanted to see whether you would be interested in contributing a column? We would need the piece in about 3 weeks. What do you think?

I know, you’re thinking, what’s the problem here? Who doesn’t want to write for BusinessWeek. And, in fact, I did. (Here’s the link.) But here’s the problem: BusinessWeek doesn’t pay me. That’s problem number one. I wrote basically the same thing for Time magazine (here’s the link), and they paid me. Which makes sense. Because I’m a professional writer. I mean, I have a book on the topic. I have a history of working in journalism. That counts, right?

Okay. So they tell me they are not paying me, but I will get a lot of traffic. Then they tell me how many zillions of page views Businessweek.com gets a month. But I wrote for Yahoo for a long time. So I know the page view game. These big sites get tons of traffic but the traffic is spread out over tons of pages. Zillions or something. So, the truth is that my most current post gets more traffic than 90% of the pages on Yahoo or Business Week.

So don’t tell me I’m writing for you for free in exchange for traffic. Just because I’m a blogger doesn’t mean I’m stupid. In fact, it means I have a lot of metrics at my disposal. (Another crazy thing: You never find out page views for your own article when you write for a huge site in mainstream media.) The week my Business Week article came out, here is a list of blogs that sent me more than twice as much traffic as Business Week without me having to write anything for them:

Lifehacker.com

Getrichslowly.org

Barstoolsports.com (not safe for work)

I’m not going to go on and on about Business Week because first of all they gave me the best review of my blog ever: A Business Week writer called my writing “poetic.” I love that. And when I complained about all this stuff, they were nice. I mean, they listened to me. That counts for something. And I really need Business Week to write favorably about my company when it’s time for my big publicity moment. So. Um. I love Business Week so much.

Email number three: Salary gap whiners

[This is for every single person in the whole world who bitches to me that there is a gender gap in the salary department. All of you. Your emails are so annoying that I’m not going to print one. ]

The reason the emails are annoying is that I’ve spent the last five years interviewing the people who do the salary discrepancy research, and digging into the details, and I report on it constantly, and the people who tell me there is a salary gap do not read this stuff.

First: Women who are in their 20s earn more than men in major cities. So this means that any data you show me about salary gap is focusing on older women. They had less opportunities, they are gonna retire, and the world has already revolved around the baby boomers. I’m done talking about salary gap like baby boomers are the only demographic that matters.

Second: Feminism in the workplace is over (link one, link two). So everyone should just shut up about dividing the workplace into men and women. Men are helping women all the time. Women love working with men. And look! Workplace spouses are the only intense flirting outlet that Cosmo readers voted was within relationship bounds.

Even if there were a salary gap, which there isn’t, women do not help themselves by bitching about it. If you work for a company that pays women less than men, just leave! Who controls you? You do.

Third: The gap is a result of women making decisions that men don’t make. I have written about this so many times because the research pops up constantly. Here’s another piece. From Cornell University (via Self magazine) A woman whose spouse works 60 hours a week is 52 percent more likely to quit her job than a man whose wife does the same.

Women choose different paths than men. Which means that women who have the same education and same skills set earn less than men because most women want different things than most men do. And this is okay. Really.

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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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1. Lie if you are a messy person.
People make a wide range of judgments based on your office, whether you like it or not. For example, a plant makes you look stable, and a candy dish makes you look like an extrovert, according to Sam Gosling, professor of psychology at University of Texas and the owner of the hottest head shot I have ever linked to on a university web site.

If you have a messy desk, people think you’re incompetent. They think you are overwhelmed by your workload, that you are not conscientious, and that you are not thinking clearly. It doesn’t really matter if you really are those things, since you are promoted and fired based on peoples’ perceptions of you. You cannot control for what people base their perceptions on, but you can make changes in your life to change how people perceive you. So do that.

But before you say messiness should be acceptable, consider this report in the Economist, that shows people are nicer, and better versions of themselves, in an environment that is neat and clean.

This means you should consider making your office clean even if you think cleanliness is BS. And you can just pretend to be clean by making your office neat but leaving your computer desktop a mess (there is no research that says that people judge you by that.) And you can have your house be a mess. (Although Gosling has research to suggest that this will affect your dating life.)

If you want to control peoples’ perceptions by managing the stuff in your office, read Gosling’s book: Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.

