Which is notable because hatred is a process. Neurologists have proven that love and hate are closely related, and I have found it's hard to hate a person unless I am also close to that person, and the same is true for a topic. In that vein, life is the process of expanding our love and our knowledge, and I suppose, our hate.

So here are some things that I have recently reached the point of thinking so much about that I feel qualified to hate them:

1. Sarcasm
The use of sarcasm is always inappropriate. Sarcasm reveals insecurity and cynicism – both things that make a person unlikable. Sarcasm is always negative in meaning, and the tone is always disparaging. On top of that, people who use sarcasm think they are being funny, but this is a poor man’s humor; because comedy is about timing. You say it, then there’s a beat, and then people laugh. With sarcasm, you say it, there’s a beat when someone realizes you’ve said something you don’t mean, and a beat to process what you did mean. The timing is off.

So comedians rarely use sarcasm because it’s not funny. And top performers don’t use sarcasm because it’s mean.

2. Getting bids
If something is so important to you that you are spending enough time on it to collect bids, then you shouldn’t get bids. Because if it’s so important to you, give it to the person who will do the best job. And if you think you can swindle someone into “giving you a deal,” well, why do you think they’re so good if they don’t even get market price for their work?

If your project is important, find someone who has done it before, with someone who was great. And hire that person. You could get another bid, but the work would be different, right? And you should hire someone who does good work. And if everyone does the same work, then pricing can’t be that varied – it’s a commodity, priced the same across the board – so you don’t need bids.

3. Maternity leave
It’s not that I don’t like the topic. I don’t like that people think this is an area fraught with controversy. This is not a gray-area area. This is a right answer/wrong answer area.

Don’t tell people you’re pregnant if you’re not showing. Hide the bump as long as possible. This is your right. And you have this explicit right because everyone knows that even though it’s illegal, women are penalized when people hear they are pregnant. No one trusts they’re coming back after the baby, so the project flow goes dry or gets boring.

Also, you do not need to know if you are coming back to work full time after the baby. Tell your employer you are. Change your mind later if you want. This is reasonable: no one could guess how they want to raise their kids until the kids are there.

Take paid maternity leave no matter what. It’s your right. And the fastest way to post-partum depression is to take no time off to recuperate. (I know from my own experience.) So even if you quit when maternity leave is over, take paid leave. The US makes women earn maternity leave. You’ve earned it already. You don’t need to work more after.

4. Pseudonyms
Here’s what I read in Car and Driver magazine: The most popular name for upscale strippers to use is Lexus. Do you know what this tells you? Pseudonyms are for strippers.

If you’re being your real self, doing things that bring you self-respect, why have a pseudonym? And if you don’t want to claim what you are doing as your own work, ask yourself why you are doing it.

Here is a post about how using a pseudonym made my life a mess. And here’s a post about pseudonyms undermine your career, which is ironic since people are usually thinking they need a pseudonym to save their career.

5. Lack of hate
My son came home from preschool and told me that using hate is against the rules. I told him that discerning people hate things, and I encouraged him to think of something he hates. (Bowser, a bad guy in Super Mario, for those who are curious.)

Recognizing that we each love and we each hate is part of the process of knowing ourselves. Talking about it is part of the process of letting other people know us as well.

Comment on: List of things I hate #3

The first thing I have to grapple with, besides having spent the last three years of my life completely enthralled and ensconced in the happiness research from positive psychologists, is if I don’t want a happy life, what sort of life do I want?

I think I want an interesting life. Not that I want to be interesting, but I want to be interested. I'm talking about what I think is interesting to me. I want to choose things that are interesting to me over things that would make me happy. For example, this post. I am not sure if I'm right on this, and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of telling me I'm an idiot in the comments. But it's going to be interesting.

I think choosing a life that is interesting to us and choosing a life that makes us feel happy are probably very different choices.

For one thing, people who are happy do not look for a lot of choices, according to Barry Schwartz, in his book, The Paradox of Choice. People who want to have an interesting life are always looking for more choices and better choices, and they make decisions for their life based on maximizing choices.

I think this because I’ve lived in NYC, where people value having a wide range of choices and opportunities over having a life that makes them feel happy. When it comes to self-reporting happiness, New Yorkers report being less happy than everyone else, and they don't care. And I’ve lived in Wisconsin, where, I’m not kidding about this, almost everyone will tell you they are happy. But you can trust me on this, Wisconsin does not offer a lot of choices and opportunities.

Now I’m going to preemptively rip on everyone who thinks they are going to comment here about Wisconsin. Wisconsin does have things that are world-class: Football, beer, cheese, PETA-inflaming bioscience departments. And there is nothing wrong with being fine with what is here. I think it is a nice life, and that’s why I moved to Wisconsin.

