One reason I have achieved so much in my own career is that I’ve taken shortcuts. For example, I played professional beach volleyball without learning how to play indoor sixes very well—I can really only play doubles, which is what people play on the sand. But it allowed me to skip a lot of years of indoor volleyball training and still play pro.

I'm always fascinated by people who find shortcuts. Tim Ferriss is a shortcut taker, but he totally annoys me because he pretends his shortcuts don't mean he still had to do hard work. One of the reasons I was initially attracted to the Farmer is that he is good at knowing what shortcuts to take and he values hard work.

Just last week, in fact, he moved his pigs to a new barn, where they will be able to mix with the cattle herd. It's not something anyone in our area does, but he had a hunch it would work, and now he manages one herd instead of two. I love that I'm learning the rules of farming by watching the Farmer cut corners.

In lists of the most common New Year’s resolutions, most are career-related. So I thought I’d take a look at the most common things people tell me they want to do, and I’d tell you shortcuts to getting to that goal. Because I'm pretty good at learning the rules and then figuring out how to work around them. This still means you have to do some hard work, of course, but it's a smarter way to spend your energy and still get to what you want.

Goal: Get a book deal
First of all, I'm not convinced that people need to get a book deal. That said, if you want to get a book published, don’t write the book until you write the proposal. That’s how you get a book deal – from a ten-page proposal, not an actual book. So here’s what you should do: Write a proposal and if you don’t get a book deal from it, write another. It’s a lot easier to write ten proposals to get one book deal than to write a book that no one bids on. And, if you don’t invest tons of time in one, single proposal then you won’t feel bad if you find out the proposal sucks. Because you’ve got another in the hopper. Here are tips from my agent on how to get a six-figure book deal.

Goal: Sell your company
You don’t actually need to have a big exit. You just need to build something and then, well, sort of give it away. Because the idea of “selling a company” is actually just the idea that you build something that someone else wanted. Sure, $10 million would be great. But so few people get that much money for their company. It’s much more common to get somewhere around $100,000 when all is said and done.

And yes, that’s a lot of money, but you’d probably still work after that size exit, and you’d probably change very little in your life. The value would be that you built something that someone wanted. So sell your company by finding someone who can use what you’ve built and will give you a small, token fee ($10) but a good job at the company. You can use that staff position as a break while you figure out what company to do next. And maybe you'll start a company and sell it all over again.

Goal: Change careers
You’re going to need to show you’ve done the new job before you can get the new job. It’s not fair, I know. But it’s how the world works. So just make up a job, do it, and then put it on your resume. You don’t need pay or permission to do the job you want. Just start doing it. And if you already have the job you want on your resume, you’re much more likely to get hired for the job you want.

Are you worried about being exposed as a fake in an interview? First of all, there’s not a law that says you can’t have unpaid jobs on your resume. And you can have freelance jobs. So that’s what a made-up job is: freelance, for free. And then keep at it so that when an interviewer wants to talk about this job and what you gained from doing it, you will look great. Because you’ll say you made the job up, to get yourself experience, and here’s what you did, and here’s what you learned, and you’ll look like a self-starter and a results-oriented super-performer. Because only that sort of someone would make up a job and then do it to gain experience.

Goal: Skip entry-level drudgery
Start a blog. Think of a blog like a high-end resume. Most peoples’ resumes are a list of the jobs they’ve done that never show how you bring great ideas wherever you go. A blog, on the other hand, is a list of your ideas. You tell the world your opinions regarding your industry or interest. If you have good ideas, people will start listening. But you have to keep writing, to keep trying to find your niche and the audience for your niche. When you get the influencers in your industry to read you, then you become a respected voice in the arena. And that’s your ticket to a beyond-entry-level job because people who listen to you will also be willing to help you get a job. (Want to get a jump-start on your blog? Try Blogging Bootcamp.)

Goal: Launch a consumer product
Don’t sell the product direct to consumers. That’s the hard route because you have to build your own sales channel. Instead just make a prototype and sell it to retail buyers. Those buyers have a lot more power than a single consumer. And if your core-competency is product design, then you don’t want to spend all your time marketing to consumers. So get the prototype done and if you have no bites, then make another prototype and try again.

This will make your failure cycle go fast, which is one of the key factors in finding huge success. It’s rare to have a big win on your first try. But it’s universal that the way to get through failure is to keep trying when other people would stop.