Before you argue with me about if you should have a messy office, please read this: I have already received many emails from people defending their messiness. And all the emails are lame. The research is clear. People don’t want to work with people who have messy desks. Stop defending stupidity. Get a life.

2. Lie if you are pregnant.
It’s illegal for someone at work to ask if you are pregnant. Flat out illegal. So give a dishonest answer. Because you are cornered. You can’t refuse to answer by saying, “That’s an illegal question.” Because usually this question is in an interview, and usually they are asking because they won’t hire a pregnant you, and usually if you tell someone in an interview that their question is illegal, they will not hire you. So telling them it’s an illegal question is pointless.

(Don’t tell me you want to change the world by telling them it’s illegal. Women do not change the world by doing things in interviews that don’t get them hired. Women change the world by gaining power to make the rules themselves.)

Many working women ask if they should tell their employer they are pregnant. They usually mention how good a manager has been, or how much the woman likes her company. Listen: telling people you’re pregnant does not help you. Ever. And there is no law that says you have to tell. And there are many laws, that are never enforced, that say that an employer cannot give you crap projects because they know you’re going on maternity leave and they think you’re never coming back.

Do you know why those laws are in place? Because employers do it all the time.

It makes sense. Women have no idea what they will want to do after the baby comes. We all know that. So why do we make women announce before hand what they are doing? We all know it’s crap. But since we’re all playing the game, say you’re coming back. Full time. Really fast.

And tell them that only when you absolutely can’t hide the bump any longer. Because however much time that is will be enough for your employer to decide how to cope with you taking maternity leave. And whatever you do, make sure you get that paid leave. It’s your legal right (when you have it – few women in the US actually have it). Do not feel guilty that you might not come back. Who cares?

If you are thinking of revealing a pregnancy early, remember this: When a guy is dealing with alcoholism, or a divorce, or a kid getting kicked out of school, he does not announce it to the company because it might affect his ability to work. So why do women feel the need to announce a pregnancy before they have to?

3. Lie if you are job hunting.
Who isn’t thinking about what they want to do next? Only losers who have no vision for their lives. Everyone has their eyes open because everyone knows that no job is permanent. People in their 20s start looking for their next job on day three of a new job. And we know that the most desirable employees, even at the executive level, are those who are employed. Which means that the top tier of employees are all job hunting while they have a job.

If you go on an interview, go at lunch, or take the day off. If you do a phone interview, do it at night, or at a time you can go off-site. The interviewer understands this. You cannot do an interview from your desk. This is normal behavior.

Your boss would give you very little notice if you were getting laid off. You can do the same for your boss. And anyway, what is your boss going to do with information that you are looking for another job but do not yet have an offer? Nothing. There is nothing to do except stop giving you interesting work. Or fire you. Both bad for you.

So instead, be a good employee and do good work while you job hunt. Besides, it’s very hard to get a good, new job if you are not doing good work in your current job.

So why bother telling anyone? It’s assumed – by any wise manager – that you’re always looking. It’s just like when you’re not engaged. You’re not engaged because at least one of you is still looking. You don’t tell the person every day. But we all know.

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Here are some ideas:

Choose people who are good-looking, but not better looking than you.
You become like the people you hang out with, according to Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Harvard. He found, for example, that if the people around you are overweight, you are likely to join them. And the more overweight you are, the more trouble you have at work, for a lot of reasons, but a new reason I just found is that in stressful work situations, fat people do not think as clearly as thin people. Yep. That’s right. Stonybrook University School of Medicine found that the more body fat you have, the higher your levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that hampers cognitive abilities. (Hat tip: Self magazine.)

But if the people around you are models, you will look ugly. Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at MIT, says that if you’re going to a bar, you have the best chances of getting picked up if you go with people who are almost as good-looking as you are. It makes sense that you will feel best if you do this at work as well.

Choose women who are happy, but they shouldn't smile too easily.
This is hard for men to do. Because men are hard-wired to be drawn to women who laugh at their jokes. Men want to be funny. But women who are slower to smile do better at work, according to communications consultant Neil Lowndes. So you should date women who smile a lot, but work with women who don’t. (Hat tip: Derek Scruggs.)

But this doesn’t mean that you should work with grouchy women. Christakis also found that if you are around happy people you will be happier. So, when it comes to work, find that subset of women who are very optimistic but a tough audience for your jokes.

