Here is why I think that:

Recently, Gretchen Rubin sent me her new book, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.

Let me tell you now, I am not a huge fan of the book. She is writing about her life, but her life is not all that interesting. The thing about reading stories about people's lives is that we like conflict. That’s what every novel is, it’s what every memoir is. If there’s no conflict then there is no path to follow in a story line.

Gretchen’s conflict in this story about her is how can she be happier. Gretchen reports that she is already happy. She has an investment banker husband, two seemingly just fine daughters, a nice apartment in Manhattan, former-model good looks, etc. She basically (as she says in her forward to the book) needs something to talk about at cocktail parties. So she is writing a book so she can talk about it.

What I realized, though, is that while Gretchen's conflict doesn’t make for great reading, it is good to surround yourself with people like Gretchen: People who are basically happy and want to talk about it. Because happiness is contagious. So I kept reading the book. And, you know what? I didn't love the book, but I love that it made me think a lot more about the stuff she wrote about.

(Not that New York City is the place to be happy, by the way. It’s not. It’s not because people in NYC value being interesting over being happy  – which probably presents a special problem to Gretchen at cocktail parties, but I won’t go into that. Also, it’s clear that happy people attract happy people because Live Science reports that people in New York City are more unhappy than the rest of the country.)

Tiziana Casciaro, professor at University of Toronto, does really interesting research about social skills. And one thing she told me is that it's very hard to gauge your own progress in the social skills department, but if you are making a conscious effort to improve your social skills then it is a safe bet that they are, on some level, improving.

And there is research that if you focus on something every day, by either writing it down every day, or at least committing to prioritizing it each day – you are much more likely to achieve that.

I think the same is true about happiness. If you pay attention to the research, whether or not you consciously implement it, the mere act of accessing the information is commitment enough to instigate change in your happiness level. (You can type "happiness" into the search box on the sidebar of my blog to find the results of my own obsessive collection of research on this topic.)

The other thing that should make you want to talk about happiness and read about happiness is that to think that you can affect your own happiness is a fundamentally positive step. Optimism about the future is a keystone of happiness. And people who think they have control over the outcome of their life — that they are the locus of control — are happier.

If you say all the happiness research is tiresome and circular – which I have said before – it might be true, but thinking that way actually does not improve your happiness. (Although it does probably make your more interesting, because conflict and cynicism are interesting.)

Sonja Lyubomirsky, psychology professor at the University of California-Riverside, wrote a great book on all the tiny little things you can do to make yourself happier on a daily basis. The book is The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. It's an inspiring book because the things we can do are so small, like, give someone a surprise compliment.  But you don't need to do that today. And neither do I. Because I think, for today, getting to the end of this post counts.

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So time passing means that even though I get a ton of comments, I do not usually run my life based on the comments section. But in the last week I have been particularly lost, and particularly inundated by timely comments. On top of that, I know it seems like I can tell anyone anything, but I’m not actually like that. I don’t understand the normal give and take of conversation.

I don’t have friends, which is typical for someone with Asperger’s Syndrome. I mean, I have friends, but it’s not normal. Like, I know some people call their friends a lot. My two best friends are not in Madison, and I call them to say hi once every three months. At most. The second best friend doesn’t even know she’s my second-best friends. She’d probably be horrified to hear it. I’m probably her twentieth best friend.

(I am the type who has a significant other and they are my friend. I am a person who should be married. I like being married because I want a friend and that’s really the only way I know how to do it.)

So I didn’t tell anyone I was getting married. I wrote it on my blog. And friends who follow the blog wrote to me to congratulate me.

Ryan Paugh—who is my harbinger for good social skills and also my universal example of someone who I like and is nice to me but I don’t know if he is a friend or not—called me the day I blogged about getting married. He said congratulations. He told me I should have told people at work. He told me it’s weird that he heard about my engagement from the two people in his life who follow my blog closest:  his girlfriend and his mom.

