1. Face the problem and make it a priority.
I used to think anger management problem is a thing for men who are in prison for setting their wives on fire. Now I see it’s a problem for people who think they will get fired for being unpleasant. Or for people who think their kids will grow up and hate them for being emotionally unpredictable.

I am both those people.

2. Focus on your trigger points.
The time I most consistently lose my temper is trying to get the kids out of the house in the morning. So I told myself to not lose my temper.

That didn’t work.

So I have been waking up at 5:30 because I need to give myself two hours to be completely organized and calm so that I can get the kids and myself out the door for school and work at 7:30 without screaming at the kids for not eating fast enough because I changed my clothes for work three times and got behind and forgot to make lunches.

I thought of having the nanny come in the morning to help me. But I hate feeling like I’m married to the nanny, and I hate feeling like I can’t do normal parenting things on my own. The mornings with the kids seem theoretically intimate, and making school lunches seems like a rite of passage for moms with school-aged kids. I want all that.

3. Use deep breathing to regulate stress.
I have been doing Ashtanga yoga for ten years. I thought I was amazing at yoga, but now I see that the point of yoga, calming, centering, whatever, is lost on someone who is focusing on the routine of  fifty push-ups and five headstands. Now the breathing resonates with me, when I do it at 5:30 am as a desperate attempt to keep myself calm long enough to get to work.

3. Have a regular sleep schedule to improve your ability to self-regulate.
I pack the school lunches the night before. And I pick out my clothes the night before. The guys I work with think I don’t ever change my clothes. This is sometimes true. Especially when I’m depressed. But a lot of times I change my clothes but all my clothes look the same so I don’t even get credit for having thought about it the night before.

To get up at 5:30 am with a good night’s sleep I have to go to bed at 9:30pm which means I have to get the kids to bed by 8pm so I can have an hour to do lunches and clothes and washing my face, which, if you are my age, takes ten minutes because of all the cream stuff I use.

I do not explain this when a co-worker asks why I don’t have twenty minutes to fix home page copy at 8:30 pm.

4. Accept that every day includes unpredictability, and that’s okay.
So it’s a regular day where I am insanely regimented in a desperate effort to not be angry but at 7am I realize that I forgot to pack to go to the farmer’s house. I also realize that it’s freezing outside, and I didn’t put the car in the garage and it’s going to take ten minutes of warming up the car so I can scrape the ice.

Then my seven-year-old can’t find socks without holes in them.

I change my clothes so I can scrape the ice and I yell from my bedroom that he should look in his brother’s drawer for socks.

He yells back up that he wants me to sew the socks so that we are not wasting. “It’s recycling,” he yells.

5. Understand the true source of your frustration.
Then the boys have a fist-fight about who is wearing whose socks. I do not catch them until there’s a cheek scrape which upsets me because now my four-year-old will go to school looking like he lives in a boxing ring.

I have prepared myself for a moment like this: I identify that I am not upset with my sons but upset with what the world thinks of me as a parent. I tell myself I am good at self-regulation and I do not take this frustration out on my children.

I say, “Put on nice socks and let’s have breakfast.” I want to tell you I used a calm voice, but I worry I used a psycho, calm-before-the-storm voice.

6. Understand the impact food has on your moods.
I make waffles. I watch the kids eat squishy, warm, covered-in-syrup waffles. I watch them wash down the drippy syrup with marsh-mallowed hot chocolate. I am convinced that when I eat sugar and bread it makes me crazy–that I just want more and then cannot think of anything else.  (There is such interesting research on this. Click here: A study about how civilization is based on the opiate effect of grains on humans.) It takes every bit of self-discipline in my body not to steal scraps of waffle from the four-year-old’s plate. I need to remember to not give him so much. I need him to feel more protective of his portion.

7. Use solutions-based language in tense conversations.
I want so much to be remembered as a dream mom that I put their mittens and coats over the heater so they are warm after breakfast.

The kids don't notice warmness because they are punching each other, furtively, like I’m not going to see them if it’s under their jackets.

As we walk out the door, my seven-year-old starts crying: the snow pants in his backpack are wrong.

