When I sent her this photo, she said: “What is this?”

I only wanted her opinion about the color of the shirt, so I thought it was okay that it was blurry. But the more I look at the picture, the more I think that it’s how I feel about myself right now.

I am not quite sure who I am, right now. And given the current career climate, this is actually how most people see themselves, too—blurry from constant movement, settled on the basics, but unclear on the specifics.

And then I read an article in Fast Company this month titled Generation Flux. The article is about how careers are constantly moving and our identity is therefore moving as well.

So I am focused on how to make myself more clear about what I look like. At least right now. And here are things I think we each need to do to pin down our moving-target, career-jumping selves.

1. Get a plan for post-35.
This is a great post by Matt Heusser, from Google, that outlines why you only have fifteen years to put a plan together.  By the time you’re 35 you have to get out of any career space that is for young people and settle into an older person job.

Want to know what young people jobs are? Making sales (as opposed to managing), writing code (as opposed to managing), working across three time zones. These are jobs that middle-aged people do not get. Mostly because no one would respect a person who has worked for 15 years and still has to take a job like this. These are not good jobs for having a life. These are jobs for working long, hard hours with the intention of laying the groundwork for a better career.

Sara Horowitz, writing in the Atlantic, suggests that the new jobs will be independent, short-term and maybe even coffee-shop based. Others, like Cathy Benko at Deloitte, suggest there will be a series of lateral moves that will somehow become respectable. Anya Kamenetz, writing in Fast Company, says this will look like continuous, back-to-back career change, so that job hopping begins to look tame and totally normal.

At any rate, you can’t get through the second part of your career doing the work you did in the first part. So there is not time to rest in a safe spot for your career.

The other reason you only get 15 years is that your salary tops out in your late 30s. (Actually, age 35 for women and 40 for men.) Statistically speaking, you are extremely unlikely to earn more than you are earning at that age.

2. Get good at setting boundaries.
In the old workplace you could take one job, on an established path, and move forward in a predictable way. The average job today lasts four years. (And other research shows that people who are staying a lot longer than four years are probably getting themselves into trouble.)

If you are changing jobs every four years, you are going to have to manage lots of close relationships with co-workers and bosses. This requires being very good at setting boundaries, which, in turn, requires good self-knowledge.

I have a bookshelf full of boundary-building books right now, and I’m blown away by how relevant they are to careers. (Examples: I Hate You Don't Leave Me and Stop Walking on Eggshells).

Most of our career problems have, on some level, a boundary component. For example, many people in their 20s know what they’d like to do but they cannot separate the dreams of their parents from their own, and so they make bad choices for themselves that they spend a decade undoing.

In other cases, career choices are clear and good, but a spouse has dreams that are incompatible with this choice. For example, the spouse wants a income, or more attentive child care, or a relocation that is not possible. In this case there would need to be a family talk about boundaries and how one person’s dreams cannot depend on impossible career feats by the other person.

The better we are at managing boundaries in our personal relationships, the better we’ll be at managing our career decisions. And as careers become more dynamic, this equation becomes more true.

3.   Get tons of coaching.
I have always been a huge fan of coaching. It’s not only that I have hired people for help with what to wear. In fact, I think one of my biggest strengths is to get coaching from a wide range of people.

As a result of realizing this personal strength, last year I started doing a lot more coaching for other people, and I started reading more about coaching as well. For example, all high performers get a lot of coaching. And the need for coaching does not wane as you get better and better at your job.

So many people told me that the coaching session I did with them changed their life that I decided I wanted to get that. I wanted a coaching session that changed my life. So I asked Christine Carter to do a coaching session with me. She wrote the book Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents. She coaches families on how to create systems that promote family  happiness. She helps them restructure schedules and priorities, which are exactly the things I’ve been having trouble with since I moved to the farm and started homeschooling.

We dealt with fundamental decisions like when I will do my work each day and how the family can be more predictable. And you know what? She changed my life. Because she took questions that are difficult and complicated for me and she was able to find good answers quickly. Which, by the way, is exactly what I am able to do when I coach people about career decisions.

A coach works on the same problem with hundreds of people, so the coach is great at seeing how to solve that one problem for you. For anything. I’ve written about coaching for mental imaging, coaching for more optimism, coaching for gait. Each of those coaches have blown me away by teaching me something totally new about myself and helping me solve problems related to that area.