But on balance, Wisconsin is not a place you go to get the best of everything, which is what optimizers do. New Yorkers love that they can get the best of everything - they want that more than they want to be happy. And if you can’t understand this you merely reveal how little you know about the world. I have no more patience for people telling me I can get great eyebrows in Wisconsin, there is great shopping in Wisconsin, etc. There simply isn’t. And it’s okay. People don’t live in Wisconsin because of that. People live in Wisconsin because the lifestyle is easy – family is here, personal history is here, things generally are fine. Nothing is fine in NYC. It’s very challenging. Every single day.

The fact that I feel compelled to have a tirade about Wisconsin in the middle of this post is interesting to me: People who value choices over happiness never argue about it. They are proud of it. People who value happiness over having a life full of interesting opportunities get indignant over being accused that they made that choice.

I wish I could tell you I am a person who picks interesting over complacency, but problem for me is that life in NYC is so interesting to me, but it's just plain too hard for me. When I lived in NYC with two kids the year I had $200,000 coming in, I felt like I was living at the edge of poverty. Whenever I write this, people who have lived in NYC with kids are not surprised at all, and people who have not lived in NYC think I’m crazy. So please, if you have not raised kids in NYC, do not comment that you could easily do it on $200,000, okay?

What this illustrates, though is how different the world of lots of choices is. People will pay a ton of money to have a lot of choices, which is what they perceive as an interesting life. (See the average rent per square foot in NYC) but people will not pay a ton of money for a life with relatively few choices. (See the average rent per square foot in Madison). This makes me think that people put a higher premium on choices, because choices make life more interesting.

I recently spoke to Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University. His book, Create Your Own Economy, is about how the information flow of the Internet allows us to manage our careers differently than before. For example, people who are focused on information (infovores, as Tyler calls them) but not on face-to-face social interaction can flourish in an information economy.

I suggested to Tyler that it’s messed up to value information processing over social interaction because I want to believe that it’s social interaction that actually makes us happy.

Tyler says that people who are infovores feel fulfilled by processing information. And he thinks that happiness is an elusive, amorphous goal. Tyler says feeling fulfilled actually gives us a feeling of happiness, and some people gain that fulfilled feeling through interaction with information rather than social interaction (makes sense from Tyler – he writes a great blog, full of fun information.)

But it scares me that this also seems true for me. I don't want it to be true for me because I want to be as complacent as the people I live with, in Wisconsin. And I want to be a socially skilled as the non-Asperger's people I try to pass for in regular life.

Tyler's ideas will resonate in the Asperger community. There is a large contingency that sees Asperger Syndrome not as a deficit but as merely a difference, and these are the people who would love to hear that the idea of happiness is myopic and that fulfillment is a more real goal, and people with Asperger’s can feel fulfilled through information processing.

I’m not sure I buy that. I want to buy it. Because I have Asperger’s and so do many people in my family, and I want to believe there is fulfillment out there for all of us.

Comment on: Do you overemphasize happiness?

This probably is not surprising to you, because admittedly, it is absurd to be engaged one day and not engaged the next day. But there are exacerbating factors, and basically, the way I got him back was to be more likable.

I have spent most of my career overcoming my lack of social skills by studying research about what makes people likable. And I think the research I’ve applied so systematically in my career is finally helping me in my personal life.

Here’s what we know about being likable:

1. Don’t give ultimatums. It’s disrespectful. Instead, be a negotiator.
The farmer does not want to be in this blog. As you might imagine, we have this discussion a lot.

First it was like this:

Him: I don’t want to be in the blog.

Me: You have to be. I can’t live without writing my life.

Then the conversation was like this:

Him: I don’t want to be in the blog.

Me: How about if you can edit whatever you want?

2. Try to think about situations from the other persons’ perspective.
That worked for a while. But the problem is that I’ve been setting boundaries about what I write about for my whole life. He’s only been doing it for a year. And after the Thanksgiving Day post he felt like he did not do a good job. In hindsight, he thinks he should not have let me write about that.

But here’s the farmer’s dilemma: He is fascinated with the idea of living an honest life.  And he loves watching me do it, but he’s horrified to realize that there are a million versions of every story, and the person with the big blog audience gets extra weight for her story.

3. Don't hide what really motivates you; secretive people are not likable.
So I am back with the farmer, but we have new rules about what I can write. Well, I think we do. We were going to. But then we had to think about the ramifications. If I don’t write about the tension on a farm, then who is writing about that?

Do you read The Pioneer Woman? I love her blog. I love her blog so much that I told my designer he should make me her blog.

He said, "You don’t want her blog. It’s huge. It probably takes five full-time people to run that blog."

I said, "No. I do want her blog."

He said, "I think you want her life."

The Pioneer Woman does have a great life. Every guy in the photos on that blog is on a horse or about to get on a horse, and all the men are hot. Their rear ends poke out of chaps. Everywhere. And their tough, gritty faces suggest they’d ravish me in bed.

Sure I want that blog, and that life.

I also love how that The Pioneer Woman never, never never disrespects her guy. The Marlboro Man. That’s his name. He’s always studly, sexy, kind, fun.