Goal: Become a writer
People ask me about this goal more than any other. And here's my advice: Just write. No one can write more than three hours a day. And most of us can find an extra three hours to do what we love. You are already a writer. No one has to give you permission to do what you love.

Of course, this is the problem with most New Year's resolutions – that the only thing between us and our goals is self-discipline.

But first, before she stole my purse, she opened my mail.

I walked into the kitchen and I said, “Hey, you opened my mail.”

“No I didn’t.

“What’s this? What’s this opened envelope that is addressed to me?”

“Oh. That? I didn’t think you counted that as mail.”

“What does it count as?”

“I knew it was from an author. I could just tell from the expensive stationary. So I thought it was like getting a book in the mail from a publisher. And you told me I could open those if I was looking for something to read.”

“No. It’s mail.”

“No. It’s not. Look. It’s from Jon Acuff.”

It turns out he wrote a thank you note to me for mentioning his book on my blog. No kidding. That made me so happy that I forgot to tell Melissa she can never, in the rest of the history of her life, open any mail addressed to me.

It made me so happy that I talked about his book because you know what? I get like ten billion product pitches a day and there has to be some system for figuring out what I’ll write about.  So I try to just write about stuff that will make people happy.

Of course, I have to like the stuff too. But look, take this water: Hint. They sent me a press release saying that they are the game-changer in flavored water. At first I hit delete. But then I thought, well, my kids like flavored water and they are drinking way too much sugary stuff because I won’t let them drink our tap water because I don’t trust anyone out here who is testing water for nitrates. Because if the nitrates are too high then we would have to report our dairy-farming neighbors to the Department of Natural Resources. So I think people in our county ignore bad water.

We just spent a week in Steven’s Point, WI (at cello camp, again) and  I was excited that we were in a city (yes, a town of 25,000 is big excitement for us now) and my son could drink the water. But I took a sip and it tasted so weird that I stuck with bottled water. And now, it turns out, that Melissa, who spends most of her time here researching insane topics, comes up with this link that says Steven’s Point is the only place  in America that has better tasting water than New York City.

So this is all to say that I’m losing my ability to discern good water, so I had the inspiration to tell Hint that I’d write about them if they sent me samples. They sent ten bottles and we drank them all in a day.

So look, the water Hint makes is good. But it’s not like Hint is now going to be a successful company because I wrote about them. Anyway, they are already distributed in Whole Foods. How big of an impact could I have?

I’m telling you this to tell you how to pitch a blogger: Show the blogger how he or she can make a difference.

Look, if a blog has decent-sized traffic, it’s because the blogger is absolutely nuts about creating a fun, interesting experience for the community.  It’s pretty much insane to do the work it takes to have a huge blog. The blog is like a monster that always needs feeding or it becomes mean.  There are no vacations and there is no sure way to keep things from going south. It’s largely a labor of love.

So I don’t want to spend time on my blog plugging products that are not going to somehow help me or the readers. A lot of PR types know this, which is why they send me offers like I can give you guys a 10% discount on someone’s insanely stupid webinar. Like that’s going to help anyone in life.

I want to tell you one of the best pitches I’ve gotten in a while, though. It was from someone who is a regular reader of my blog, and she showed that in her email with little mentions of my pet peeves.

And then she told me, in a get-to-the-point-quick way, that she has been executing on a business plan and she has a model that is fundable, but she needs traction right now to show that if she expanded her line she could sell more purses.

I like that she has a plan, and I like that she showed me how I could be part of it. And I like that she sounds like someone I would like.

So I said sure. Send me a purse.

The purse came in amazing packaging and I told Melissa to take photos of it so we could copy it for our next book. Like, maybe the book could arrive in a nice box or something.

But then we realized that this packaging is way too expensive. The book would have to be $200. Which is pretty much what the purse costs.

Then I lost interest in the purse because I had to meet with the guy who I want to do my goat business with me but keeps refusing because he wants to be a millionaire now, not when the company sells.

As I’m going to the meeting, Melissa tells me that I have to use the new purse. It fits a laptop. Melissa packs up my laptop in the laptop spot and the phone in the phone spot and then I throw a fit that I can’t find the phone because I didn’t know I had a phone spot.

Then Melissa has me change all my clothes because she thinks I am retarded at dressing myself, which I think might be true, but she is retarded at interior design so I don’t feel bad, but I feel mystified as to why can’t I just think of my body as a room and then be better with my clothes.