So I can’t stress enough how much I recommend that you get coaching this year. You cannot rely on your company to teach you what you need to know to manage your career. Because first of all, no one knows that answer except you. But also, a company cannot make that kind of investment in employees when the average tenure is four years.

And one more thing about coaching: It's very hard to know what question to ask. Which may make you think that this is a reason to not get coaching. But in fact, learning to ask good questions is something you can get coached for as well.

After I realized that the most underrated skill is asking good questions, I realized that I am not very good at it. I don’t ask for help enough because I don’t know what question to ask. And also, I worry the question will be bad and then the person won’t want to help me again.

So I started forcing myself to ask for help. Like, I put myself on a schedule. And the result was not so much that I got good help (I did) but what I really got was good at asking questions. Because I thought so much about it.

Here are things I’ve been noticing about what makes a person good at asking questions:

1. Surround yourself with people who make you curious.
The first time we had a bonfire at the farm I was dating the farmer and he was winning over my boys with tree climbing and hot-dog roasting. I was concerned about fire safety, but I knew it was hopeless when I realized that the number-one rule I learned about building fires – put them out before you go to bed – does not apply on the farm. He just lets it burn out itself.

Here’s something I like about the farmer. He asks questions. When we were dating, and I had a fireplace in my house, he said he’d build a fire. But it turned out he had no idea how to make a small fire. You have to light kindling and then get the little sticks to catch, and then little logs, and the farmer lost interest after about three minutes.

I think this is what draws us to each other, though: We learn stuff we didn’t even know we needed to learn. It’s so hard to learn when you don’t know the right question to ask. Being around each other gives us the chance to learn stuff we’d never seek to learn. Like building fires.

It also gives us practice figuring out what question to ask.

 2. Learn rules for asking questions.
Each industry has rules. Each circle of friends has rules. I think a reason I love work so much is that it’s all about rules. And there is no industry more full of rules than the venture capital industry. It has to be because it’s a matching system between two wildly different types of people: crazy, rule-breaking risk-taking entrepreneurs, and risk-averse, by-the-book, right-out-of-Wharton venture capitalists.

But the VCs are most valuable to startup founders when the founders are learning from the VCs. So there’s a lot of rule teaching going on. One of my favorite recent examples of this is how to ask for time from a busy person. Mark Suster, who is a VC, warns that you should never ask a busy person to lunch, because it’s too big of a time commitment. He has great examples of terrible ways to ask for time and also good ways, like, “grab a quick coffee” which is not so clearly defined, but clearly short in duration.

3. Get your timing right.
When my step-mom was in and out of the hospital getting chemotherapy, I learned a lot about how to deal with doctors. When it comes to cancer, once you pick a doctor, most people advise that you stay with that doctor. And then get to know the doctor well. Because ongoing quality of life depends, in part, on being able to ask good question of that doctor – asking what is happening, how things are going, and what is likely to come next. These are difficult questions for most people because this is an area where the vocabulary is new, and everything feels like a biology test you need to study harder for.

The best advice I got for asking questions was to not worry about asking too many questions, and instead focus on asking them in a good way for the doctor—ask in the morning, when doctors make their rounds. Leave questions at the nurse’s station, and then the doctor can pick up the question when they are starting their day. If you make it easier to answer your questions, you will get more attentive responses.

4. Your questions get better with more information.
The best questions are ones that come after a bunch of questions. The first question is never the real question.

I saw this in action with my sons. When we visited the Baha'i Temple in Illinois.

The first question was: “Can we play tag?” And they stepped on every step and jumped every railing and then asked if there's an area for kids.

The next question was “Do Baha'i people celebrate Christmas or Chanukkah?”

By the end, my older son asked me, “Do you think that the B’hai people would mind that we're Jewish?”

I liked that I could see his questions getting sharper and sharper as he figured out what really matters to him about the visit to the temple.

I thought to myself that I need to be the type of person who asks a series of questions rather than just one. I need to trust that questions are more interesting than answers, and people will not get annoyed as long as each question reflects a little more understanding on my part.

5. Be true to your passion.
Asking good questions means risking that the answer is totally obvious. That’s the scary part of asking a question. Here are tips for asking good questions in life, and here are tips for asking good questions in interviews.

But here’s something I’ve learned. If you ask a question about something you are passionate about and totally engaged in, the question will be good. Case in point: there are no stupid questions when you are asking a doctor about cancer treatment for a close relative.

But there are a lot of stupid questions from people who use the act of asking a question as a substitute for passion and engagement. Other people cannot do the work for you to make you care. When you genuinely care about a topic and have done honest investigation in that vein, trust that your question will be engaging to other people. Passion is always interesting.

