I have a disorder called prosopagnosia, more commonly called face blindness. It means that I have a hard time seeing faces.
It took me about a month to know what each of my babies looked like. I remember thinking how it's a miracle that the human race survived when it is so difficult to remember what [...]

Now that I do a lot of public speaking, I am flying a lot – two or three times a month. There are a lot of perks to travel, like expensive hotel rooms and a break from my kids. But my favorite perk is meeting sales guys.
Warning: here come generalizations with no data to back [...]

It is a cliché that everyone thinks they're a strategist. The reason everyone thinks they're a strategist is because they don't know what a strategist does.
Get a reality check. Odds are you are not a strategist. 
Strategy requires thinking conceptually and creating something from nothing. So, for the most part, if you need to see something [...]

Here is an open letter to all the parents, aunts and uncles who write to me asking for advice about the twentysomething  in their life who is an incorrigible underachiever:
Lighten up! No one should be labeled an underachiever in their twenties! The first thing you should ask yourself is whose standards are you using? This [...]

Most people who are overweight blame their job for their inability to eat right and get enough exercise. Too much work, too tired after work, too much travel. The list is endless. But losing weight is so important for you career that you should go so far as to cut back on your work-officially or [...]

One of the first major religious decisions that young, Jewish professionals make is whether or not to go into the office on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
Most Jewish holidays start at sundown, a safe time to leave the office. However, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are all-day affairs, and this year Rosh Hashannah starts tonight [...]

By A.J. Jacobs – For my last book, The Know-It-All,  I tried to fill in the huge gaps in my learning by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. I read from A to Z. Or more precisely, from a-ak (East Asian music) to Zywiec (a town in Poland)  – a total of 44 million words. Admittedly, [...]

By Ryan Healy – According to Monster.com, 60 percent of college graduates move home with mom and dad after graduation and the trend is on the rise. The statistic holds true with my friends from the class of 2006. More than half moved back to the suburbs to start adult life, much the [...]

When you are trying to figure out your next career move, the company match is more important than job match. This is because the people who are happiest at work are doing what they do best, every day.
You can be a janitor and use your strengths, and you can be an associate at one of [...]

It turns out that money actually can buy happiness, but not a lot of it. At some point, well under $100,000, the happiness value of a dollar starts to plummet, according to Richard Easterlin, economics professor at University of Southern California. This is because social interactions impact happiness more than money does.
But here's a new [...]

If you want to know how old you really are, look at the media you use rather than the generation you were born into.
Generational labels are important in the discussion of the changing workforce. For example, we need to understand who is pushing for change and who is criticizing change in order to understand [...]

A few months after I graduated from college, I got a job at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I thought it was the perfect job for me because I was very focused on playing professional beach volleyball, and I needed to earn money to get myself to Los Angeles, but I couldn't work 9-5 because then [...]

The biggest difference between the workplace today and the workplace twenty years ago is where the friction is. It used to be that the frontier of workplace change was feminism. Today it is time.
Women pushed for equal opportunity, equal pay, equal respect at home. Men pushed to hold their ground, hold their sense of self, [...]

There is room to be true to yourself within the framework of a career. Today we have so many options that when we are not being true to ourselves we cannot really blame the system. We make our own choices and create our own lives.
It's very hard to know what we want, though. So often our priorities get [...]

I am fascinated by self-esteem because it's such a huge differentiator among everyone – even among the smart and talented. And I don't think people can fake it. Maybe it is my own, overzealous self-esteem when it comes to my ability to read self-esteem, but I think people reveal their own levels no matter how [...]

I had a career coach. I got the coach the day after a meeting where I was the only woman and the only person under thirty. My boss said, “You need more polish. You need a career coach." I thought, “Great, my boss is going to pay to help me to fit in with the [...]

Emotional intelligence. This is how you will differentiate yourself at work in the new millennieum.
We can see the world shifting around us in response to the fact that tolerance for poor social skills is getting less and less. The need to fit in with a group on some level, is getting higher and higher, and the tendency [...]

In this age of transparency and authenticity it seems absurd to not tell you my real name. My real name is not Penelope Trunk. Well, in fact, it is Penelope Trunk. Sort of. At any rate, my name is definitely a lesson in personal branding.
My name started out Adrienne Roston. It's fun to write that [...]

One of my best friends, Sharon, is a hairdresser. She is not a normal hairdresser. She's a big-shot hairdresser in Los Angeles. And one of the most important moments in my financial life was when I moved from client to friend — I started saving $100 on a haircut and $150 on color because she [...]

When someone says, "So tell me about yourself," a lot of people stumble. When you craft your answer, you have 10 million hours of information to choose from. Many people actually hate getting this question because it's so hard to zero-in on an answer.
This is an honest question. Someone wants to know about you. You [...]