I told him I didn’t know how to tell people. I feel too weird telling people stuff about me because I think, why would they care? It’s so different on a blog. If you don’t care, you can just type in a new URL. But if I’m standing in front of you and you don’t care, I won’t even know. Like many people with Asperger's, I don’t know how to tell.

So I have told only one person in the non-blog world that the farmer called off the engagement. Which means I’m definitely short on feedback. But, one of my strengths is asking questions and getting feedback.

So, I bridged the feedback gap by running my life based on the comments section. Here’s how I did it

1. I paid close attention to why some people completely missed the boat.
There were a few comments that were very harsh, against me, and they were that way because the people didn’t have the whole story. I considered deleting some of those comments. Then I wrote a response instead. Then I deleted the comments and the response. I never delete comments like that. But in this case, the process helped me to understand that I did not have the story straight in my head. Here’s the missing part (from my missing response to the missing comments):

The farmer's lawyer recommended that the farmer threaten to leave the farm in order to get an irrevocable inheritance. I wanted to stay at the farm he has now, and not leave.

And, I suggested that things would be easier if the farmer worked for cash, as he had been doing, and not worry about the land. And the farmer and the lawyer said no. It had to be the land.

So the farmer told me that I need to explain to his parents why I will have no security if they can revoke his inheritance at any time. Because with that arrangement, my behavior is always being tested. The farmer told me that if they still didn't want to give him an irrevocable inheritance, then he'd leave with me.

I told them that, but, in the conversation it became clear, as the farmer distanced himself from me, that he wouldn't leave. But I had already given the ultimatium.

2. I read the comments from farm families and gave them extra weight.
Some of those comments explained to me why farmers never leave their land. I didn’t know this, because the farmer was telling me he could leave. I see why he was hoping he could leave, and I see now why he can’t.

There were lots of people who told me that the family was insane and that the guy should always choose me before the farm but I decided that if you want to live on a farm, you have to live by those values, so I should go with what the farm family comments told me.

3. I gave special weight to people who said things I hadn’t thought of.
Especially when I could tell that I was acting out of fear. People wrote that I was assuming the worst, which is true. And I don’t want to be that kind of person. And people wrote that I’ve always been a risk taker, so I should take a risk.

This seemed true. I felt like I had been acting out of fear. And I didn’t want that.

So I told the farmer that I’d move to the farm under whatever circumstances he wanted.

But, as you can imagine, it was too late. He didn’t want to talk about it.

4. I paid attention to the comments about systems.
This comment, in particular, made me think about how people in relationships feed off each other. You want it to be that each person makes the other better. The farmer and I had that. But we had the other way, too.

I got scared and gave him ultimatums. He got scared and dumped me. And then we both got more scared and did the cycle again. Until, in the end, everything was based in fear.

So this is what I learned in the comments section: I need to not be so fearful. I think there are a lot of ways to do this. There are many ways to understand fear.

But that’s not what I’m writing about here. What I’m writing about is how to take advice, and how to know what advice is good advice.

If you’re lucky, you get tons of advice in your life. And if you’re normal, only a small percentage of it is good. The key is to be able to tune out what’s not right and to act on what is right, and take responsibility for fixing the roadblocks to doing better next time.

You know this. We all know this. But, like all things that are hard to do, if one more person is reminding you to do it, you’re more likely to get it done.

And P.S. Thank you for all the great comments!

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The answer is not always intuitive. For example, you'd think that if Bill Gates wants to give you career advice, you should take it, right? I mean, the guy’s had a pretty decent career. The problem is that if he doesn’t care about your career, he’s going to give you generic advice.

Here are five other counter-intuitive principles I have used to figure out who to listen to when it comes to my own career:

Listen to people who hate you. People ask me all the time how I put up with the level of criticism this blog draws. The interesting thing about taking advice from people who don't like me is that sometimes, they'll say things that other people wouldn't say because it would hurt me. I rely on my gut in terms of whose criticism comes from caring and understanding and whose criticism comes from an obsessive need to take me down, but after I figure that out, I still pay attention to my critics.