The farmer is that, too, but there are issues. He’s not studly when we’re having a fight. The problem is that I’m drawn to writing about the fights, and the Pioneer Woman is drawn to writing about pies, and feeding the Marlboro Man.

I am a great cook. But this is not the sort of thing that would go over well on this blog. I’m the kind of cook that understands principles of food so I don’t ever use a recipe. But I’m not drawn to tell you how to make pot roast perfectly as a precursor to cowboy sex. I’m more drawn to tell you that I experimented with fruit in stew and accidentally used bad wine, and to fix it I laced it with brown sugar. And it’s not just that the farmer wouldn’t eat it, but neither would the farm cats, who will eat almost anything in winter.

I want to put a recipe of that. The worst stew ever. With grass-finished beef, of course. Because the farmer gets a full cow butchered and then stores it in his freezer. And before he knew me he used to turn everything into microwaved hamburger, but now he brings me gifts of frozen cuts of grass-finished beef that I defrost over days and turn into dinners to wow him.

The secret, really, to amazing cooking with beef is to spend a lot of money on ingredients and then do almost nothing to them. The farmer did not know this until he was with a city girl who will spend $5.00 on a bag of spinach.

4. Try to look at the positive side of things; people like optimists.
I digress. Sort of. Not really, though. Because what I’m telling you is that what would be perfect is if I could be the Pioneer Woman and only tell you good things about me and the farmer.

But what about that she’s living on a family-owned ranch that is a business, and surely, she had to sign a prenup? Surely her in-laws are nuts over the possibility that their son gets run over by a stampede and she inherits his part of the ranch and marries a different guy with a tight ass in flowing chaps and gives her share of the ranch to him?

What about that? Was there discussion?

Is there discussion over that she has so much traffic on her blog that surely she earns more money than the Marlboro Man? This is not easy stuff to deal with. But there is nothing about that.

Unfortunately, for me, the world loves reading the Pioneer Woman. And so do I. She’s upbeat and her site is gorgeous, and no kidding: the minute the farmer broke off my engagement I started thinking there’s gotta be a guy on her ranch who’s right for me.

But I am drawn to write about only the hard things. I don’t need help from a blog community to know that I’m great in the kitchen. I need help from a blog community to figure out my anger management problems . Because I need to fix that fast: The farmer won’t put up with me yelling anymore.

So I guess that’s what I’ll blog about. I have an anger problem with the farmer, and, honestly, everyone at work is sick of my anger issues, too. So I have a problem. It’s so much more interesting than the cupcakes that I decorate so well that my friend said she could sell them in SoHo.

5. Understand peoples’ boundaries and respect them.
This would be a great place for a picture. Of a cupcake. But what I’d like is a picture of me, and the farmer.

He won’t do that. He is figuring out boundaries. And that’s definitely one.

Another is yelling.

And another is his family.

I am figuring out boundaries, too. I would be insane to say that my blog is more important than he is. But, in some ways, it is. My blog is what makes me able to support myself–I can support myself, somehow, as long as I’m posting to my blog. And my blog is what makes me able to not feel isolated on a farm in the middle of nowhere. I’m always connected to people if I’m blogging.

But I told him that I’d stop blogging about him if he wants me to.

I could offer that only because I knew he wouldn’t want me to. He likes it. He likes that we would have had to keep a secret, forever, that we considered an abortion, but now we can talk about it openly and he can tell people what he thinks. He’s from a farm in the back, dead end street of a road in the middle of nowhere. No one ever asked him what he thought of abortion before. It’s interesting to him. To have a real discussion.

It makes him uncomfortable. But the thing is that the stuff that is most interesting to me is what makes me uncomfortable.

So we agree that we are back to where we were: Me blogging and him getting final edit to any post with him in it.

And I say, “Thank you so much. You make me feel really loved.”

He says, “Tell that to your readers so they know that. “

And I say, “They already do.”

Comment on: How to make yourself more likable

For example, I quit playing volleyball and went to graduate school for English. And, at the same time that I realized that English professors make no money and have no job security, I also got dumped by the guy I had been living with for five years. So this is what I did in graduate school: Nothing. I had already written two full novels, so I turned in a little bit of them each week. And I had to take literature courses, which I passed by reading New York Times book reviews (you’d be surprised how far back those go.) And then, after burning every bridge possible at Boston University, I left, one credit short of a graduate degree.

There were other times I fell apart. And stopped writing. For example, when I had a baby, I stayed home with it, every hour of every day, while I had an identity crisis. I still needed to support the family, but I couldn’t write anything because I couldn’t imagine giving career advice when I was having a total career meltdown. So I took columns from five years earlier and turned them in as new columns. And, after about three months of that, I got fired.