I can see why she wouldn't want to have to deal with me. But, if I am not a reliable reference then I'm probably also, in her eyes, not a reliable person for assessing whether the job that Melissa took is totally stupid for her to take. So maybe she is just ignoring my blog anyway. Or maybe she is printing out each post and putting it on she office wall and throwing darts at it.

The second-to-last day Melissa was here, we went berry picking.

The farm is full of little pockets of wild blackberries. And we set out to pick enough for me to make a pie.

We sort of stick together, but it's fun to search the sides of the hayfields til you find your own bush full of berries.

We each took our own bucket and, did you ever read that book Blueberries for Sal? In the book, the little kid eats more berries than she puts in her bucket. It's best to do that when you think no one's looking.

After a while, it starts to feel like you have picked everything. And you don't want to go back where someone else has picked, but as you walk toward that place where they have already picked, invariably, you find plenty that they missed.

If you approach a bush from the left, you end up missing the berries you'd find if you approached the bush from the right. And, really, the angles of approach are infinite. For example, my son specializes in the berries growing closer to the ground.

The same variety of approach exists for career coaching as well. I, for one, have given bad career advice (like, for example, to my brother's college roommate,) and most of the time that I've given bad career advice it's been because I have a perspective that just doesn't shift in that instance. For example, I have very little patience for people who won't leave a terrible career because they need to earn six-figures.

So–back to Melissa. I have told her before that I think she is a phenomenal photographer. I think she should earn a living doing that. Melissa has a problem that is really, really common for people with Asperger Syndrome. She is almost always the smartest person in the room, but she can't last in a job.

She is not alone. People think they would like to hire me, but really, I'm a nightmare. And really, at this point in my life, I don't think I would try to do life without an assistant. I'm just not good enough at the day-to-day life that non-Asperger's people find manageable. Like, going to the DMV, sitting through a long, loud dinner , or navigating an airport.

The issue here is executive function. People with Asperger's have terrible executive function. We cannot stay focused on the thing that is most important. We are easily distracted by what is most interesting. This is a low-level problem for everyone. But for someone with Asperger's it means forgetting to respond to someone who says, "Hi, how are you?" or, literally, burning down the house.

You won't believe what I am about to tell you. Melissa's new job is an executive assistant. I asked her, "What? How can someone with terrible executive function take a job with the word executive in it?"

"Shut up," she says. "You were a CEO. That's executive."

We have this fight all the time. I think she should work at Forever 21, which is her favorite store, and do photography on the side. Today, retail is a totally respectable career path, and the trend to do a day job while you get the real job up and running is so mainstream that Jon Acuff just published a book called Quitter: Closing the Gap Between Your Day Job and Your Dream Job.

Melissa does not want to work at Forever 21. She is making way more money at the job which I am not going to name because maybe if I don't name the company then Melissa won't be mad that I'm writing this post.

Yesterday, Melissa packed up her life. She is great at packing. She changes countries every year, so Wisconsin to Texas is nothing for her. It's not a move so much as a hop, skip, and jump. She wheels and deals frequent flier miles until she lines up her international miles to coincide with her local miles and her premier flier perks and soon she's flying six suitcases for free with a seat upgrade to boot.

She throws out fashion souvenirs of Milan and Hong Kong and Shanghai and other places where the clothes don't work on a farm, or in Austin, Texas.

As she moves her clothes out of the cupboard, I move my books back in.

I'm a grouch that Melissa is moving, but I am happy to have a place for my books. I lift up the old wooden door we used as a makeshift desk, and I forgot she raised the door to the right height by putting books underneath.

I find Picture This, by Molly Bang. It is one of my favorite books ever. Every designer in the world should read this book, and anyone who wants to give criticism to designers should read this book. In fact–Wait. I have an idea. Designers: pass this book out to everyone you have to work with, and tell them, "You cannot give me input about my design until you have read this book." This is a great strategy because smart people will read the book and understand that design is way too hard for them to be telling you they don't like the color blue. And dumb people mostly don't read books so most of them won't read the book and you will never have to talk to them.

Melissa is packing and I am unpacking and we are both sad. I will miss Melissa and anyway, I really think if the Farmer was going to cheat, he'd find someone to cheat with without my help. It's not like men are dependent on their wives supplying resources for cheating. (If they were though, wouldn't it be a great world?)