Stop thinking your issues are especially difficult. The most important piece of self-knowledge is that our problems are not unique. If you had problems no one else has, then no one will understand you enough to help you. But the truth is that it’s pretty easy to see what someone else should be doing  if you have distance from a problem.  So don’t be a snob about who to take advice from. You don’t need a “career expert." You don’t have the world’s most sophisticated problems. If you are articulate about framing your problem, most of your friends can give articulate, useful guidance for solving the problem.

Less experience often means better advice. When it comes to finding a mentor, the most effective mentors are 3-5 years ahead of you in the workplace. Those are the people who have the best memory of what it was like to be where you are. In today's workplace this is especially true. The rules are changing so quickly, that many times someone who has a lot more experience than you do will also be out of touch with what the workplace is like today. I find that this is a big problem when people rely on their parents for advice.

Be wary of people whose lives look perfect. Happiness researchers have known for a long time that if you ask people directly if they are happy in their career, most of the time they’ll lie. This makes sense becuase if someone has invested tons of time in getting to where they are, it’s a really tough thing to say they’re unhappy; then they’d have to take action to change. So you’re often better off just watching people. Many people hide their lives – they want you to think things are going perfectly, and they’re always making great decisions, so they don’t tell you the parts that are a mess. But sometimes, you come across people who are willing to show you the messy parts, and you can learn the most from these people. This is why I like reading about celebrities. They can’t hide as much as non-celebrities, so I can learn more about what works and what doesn’t.

Stick with people who give you bad advice. If you're getting advice from someone who has never steered you wrong, then you're not asking this person enough questions. After a  while, someone who has given you a lot of advice will falter. Because no one is perfect, and no one can do as well at running your life as you can. So if you find someone who is giving good advice, push harder, until you get to their limit. Everyone gives bad advice sometimes, even me.

In some respects, bad advice might be better than good advice. Because what you really want is advice that makes you think in new ways about possibilities for yourself.  So when it comes to taking advice, you still have to have your inner compass. You can’t blame anyone else for where you end up. But, in a way, that’s good news. Because if you are responsible for where you are, if you don’t like it, you can get yourself to a new spot. This means that you should gather lots of advice, but be aware that sometimes, you need to ignore it. After all, what is the fun of life if we can’t make our own mistakes?

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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. The women they know are the exception to the rule.

I think it’s safe to say that mostly women are reading this post. Women are reading to figure out how to get the men in their lives to send flowers.

Here’s what it’s going to take: Bottom line impact. Yes, the guys want to get laid, but dinner seems better: it's like money well spent to them – you still get the sex, but you also get good food. What do you get with flowers? This is how men think, for the most part.

So, here’s what you get:

1. Flowers make the giver happy. The act of giving flowers elicits a real smile (as opposed to a fake, oh-that-was-nice smile) more often than other gifts of similar cost, according to research from Jeannette Haviliand-Jones, psychologist at Rutgers University.  And men are conditioned to react very positively to a real smile.

2. People think you are smarter if you’re a guy who gives flowers. That’s right. Send the flowers to your significant others’ workplace. Science says that people will perceive you as having higher emotional intelligence than your peers. Next step: Start milking your significant other's network of contacts since they are already impressed with you.

3. Your will be a better manager. Men give flowers at work, too. Not every bouquet means I love you. Some bouquets mean, “Get the project done on time or we’re screwed.” Give flowers during crunch time because flowers and plants at the workplace increase productivity. This seems like a good time to link to the post about when I got flowers from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. They definitely made me more productive.

Nancy Etcoff, evolutionary psychologist at Harvard, (who spouted radical views of female beauty at the Ted conference) concurs that flower make people happier. She found that if you see a vase of flowers in the morning, you have more spunk all day and less stress and anxiety at work. So don't just send flowers to your girlfriend and your co-workers. Send flowers to yourself.

Hat tip: About Flowers

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So, anyway, the reason I’m good at giving career advice is because I had to learn things systematically, which helps me break it down for everyone else.