So I know it’s not going to work for me to stop writing during my current crisis because it has not worked for me in the past. At this point in my career, I have a lot of achievements. I have played professional volleyball, I climbed the corporate ladder in Fortune 500 marketing, I was a journalist at the Boston Globe, and I’ve gotten three startups funded. There's no way I’m going to go down in flames right now. I know that.

So this seems like a good time in my life to tell you what it’s like to be lost at your job. Who else would do this? It would look like career suicide to anyone else.

I worry, actually, that it looks that way for me. For example, I think maybe I went overboard in my comment, in a discussion about whether I am managing my personal brand well. Dan Schawbel gave a great answer and I could have left well enough alone. But here’s a rule about being lost: You make bad choices.

Last week, in addition to being lost at work, I was lost trying to cope with the farmer ending our engagement. So I flipped a grilled cheese with my bare hand instead of the hand holding the spatula: Insane pain. I drove myself to the emergency room, and they said I was actually at risk of going into shock behind the wheel. Okay. So it was bad enough that they gave me vicodin.

They gave me 20. Yes. Right here in Madison. You can get 20 vicodin for a grill cheese burn. If hospitals in NYC did this, there would be a run on grilled cheese ingredients all over the city.

I popped my vicodin. And I could not think. There was nothing. In only fifteen minutes, my head was a blank slate. The only thing I could see in my head was my hands literally trying to grasp for my problems. Where were they? Where were the things I was worrying about?

I hated the vicodin. I woke up the next morning excited to have my problems back.

This makes me think that maybe, somehow, I can enjoy being lost. To do that, I’m going to have to tell you my biggest problem: I have no idea what I’m doing at work and I am being a brat about it.

I think I have already made it clear that I’m difficult to work with. People cut me a lot of slack at the office. After all, I have this remarkable ability to know what works with social media even though clearly I am not able to use any tool the normal way. This must be valuable to a company. If they can put up with me in meetings.

Ryan Healy has told me not to write about him anymore. (This was his final straw.) So I’m just going to tell you that I have demonstrated for Ed, our new CEO, what Ryan does that makes me hate him, and Ed has said that I’m nuts. That he just doesn’t see what the problem is.

And. Okay. Here’s something disturbing: I have the exact same problem with my ex. The way he talks to me. And our nanny has heard him, and I ask the nanny, “Do you see how rude he is?” And the nanny says, “No, I don’t. He sounded fine to me.”

If only the nanny and the CEO knew how closely aligned they are in my life.

So my problem is that I am not hearing people right. I am not a good listener. I try to be a good listener, but I do not hear things right.

So I have a tone of voice problem, (which is typical for someone with Asperger's Syndrome, by the way). I’ve been complaining to Ryan about his tone of voice for two years, and he’d probably divorce me if he could, but, let’s be honest, the company would not do well if we did that.

So it's not just that I’m lost at work, but also I've been a brat.

I cannot solve the lost problem right now. I cannot quite figure out where I fit at my company. I mean, I gave day-to-day operations to Ryan and I gave CEOness to Ed. And where am I? Yes. I am very good at driving traffic to Brazen Careerist. Look. I’m doing it right now. It’s a game: Click.

But I need to do more than that. I am figuring that out. And I'm sure that Ryan and Ed would have more patience for me if I am not a brat while I’m figuring it out. Which means I have to:

1.  Be patient when people talk. No cutting them off. Here is the post about how hard that is for me. I don’t know how I’ll stop. I have to have a rule. No talking until there is quiet space. But honestly, I panic that that space will never come.

2.  Try out doing new things even if I don’t like them. Like, webinars. I’m doing a webinar tonight. I should promote that now. Okay. Here’s a link. Do you know what I hate about webinars? I can’t stay on topic, I only want to talk about sex, and I have to make my hair look good.

3.  Be positive. I am always telling people what is wrong. People do not like that. I mean, they like it in a blog. Look. You’ve read this whole post. But people don’t like it in real life. And Ed and Ryan told me they don’t want to hear why things won’t work. They want to hear the most promising idea; I need to talk like someone full of hope and promise.

So I am being positive right now: I am thinking that I can decide what to try. And I can decide to think that what I try will work. And if I try something and it doesn’t work, I can try again.

Comment on: How to hit a wall at work, with grace

I have written before that for me, the biggest problem at work stems from my own sensory integration dysfunction – something that typically tags along with an Asperger's diagnosis. But for someone with Asperger's, it's not enough to deal with sensory integration dysfunction; in order to succeed at the workplace, you need some guidelines for bridging the gap between other peoples' social skills and your own.

So, based on my own experience, here are some concrete rules for doing better at work if you have Asperger’s, and maybe if you don’t.

1. Spend limited amounts of time with people.
One of the things that is alarming to non-Asperger’s people is how few friends and relationships people with Asperger’s have. But I have never heard anyone with Asperger’s lament this. (Temple Grandin is a good example.) It’s not something we feel a loss about. We only need a small amount of closeness in our life. What I do hear Asperger’s people sad about all the time is a lack of employment opportunity.