Melissa wants me to understand why she is leaving. I don't want to be overbearing. I know the kinds of parents who want you to do what they want you to do. I think half of my coaching business is giving people in their 20s confidence to choose a life that their parents think is totally stupid. I don't want to play the role of that limiting parental influence.

Then the phone rings, and I hear Melissa talking to her friend Missa. Melissa sounds like a college girl. She talks about things I don't care about like Facebook status updates, straightening hair, new stores in Austin. I realize that Melissa is a twentysomething who has adjusted to my family life in order to get stability. But now she needs to go back to her twentysomething life.

Of course I think the choices she is making are lame. Everyone thought the choices I made in my twenties were lame. I stuck with them, but I wish I had had more confidence doing that. I wish I had believed more in my ability to steer my own life.

So I hug Melissa. I don't like touching anyone besides the Farmer and my kids, so it's a big deal that I'm hugging Melissa. She knows that. I tell her, "You need to go be a 27 year old, right? That's what you're doing. I get it."

The next day, we try the berries again. It's absurd that we are doing it the day she is leaving. But I think it's normal to cope with a very sad goodbye by ignoring it. Besides, the berries are only ripe for a few days each summer and I don't want to miss them.

We go back to where we were the day before. We each go to places we didn't go yesterday, and I find myself watching everyone else find berries that the other people missed. I want to be the person who can see answers from many perspectives.

I want to help people by seeing past my own experience to a place where the number-one value is people making their own decisions—good or bad. I want to help my children do that, too. But I think the first step is for me to work on helping myself to have faith in my ability to make my own decisions.

So I built a career in tech. All men. And I started doing venture-backed startups. All men. And when I have been in departments that were all women, I either quit or switched to another department.

So I clicked over the BNET to investigate the situation and I stumbled on Kimberly Weisul’s post titled, Why Mentoring Helps Men More than Women. I read the post, mostly because I am always worried about not having the right mentors.

It turns out, I probably don’t have the right mentors, because women connect with people lower on the food chain than men do. I panic. I need to connect with business writers who are not writing work life stuff. No. Wait. I need to connect with Eric Schurenberg, who is editor-in-chief of BNET. I need to go out to lunch with him and make him love me, and then he’ll think of me first when he creates the power-writer’s group that lives on the home page of BNET and pops up in everyone’s browser with the urgency of a subscribe-now button on a porn site.

The thing is that Kimberly concludes, in her post, that women are getting ripped off. It kills me. I don’t want to be writing next to women who are whiners because then I sound like a whiner. So, to be clear, I am not whining about Kimberly, I am dissing her.

There is not a salary gap between women and men. There is a competition gap between women and men. Women choose collaborative, feel-good jobs, like writing in the how-can-we-all-get-along-better section of BNET and men choose the competitive, dog-eat-dog jobs like managing all the feel-good writers on BNET. That link is to Paul Sloan. My editor.

Will he even let me run this piece? I don’t know. You know what? I can’t stop writing about him. I have a little crush on him even though he won’t answer his phone when I call and he always returns my calls at 6pm central when he knows I won’t pick up the phone because I’m having dinner with my family.

Women: It is very bad to write stuff about dinner with family if you are trying to get ahead. Do not do this. People assume that if you have kids you will do less work. This may or may not be true – I mean, doing less work. But what is true is that you should not talk about family at work if you want to be in the all-boys departments.

However it is okay to talk about crushes at work because it is more of a single person thing to do. I mean, everyone has crushes, but only single people talk about it. So I think it makes me have a better chance of getting out of the girl ghetto at BNET if I tell you that Paul is a little shorter than I am, and not as good-looking as I am, but still, he is fun and cute.

This is an excerpt from the full post at BNET.

He wrote back. He was relentless, so I asked him to tell me a bit about himself. He wrote, among other things, “I’m the guy you want to date.”

It was such a direct response. And I like direct. Plus, he was going to be in Madison. That never happens.

Two days before the date, I checked him out on Facebook.

Then I wrote him an email. “You are way too young. I can’t go out with you.”

He wrote back, “You should know more than anyone else that online identities are deceiving. And anyway, I’m older than you think.”

That was a good response.

So we agreed to meet at a diner. For coffee. I walk in, and right away I know who he is: The guy with the backpack.

We sit down.

I lean across the table, and in a low voice I ask, “How old are you?”

He says, “I knew you’d ask that.” He says, “Twenty-five.”

I look around to see if people at the diner are staring at us.