I tell him those are to keep at school. I tell him I am streamlining our morning by keeping snow pants at school so we don’t have to bring them back and forth.

He does not like his other pair. He is crying. I decide I am going to take a firm line because really, it’s school that makes him nervous and he finds something to cry about every morning and I have to put a stop to this.

I tell him I already made a decision about the pants. I tell him I am the mom and I already made a decision. This is good. Kids feel secure when they have boundaries and authority.

He screams.

I pound the refrigerator with my fist.

I scream, “Shut the fuck up with the crying.”

I scream, “If you don’t quit crying every fucking single morning I’m never taking you to school again.”

That’s how it is. Nearly 24 hours of preparation to get through a morning without me yelling, and still, I break thirty rules of anger management in thirty seconds.

My four-year-old says, “Mommy, you’re hurting me.” And he covers his ears.

8. Slow down a tough situation so you make good decisions.
I take a time-out for myself in the living room. I say a prayer to the god of anger, if there is one: please let me always pound the refrigerator and not my kids.

I take them to school. I kiss them too much when I say goodbye. I tell them I love them like my life depends on it, while other moms, who clearly do not worry about yelling and maybe don’t even worry about waffles, casually do drop-off and drive off to the gym.

Then I go to work, and everyone is laughing and joking about Pee Wee Herman’s new show, and I yell, “Arrrggh! Can everyone please shut up for twenty minutes so I can finish my post? I can’t think with all the banter.”

Ryan Paugh tells me that it’s not that I can’t work with talking. I work with talking all the time. He says, “It’s self-loathing. Take some responsibility.”

I want to tell him to fuck off. But I need a quiet place to write this post, so I go to his office, and sit on the floor, and I hope he doesn’t talk to me, because it’s 8:30 am and already I am not having a good anger management day.

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The absurdity of the workplace being set up for extroverts is that 57% percent of the world are introverts, according to Laurie Helgoe, a psychologist and the author of the book Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life is Your Hidden Strength.

A lot of people tell me that my posts about how to approach social situations if you have Asperger Syndrome are helpful to people who are introverts. That might be true, in that both types of people need to limit their exposure to social situations. But the difference is that people with Asperger’s are disabled socially. People who are introverts could be great in social situations.

So you can’t judge yourself by whether or not you are socially competent. Rather, if you have the choice to be in a social situation or be alone, which would you choose more often? An introvert has more energy for doing life if he or she gets time alone, to recharge. An extrovert gets recharged from being around people. (Here’s a test to take if you’re not sure what you are.)

I am not an introvert. (I’m an ENTJ.) But I have sensory integration dysfunction, which gives me a similar feeling to introverts when they are overwhelmed with outside input. So unlike most ENTJs, I have a soft spot for introverts. And I am realizing that introversion is an important thing to have in a workplace – the trick is having introverts that understand why they’re so valuable.

Here are five ways to leverage the advantages of introversion:

1. Work in the world of ideas.
Introverts generally love to talk about ideas, according to Helgoe. She says that in conversation, introverts are stronger if you talk about “what are you thinking?” instead of “what are you doing?” And at work, you are stronger if you are helping people with ideas rather than sticking to a routine pattern of work.

2. Give ten minutes and then go.
Make a  connection, really contribute to the conversation, and then ten minutes is enough. Also, Helgoe says extroverts often have anxiety that they cannot get access to the introverts in their life – because they are always leaving to be alone. Introverts can alleviate this problem by being fully attentive for a short time and then leaving.

3. Have confidence in your self-knowledge.
Do you know the personality type that has the longest Wikipedia page? INTJ. Because the combination of being an introvert and being idea-driven makes one very interested in learning about oneself. INTJs are extreme cases, but all introverts have this combination to some extent, and the self-knowledge will help you to put yourself in situations where you’ll have the most positive impact. For example, Helgoe has a great chapter on how to get out of going to a party – a key skill for an introvert, who does better in very small groups.  But the bottom line is that you have to say that you’d rather be alone, which, Helgoe points out, “requires a real grounding in who you are."