I go out to the car and the goats follow me, of course, because goats are like dogs  but way more destructive.

As I leave, Melissa says, “The purse looks so good! It matches so well!”

Then I come home, and by the time I am done sorting through my mail to see if Melissa has opened any, Melissa has dumped my stuff on the floor, and the purse is in her room.

And I think that’s okay because Melissa loves the purse. And we will do something nice for Alesya. And so, too, maybe will a bunch of the readers, and then she’ll get funding. And then, maybe, we’ll do that again, with another company that pitches me.

I tell Now Magazine (I think it’s basically People magazine for the UK audience) to call back after I got the kids off to school. I ask my housemanager to come early because I can't handle the sleep deprivation and the early-morning interviews and school lunches all in one morning.

I block out the morning to write a thousand-word essay for the Guardian to justify tweeting about my miscarriage. Which the Guardian wants done in the next 20 hours.

Now magazine wants to know if they can send a photographer to take a photo of my kids.

No.

Or the Farmer?

No.

What about if their faces are blurred?

No. (But this at least makes the Farmer laugh.)

The Today show called Tuesday to see if I could be on the show on Thursday. I said yes. They call in between the Guardian and Now magazine to ask if I can fly there.

The first thing I think is that my kids were so sad that I was not taking them to school as usual that I promised to pick them up after school, and I don’t want to break the promise.

The only reasonable flight to NYC is at 3:08. I decide that the only thing to do is take my kids with me. I can’t bear to simply be gone when they come home from school. I did that so much last year. I don’t want to do that anymore.

So I tell the Today Show that I can make it only if they will fly my kids and the nanny with me. And pay for two hotel rooms.

The Today Show says yes. They start booking tickets. I finish interviews and the nanny starts packing. She calls the school to get the kids ready to leave early. She cancels violin lessons and cello lessons and a reading tutor.

I call the Farmer to offer him one last chance to go with us. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t take the offer seriously because it is so far from anything he’d ever do. He says he can’t believe I’m taking the kids on a trip again when the last business trip I took them on turned out so bad that the police came.

He has a point, but I tell him that I’m taking the nanny along this time.

Then the new CEO of Brazen Careerist calls. He’s concerned. I have given a one-hour interview with a tabloid that was not recorded and it’s being taken out of context all over the UK.

So we have a two-hour phone call about the Brazen Careerist brand. Should it be tied to me? Is miscarriage a workplace issue? What drives people to sign up at Brazen Careerist anyway?

Wait. Can you just go sign up at the site right now so the CEO can see that a post like this does not hurt the brand and I should just write what I want on my blog?

Okay. So the nanny is decked-out in black, with blown-out blond hair, and she almost looks a little New-York-y for her first-ever visit there, when the Today show calls to say they need to move me to Saturday.

Really?

This is what I thought: Is there enough time for me to get really drunk on junk wine in the fridge before I have to go pick up the kids?

I say no to Saturday.

Later, I get a death threat. This is not new. I have been getting death threats all month but today’s death threats are different. They are from the UK, and then from the Australian Christian Coalition. No kidding. Three calls in a row.

This all might be the end of me catering to mainstream media. But. Wait. I’m so happy to be in Inc magazine this month where Max Chafkin wrote a great list of top bloggers. And Max was so easy to deal with. He scheduled a call. We had a nice conversation. And he wrote an intelligent article.  He’s so good, and considerate that he’s almost like a blogger.

But for now, I’m exhausted. And I am thinking that dealing with mainstream media just isn’t worth it. I get my own story out, the way I want it, on my blog. I have a smart, engaged audience that is fun to talk to and, when there’s something really good, they tell their smart, thoughtful friends. I don’t think I need mainstream media. And I know I don’t need the ridiculous way they've been talking with me.

(Hi, Penelope Trunk? This is Steve from the early show –

What? What early show?

It's the morning show on CBS.

Oh.

Can you tell me how you justify your tweet?

What?

Just quickly. I’m going into our 4pm meeting and I need a summary of your position.)

So, mainstream media, here's my position. More than feeling compelled to justify myself to your audience, I feel compelled to protect my schedule and my family from your intrusive calls and seemingly random deadlines. I feel an urgent need to separate a sane online conversation about women at work from an insane media that is doing exactly what destroys women at work: Making it extremely difficult for me to have a manageable schedule for parenting.