He is surprisingly interesting. He’s semi-pro in an odd sport, and he has a business plan to create a quirky application for the iPhone. We talk for an hour.

Outside he says, “I’d like to see you again.”

I think that’s hilarious. I mean, I can’t believe a 25-year-old wants to see me once, let alone again. And I can’t imagine how things will unfold. So I say, “Okay.”

On the next date he knows the chef of the restaurant, so I think he does not totally have to pay for dinner, which is good, because he doesn’t have the kind of job that could pay for this kind of dinner.

We talk about social media. He tells me about conferences he goes to in warm places with hipsters who live and breathe technology. Topics like iPhone applications for crowdsourcing get me excited. I am a sucker for someone who can teach me something.

After dinner he wants to go to a bar. We walk to one he can’t find, and I am freezing and complaining and he slips his arm around my waist.

I think it was warmer with his arm there. Or maybe my body started sweating from the stress of walking through Madison with a twenty-five-year-old.

The bar is loud. I lean over, close to his cheek, and say, “I have to leave now. My ex-husband is with the kids and I told him he could leave at 10:30.”

The twenty-five-year-old looks at me.

I go on. “Maybe we need a plan or something. I mean, I need to either drive you back or drive you to my house.”

He says, “Let’s go to your house.”

In the car I tell him it’s crazy to take him to my house.

I look over at him. He looks back.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. My house.”

In the car I imagine him at my house, and he will have to take a cab home, and it seems like a pain. And the potential for awkwardness is huge.

At a stop-sign on a dark road, I say, “I’m turning around and taking you back.”

He takes his seatbelt off, leans over and kisses me. It is a very good kiss, slow and soft, and a little bit wet. And it seems very hard to do that when the whole rest of the evening is riding on one kiss. I reward him by heading toward my house.

My Ex is at the house when we walk in. The guys I work with are the same age as the twenty-five-year-old, and they’ve been to my house late at night many times, so my Ex assumes I work with the twenty-five-year-old and he’s chatty.

When the Ex leaves I take the twenty-five-year-old into the kitchen. I tell him, “It’s my son’s half-birthday tomorrow. He needs cupcakes for school. I have one more batch to make.” Then I start dripping gooey batter into superhero foils.

The twenty-five-year-old is patient. And anxious. I sit on the counter and watch him watch the cupcakes, and then when he’s within reach, I scoop him over to me with my legs.

We cannot kiss too much because there’s no extra batter if this batch burns. I am focused on cooking.

Then we go upstairs.

When he pins me against the wall, our age gap dissipates.

Fast-forward: I have seen him again. Though not a lot.

I’ve seen him enough to get flashbacks to when I dated guys a lot farther along in their career than I was. It was exciting. They knew a lot more about sex than I did, but you equalize on that pretty fast. And then, what’s left in the inequality department is career stuff. And I could always figure out how to get stuff from them.

It was exciting to be the young girl who the older guys want to help, and date. At the same time. I was never sure how much I wanted either offering, but I knew that together, they were intoxicating. I want to see what that’s like from the other side.

I am nervous with the twenty-five-year-old because of that. He asked me why I’m not following him on Twitter and I told him I forgot. But I didn’t forget. I read his feed all the time. But I didn’t want to look like a stalker, because so many times in my life, the older guys felt like stalkers to me.

The twenty-five-year-old asks for a lot of advice with work. He is, after all, working in my field. Almost everyone he has needed to get in touch with is someone I’ve had lunch with. I’m also very hesitant to ask friends to help a guy I’m having sex with. In the past, when I have seen executives do this with marketing girls (I have seen this a lot, actually) I have been embarrassed for them.

So I have not helped him that much, honestly. And in bed one morning I say, “How come you haven’t asked me to get you a job?

He says, “The thought’s occurred to me. I figured it would eventually come up.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t want to help him get a job. I want this to not be about all the stuff I could do for him. But all the older men I dated when I was his age were people who helped me with my career; they it did gracefully, and I was so thankful.

I started writing career advice because in my career I found myself constantly in situations that made the old workplace rules seem irrelevant. I realized the workplace had changed, and I wrote advice as I lived through it so the next wave of workers would have a relevant guide.

Today I have an amazing network of men and women who help me guide my career. But periodically I find my career lands me in a spot I have not been before. Right now I feel clumsy. Like the people who write long emails to me, thinking I have not heard their career problem before.

When I started writing career advice, the questions I answered were is job hopping bad? Is being lost bad? Today I find myself wondering: When women get power at work, do they use it like men do?