Choose people who swear, but don’t choose someone who's trashy.
It turns out that a little off-color language is good for the workplace. For example, if you use not-too-vulgar swear words at work, you inspire more teamwork. Of course, the standards for vulgarity will vary, but it’s probably like porn: You know it when you see it.

Which is why using something innocuous, like the word asshole, is okay, but not if you are talking about intercourse. People who talk about sex at work decrease morale. Well, the research actually says that it’s the raunchiness of the sex talk that affects the workplace negatively. So I think factual talk about sex, without the raunch, is okay. (Hat tip: Chris Yeh)

Also, while we’re on the topic: double-bonus for choosing a boss: Pick one that will send you to sex conferences.

Choose people you admire.
This seems like a no-brainer, but we rarely choose a job based on this. We usually choose a job based on the job description, or the title. The problem with choosing a job this way is that a job description is not a contract. It is a way to lure you into the job. And it’s a hiring manager’s best guess on who he or she is looking for. In general, we do not end up doing what we are hired for.

So choose your next job based on the people you’ll be working with. You will learn the most on a job by having a great mentor looking after you, rather than a good job description preceding you. And you’ll be happiest at work if you focus on having friends at work instead of looking for a boss who pays high salaries – those bosses don’t understand what really matters.

The problem, of course, with choosing to work with people you admire is that you have to understand yourself enough to know, of all the traits you admire in people, what are the most important.

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Then, when it became clear that the first company could say one, tiny bad thing and then make this person unemployable (because they had only worked for one person their whole life), giving bad references basically became illegal.

So that pretty much put the kibosh on the usefulness of corporate references. Yet people still ask for them today. So here are some ways to get a good reference.

Get a ringer lined up ahead of time.

There is no rule that says you have to use your last employer as a reference. Explain to a prospective employer that you are giving the name of a person who knows you well and can speak to the issues this particular employer is interested in. Then give the name of a ringer. For almost a decade my favorite ringer was my boyfriend, who dated me and hired me and gave me glowing reviews even after he dumped me.

Give a company you hate as a reference, if you have to.

Let’s say you worked for a company for a year and it didn’t go well. Maybe your boss was incompetent. Maybe you hated the work. You can spin that in the interview – just talk about what you liked. There’s gotta be something you liked. And then, when it comes time for a reference check, you can give the phone number for human resources. As long as it’s a big company, HR will be trained to just confirm dates of employment and title. Nothing else, because they don’t want to get into legal trouble. And, if you want to make sure the company won’t say anything bad, hire a company like Allison & Taylor to find out.

Don't work for a person who relies on reference checks. They’re lame.

Rebecca Thorman has one of the most interesting discussions about references that I’ve seen in a long time. First, she says that references are outdated because most good jobs require that you know someone to get in the door. And this goes back to the idea that a network matters a lot more than references. If you have someone referring you who knows the hiring manager then that’s all the reference you need.

Rebecca also points out, (in an impressive video) that rich people have never needed references. That makes sense to me: Rich kids have always had their parents’ friends in high-up places vouching for them. They have a built-in network. So today, social media democratizes networking, and it should, therefore, democratize the reference process. Get a referral for a job and you won’t need to go through reference checks either, no matter where you fall on the economic spectrum.

Replace reference checks with networking.

I think references are outdated. I think they are an old-school word for a network, and people who have strong networks and work for people with strong networks don’t bother with reference checks because they generally only hire people who come recommended by someone they know.

To understand how the uber-networked handle the reference check, take a look at the venture capital community. Their job is to know everyone, so they don’t miss a deal, and to know everyone’s weaknesses, so they can mitigate their risk. My favorite VC blog is by Fred Wilson, and today he talks about how he does face-to-face reference checks so that people are more forthcoming.

The first thing I think of is, Would that boyfriend have put himself through a face-to-face reference check for me? But the next thing I think is that no one would ask. You have to be hiring at a very high level to make this worth your time (Fred is hiring CEOs.)

In any case, this is a good example of how networking and references merge. And you don’t have to be in the VC community to see that if you are best off if you surround yourself with other people who see this merge coming as well.

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I say, “No.”

He says, “We’re trying to hire her.”

So I check out her blog and dis her and he says, “She was dating Matt Mullenweg.”

I say, “Really.”

He says, “Yeah. I was talking with my business partner and we both thought it must really suck for her that they are not dating anymore but they are still mentioned in the same breath a lot.”