Newsflash: No one could write in the Middle Ages, when the good writers wrote in Latin and everyone else spoke colloquial languages like French and English, which priests told them were too lame for real writing.

It’s the same situation today in that the best way to have a population of good writers is for people to write constantly, in the language that is theirs, so that they are great at expressing themselves.

People do good writing every day, in social media—when they write a note on someone’s Facebook wall, when they post a caption to a photo on flickr, or when they post a comment in a group on Brazen Careerist.

The people who are complaining that no one can write anymore are the same ones who are stressed about information overload. This is not a coincidence. Information is changing, the flow of ideas is changing, and written communication is changing with it. Information overload is the feeling of not being able to deal with this change. Young people do not feel information overload, which is another sign that they are excellent writers for the new millennium: They can process and communicate new ideas at the new pace.

I remember the first time in my life I heard about people who can’t write anymore. It was my grandma telling me to read A Little Princess, instead of Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret.

The people who tell you who can write and who can’t are the people who don’t want language to change. They don’t want ideas to change. They don’t want people to talk in ways that are new to them.

And now, for all you doubters, I present the research to end all research. It comes from Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. She has conducted the Stanford Study of Writing, which includes about 15,000 writing samples from students from 2001 – 2006.  The always-interesting Clive Thompson reported her findings in Wired magazine:

First, only 38 percent of the writing young people do takes place in the classroom. Prior to the Internet, almost all writing people did was for the classroom. The increased amount of writing that young people do outside the classroom these days is so significant that Lumsford calls it a paradigm shift.

Second, the type of writing that students do—via IM, Twitter, Facebook, and so forth—is actually great for building communication skills.  Thompson writes that, “Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.”

Third, the students have an acute sense of what good writing is because they are almost always writing for an audience. Lumsford found that students are writing mostly to debate, organize, or persuade. This is much more demanding writing than most of the writing students do for school. And, in fact, students in the Stanford study were not as enthusiastic about writing for school because they felt that the only purpose was to get a grade.

Finally, for those of you who think students don’t know how to write in full sentences, you are the people who probably don’t understand how to use text as a persuasive medium.

Lumsford finds that students are adept at making their point heard across a wide audience. And a study about Twitter, reported in Fast Company, shows that the text most likely to go viral—that is, the most persuasive text—does not have abbreviations or emoticons, the evidence most cited of a crisis in modern writing skills. Which means that students probably know intuitively to use texting slang only when texting.

Which makes me think that the people who are most worried that kids today don’t know how to write are the people who are most unable to write for an audience.

In the history of western thought, the first thing to happen when there was a paradigm shift was that the writing shifted, (Chaucer's stories of common people and Martin Luther's translations of the Bible come to mind). And the first people to complain were those who had a stake in keeping things the same. So ask yourself, do you want to be part of the next period in history, or do you want to be a person representing the futile force in history that tries to hold us back?

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.

Every time I write about a person or a company it’s a conflict of interest. Because I want to be on their radar. It’s good for me. And the same is true for every other intelligent blogger because that inherent conflict of interest underlies why blogging is so valuable for someone’s career.

The reality is that readers are not hurt by the conflict of interest. Readers are hurt by bad content. But only once. Because if readers hate the content, they leave. (I know this to be true because of all the people who leave comments on my blog that say “This post sucks. I’m unsubscribing.”)

Mainstream media is mostly about money, so they reveal every time they have a financial conflict of interest. But bloggers are more about influence than money. So they have conflict of interest all over their blog, with every post. For example, every time you link to someone, you are hoping for some sort of acknowledgment, or some sort of good karma. Do you need to acknowledge that so as to protect your readers? Of course not.

Here’s how it really works: Guy Kawasaki keeps such close track of favors exchanged that I think he must have it on a spreadsheet. When I link to him, he definitely notices, and he definitely helps me in exchange. So, should I list the conflict of interest every time I link to him? And every time I say I love Alltop?

No. Because if I tell you I love Alltop, and you go there and it’s stupid, you will think I’m stupid. (Note: What Alltop is good for is finding out what sort of blogs exist in a given category. Amazingly, there is no other efficient way to do this.)