For example, I had to learn that a candy dish on someone’s desk means “I like to talk with people.” Other people read this cue instinctively. It makes for a good blog post but an annoying co-worker if I don’t teach myself stuff quickly.

I don’t really do career coaching. I don’t have patience. But often career coaches send people with Asperger’s to me, because mostly, these people are extremely difficult to coach.

They are difficult to coach because the biggest problem is that non-verbal cues that are obvious to everyone else are totally lost on people with Asperger’s. For example, you can tell when you are boring someone, but someone with Asperger’s cannot—we just keep talking.

Here is a link about how important it is to be well liked. I write about this need all the time. It’s obvious to people who are well liked, and impossible to understand if you are someone who is not well liked. That’s precisely why you’re not well liked. And this is the problem with Asperger’s.

Note that the person who sent me this link is Sarah Kunst, (event manager at guestofaguest.com). The biggest difference between men with Asperger’s and women is that women get help from other women, and men don’t. So women with Asperger’s are generally more high-functioning than men.

Sarah is a great example of a helper. I met her through my blog. Then I met her in NYC. She recognized me as someone who has trouble knowing what to wear, and what to do. So she gave me tips. Unsolicited, really. First makeup, then no cap sleeves, then a whole wardrobe. Men don’t get this kind of help unless it’s from a spouse who is desperate to keep the marriage together.

Note to parents: the most painful part of being an adult with Asperger’s is not the lack of relationships. Really. I have a lack and I want to care, but I don’t. And most people with Asperger’s will tell you that the painful part of having Asperger’s is not being able to work successfully.

So, this is an introduction post to this week’s series: How to succeed at work with Asperger Syndrome. Stay tuned tomorrow for the next installment.

(And, hat tip to Virginia, another friend who helps me navigate the world, and emails me good links!)

Comment on: This week's series: How to deal with Asperger Syndrome at work

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 can’t figure out what to do with my kids on Yom Kippur, so I’m sending them to school. I never, once in eighteen years, went to school on Yom Kippur. So I know it’s going to feel crappy. I hope my family is not reading this.

Well, of course they are not, because they are in synagogue today.

I wish I could make my religion problems go away. I wish I could not care about religion because I’m an intellectual. Or I wish I could not care about religion because I am fine doing it however I do it.

One thing that nags at me is that I know for sure is that religion is great preparation for being able to get what you want out of your work life. And, if you read this blog regularly, you know that I think the purpose of work is to get you what you want out of your whole life, not just the work part.

So what I’m thinking, while I’m being a bad Jew on Yom Kippur, is that all career questions are really: “What is my purpose in life?” It’s very hard to understand what our career problems are, because we never really understand what we are doing here, in our life.

Wondering if you should relocate is really “What’s most important to you in life?” And wondering if you should change careers is really “What is my telos?” And where do you learn to find answers to these extremely difficult questions? I think from religion.

All of adult life is about facing terrible choices.

Why do people tell you you can do anything? You can’t. I mean, you can. But it’s harder to decide what you’re not doing. We make enormous sacrifices everytime we want to get anything: You get no alone time when you have a newborn. You get no more sex partners if you get married. You do not get to live in a small city for some careers. You don’t get to live in a big city for some marriages. Adult life is often about making horrible choices that feel like blood letting.

Where else do you hear about this except in religion? Adam and Eve face this problem and that’s what the history of humankind is built on. That’s the narrative of religion. And it’s more helpful than the narrative that you can have everything. Because you can’t. And you need some preparation for that.

The most important thing to do at work is good deeds.

So many people tell me that Gen Y is difficult to manage. Gen Y wants constant feedback, top-tier mentoring, and they want someone to help them build the right skills for where they want to go.

So what Gen Y really wants is people to care about other people at work.

What are you doing at work that is more important than helping people? Sure, you need to earn a paycheck, but, people don't get promoted for doing their job. People get promoted for doing good deeds, which cynics call office politics. But the truth is that if you are well-liked at work it is because you care about people and connect with people and look for ways to help them.