4. Teach other people to interact with you.
A lot of the conflict Ryan Healy and I used to have is that I had no idea how to communicate with an introvert. The biggest difference is that I think out loud, so I never stop talking to think. Ryan thinks and then talks. But if I never shut up, he can’t actually think long enough to have a response. He did a bunch of research about communication styles and he taught me this difference between us. It helped me a lot to make space so that we could have a productive conversation.  (Here’s a book that can help you teach people how to approach introversion, and here's a summary of the book.)

5. Take control of your work.
One of the most popular professions for introverts is being a writer. What this means is that there is a lot of information written about what work is well-suited for an introvert.  Here is a list of ways to make an office that will help introverts excel.

And, I’m going to end by telling you to check out the book I recommend more than any other book in the world: Do What You Are by Paul Tieger. This book does not provide a single list of jobs suitable to introverts because there are so many different types of introverts. But this book can tell you what sort of introvert you are (for example, an artist or an activist?) and what sort of work you will thrive in.

As for you extroverts, stop assuming everyone is like you, and start tailoring conversation to introverts when it's appropriate. Once I understood the different types of personalities, I started doing much better at work.

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I have written before that for me, the biggest problem at work stems from my own sensory integration dysfunction – something that typically tags along with an Asperger's diagnosis. But for someone with Asperger's, it's not enough to deal with sensory integration dysfunction; in order to succeed at the workplace, you need some guidelines for bridging the gap between other peoples' social skills and your own.

So, based on my own experience, here are some concrete rules for doing better at work if you have Asperger’s, and maybe if you don’t.

1. Spend limited amounts of time with people.
One of the things that is alarming to non-Asperger’s people is how few friends and relationships people with Asperger’s have. But I have never heard anyone with Asperger’s lament this. (Temple Grandin is a good example.) It’s not something we feel a loss about. We only need a small amount of closeness in our life. What I do hear Asperger’s people sad about all the time is a lack of employment opportunity.

The way to improve this is to spend less time with people. We can be normal in small spurts. We can look charming and quirky in small doses but in large doses, it’s overwhelming. So go out to dinner, but then go home. Go to the company picnic, but just talk with people for a little bit. Then leave.

At work you do not need to spend tons of time with people. You can be the weird, smart one. As long as you’re not too weird. Get along with people for a little. Then go back to your cube.

2. Don’t tell your boss.
People don’t care about your random, personal crap. I know, that’s crazy to say on this blog. But I’m entertaining or useful, and when I’m at my best, I’m both.  Also, your boss won’t know what to do. She can’t read 400 pages on Asperger’s.

Instead, ask your boss questions about social situations. For example, at Brazen Careerist, we just closed a small round of funding. And my boss, our new CEO, sent a thank you to the investors. I emailed him to find out: Should I send a thank you as well? And he said yes. So I did.

When you ask specific questions about social situations, your boss will appreciate that you know you don’t know.  And your boss will think you’re coachable. That helps when your boss sees you being a social moron. The biggest problem with people who have poor social skills is that they don’t know what they’re missing, so they are not coachable. You will differentiate yourself from this crowd when you ask for help.

Ryan Paugh has great social skills. So I ask him a lot of questions, and I watch him. When Ryan Healy’s parents came to visit, I knew I needed to talk with them, because I was the CEO. I know that's a social rule. But I absolutely completely could not figure out what to say. I listened to Ryan Paugh go first. He said, “What do you have planned for the weekend?”

That was a great line. I wouldn’t have thought of it. But I know for next time.

People who are typical will think this is an easy conversation to have. They’ve had it before, in another form. People with Asperger’s cannot generalize social rules. We have to learn the thing to say in every single situation.

3. Be great at what you do, and a little odd.
I write obsessively about how important it is to to be a star. It is actually more important for people with Asperger’s. This is the only way to stay employable. You will always be difficult to deal with. You need to make it worth everyone’s time.

Often, people who are really likable don’t have to be good at what they do. People just love being around them. And it’s fair, because someone who everyone likes actually does make the team more productive.