]]> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/03/09/when-women-get-power-at-work-do-they-use-it-like-men-do/feed/ 114 http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/03/03/get-your-next-mentor-by-being-slightly-annoying/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/03/03/get-your-next-mentor-by-being-slightly-annoying/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:36:55 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/?p=2220 Brian Wiegand is a very low-profile guy who has sold three companies, most recently to Microsoft. He is big enough that TechCrunch writes about him as a good bet for anyone betting. But the bane of Brian’s existence is that his exits have all been for under $50 million.

This is enough for him to have a private jet and be King of Madison (Wisconsin), but not enough for him to get a lot of respect in Silicon Valley. A quote from my advisory board member who lives in Silicon Valley: “For big VCs, $50 million is a rounding error.”

So Brian is not looking for people to mentor or boards to sit on because he is consumed with running his fourth company, Alice.com, which will compete with Wal-Mart and Target.

I do not tell Brian that I will have a hard time ever missing a trip to Target to shop at Alice because Target has such great clothes that are so cheap they are almost free.

Well, actually I did tell him that. And I told him a bunch of other stuff, because I decided that I need him as a mentor. Eventually, I got him to agree to be on the board of my company. Here’s the process I took to convince him to help me. And these are good steps for anytime you have someone you’d like to ask to be your mentor:

1. Don’t be discouraged by lack of response.

The way Brian operates is that he doesn’t talk to anyone in Madison and I had to send him fifteen emails before he’d have lunch with me.

Later her told me that he gets so many invitations for lunch that he doesn’t even respond until someone sends him two emails. “They have to show a little tenacity,” he says.

2. Find the person’s weakness, so you know where you can help him.

When we had lunch I opened by regaling him with stories of my dating life, to make him feel a little unstable and vulnerable. And then I launched into how he needs to help more entrepreneurs and he is helping no one in Madison and it’s not enough to be great at building companies. “You need to be great at building communities of people building companies,” I told him.

He looked at me with an incredulous stare.

“It’s more fun that way,” I said. “We’re doing this for fun, right? I mean, you do not need more money. So there is no rational reason for you to be working insane hours for another company. And I do need a lot more money. And it would be much safer for me to go to a Fortune 500 company and draw a big salary than take a risk on a startup. So we’re both doing this for fun, right? And it’s more fun if you help more people.”

Brian pointed out to me his companies made several people in Madison millionaires.

Immediately I wish I had met him earlier. Like, when I was scooping ice cream at 31 Flavors and I could have been getting him coffee in exchange for stock options.

We come to an agreement that he will help me because he wants to be a good and giving person and I promise him that I will be fun.

3. Be real. No one wants to mentor someone who is perfect.

I then proceeded to be totally not fun by running out of money, being moody and difficult, and totally pissing off my lead investor who is also one of his investors. To the point where Brian told me that he couldn’t be associated with my company. Because we were in too much trouble.

He would not agree that he said that. I am summarizing. But this is really the crux of the whole problem: He is the paragon of diplomacy and I am not. And I need to be. Because we live in a small town. And all angel funding is local.

But while I was melting down, he was paying attention. For the first time, I didn’t have to chase him – he was genuinely interested in how I was getting out of my mess.

4. Remember that good advice is harder to find than money.

Speaking of melting down over money, you’d think it would be totally annoying to me that he’s not putting money into my company. Because money is local. And he is local. And he is money.

We talk about this over lunch. And he is paying for lunch. That’s a good start.

It’s our third lunch. I pace myself for topics to cover. I try not to think about the fact that he gets a little antsy at the end. Like, he just sort of gets up when he’s done. Other people kind of wind down the conversation. Or do something like fold their napkin. He just stands up. Sometimes I’m mid-thought.

I am one of the most socially awkward people I hang out with, so it takes a lot for me to be making remarks about someone else’s social retardation. But the truth is, though, that entrepreneurs are often described as quirky, and Brian’s weirdness makes me trust his advice more.

Brian gives great advice about the nuts and bolts of running a company. After all, once you’ve done three, you have to have sort of a system for going the distance, right? He is great for keeping me focused. I am always thinking about the future – where is human resources going? Where is generation Y going? Where is blogging going? I am asking the huge questions instead of “Did anyone call Deloitte to find out what they are posting on Brazen Careerist next month?”

Brian says something like, “What are you doing to make sure that everyone in the company is focused on the same vision?”