And what about my blog post about oral sex? I’ve gotten way more oral sex since I wrote that. Mostly because I realized from my research and from the comments section that men who don’t do oral sex are losers. So I stay away from them. Should I disclose that I had side benefits from that post? Should I disclose that I have benefitted beyond the benefit of just educating the public? No. Who cares? Insanity. But honestly, getting more oral sex far outweighs any financial gain I could have gotten from any given post.

And that is saying something. Because I’ve made a lot of money selling posts. For example, when I wrote a post about PayScale, I was getting paid $5000 a month to talk about them. (I considered not revealing the true value of the contract, but then I thought: Well, PayScale is the poster child for transparent salaries, so how can they complain?)

But readers don’t need to know that I was paid to write the post. Readers should just want the post to be useful and interesting and all the other things you want from any post. Who cares how I get paid as long as I write well? The post got about 100 comments, and it got picked up on 20/20 and in the New York Times. That means it’s a good post. In fact, it probably means that PayScale has good ideas and that’s why I chose to work with them. You should just trust me to take money from smart companies—if I take money from stupid companies then I’ll write stupid posts.

Here’s another reason bloggers shouldn’t talk about who sponsors them: It’s boring! Here’s my post about telling you that LinkedIn sponsors my blog. Here’s my post about how to use LinkedIn if you’re a journalist. You know what? The second post did way better than the first one. There are tons of incoming links to the journalism post, and I got three big speaking gigs at journalism conferences, which made LinkedIn happy (they wanted journalists to use LinkedIn and then write about it.) And it made me happy because it gave me a platform for telling journalists they should sell their columns to the highest bidders because bloggers are doing it.

So we don’t need stupid rules about conflict of interest for people who are putting themselves on the line. That rule is for old media, where writers were putting only the brand of the newspaper on the line. In old media most journalists were no-names, writing under big (newspaper) names. So if they wrote something moronic, so that they could increase the value of a stock they held, or, maybe, get more oral sex, they would put only the newspaper brand at risk. Not their own.

Which means that the arcane conflict of interest rules are to protect the newspaper, not the readers. And this, by the way, is why newspapers are going down: because they are more about themselves, and their hierarchies, and rules and structures, than they are about what their readers want. Readers should not care about the business dealings of the writers or their publishers. Readers just want good content.

So I know I love grammar and I know it’s not normal.

My first real corporate job came right after I went to graduate school for English. The job I landed was managing content for Ingram Micro's web site. The experience I had was HTML—I turned my master’s thesis into HTML before anyone knew what HTML was.

So the head of copy writing had to teach me the AP Stylebook. I was the only person in the department who had gone to graduate school for English. I was the only person who had been published in literary journals. But when it came to grammar, there is a whole book of rules I had to learn so I could write in the Fortune 500.

An example (which, by the way, is e.g., not i.e.): Follow up is two words if it’s a noun: “I’m doing a follow up.” But it’s hyphenated if it’s an adjective: “Follow-up meeting.” But when I say I love grammar, that is not what interests me. I'm interested in how we naturally know grammar because we naturally speak in sentences with good rhythm. I will spend an extra hour editing a blog post by reading it out loud and hearing in my cadence where a preposition is wrong.

This is all to tell you that I think we need to stop judging people by their grammar.

We should judge people by their ideas, their creativity, their enthusiasm. None of this naturally comes at the heels of good grammar.

(Please note that I am not talking about typos, even though I do think you should largely ignore them. Writing without typos is outdated. It’s impossible to proofread your own work, and it is not financially viable to produce typo-free copy—if it made financial sense, the newspaper industry would be booming. But instead, the riddled-with-typos blogging industry is booming.)

What good grammar reveals is what sort of education you had. The more conventional and well-funded your education was, the better your grammar will be. And this is largely how people use grammar—to make snobbish judgments. Here’s a great example of someone doing just that. The person who wrote the post says that if you don’t know grammar rules, you’re stupid.

It’s snobbish because it’s a set of rules that are not actually that useful. Yes, there are some grammar rules that, should you violate them, completely change the meaning of your sentence. However these situations are so rare that they are actually interesting, and even created a bestselling book: Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Most grammar rules don’t matter, though. That is, if you get them wrong, the reader still can find the meaning. For example, few people know when to use effect and when to use affect. But it doesn’t matter because the first is a noun and the second is a verb so the likelihood you'll mistake the meaning of a sentence because of a grammar error in this case is extremely low.