People get promoted for office politics, and office politics is about doing good deeds, and I know you know that the people who are talking, week after week, day after day, about the importance of doing good deeds are the religious people.

Good work is about good rhythms.

We need rhythm in life to successfully reach our goals. Whatever they are. We need to have some things we do that are simply not a decision: Make school lunches for the kids. Say no to fried food. And, when you’re really rocking, going to the gym. No decision: You have it on your schedule, at the same time each day, and you do it. Because it makes your life better.

And then sometimes, you stop everything, and you shake things up, and then you see the world differently. Like, this is why you need to take an extra long lunch, or a short vacation.

You know what is great training for establishing these rhythms in life? Religion. As a Jew, I can tell you that morning prayers, and evening prayers, and Shabbat, give order to my days and weeks. And interruptions to that order, Rosh Hashannah, or Yom Kippur, for example, shake things up for me. I am used to this sort of rhythm. I’ve been doing it for a long time. (Religious zealots don't get giddy: I do this in my own, customized way. I’m the bad Jew of my family.)

Personal responsibility is the most important trait of a successful career.

In order to succeed you do not need more luck. We each have the same amount of luck. It’s how you use your luck that differentiates you. Because everyone faces adversity, and the people who are the most resilient to adversity are the one’s who succeed. Makes sense, right? Everyone succeeds when things are going great.

So if the differentiator is resilience, the people who are the most resilient are the optimists. The optimists can face adversity and turn luck into a ladder to get past adversity. Do you want to know how optimistic you are? Here are some ways to test yourself.  But the big difference between pessimists and optimists is explanatory styles — pessimists blame external factors for circumstances, optimists think circumstances are within their control.

People who think their lives are within their control can overcome obstacles more effectively. And this is personal responsibility. Religion teaches us to take responsibility for being good, and honest, and rectifying things we have done wrong. Religion teaches personal responsibility which could explain why religious people are more optimistic than less religious people.

(A plea for civility in the comments section.)

It's ironic that I'm looking for a conversation about religion on a day when religious Jews won't even read this post. But there is a wide range of religious beliefs represented among the readers of this blog, and I don't think these observations are religion-specific. Also, for the atheists who might want to eat me alive in the comments section: Instead of saying you don't need religion to get taught these values, which of course is true, why not think about, instead, how interesting it is that the teachings of religion seem to be exactly what we need to face our most common and most difficult career issues?

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Here are three examples of topics your parents talk about all the time in their careers, but these topics will not be a part of new millennium careers. Watch out for these three terms — they probably come with outdated advice.

1. Career change
When Baby Boomers change careers, they stand on mountaintops. They announce that career change is a new trend, and they are doing it, of course, to save the world. The Baby Boomer specialty is saving the world by screaming from mountaintops, and then borrowing some more money to support that habit.

The other thing about Baby Boomers and career change is that they didn’t really do it before now. I mean, they did, but it was cataclysmic and often seen as reckless. For example, it’s what men did in their 40s after a midlife crises. Or what people did when they got to middle management and realized they were sub-par at their chosen career. (Note: It’s very easy to delude yourself that you’re competent until you get to your mid-30s. Around then, the less competent end up competing with people in their late 20s and losing.)

Gen Y will change careers at least five times. And, if they’re smart, the job hopping they do – which happens every 18 months in their 20s – will span a wide range of jobs. Which means that the idea of career change is outdated. People do it all the time. But they don’t call it career change, they call it finding a job.

The best way to find a job is to hone your skills, update your ideas, and adjust yourself as the workplace changes. Which means that you are not likely to have a single career for more than a few years. Or, more likely, it becomes semantic: is this a change or a shift? And really, who cares? Just keep your skills up, know what you like and what you’re good at, and stay employable. All the time. Not just the year you want to scream from mountaintops.

2. Networking
Do you know who is using social media? Gen X. The average Twitter user is in their 30s. The median age of LinkedIn is 40. The majority of people who are joining Facebook right now are over 35. This is because Gen X wants to meet new people online and reconnect with all the friends they lost along the way. Gen X is using social media to network.

