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

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!)

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 your wife/girlfriend is why can she not ask for herself? I can only imagine that she does not see her problem the same way you do. And in that case you should butt out. Or, maybe she does not want to ask for help. And in that case you should butt out, too, because who are you to tell her she needs help when she doesn't want it and then go get it for her anyway?

Newsflash: The guy who asks career advice for his wife sounds way more needy and off-track than his wife does. Because the guy is being so disrespectful in such a public way and he doesn't even know it.

And hey, mister, how would you like it if your wife walked around telling people that you need career advice but won't get it yourself, so she's getting it for you?

2. You ask me a question when five people have given you an answer you don't like.
I have some bad news for you. Five people who agree on anything are probably right. Especially since it's likely that after three people gave you answers you didn't like, you probably started asking people who are maybe a little bit crazy so maybe they'd give you a different answer. And they still didn't.

So look, consider taking the advice when a small community accidentally comes together as synchronized advisors. You are lucky. These people all took the time to hear your problem and give you a thoughtful answer. Don't spurn them if you can help it – they will not want to give you an answer again.

Cheat sheet: If you are thinking that your problem is very unique and difficult, or that people everywhere do not understand you, then the problem is you. Because you don't want to face the reality that you are not special (none of us is, really) and the people around you are not idiots. (And if they are, who is the original idiot that aggregated the idiots?)

3. You ask me a question that requires more than two paragraphs.
Sometimes I get emails that are more than two pages long, attempting to explain a problem. I'm going to tell you something: All career problems can be described in under 100 words. If you are going over 100 words, you don't know your problem. If you are going over 1000 words, it's because your self-knowledge is really bad, so that is your problem.

Think about it. If your problem is that you don't know a good way to answer the phone when it rings, that is a very concise problem. If everyone in the office hates you and you can't figure out why (maybe you can't narrow it down to the phone) then that is still a concise problem.

If you have to explain to me all the characters of your office and why they suck and I have to infer that everyone hates you and that's your problem, then your problem is self-awareness. You lack it.

So try this: If you are writing your problem and you're on the fifth paragraph, try to edit. Try to get it to one paragraph. And then try to get it to one sentence. That's a good exercise in figuring out your own problems.

Being smart about your career is not so much about having good answers. It's having good questions. You don't need to have answers to everything. But you need to work hard at making your questions useful, for both you and your advisors.

I said, No, that's the dumbest idea I ever heard.

He told me he thought he had talent, and then (like I wasn't against the idea enough) he told me he was dating some girl he met in Vegas, and she is going to be an actress, and she said that he had talent.

I actually questioned how my brother could be such good friends with someone who was so stupid. I tried to be patient, but mostly I told Rob that everyone in LA has a girlfriend who thinks he has acting talent. I thought maybe his best career move might be to find a girlfriend who was impressed with his healthcare consulting talent.

But really, he did not think he had any future in healthcare consulting. So I became a largely useless advisor to him. And then my brother forwarded me a trailer to Lipstick Jungle and there was Rob: naked, with Kim Raver. And he looked so good. Who knew? And more importantly, who knew I could give such poor career advice?

I think the reason that I gave such poor advice is that I had such strong preconceived notions about the acting career. But I actually don't know anything about making it big as an actor. I only know that when I played professional beach volleyball in LA we were constantly surrounded by casting agents and entertainment industry types. And I learned that the competition to get anywhere in acting is so tough that you should buy lottery tickets instead.

It's ironic, though, because I'm a writer, where the odds are not much better. And both actors and writers generally ply their trade because they love it, not because they think the odds are great. If someone asks me if they should become a writer, I repeat the advice I received in graduate school: No. Try anything else first. Writing is too hard.

And I was thinking the same thing with acting: No. Big no. But I needed to adjust my advice. I needed to be able to see when I was looking at someone who could not feel fulfilled if they did not do this type of work.

So every week I watched Lipstick Jungle (I loved it, by the way—for the writing, of course) and I thought about how I could have given such misguided career advice. And I figured out that the hallmark of a bad advisor is to not understand where she is coming from, what preconceived notions she brings to the table.

I didn't think much more about this until I was in Menlo Park last week for the roundtable organized by Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh. They posed questions to the group of entrepreneurial types: What makes good advice? What makes bad advice?

The answers were interesting, and each shed more light on why I gave Rob such bad advice. Here are some ideas that came from the group:

1. A good advisor asks good questions. Mostly in order to understand the goals of the advisee. No advice is given in a vacuum. Understand that an advisor can probably give you great tips on how to get to your goals, but really, the hardest part of making any decision in life is understanding your goals in the first place.

So your advisor needs to be very attuned to your goals and where you are in your life. This is why the best advisors ask questions rather than make proclamations. Often a good advisor is more sounding board and less Magic-8 ball.

2. A good advisor is a good listener. Advice is so much about understanding the particular situation that if she is not listening most of the time, then you are probably receiving advice based on incorrect assumptions that actually apply to a different circumstance. But it's hard to listen when you are a subject matter expert.