Here’s another example: Find me a sentence with the wrong version of it’s that you can’t understand due to the error. Wait. No. Forget it. Because you can’t. So a lot of grammar does not clarify meaning, it just serves to show you are good at grammar.

But why is being good at grammar more important than, say, having good social skills? It shouldn’t be. People get hired and fired for getting along with people. Not for knowing when to use lay and when to use lie. The irony is that most people who are great at the rules and details of grammar do not have great social skills – it’s just how the brain works.

Why do we need to spend our brain power learning the rules of grammar if it is not interesting to us? Why not focus on what we like? Really, if each company is hiring a range of personality types with a range of talents, then only twenty percent will be interested in the philosophy of grammar, and only twenty percent will be good at memorizing rules.

Do you think I’m nuts?

Here’s what’s on Google’s home page on May 16, 2009:

Over 28,000 children drew doodles for our homepage.

Vote for the one that will appear here!

Test yourself: Can you find the two grammar errors?

The AP Stylebook says "over" is a way to move—a preposition. And “more than” must precede a number. Also, if you are voting for one, specific doodle, then the AP Stylebook tells you to use “which” rather than “that.”

But look, there is no page in the universe that gets more traffic than the Google home page. So you can bet someone who knows grammar knowingly violated AP Stylebook rules.

Anyway, if Google is deciding that these rules are no longer useful guidelines, then we can all follow suit. And if you don’t, you risk being more newspaper and less Internet, and we know where that’s going to put your career…

1. Big bloggers come from big media.
Usually I'm the first person to rip on print media as outdated and a dead-end career. But here's something that maybe you don't realize: Most big bloggers today have a strong background writing for print. For example: Erik Schoenfeld (TechCrunch), Owen Thomas (Valleywag), and I all wrote for Business 2.0 magazine at the same time. Ten years ago. Which means we had a ton of national media experience before we started blogging. Anya Kamenetz (Yahoo Finance) wrote for the Village Voice and had a very serious book published—before she started blogging.

2. Sure, there are exceptions. But you're probably not one of them.
Let's look at some people who have big blogs who didn't come from big media. Heather Armstrong at Dooce. She's a good one. Here's what she has that you don't: She's a talented writer and a talented designer. She's married to a developer who does all her tech stuff for free. And she has an amazing story to tell. She has the ability to translate her genius across many media—photography, memoir, twitter, and so on. She is a marvel. And you are not. None of us is. That's why she is making so much money from her blog.

3. Even if you can do it, supporting yourself with a blog is crazy hard.
Most people had to do their day job and experiment with their blog and figure out what works and then do two, pretty much full-time jobs, and then quit their day job when their blog earned enough money. JD Roth did this at Get Rich Slowly. I did this with my blog (and nearly fell apart). Most people who do this do not have kids. Because if you have kids and a job you already have two full-time jobs, so you cannot add another. Blogging to support yourself is a complete full-time job. Read Gina Trapani's post about how she is taking a break from blogging because it’s so life-consuming.

4. You probably have to be controversial to make money blogging.
Yes, there are some topics that do not require controversy: Productivity tools, for example. I think it's safe to say, though, that that market is pretty saturated. You will have to find a good niche for yourself in order to stand out from the crowd. So you will have to be different, and the bloggers who are different have surprising things to say. And if you have surprising opinions, you'll have people who tell you you're an idiot. And if you are making good money from your blog, you'll have hundreds of people telling you how you're an idiot. Do you want that? Really? Will you be able to write another controversial opinion the next day or will you be too nervous?

5. You can make more money flipping burgers.
If you want to get your opinions out into the world, or you want to write a diary about your life, whatever—do that. But why do you have to make money at it? Most of you would probably like to write a bit, to get new opportunities, and then leverage the blog to do something fun. Most of you do not want to write blog posts optimized for advertisers. Really.

6. Please shut up about your book deal.
Books are not cash cows. They are time sinks. And they are marketing tools for something else. Like a consulting business or a speaking career or a blog. And people who are great speakers are seldom great writers, and vice versa. So don't tell me you are doing a blog to get a book deal: Dead end. And don't tell me it's not a dead end because you'll turn that into a speaking career. Show me someone that has worked for. Don't tell me about Seth Godin. He had huge books before he started blogging. Not the other way around.