Gen Y doesn’t need to. They never lost their connections because they’ve been online since they were ten. They do not need to meet more people online to expand their network because they are native networkers – they have had the tools and the predisposition to use them since before Gen X even knew what Facebook was.

So while Gen X is busy using Twitter to let people know what they are up to and promote the hell out of whatever they are doing, Gen Y is using Twitter for tweetups – meetups set up via Twitter. Which is a way of making genuine friends offline.

Even though Baby Boomers have been telling their kids forever to network. Networking is a dirty word to Gen Y. (Think about it: A Boomer says, "I'm going to a networking event." A Gen-Yer says, "I'm going to a party.") To young people, networking is sort of like job hunting: Both are for people who don’t have a grip, because if you’re smart, networking and job hunting are like breathing. You do it all the time, so you don’t need to talk about it. It only comes up if you stop and want to start again.

3. Midlife crisis
It’s not that you won’t have crises. But they’ll be earlier. The midlife crisis is a result of people getting on a path that someone else paved before them. If you see that you have a limited range of choices and you have to make one, then you don’t need to know very much about yourself in order to move forward. That’s what Baby Boomers did – they chose a path. Even the women chose a path that men laid out before them. The women fought to be able to take those paths, too.

So when the Boomers hit their 40s, they realized that the paths they chose from were all wrong, and to find a good path, they would actually need to know who they are. The crisis point is that it’s pretty hard to focus on yourself when you have kids, a mortgage and a marriage that is probably faltering because what marriage doesn’t need a lot of attention after ten years? There is not a lot of space for you to be retooling your idea of yourself. That’s the crisis. You need time and space that you don’t have.

Now, though, people take that time and space in their 20s. Gen X did it instinctively, and weathered belittling from Baby Boomers with labels like slackers. So Gen X is not having midlife crises. We had our crises in our 20s. And Gen Y is doing the same thing, but with more optimism (they always have that) and more support (their parents would do anything for them.)

Today the crisis happens earlier. The people at risk of having a crises are those who do not give themselves a chance to explore and falter in their 20s. Beware of the lives that look too perfect in their 20s. Those are the people who will be a mess in their 30s. And it will be a quarterlife crisis.

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Here are five steps to follow:

1. Aim to be great at something that matters in the world.
The process of being great is long and hard. It requires you to try a lot of stuff to figure out the intersection of your gifts and what the world will pay for.

It’s hard to be great at something you have to stop doing. But that’s the reality you face if you are going to be a star performer. It’s about self-discipline. When I was in graduate school, my writing professor was reviewing my writing, and he announced to the class, “She writes the best sex scenes I have ever read. Week after week she surprises me with her wry, funny, salacious approach.”

I had to look up the word salacious to make sure it was good.

Then I had to stop writing about sex. Because it was clear to me that being great at writing literary sex is too narrow. The greatness is so small it doesn’t matter. Greatness needs context that has value.

2. Expect that being great will entail many levels of disappointment.
So I got a job in a marketing department in a Fortune 100 company where we spent lots of time talking about whether HTML accommodates a proper em dash.

I felt sad, for sure, that I had given up the process of novelizing my sex life. But at that point, I had also given up some other stuff that I was really good at but could not achieve greatness: Beach volleyball, for example. I was good enough to have games against the US Olympic team. But I was never going to be good enough to save myself from getting my butt kicked.

Since then, I have tried a lot of stuff that I’m good at, but not great. I wrote a book. It got great reviews, but you know what? I’m not going to write a New York Times bestseller. I don’t have the patience for the long format or the long-term investment in promoting a book. (Warning to the uninitiated: It takes, literally, a year of preparation to promote a book properly.)

3. Try starting and stopping; we feel desperate to do what we're great at.
I think what makes me great is something at the intersection of blogging and entrepreneurship. Both are time-consuming and most people fail at both, and because of that, I have tried to stop doing both. I can’t stop.

But I still have to figure out: At this intersection of blogging and entrepreneurship, where am I special? Where am I a star? I am always searching and trying new things.