Many people who work with me know that I’m weird. The first thing Ryan and Ryan said when they got to Madison was that I am totally eccentric. They put up with it. They stayed because I have built such a good career for myself. They wanted to work with me because of that, so they excuse the poor social skills.

By the time you get to the mid-point in your career, it’s clear that the people who stand out as great at what they do are also weird, and they are thinking in odd ways. It’s what makes them stand out. So the more successful you are in your career, the more okay it is, and the more expected it should be, for you to be odd.

4. Do office politics by being totally direct.
There is office politics in every office. Because office politics is about how people get along. If you have Asperger’s, there is not a good way for you to know all the nuances—we don’t understand mean, vindictive, passive aggressive, these are all way too complicated. So we don’t do them. This should make people like us, if we do it right. Unfortunately, I've noticed that much of how I act comes off as mean, even if this is not my intention.

So you need to really look at peoples’ faces. And if you get a bad reaction when you say something, even if you think it’s not a bad thing to say, you need to stop and ask if you hurt someone’s feelings. I ask this four or five times in any given day. “Are you angry?” Most of the time people are surprised that I don’t know. But I keep asking. There is no other way to find out.

5. Don’t get frustrated by the rules.
Recently, I’ve been reminded about how hard it was to learn business rules because I had to learn dating rules. I got frustrated about dating. Like I’ll never learn. For four dates I didn’t understand why people drink on a date. I don’t understand why you don’t say at the beginning of the date if you want to have sex at the end, so you know what you’re leading to. But I tried to just do what other people are doing. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I just try to fit in.

There are rules like this for the office, as well. Just follow them. Don’t ask for any rationale. It won’t make sense. That’s okay.

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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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I will never have great social skills, but I make them better by ensuring that I’m in my best social environment for work. For most people with Asperger’s, inadequate social skills are exacerbated by sensory integration disorder, which is a tendency to be overwhelmed by outside stimuli. This frequently overwhelmed feeling makes one unable to concentrate on social skills.

Here are the ways I compensate for sensory integration disorder so that I can focus on having social skills that will make people want to work with me.

1. Establish routines to limit input.
Food is a problem for me. I hate variety. I hate that I don’t know what is coming. My effort to control food got so extreme that I landed in a mental ward with an eating disorder. Today, I try to never go out for a meal. If I have to, I order salmon. Everywhere. And just looking for the salmon I get overwhelmed reading the menu. Too many details about food.

Given a choice, I eat a Power Bar for every meal and snack, (two= a meal, one= a snack,) and I hate if the store is out of both peanut butter and vanilla. I don’t like variety, even in Power Bars.

2. Find people who believe in you, and then reveal deficits.
I often tell people I’m booked for lunch or dinner, and suggest coffee. That way people only expect me to get a skim latte. The foam always varies, which is annoying, but I like that I always control the sugar.

Like most problems related to Asperger’s, when people know me, I am more forthcoming about the problem. This is the only way I can get help from people. For example, one of my favorite board members takes me out for breakfast each week. At first it was to control the company’s cash flow. Now it is to control for my eccentricities. He understands that I add a lot of value to the company, and he understands that I don’t eat breakfast when we go out for breakfast.

3. Assume that your most severe deficits relate to Asperger’s; you’ll understand them better.
I have math dyslexia. I don’t think people knew it existed when I was a kid. People said if I’d just do the homework then I’d be able to follow in class. But I couldn’t do the homework. Even with a tutor. By the end of high school I was in honors everything but remedial math, and still failing.

I also do not know left from right. Please, do not tell me your tricks. I know them all. For example, your left hand makes an L with your thumb and forefinger. The issue is that I don’t understand the concept of left and right: How can my left not change when I turn? How do you know my right? How can I tell which is right on the truck to my left? It all feels like a math problem to me.

4. Find people who are willing to help.
The first company I founded was, ironically, a community for math teachers. And I got killed on the financials because I didn’t ask for enough help. So with my second company, I hired a controller right away, and I spent two hours a day with her so that I’d always have a good handle on the numbers.

When I founded Brazen Careerist, I was very careful about who I partnered with because I know the gaps in my skills. Ryan Healy has a degree in finance and an ability to run numbers in his head that looks like magic to me. The first thing we did after we got our seed funding was to establish that Ryan is in charge of all the money.