7. Blog for better reasons than money.
There are a lot of reasons to blog, but for the most part, money is not one of them. In the book, Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets, Stephane Grenier asked forty bloggers what their definition of blogging success is. He talked with people like Seth Godin, Neil Patel, Ramit Sethi, and me. We all make a living online, and we all have big blogs, but almost no one in the book said money was the definition of success.

Bloggers defined success as things that mattered in their life: influence, connections, friendships, the ability to lead a conversation that matters to people. Some talked about a blog leading to other business opportunities.

8. Banner advertising is the mafia.
I have not had banner advertising on my site because I am so adamant that people should not blog to earn money—I don't want to encourage anyone. I did take one ad. For Career Bags. I'm going to tell you something: The amount they paid for that ad was insignificant to me. But they let me do a lot of shopping on the site for free. Which was a huge treat. Shopping was fun. And I think about how much I love my blog every time I put my laptop into my Casauri bag.

I would never say that about a banner ad. But I am about to capitulate and sign a contract with Federated Media, the by-far-biggest company for online ad sales. Federated is sort of doing me a favor. I mean, I have about 400,000 page views a month, which I think is less traffic than any of their other clients. I'm grateful to be part of Federated because I do, in fact, need to make money from my blog. But what I have done to get here—work two jobs at once while raising kids, sell equity in my blog and then almost go out of business, and spend about four hours on each post—you probably wouldn't want to go through all that just to make money on banner ads. You probably have a way more efficient mechanism for earning money and you can blog on the side.

This seems like a good time to tell you the advice my writing teacher gave our who class in graduate school: Writing for a living is a very, very hard life. If you can do anything else for a living, you should.

So the idea that blogging will help you get rich: Forget it. Your chances of that are so slim, while your chances of gaining the other benefits of blogging are very high. So blog, yes, and do it to reach real goals, just not financial goals.

I have written a lot about how anti-aging information is essential for managing one's career. Aging is not equal in the workplace. Women are penalized much more heavily than men. So women can gain power in the world through knowledge of the tools for looking younger.

But mainstream media is reluctant to recommend that women turn to a resource like RealSelf. Those reporters don’t like the reality of the world they live in, so they don’t write about it.

That’s why public relations professionals should scrap the traditional pitch to mainstream media — saying that is almost cutting edge, except that Obama’s team beat me to it:

Time magazine has great analysis on why Obama’s campaign team was so effective. “Incoming press secretary Robert Gibbs pointedly told the New York Times magazine that Obama never sat down with the Washington Post Editorial Board. You could go to Cedar Rapids and Waterloo [Iowa} and understand that people weren’t reading the Washington Post… Obama posts weekly addresses on YouTube, and Gibbs answers questions via video on change.gov.”

But the big problem with PR pitches to print media is that there are too many failure paths. There is nothing to click. You have to make a note to yourself, while reading the paper, to go check out something online. And then you write a link that is prone to typos and then you can’t lose the note. All this means a newspaper pitch is unlikely to go viral.

Pete Blackshaw, from Consumergeneratedmedia.com, says, “PR is not the owner of the story. There are still some PR people who are great at convincing the mainstream media to pick up their client’s story. But today, the story, if it goes anywhere, will grow through consumers, online.”

The good news is that finally, there’s a social media tool that people expect to see pitches on. No longer do PR types have to annoy bloggers to the point that bloggers create blacklists. Now publicity mavens have a spot of their own, and, big news, the bloggers love trolling Twitter for good pitches.

Here’s how it works: The online influencers are on Twitter. They send traffic to blogs and Facebook and StumbleUpon. And those people email their friends, in community-wide missives, and that’s how something becomes viral.

The only catch is that PR folks need to get good at pitching in 140 characters.

And sure you can do it without Twitter. But in this situation, Twitter is hard to beat.

“Brands will adopt Twitter for everything from media/influencer outreach to consumer service to crisis communities. But more than any push channel, Twitter will give consumers—advocates and critics—unprecedented access to corporate personnel, and vice versa,” says Scott Monty, author of the Social Media Marketing Blog.

But even the best viral campaigns are not as effective as real conversations. Companies will participate in the conversation instead of paying people to control it. “The consumers who love the company and help vet the storyline will also be keen to help the company succeed – promoting that storyline in … guided content,” according to Todd Defren, who blogs at pr-squared.com.

This is happening now. We’re in a recession. So it makes sense that instead of paying expensive PR agencies to work their magic on outdated media gatekeepers you save the money. Instead, train passionate employees and customers to have authentic conversations about the brand.