5. In the end, you want the mentor to care about you as a person.

I knew things were going well when we were talking about how to make payroll and Brian said, “Wait. One more thing. You have to get rid of that farmer.” (And I’m thinking, “Brian, when you are walking through the parking lot for your private jet, why don’t you look around for someone better for me to date?”)

The great thing about Brian is that he’s exited enough startups that he can afford to be light. For isolated moments. Most entrepreneurs are anxious during the early phase of a startup. Obsessively focused. Tweaking models often. Praying something sticks.

Brian is steady though – he knows he’ll figure it out. When it comes to building a company, Brian has the perfect combination of calm and excitement. And in the end, I think he might be my mentor for being lighthearted and calm. Or faking it.

You should try to get a mentor like Brian. But since you probably won’t get one right away – after all, you need at least fifteen emails – you should subscribe to his Twitter feed. Which I love. It’s a peek into how a startup unfolds in an entrepreneur’s brain.

In the meantime, I’m thinking about the day of service. How Obama wants the country to come together in the name of service. And I heard MTV declare, last night, that the next generation is Generation S. For service.

So I’m thinking about service, and how all our efforts to help people, really, are aimed to make them more indepdent. And that’s what work is about: Taking care of ourselves, mentally and financially.

When you mentor someone in the work arena, you are providing that service. So often we pick the superstar to mentor. Or the up-and-comer. Or the one who can help us with our own networking. But you can use your work skills to help someone pull themselves out of a bad spot. A really bad spot. Work skills are very powerful. And so is mentoring.

So when you think about service, don’t’ think of it as separate from work. Obama stands for all the things that we do, on this blog: Personal responsibility, transparency, honesty, change even when it’s difficult. This inagural day is the beginning of meshing the public life and worklife so that we are living the values we believe in, wherever we go.

Think about how you can focus on service at work. Each of us has a lot of tools at our disposal. If we take the time to use them.

She did a great job. She memorized speeches that she trotted out in good moments. And she had such nerve! Most of us would be too shy to flagrantly disregard the question, but she knew that was her job. She knew her job was to give set up answers and fit them in the best she could, and she did that. She delivered her lines very well. She played to the camera. She was friendly, and charming, and eloquent as long as you didn't mind that she talked about whatever she wanted.

The thing is that most of politics is not about giving the right answer. It's about giving any answer the right way. The world is not bashing Kennedy for beating Nixon in the classic debate where Nixon wore all the wrong stuff and the wrong makeup and could have said anything and he still would have lost. No. No one is complaining about Kennedy's dependence on style in that debate. And we didn't generally bash Reagan for being a great orator even though we thought he was probably losing his mind even before he got to office. He was still a great orator and could deliver his messages in a mesmerizing way.

So give Sarah some credit. She did a great job. Sure she's probably not ready to move into the White House. But that doesn't mean she didn't do a great job. She can only do her best. And she did. And you have to respect someone who takes a huge risk and does a good job. Look, if you think she's unqualified, don't vote for McCain, because he's the bozo who selected her. But since she's there, learn something from her. Take advantage of a fun, capable woman who is rising up to the occasion. She's ignoring the taunts (even I have thrown some) and she has enough of a sense of self that she's plowing forward.

But really, it's hard to believe that she will be on the winning ticket. It's hard to believe that anyone could choose McCain after he has shown such poor judgment. But Palin will land on her feet. She'll get some TV commentator job, or some interior secretary job, and she'll learn the ropes, and she'll succeed.

If you are wondering why your own career is stalled, consider that it's because you don't have mentors like her. She is scrappy and she knows how to manage her image. It's not small peanuts, and it's hard to find a woman who is as good at it as she is and public about how she's doing it. Take advantage of the learning opportunity.

Jim teaches creative writing at Santa Monica College, (and his faculty page reveals so much about him). He lets anyone join the class, but you have to read your writing out loud. This weeds out almost everyone. Because first you have to write something. And then you have to let everyone rip it to shreds. In front of you.

But wait. It gets worse. Because Jim edits. He slashes most of the writing he reads. And then, if you're new to the class, you assume he's wrong, so you read out loud what he has cut and you hear it fall flat as soon as it leaves your lips.

Try it. Read something you wrote out loud to a friend. If it's bad, you'll feel right away that boredom has overcome the room. If you have even one flat sentence, you hear it when you read it out loud.

The first time Jim heard me read my writing, he said it was the best he’d heard anyone read in his class in a long time. Then he slashed everything I wrote for the next six years. Sometimes I'd hand in three pages of writing and he'd leave only five sentences.