The way to improve this is to spend less time with people. We can be normal in small spurts. We can look charming and quirky in small doses but in large doses, it’s overwhelming. So go out to dinner, but then go home. Go to the company picnic, but just talk with people for a little bit. Then leave.

At work you do not need to spend tons of time with people. You can be the weird, smart one. As long as you’re not too weird. Get along with people for a little. Then go back to your cube.

2. Don’t tell your boss.
People don’t care about your random, personal crap. I know, that’s crazy to say on this blog. But I’m entertaining or useful, and when I’m at my best, I’m both.  Also, your boss won’t know what to do. She can’t read 400 pages on Asperger’s.

Instead, ask your boss questions about social situations. For example, at Brazen Careerist, we just closed a small round of funding. And my boss, our new CEO, sent a thank you to the investors. I emailed him to find out: Should I send a thank you as well? And he said yes. So I did.

When you ask specific questions about social situations, your boss will appreciate that you know you don’t know.  And your boss will think you’re coachable. That helps when your boss sees you being a social moron. The biggest problem with people who have poor social skills is that they don’t know what they’re missing, so they are not coachable. You will differentiate yourself from this crowd when you ask for help.

Ryan Paugh has great social skills. So I ask him a lot of questions, and I watch him. When Ryan Healy’s parents came to visit, I knew I needed to talk with them, because I was the CEO. I know that's a social rule. But I absolutely completely could not figure out what to say. I listened to Ryan Paugh go first. He said, “What do you have planned for the weekend?”

That was a great line. I wouldn’t have thought of it. But I know for next time.

People who are typical will think this is an easy conversation to have. They’ve had it before, in another form. People with Asperger’s cannot generalize social rules. We have to learn the thing to say in every single situation.

3. Be great at what you do, and a little odd.
I write obsessively about how important it is to to be a star. It is actually more important for people with Asperger’s. This is the only way to stay employable. You will always be difficult to deal with. You need to make it worth everyone’s time.

Often, people who are really likable don’t have to be good at what they do. People just love being around them. And it’s fair, because someone who everyone likes actually does make the team more productive.

Many people who work with me know that I’m weird. The first thing Ryan and Ryan said when they got to Madison was that I am totally eccentric. They put up with it. They stayed because I have built such a good career for myself. They wanted to work with me because of that, so they excuse the poor social skills.

By the time you get to the mid-point in your career, it’s clear that the people who stand out as great at what they do are also weird, and they are thinking in odd ways. It’s what makes them stand out. So the more successful you are in your career, the more okay it is, and the more expected it should be, for you to be odd.

4. Do office politics by being totally direct.
There is office politics in every office. Because office politics is about how people get along. If you have Asperger’s, there is not a good way for you to know all the nuances—we don’t understand mean, vindictive, passive aggressive, these are all way too complicated. So we don’t do them. This should make people like us, if we do it right. Unfortunately, I've noticed that much of how I act comes off as mean, even if this is not my intention.

So you need to really look at peoples’ faces. And if you get a bad reaction when you say something, even if you think it’s not a bad thing to say, you need to stop and ask if you hurt someone’s feelings. I ask this four or five times in any given day. “Are you angry?” Most of the time people are surprised that I don’t know. But I keep asking. There is no other way to find out.

5. Don’t get frustrated by the rules.
Recently, I’ve been reminded about how hard it was to learn business rules because I had to learn dating rules. I got frustrated about dating. Like I’ll never learn. For four dates I didn’t understand why people drink on a date. I don’t understand why you don’t say at the beginning of the date if you want to have sex at the end, so you know what you’re leading to. But I tried to just do what other people are doing. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I just try to fit in.

There are rules like this for the office, as well. Just follow them. Don’t ask for any rationale. It won’t make sense. That’s okay.

Comment on: Asperger's at work: 5 ways to be less annoying

Yesterday I was trolling for posts, and I remembered this one, about hiring a babysitter. I never link to it because I can't read it. I get physically ill. It was a short, stinging moment during an absolutely terrible time in my life. But a part of me likes that sting. I'm the kind of girl that picks scabs off just to feel like I'm alive.

So you can imagine that a blog post about how to sell is not rocking my world. It's true that I've been thinking a lot about creating more stability in my life. But it's also true that in the recent post about what I learned from sales guys, I should have told you that when I met one of those sales guys on a plane, I went to a hotel and had sex with him. I had never had a one-night stand and I thought I should know what it's like. And it was terrible. I like picking scabs, but it's very controlled. It's hard to control a one-night stand, and it was, actually, very scary and not fun at all.

I want this blog to be somewhere in between a one-night stand with a sales guy and a five-point list of sales tips. In fact, I want my life to be that way as well.

A few days ago I flew to LA to get my haircut. I know that sounds crazy, but remember that I live in the middle of Wisconsin. Also, my best friend, Sharon, is in LA, and she owns a hair salon, and she's been cutting my hair for 15 years. Before I was her free-haircut-friend, a cut and color with her was about $300. So I feel like the plane ticket, together with the free haircut, is somehow still a bargain.

