Here’s the deal with giving flowers. Women like receiving flowers. Men think flowers are stupid.
Men think: Flowers die, they don’t do anything when they are alive, they are expensive, and they are a cliché. Men know that women in general like flowers, but men also believe that women they know personally do not like flowers. [...]

People often tell me that I should write career advice for people with Asperger Syndrome. This is because I am surrounded by people who have Asperger’s, and I have it myself.  Please, do not tell me I don’t have it. First of all, it looks very different in men and women, and most of you [...]

I starting to think that the most effective preparation for a good career is religion.
I am writing this post on the eve of Yom Kippur. I am constantly trying to figure out how religion fits in my life. Sometimes I think it doesn’t fit. I mean, I’m a Jew dating a pig farmer. And I [...]

Be careful who you take career advice from. Knowing who to take advice from is a really good skill for any aspect of your life, but especially in the field of work, because work is changing very fast right now. A lot of advice that was good ten years ago is not good now. And [...]

The best way to get control of your career and stability in your life is to be great at what you do. Superstars are not out of work right now. Really. Even in finance. If you have an amazing track record in your field of work, you’ll have a job. And if you need to [...]

I receive about fifty career questions each week. The questions have a predictable diversity, but not my answers. My answers are almost always the same advice: Know yourself better.
Watch:
Problem: My boss is a jerk. How can I fix it?
Advice: Understand what you can do differently to make people act differently around you.
Problem: My coworker got [...]

This week's poll is about celebrities because I love peeking into their lives in order to see the world in new ways. I love learning so much that I think that’s even why I spent so much time with the farmer even though it was bad for a long time before I stopped dating him. [...]

I'd like to tell you that there are no bad questions. But you know what? That's not true. So here are the ways people ask me questions that drive me nuts:
1. You ask me a career question for your wife.
The first problem with you walking around in the world telling people you need help for [...]

The worst career advice I ever gave was to my brother's college roommate, Robert Buckley. He was one year out of college when he asked me if he should quit healthcare consulting to become an actor.
I said, No, that's the dumbest idea I ever heard.
He told me he thought he had talent, and then (like [...]

One of the most dangerous things you can do in your career is to think you are different from everyone else. The biggest validation of that idea comes in AA meetings – it is widely understood by this group that thinking you're different is just an excuse not to get help, an excuse to think [...]

I started using Twitter, after thinking about starting for at least six months. It's very scary to start something new and have no idea what I'm doing.
But I also know that all the excitement in my career has come from my willingness to try stuff that is scary—because I don't know if I will be [...]

I have been auditioning to host a reality show about work, and I'm supposed to fly out to Los Angeles for a test run in front of a camera. My friend Sharon, hair stylist to the LA jet set, told me that I have to get my teeth whitened.
I am a big fan of taking [...]

Do you ever search 43 Things? I love going through it to see what goals people have for themselves. I like seeing where my own goals and accomplishments fit in with everyone else's.
On 43 Things, 21 people want to learn to take criticism but 77,000 people want to get a promotion. You know what's wrong [...]

My son's I.Q. is in the top .05% of all preschoolers, but he attended preschool in a special education classroom. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism typified by a distinctly high I.Q. and a notable lack of emotional intelligence. Asperger's is thought to be genetic, and it is surging among kids in places [...]

The best questions are not necessarily those that get answers, but those that lead to sharper questions.
My friend Marci Alboher, who writes for the New York Times, often calls me to ask questions about blogging and personal branding. I usually give her strongly opinionated answers and add a little emphasis about how I know that I'm right.
Then [...]

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 [...]

Today's the big day that I announce my book. It's not out yet. Not until May 22. But today is the day I put the photo of the book cover on the blog and tell you that you should pre-order the book. Yes. Please do that.
But what I'm really going to do today is tell [...]

Take a look at my Yahoo! Finance column for this week: 239 people rated it an average of two stars out of five. Which is an improvement, because yesterday the average was one star. Also, there are 94 comments, which can be fairly represented by the one that I copy and paste here:
"I think this [...]

Giving advice about careers is easier than taking it. People are always calling me on this — spitting my advice back to me at my most vulnerable moments. Like when I was late delivering my column five weeks in a row, and my editor said, "Remember that time you wrote about how being late is [...]

If you ask most people if they like their jobs, they'll say yes. Alan Kreuger — scintillating economics professor at Princeton, whom I interviewed this morning — says that this is not because people have jobs they like, but because people have cognitive dissonance and are hard-programmed to like what they have.
On the positive side, [...]