“Really? Like how?”

“Google Glenda Bautista Matt.”

I do that. Their life looks really fun. They do cool stuff, meet cool people, and how can you not think Matt is great? He is. Who knows what he’s like to date, but he’s a great online brand.

That conversation was four weeks ago. And I have talked with this guy I’m sort of dating, D, a lot since then. But I am not saying that he’s my boyfriend because maybe I want my boyfriend to have as big a brand as Matt.

For forever, girls have been looking for guys with a ton of money — even the smart girls. But I married a guy who never earned any money, and honestly, I never really cared. We had problems, but not because I earned all the money.

So now I know that I don’t need to look for a guy with a ton of money. And since my divorce, I've taken time to be sort of a free spirit, just dating people for fun and connection and all the corny things my readers ask me to pay attention to, as they explain how the farmer is not right for me, and how the 25-year-old is not right either, and that the alcoholic private equity guy is an alcoholic.

Then I thought about Glenda. I immediately thought she must be a good hire because she dated Matt. It’s a good reference. You know she’s smart. Because how could Matt be with a moron? He couldn’t. And even before you see her in person, you can know she’s not below average in the looks department, because I don’t think Matt needs to go there. So my point, here is that attaching your own brand to a known, solid brand is very good.

I see Hollywood people doing this. It's not new. But it's new that today each person online is some sort of brand and we are all personal brand managers.

So, D, who is really attentive and normal—two traits I have never had in a boyfriend, ever—is scary to me because I’m giving up the chance to enhance my brand by dating an online star.

So I was sort of keeping D a secret. Because I was worried doors would close. But I could see doors closing because each week I’d spend more time on the phone with him. You might have noticed this. There’s an inverse correlation between how smitten I am with who I’m seeing and how frequent these blog posts arrive.

Last week, for example, there were two posts, and I only wrote one of them. When I was in a terrible marriage and trying to hide in my work, there were four posts a week, sometimes five.

I found myself doing stuff like talking with him all day via IM and text and email and the phone. So that even though he lives very far from me, it felt like he was sort of everywhere, all the time.

I got tired, so tired that I actually sent the kids to school one day and went back to bed and missed all my meetings. When I called Ryan to tell him I overslept I felt like I was the intern calling human resources and hoping not to get fired.

Ryan didn’t care. He knows I work way more than most people and that I would probably be more sane if I worked less.

But I got nervous and went back to working long hours and still talking on the phone late at night, until one night recently.

I saw I missed a call, and I called him back, and I said, “Where are you?” Mostly I asked because it sounded loud and I know his routine now, and it’s never loud at 8pm. He said, “I’m on a plane. Stuck on the tarmac.”

I said, “You didn’t tell me you were flying tonight.”

He said, “You didn’t ask.”

I went ballistic that how could we talk this much and he not tell me his travel schedule.

Then he told me his schedule.

I told him I am planning a trip to the same city. We could be sharing a hotel room. Why is he not telling me ahead of time? I tell him I’m so frustrated that I have to hang up.

He says, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you wanted to see me.”

I said, “Are you nuts? I talk with you almost every night. “

Then we both paused.

He said, “You don’t know who this is, do you?”

Then I died as I realized he is my freelance sales guy who lives in the same area code as D.

I tell him,”Oh. God. No. I didn’t know it was you. I have to hang up. I have to call you back. I have to call you back in maybe ten years.”

That was the first thing. Of many things that are the result of me spending way too much time talking and writing to D.

He sent me a quote about how we each vibrate a certain way and we find our vibrational match.

I told him I think that’s true, but I vibrate like an insane person. And I worry that I am attracting my vibrational match for insanity and that if I could just get more sane, I’d attract a different match.

He pointed out the obvious: I will probably not get more sane. “This is just you,” he said.

And then I got happy that he is stable and calm and largely unshakable, when I am often shaking as much as I can.

And then I tell myself that I have to admit that I’m dating him. I’m not sure what that means, but the only reason I’m not doing it is because I’m holding out for some amorphous online brand that will perfectly complement my own.

Do not write to me and tell me that’s shallow, okay? It’s the new millennium version of a gold digger. And I know I’m not the only one. I’m just the only one willing to admit it.

So I guess when someone wants to hire me, I’m not going to be able to get the job based on who I’ve dated.

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