I go there on a day the salon is closed, and we do my hair and then spend the day hanging out in Santa Monica talking.

At lunch, outside, with cars driving by, I tell Sharon I need a break. I need a vacation. I have been working absolutely insane hours for the last five years. I traveled so much that when I get on a plane now, I have panic attacks.

She said, "What would you do on vacation?"

Me: "I'd probably wake up, take the kids to school, go to the gym, write a blog post, and then work on whatever company I was percolating. And then pick the kids up at school."

So I don't really want a vacation. I want breathing room. But not a vacation. To be honest, I still work at night. I am not sure why. I think because I'm interested in what people are doing. In what I'm doing. I don't want to miss anything because everything is still fun.

I think working at night is like picking scabs. It feels lively to solve some problems before I go to bed. Or create some. (Same way with pulling a scab, right?)

After lunch, Sharon and I drove to Culver City, to get my eyebrows done. I usually go to NYC for eyebrows. But I don't want to travel anymore, so I don't want to have a hair person in LA and an eyebrow person in NY. So, as a step toward simplifying my life, I did my eyebrows in LA.

I liked the place immediately because there was a whole display of gray nail polish and I know gray is the it-color for fall, and I know no one is wearing it yet in Madison, so I had high hopes for my eyebrows.

But they are uneven. Sharon tried to tell me they were okay, but good friends, really, don't do that. So in the end, she didn't. And I'm going back to NY next time.

I know you'll say, "Just find someone else in LA." It's not bad advice. In fact, this is what Sharon said.

But I'm upset about the eyebrows, about how it turned out. It's hard to make changes, even if the changes could make my life more calm. It's so easy to convince ourselves that the change is too difficult to make. For eyebrows, for a blog, for a career.

Comment on: This is what it looks like to have a hard time making a change

I used to think I’m not that good at sales. For example, I’m an open book—I have very little ability to bluff or play my hand close to my—actually, what is that expression? I don’t even know the expression.

But then, when I told one of my mentors that I’m not good at sales, he said, “Of course you’re good at sales. You’ve gotten three companies funded.” He’s right. I wanted to take back all the times I said I’m not good at sales. The thing is, I have a specific talent in this department: selling ideas.

I have gotten companies funded when they were still just philosophies about how a market will move, what the trends are, and what ideas will work. I have yet to raise a later round of funding, where the company is selling actual products or services with me raising money to sell them faster.

I’m also great at the consultative sale. I’m great at meeting someone who wants to think in new ways, and tossing some ideas back and forth and then going to lunch, or yoga, or commenting on each others’ blogs. I connect easily on ideas, and can close a sale there because the idea exchange is so rewarding.

There’s another kind of salesperson, though. The kind that can hit numbers, close tough deals with demanding customers, and compete effectively against the most cutthroat of their peers.

I am fascinated by this type of person. I don’t meet them a lot, which makes me nervous. Because I want to be more like them, and there’s a great piece by Clive Thompson in the New York Times about the Framingham Heart Study that shows that you become more like the people you hang out with. And it started to worry me that I don’t like hanging out with competitive types.

I know, you’re thinking, WHAT? But I’m never about getting the most money or getting up the ladder the fastest. I’m always about getting what I want to do when I want to do it—having the work that makes me happiest feeding the life that makes me happiest. Frankly, that is so much work for me that I don’t have any energy left to notice who is winning.

But it worries me. It worries me that in general, when I’m in hand-to-hand combat—on the volleyball court, in divorce court, in Ryan Healy’s office—I tend to give in so that the whole process ends sooner and I can get back to whatever is going on in my head. I always want to get back to thinking about ideas. And that desire makes me not the strongest competitor.

When I was flying two or three times a week, I sat beside a lot of sales guys.  And it is mostly guys. First Class is always full of men when you travel between smaller cities, and the odds of sitting next to someone in sales on any late-in-the-day, weeknight flight, is very high from any city.

I talked with sales guys a lot and mostly I learned that I don’t think like they do.

So it should come as no surprise that my company just had to hire one of these sales guys: Justin Rheinhardt. That’s his name. I loved hiring him because I knew my days of having to be a cutthroat closer were over. Justin is that. But also I loved hiring him because I learned so much from him in just two weeks.

For example, Justin was in recruiting, which makes sense because we are selling services that help recruiters. So I asked him why he wants to do sales instead of recruiting.

And he told me that if you’re a sales guy, you can’t be a recruiter, because good recruiters really care about placing the candidate where they fit. Good recruiters build relationships to help people over a long period of time—helping that person build their career on a path that works for them.

Justin just wants to sell, so he was closing instead of counseling. For Justin, the rush of the close is what drives him. Which I totally believe, because I don’t really have that. I have the rush of a good idea.