4. When you know what's special about you, refuse work outside of that.
Some things fail. Like the polls on my sidebar. I wish it were working. Because I think that part of what makes me great is that I love hearing what other people think about the topics I’m thinking about. But the poll strikes me as disingenuous. The choices are limiting so I don’t really find out what people are thinking. And then I feel like a fake running a poll. And I am certain that whatever I am great at will include authenticity of some kind. So the poll is a distraction from me figuring out how to be great. I need to get rid of that poll.

Another thing I’ve done is public speaking. I would say that I’m in the top 10% of all speakers. This is not scientific. It’s my instinct. I get a lot of feedback. Including my fee. And my fee is high and my feedback tells me that I’m special. This doesn’t mean that I am perfect, but it means that the greatness I already have in the field of public speaking, and the synergy it has with other things I’m great at, like, blogging (ideas) and entrepreneurship (sales) means that I should keep working on it. I need to speak slower. I need to stop using the F word. But working on that is a good investment for me. (Look. Here's a speech I gave at Cornell University.)

5. Quit quickly if you won't be great. You don’t have time for mediocrity.
I thought that because I’m great at speaking and great at ideas, I’d be great at radio. So I agreed to do a radio show with Webmaster Radio. But here’s something I didn’t realize about radio: It’s actually about social skills. You need to be a great conversationalist, and you need to be able to read what someone will do next in conversation.

You know why I write so much about social skills on this blog? Because mine are so sub-par and I have to work so hard at learning how to make myself less awkward socially. So radio is never going to be my strength.

And here’s another reason I know: because people are, at their core, honest, caring, and supportive. And people will tell you, effusively, if you have exceptional talent at something. Because it’s fun to see great talent, and fun to be a part of watching it bloom. And people do not say that with me and radio. They say they like the show, but I know what it is like when people think I have huge talent. So I am not doing my radio show anymore. Because maybe I’m good, but I won’t be great. And I don’t have time in my life to not be great.

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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 promoted instead of me but she does not work.

Advice: Understand why you are not as likable as your coworker and make yourself more likable.

Problem: I’ve been out of the workforce for three years and I want to reenter. What's the best way?

Advice: Understand the unique things you can offer your network and an employer, then craft a resume that shows those things.

Do you see the pattern? Self-knowledge is what helps you solve your problems. Sometimes we can get it on our own. But if your problem persists, and you can’t solve it, go to therapy. Therapy speeds up the process of gaining self-knowledge.

I can tell you that in my own experience, people who have been to therapy are more interesting than those who haven't. (Which is the genesis of today’s poll – I have a hunch that many of you have been to therapy.)

I will admit that I am probably biased about therapy. I have been going since I was five. My parents knew I was weird but didn’t know what to do about it, so they took me to a therapist, and we sat at his desk, because play therapy had not been invented, and I wondered how he could have had such a boring job, and then he told my parents I didn't need therapy.

But they kept sending me. Sometimes it worked: like when i was throwing up five times a day, on purpose, and I was in the mental ward with a great psychologist. And sometimes it didn't work, like when I was depressed in college and my therapist made a pass at me, in his office, while I was paying him, and I couldn't tell him off because he had prescribed me what was then an experimental dose of Prozac and I was hallucinating and I needed him to fix it.

Sometimes you don't know if it works. Like when I went to marriage counseling with my not-now-husband. That counts as therapy even though you go together and usually there is not someone else in the room to distract you. Counseling worked because it forced us to look at what we would need to change to save the marriage, and my husband said forget it. He didn’t want that change. So therapy helped us face the inevitable, faster. That's what I mean by speeding things up.

Of course, in business, you don't always want to work with those interesting, in-therapy people. My favorite people to do business with are actually the types who would never go to therapy unless their wives dragged them (a common reason for men to be in therapy, by the way).

But in NYC and LA, going to therapy is something to brag about. It's like going to the gym. You are telling everyone, “Look! I take care of myself.” Really, going to a therapist serves like a good personal ad: “Look! I understand how to be with myself and other people.”