But this is the thing about those five sentences: they were great. And here's why I became a dedicated follower: Because I felt like he understood my compulsive need to write my life. And I understood his goal, which was to have interesting sentences. So when he cut full paragraphs that I thought were important because my sentences were boring, I felt grateful that he saved me from banality.

And I channel him every day that I write a post. I think to myself: Is this sentence one that Jim would cut?

I am not so arrogant as to think that Jim would even bother to read any of my sentences today. But I do know that the lessons I learned from Jim are the essence of good blogging. You can’t be boring on a blog. People will stop reading.

So if you want to know how to write interesting paragraphs, read the authors who are famous for their ability to stun sentence by sentence. Try Jim Krusoe. Try literary types who sacrifice plot for prose: Ken Sparling, Martin Amis, Ann Beattie. (And, when you are feeling ambitious, Marcel Proust.)

I tell people all the time to pick a mentor rather than picking a job. Jim Krusoe is my first experience with this. He didn't teach at a college I had ever heard of. And he didn't even write books that I understood. But he is legendary for churning out well-respected writers, year after year.

Find a mentor with this reputation, and then work hard to make sure you each understand each others' goals. What you'll get out of this relationship is a new way to be more of your true self. And this is the best kind of job we can ask for.

We don't have to find our true calling from a mentor. In fact, what I found from Jim was confidence to think that I should keep writing and see what happens. A good mentor opens doors, in our minds, and you can find that at any job, any company, anyplace your connection with someone is strong.

Eland gave me a seven-step plan for finding mentors (yes, you need a small group of them). And since then, I've written about other aspects as well – mostly as a way to keep myself focused on the task because it's so important and so difficult.

Getting mentors is difficult because it's just like dating: You have to invest a lot of time in a lot of people to find the ones who will really change your life. Over the years, I've had lots of different types of mentors. The eccentric CEO who showed me that success does not preclude weirdness, and my secret mentor who popped up unexpectedly. But the one I am feeling best about right now is a guy in Palo Alto, Chris Yeh. He turned out to be a real gem, so I'm going to tell you how it happened.

1. Recognize someone who thinks in ways that complement you.
I was interviewing a guy for my column in the Boston Globe, and I asked him, as I often do, if he had any friends who would be interesting to talk with. He gave me Chris Yeh's name. I was immediately struck by Chris's ability to talk on a wide range of topics that I care about a lot. And as a Harvard Business school grad living in Palo Alto, he brings a fresh perspective to my own.

2. Do favors. Again and again.
I immediately thought to myself, what can I do for Chris? I asked him what he is aiming to do next, what his plans are for the future, where he's headed. He said he wanted to write a book about fatherhood, so I put him in contact with my agent.

3. Stay in touch continually.
I did not actually do this myself. Chris did. He would call at random times, just to say hi. I know very few people in business who do this. Most people email or IM, or, if they really want to talk on the phone, we schedule a call. Chris was different—I was not really his friend, and we were in different time zones, so he made the effort to figure out when I was most likely to be able to talk. Now I see that this as a super smart approach I should have initiated myself to build the relationship.

4. Ask for a formal relationship.
When I started my company, I asked Chris to be an advisor. He said yes, and then he told me the best way to use advisors, based on his experience at his own companies: Call at times you know are easy for them to talk, keep them up to date, and ask them what you should be asking them about.

The first time I asked Chris, "What should I be asking you now?" I felt silly. After all, it's a line he fed me. But now I use it with him all the time, and it's actually an invitation for him to tell me what he thinks I'm missing, which is information I wouldn't get if I directed the conversation the whole time.

5. Invest time.
I had talked with Chris for hours and hours without meeting him in person. When I interviewed Edward Hallowell about his book, Crazy Busy, he described his research about face-to-face contact—how meeting for a just a few minutes changes the nature of a relationship. So I decided to meet Chris in person. On a trip to Los Angeles, I decided to fly to Palo Alto especially to meet him.

The trip took a lot of time, but I discovered that, true to what Hallowell says, meeting in person makes the relationship feel qualitatively deeper by virtue of the fact that you get that whole other layer of nonverbal communication.

Addendum: I called Chris this morning to make certain it was okay to use his name in this post. And he said "Sure, and tell people if they can't find a mentor, they can ask me questions—and you can link to Ask the Harvard MBA." So there's the link. And see, I told you—you have to keep doing favors.