I talked to Richard Goldman, COO of Birkman International, a company that helps businesses make intelligent hires by using the Birkman Method for personality assessments. Goldman says, “If you’re a great team player, you probably don’t belong in sales. Salespeople are in it for themselves. They eat what they kill.”

I asked Goldman if he thought I could develop these skills, and he says that our underlying needs are set by age five or six, and our usual behaviors are set by age 22.

So it’s pretty clear to me that I’m not a salesperson, and I’m not an eat-what-I-kill sales person, plus I’m not going to become one either. I’m more of a convince-someone-else-to-go-out-and-do-the-killing person.

Also, Justin has a rule that you make your calls list at the end of the day, so that you can start calling right away in the morning. That calling part seems really hard to me. You have to be really driven to kill to be able to sit down and make calls every day.

But I know that if you want to be an idea person, you should sit down and write an idea first thing in the morning. And now, come to think of it, maybe you can tell who you are by what you require yourself to do first, every day.

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Wait. You think of one, now. Quick. Just any one…

So I thought of a time:  it was in my grandparents’ huge yard with fruit trees and flower gardens and grass for running. And it was so peaceful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Countless studies show people would rather have pleasant and personable co-workers than a co-worker who is always right. I try to keep this in mind each day, and consequently, I spend a lot of time planning my interactions.

But sometimes my plans fail. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’m going to walk you through my most recent parent-teacher conference. Which was a disaster.  And while it was a meeting in a second-grade classroom, it could have been a meeting with anyone, anywhere.

1. I can’t tell the difference between social niceties and reality.
I think I'm late.  I am bad with transitions — I space out from the stress of change so I drive around the school a few times without noticing before I go in. I am bad with time, because I don’t totally understand how to predict what the next number will be. So sometimes I forget where I am in the hour.

But then I get to the school and I think I am early to the conference, and I go to the bathroom, because the school halls are bustling and I want calm.

I get to the room and the teacher is sitting at her desk. Doing nothing. I think this means she is waiting. So I ask if I’m late. She says no, but I am pretty sure she means yes. I know some people say the answer they think would be good manners instead of the right answer. I stare at her body language for a clue.

2. I get sidetracked by insisting on telling people what they don’t know.
I forget to listen to her talking because I’m stuck on if I’m late or not, but I perk up when she says that my son’s cursive writing is too slow and he needs to print like the rest of the class.

Because I need her to know that spending any time on kids’ handwriting is stupid.  I tell her there are no jobs that require people to have decent handwriting, and definitely no jobs—besides wedding calligrapher—that require cursive.

She thinks I'm saying kids don't need to learn to construct paragraphs, or book reports.

I try to clarify that I mean good penmanship is useless.

She says she's sorry that I am upset.

This is when I realize that I picked a fight, and parents do not pick fights with teachers unless the parents are jerks or idiots or both. And I don't even know what I'm arguing for any more. So I try to get out of the argument. I tell her that I will explain to my son that cursive writing is for at home until the rest of the class is doing it.

3. I interrupt constantly and don’t realize it.
She tells me my son is great at math. I tell her that it’s typical of boys with Asperger Syndrome to be great at math, so that’s not what I’m worried about.

I tell her I’m worried about his spelling. She tells me about his spelling and I tell her that he can spell the words he’s missing but he can’t listen and spell and write all at the same time.

I start to tell her about sensory integration disorder, but I see that I am lecturing, so I stop. And then she is hesitant to talk again. That’s when I realize that I’ve been cutting her off.

I feel terrible and tell myself I have to be a better listener. And then I start focusing on how terribly I’m doing and I forget to be a good listener. I am upset that I am offending her. I think about the  psychiatrist who says people often mistake someone with Asperger Syndrome as a narcissist. I think this is a moment when the teacher is thinking that I am totally self-absorbed and not caring at all about her.

4. My mind is too scattered to focus on being nice.
Just when I start thinking of how to care about her, she says, “in conclusion” and then I panic. I will not have time to show her I appreciate her.

I remember a photo of the Obama’s going to their parent-teacher conference and Michelle is carrying a vase of flowers. I should have brought a vase of flowers.

I try to focus.

I look at the teacher to focus on what she is saying and she is saying my son is delightful to have in class. I hear this as something she says to every parent. Then she gives me an example, which is that he is very easily redirected when he is not doing what other people are doing.

I tell her that his problem is not that he can’t be redirected. People with Asperger Syndrome are dying to please everyone around them. People with Asperger Syndrome don’t want to stand out or be the center of attention. They just want to get along with people and have things run smoothly.

So of course if she tells him what to do to fit in, he’ll do it. The problem is that he will not have someone around him for the rest of his life telling him that. I tell her it would be a positive thing if he could tell things were going badly and then he knew the right way to get help in order to make himself do what is expected.