But now that I live in Wisconsin I realize that most of the world thinks therapy is only for people who are messed up.

Understanding why there is widespread misunderstanding about the usefulness of therapy is easy, though.

Just think: in general, the people who do well in therapy are very interested in understanding themselves and interesting in changing themselves to more effectively meet their goals. Then it makes sense: people in big cities are generally optimizers wanting things to be better and better and not generally content. People in smaller cities are generally content with what’s in front of them.

So look at your weaknesses and ask yourself how much they bother you. If you have not been able to overcome them (and you want to), then see a therapist.

Remember those men I love to do business with—the steady, strong performer types? They’ve always had coaching. So if you don't want therapy but you don’t know where your weaknesses are to begin with, see a coach. But know that the people who cannot implement a coach’s recommendations should see a therapist next.

Of course, maybe not everyone needs therapy. Maybe lots of people would prefer a more relaxed pace of self-discovery. In this vein, I’ll leave you with a great poem by Hal Sirowitz, who writes about therapy:

Taking a Slow Train

You shouldn't keep telling your girlfriend,

my therapist said, that she needs to be

in therapy. You might think that you're

trying to help her, but she sees it

as an insult. Not everyone needs therapy.

Just like not everyone likes to take planes,

Some people prefer to take their time

& travel by train. And she may not want

to get rid of her anger right away. It

seems like she's getting too much enjoyment

out of it by directing it at you.

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If you don't read about celebrities, you're missing a big learning moment. Of course, you're missing a learning moment by not dating a farmer, too. But some things are more time-consuming than others. And I have to say that flipping through People has relatively high payoff. Here are some reasons I do it:

1. Use celebrity messes to gauge how you're doing in your own failures.
One of my (many) past therapists told me that you can't really tell how well you're doing until something bad happens. Most of us manage ourselves fine when everything is going well. We discover our level of resilience only when things go poorly (download movies).

But how do you learn about this when most people hide themselves when things are bad? Most people hide and most people don't talk about what's truly sucking in their life, so we don't really see how their resilience is tested until their problems are so over the top that they're uncontrollably leaking into all aspects of life.

The best place to see people coping with the dark, dirty side of sunshine and roses is People magazine (or your favorite stand-in, like the Enquirer or, on an especially smutty week, New York magazine). This is where people can't hide their problems because they have made their lives public property to further their careers. We benefit because we see what people do to stay resilient.

Sure, you cannot compare yourself to a celebrity when they are dressing for the Oscars and you're going to a party, too. But you can compare when they are getting dumped by their lying boyfriend and you are in love with a liar as well.

2. Dress yourself like a celebrity by picking one to mimic.
When I wrote about Sarah Palin spending lots of money on clothes and Michelle Obama knowing how to work J Crew, there was a lot of hoop-la in the comments section about how you need to learn how to dress right for your body.

If you live in NYC or LA, it's not that hard—most women there are good at dressing themselves. Looking good is super important because there’s no shortage of competition. Not so true in the Midwest. (I would know—I'm there right now. ) Just as you get more happy being around happy people, you dress better being around good dressers.

People magazine is a way to compensate for a lack of role models in your town. Look for someone who has the same body type as you and start watching what they wear. It'll save you a lot of time and a lot of mistakes.

3. Know the rules to follow by noting the rules celebrities ignore.
The smaller our world, the more constrained we are by social norms. Sometimes that's good because being part of a community is important. But often it's mentally constraining. I like reading the perspectives of celebrities because they are exposed to a wide variety of things that I am not. So they have fresh perspectives on topics I am not as smart about.

Celebrities use a more diverse arsenal of tools than most of us do to manage our own brands, like marrying someone a lot older to look like a more serious actor. And celebrities feel less of a need to adhere to rules that do not help them to be their true selves, like, don't have six kids in four years or you'll go crazy. I like watching people make their own rules for themselves—not necessarily the choices I would make. But I like seeing what happens.

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