Here is a great example: When bombs went off in Mumbai last November, American Express immediately went through their databases to find any customers who might be there. American Express called each customer to see if they needed cash, housing or help getting a way out of the city.

I didn’t find this out from the news. The gatekeepers of the media world wouldn’t print this. They’d think it was too much like PR.

I heard it from my mom, who works at AmEx. And it didn’t feel like PR at all: She was genuinely proud to work for a company that would do that so she wanted people to know.

And I’m telling you because I don’t care if something sounds like PR or not. I care if I got a chill when I heard the story. And I did.

Note to AmEx: This is your new PR. Compliments of all of us. Because we’re all in this business of PR now.

(For a great overview of social media and PR, read interviews by Peter Kim in Social Media Predictions 2009.)

So instead of worrying about how maybe you need to get a book deal, consider these reasons why a book deal is no good for you:

1. People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book.
A blog is more immediate, so you’ll get better feedback. And getting feedback as you go is much more intellectually rigorous than printing a final compendium of your ideas and getting feedback from the public only when it's too late to change anything.

Many people think they have a ton of ideas and they are brimming with book possibilities when in fact, most of us have very few new ideas. If you have so many ideas, prove it to the world and start blogging. There is nothing like a blog to help you realize you have nothing new to say.

And, if you do end up having an amazing blog that focuses on one, big grand idea with great writing to boot, then you can get a book deal from your blog.

2. A book is an outdated way to gain authority.
It's true that lots of people think that book authors are the people with authority. But anyone can have good ideas, and only some good ideas fit into book format. On top of that, the people who are on the cutting edge of any topic are not waiting the two years it takes to deliver new ideas in a book. Instead, they’re reading articles and blogs and discussion online with all the immediacy of the Internet.

So if you feel like no one is giving you credit for having good ideas because you don't have a book, think again: Maybe your ideas just aren’t that good. Or maybe you are trying to get credibility with people who don't know how to assess authority in the information age.

3. Books lead to speaking careers, but speaking careers often lead nowhere.
This reason actually works, because one thing a book really does provide is enough traditional authority to get you speaking gigs. People who schedule speakers are reluctant to give you a slot unless you have a book published by a top-tier publisher.

But before you get giddy about those huge speaking fees that take you to Hawaii and Belgium, remember that the life of a public speaker may not be what you expect. You don't really connect with people and work with them, but instead flit from city to city making one-hour connections and then leaving. Also, it's great to get a gig in Newport Beach, but usually it'll be Bismarck or Birmingham. And the constant travel will keep you so tired that you'll become numb to those chic-chic accommodations.

But really, the biggest problem with the life of a public speaker is that it is so tenuous, because you have to speak about what you do, but if all you do is speak, then it's a Mobius puzzle that ends with you having nothing to say. So most speakers have to eventually figure out what to do after the speaking is over. Which means why not just forget the book and figure out your post-speaking career before you even start?

4. You'll make more money per hour flipping burgers than writing a book.
The odds that your book will be a best seller are absolutely terrible. Writing fiction is an impossible life unless you hit the jackpot. There's a great article in the New Yorker about a relatively famous, established novelist who cannot support himself on book advances. I can't find that article, but just trust me: It's a very very hard industry to survive in.

Nonfiction books are a better bet for personal survival, but this is not to say books are big money makers. Most nonfiction books are paperback originals which means they are $50,000 advances, and most of you could earn more than that spending a year in an office.

On top of that, a book costs so much in time that it's a cost center which you have to justify by deciding what you are using the book to sell. And that's the crux of all of this: That a book is a marketing tool. You can market your company or yourself or your blog or an idea, but you need to have something you want the book to support.

5. When you're feeling lost, a book won't save you.
A book will not give you direction in life. A book is something you write in order to get you to where you're going. If you have nowhere to go, a book will insure that you stay where you are: Lost.

People use books like law school. They think if they have some piece of paper – a degree, a contract – then people will respect them and then they'll respect themselves. But self-respect comes from having some sort of vision for one's life and heading in that direction. And there is no one who can give you that vision – you have to give it to yourself, and before you can feel like you have direction, you have to feel lost — and lost is okay.

So stop with the idea that you need a book. Most people who think they need a book deal probably need to answer the question: What will I be doing two years after that book? Do you really need the book to get where you want to go? Probably not.