I look at the teacher. She is clearly exhausted from dealing with me. It occurs to me that teacher conferences are only fifteen minutes. Of course we cannot cover anything significant in this time. This is a friendly, get-to-know-each-other moment. It’s a small-talk-and-smiling moment. And I should have known to ask someone to come with me, to cue me, so I would do what is expected.

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The problem is that we are not taught to ask good questions. We’re trained to answer questions. But only answering questions doesn’t make an interesting life. After all, if you have all the answers, and you’re spewing them all the time, then you are not learning anything new.

Asking questions is how we get smarter. One of the earliest signs of a child with Asperger syndrome is that they fall behind in their learning because they do not understand how to ask a question. It doesn’t occur to them that someone would have information.

And maybe all my blog posts are actually about my obsession with a good question. For example, my recent rant about how blogs need topics is really about how a good blog is based on a good question. (My question is: how can we make the the intersection of work and life better?)

Today I’m going to focus on the kinds of questions that back us into a corner.

1) The question that asks: What is the meaning of life?

I think a lot about how people ask questions because I get them all the time. Often, the questions are so vague and poorly framed that I can’t believe the person actually sent an email. Here’s an example of one:

Hi Penelope,

I am from Bangalore India and an avid reader of your blog. I have recently quit my job at [big, international tech company] after working with them for many years. I would like to start something of my own but do not know how to go about it.

Can you guide me please?

Thanks for taking time out to read my mail. I will look forward to your response.

I sent a reprimanding email back to this person. In hindsight, I should have directed him to the post titled How to Write an Email that Generates a Good Response. Instead, I told him that there is no answer to this question. The question is so vague that it is not actually a question but a plea for respite from the inherent difficulties of adult life.

2. The question that reveals that you don’t care.

The questions that are most interesting are ones that create a conversation. My friend, Marci Alboher is great at these questions, because I love the conversations we have, even though she never likes my answers.

One of the most frequent mistakes people make in a job interview is when you switch to complete BS when the interviewer asks, at the end, “Do you have any questions for me?” Face it: the best way to ask questions in an interview is to ask them the whole time, not just at the end, so you can create the conversation that the interviewer needs so she can learn that yes, you are the right person with the right ideas for this position. If you wait until the end of the interview, it’s obvious that you don’t care—you have already had your conversation, based only on you answering the questions and having nothing to contribute on your own.

3. The question that generates an answer you can’t cope with.

I like to think that I’ve learned to be great at asking questions. I spend days dreaming up the perfect question for my mentor who I haven’t spoken to in a month. I want to make sure I ask a question that is interesting, and engaging to him and useful to me.

And I hear so many bad questions that I think I have become immune to asking them.

But it turns out that I’m not. Because I knew I was going to have a hard time getting myself to write a blog post today. Last year, I’d often go five days with no post. But that was when I was CEO of Brazen Careerist, and traveling every week, and also worrying that the company had no money.

Today I have a relatively calm life. The company is going great, and there is a new CEO, and my job is to write this blog, be a thought leader about the workplace, and talk to the press.  So I need to be posting more regularly.

I know that having a trick works for me, from days when I can’t get myself to go to the gym. Like, I tell myself I will go to the gym and just sit in the locker room and listen to my ipod and then go home. Invariably, if I convince myself to do that, I don’t actually stay in the locker room. I end up doing some sort of exercise.

So I thought of a trick for blogging. I told myself that I’d make a game of it. I asked my Brazen Careerist chat group (sign-up required) for a topic. I told them I’d write about the first three topics people suggested.

But here’s what happened: I didn’t like the topics. Well, some of them I liked a lot. Like, Karen Gaustad and Mara Lunaria both asked why we link to Facebook profiles from Brazen Careerist. It’s a good question, because I talk all the time about how Facebook is a network for personal –and often unprofessional — aspects of your life, and Brazen Careerist is for building your professional network. So I actually don’t know why we link to Facebook. I keep asking Ryan and Ryan and they say something which I will summarize like this: Wait. Hold it. I can’t even summarize what they say, because I can’t remember exactly, but I think it’s something like “You’re too old to understand” but I don’t want to write that.

Okay. So I asked a good question that generated good questions in return. But I don’t like that question. I try to spend my life not hiding from hard questions. You’d think it’d be the abortion stuff that flummoxes me. But I’m pretty clear on how I feel about that. Why to link to Facebook, though? That’s a tough one.

4) The question that has unintended consequences.

Melissa Mansfield asked me to write about how companies that are highly ethical and also highly profitable. She will think I didn’t write about this topic. But I did. Because we can’t control companies. We can only control ourselves. So I’m always more focused on how I can change the world personally than how I can try to require institutions to change the world.

The thing is, though, that ethical workplace behavior is based on asking good questions. They lead to honest conversations and meaningful connections and the world of good behavior is build on relationships like these.

Not that every good question leads to a great relationship. The world is not perfect, of course. Because sometimes you ask a question that reveals only that the person you’re asking is useless.

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