In general, all situations sound the same when you give advice to the same types of people all the time. The trick for the advisor is to stop focusing on the similarities, which make her job easier, but to focus instead on the differences, which is more challenging—but makes for better advice.

3. Good advice is not fly-by-night. Advisors are best when they really know you, and they really know the arena where the issues live. So cultivate a relationship with someone who is a subject matter expert, and then he can give you ongoing advice that is relevant to your particular circumstances based on both what you are telling him, and on the relationship that provides a context for your questions.

Wondering how you are going to attract this kind of advisor? Be one yourself. Giving good advice is the same thing as giving a good kiss. You attract what you deserve. Not in a Secret sort of way, but in a way where if you are practicing good behavior then you will attract good behavior.

And, while I hesitate to give advice at the end of the piece about how advice should not be in a vacuum: You usually get in life what you expect to get. So expect good advice. And good kisses. And they will come.

Yet we jump through hoops to convince ourselves that we are different from everyone else and the experience of others does not apply to us. Daniel Gilbert found, for example, that most of us think we are worse jugglers than average, and most football players think they are better than average, but most people really are – surprise – just average. Gilbert has also shown that we are terrible at making decisions for ourselves, in part, because we think we're special.

If you stop thinking you are so special, then you can learn from watching others, you can take advice from people who have been there before, and you can make decisions based on tried and true methods.

So finally, here’s an example of this problem in action: a blogger gets on the cover of the New York Times magazine, Emily Gould. She talks about how her boyfriend hates that she blogs about him. Of course this hits close to home. But, it's old news. I've already spent 20 years only dating/marrying/then dating people who will put up with me chronicling their every move.

So here's another way for Emily to think: Instead of thinking that she's so special because she's blogging about her own life and everyone is knowing her through that, she could look at what has come before her. Women have been writing about their relationships forever, in transparent ways. It's what women write about. And sometimes, it destroys relationships. But for forever, some women have been absolutely driven to put their life in words. They can't stop. Emily is part of that history.

And so am I, so I know the history pretty well. Anne Frank did it, too – in the face of war. And Edith Wharton did it – risking the wrath of her high-end social circles. And Colette did it – with any guy who would put up with it, including her editor.

When I was a child, Anne Frank spoke to me not because she was documenting war, but because she understood that in some people, the drive to write down what is happening is stronger than anything else.

I told this to my divorce lawyer last week when he told me would not represent me if I didn't stop writing about my divorce. He told me that he can't represent me if I am undermining my case in my blog. I told him there is nothing worth saving more than my ability to document my life. I told him that somewhere, my husband understood this, because I published weekly documentation of our courtship – which focused on him never going down on me and me being pissed off–and we still got married. At that point, there is nothing left to hide. I told my lawyer it's how I run my life, and I don't know how else to do a life.

In the history of documenting one's life–I hate to be snippy–but Emily Gould is no great example. The stakes are not very high for her. And relative to what other women have gone through, the stakes are not high for me, either. After all, I married someone who had already signed up for this life. Heather Armstrong is maybe a good example of the stakes being very high, because her blog, Dooce, includes her daughter so often.

But the poster-child for a woman going through hell in order to document her life is the photographer, Sally Mann. When I bought her monograph, Immediate Family, I had no idea it was controversial. I only knew that I was mesmerized by how the photos of her children captured the pain of adolescence, the edgy gross innocence of childhood and the closeness of a family's bond: All at once. Every photo.

But stores wouldn't sell it. They called it pornography. And people accused Sally Mann of child abuse for making pornography from her kids.

In Sally Mann's eyes, she was just documenting her family life, and her love for her kids, and the fun of childhood. And with an open mind, you can see that in the photos. Wait. I'll link to some (probably not safe for work).

Herman Melville is another great example of the stakes being much higher than Emily, or me. Melville had many children, whom he did not really support. He found his family depressing, and he thought his writing was too important to be distracted with the task of family life.

The history of obsessive writers destroying lives around them is not new. The history of writers feeling an insanely huge need to tell something to the world at all costs is not new.

So back to careers. In the New York Times, Emily portrays her career as anomalous, eccentric, and so difficult to manage that she needs to quote magazine articles to her therapist in order to describe her life. But if you put Emily in historical context—which I would have expected the NYT magazine to do—there are a lot of people who have paved the way for her. She can learn from lots of people who came before blogging, how to manage one's career as a blogger.

And this is true for most of us.Very few of us ever have a totally unique career problem. Most problems come down to five or ten situations that happen all the time. I think we get clouded by the specifics of our own story, and that makes us unable to see why we are just like everyone else. Each person's details are different, but the problems we have repeat themselves over and over again—especially in careers. That's why a community of people helping each other with their careers works so well. That's why I love my blog.

So take time to figure out why you are the same, instead of focusing on why you're different. There is a community out there who can help you. This is true for everyone. Anyway, it's not that interesting to operate as if we are the only person like us. None of us should reinvent the wheel by ourselves. Ever. It's too lonely.