Ryan Paugh has a core kindness and patience that makes me feel comfortable asking him for help in areas other people would not put up with. So, for example, I cannot read a map and I can’t follow GPS directions, so Ryan is on the phone with me all the time helping me drive to where I’m going. (“Turn to the driver’s side. The side your body is on. That side. Turn now.”) He has dealt with me crying because I turned the wrong way, even with those directions, and he has dealt with me being lost six blocks from where I grew up. Really.

5. Watch the words people use in order to see where you are distasteful.
I was always great at sports. In grade school, I was the only girl the boys let play kickball. In middle school, I was a regional figure skating champion. After college, I played professional volleyball.

But if I’m not focusing on the sport at hand, I lose track of my body. I bump into so many things that I almost always have bruises on my thighs, shins, and shoulders. This happens so routinely to me that it wasn’t until the past few years that I realized that not everyone bumps into each other, and people think I’m being inconsiderate.

I also find that I physically cut people off. Like, I jump in front of them in a way that startles them, or I walk so close to them they stop to let me pass. I can’t see how offensive I am until they are already saying “Hey! Excuse me!” but I know they mean “you are so rude.”

6. Pay more attention at work, where the judgement is most likely.
I try very hard at work to not invade peoples' personal space. This means consciously slowing down to watch where everyone’s body is before I move my own. Sometimes, if there are a lot of people moving at once, I just wait until there are fewer people moving before I move.

No one notices this, I don’t think. And when I’m very careful, I only end up bumping into people I work with once or twice a week. I don’t think they know I’m doing it. I mean, they know I’m a little jerky in how I move, but they don’t realize that I keep bumping into people.

I also try to notice if I’m standing too close to someone. And then I take some steps back. That means that people don’t know me for invading their personal space, which I know I am prone to do if I do not pay attention.

The thing is that this takes tons of mental energy. So I do not pay attention to this at all outside of work because it’s too exhausting.

7. Stick to one-on-one meetings, and use email a lot.
I don’t like crowds. They are too loud for me, and if the acoustics are bad, and it’s loud, I could actually end up in the bathroom crying from anxiety.

I can’t read nonverbal cues of more than two people at once. I can’t tell: Are they loud or quiet? Are they intimate? Are they anxious? Do they want to talk with me?

So if there are a lot of people, I either don’t shut up (because then I don’t have to do back and forth conversation) or I don’t say anything (so no one knows I’m missing cues).

I rarely go to parties. The only time I do is for work, and I usually have someone there who is translating for me. (Here is a good example of that, at SXSW.)

I am not a good collaborator in group meetings because I have to work too hard at reading people to also come up with ideas. So in groups I am either the person leading the meeting, and it’s informative rather than collaborative. I collaborate via email (finally, a good use of the “reply to all” button).

I spend most of my time one-on-one. Most people like me one-on-one because I am my most normal self. People who work with me accept that I am not my best self in big meetings and rarely invite me to them unless I’m leading them.

I know this is a lot of information for someone who is trying to deal with Asperger’s. The two most important things to take away from this are:

1.     Understand common deficits of people with Asperger’s. You probably have them.

2.     Surround yourself with people who will coach you through situations.

Comment on: Asperger syndrome in the office: How I deal with sensory integration dysfunction

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

One thing I’ve learned on this blog, though, is that most of my personal qualities that feel weird to me are actually pretty common traits among thinking people who desire self-knowledge. So to those people, I hope this blog gives you a sense of fitting in.

And, here are three workplace issues that I wonder if you think about as much as I do.

1. Having a huge crush on your boss.

Seriously, I have never worked for a guy for more than three months without developing a huge crush. This is, in part, because I have been fired so often that any guy I did not last three months with probably fired me and probably had no synergy with me.

But the bosses I did well with, I developed mad crushes on. All of them. Of course, I have worked always for good-looking men. (But, statistically, most of us have good-looking bosses.) I have always grown more attracted to my boss as we did better in the business. And I have noticed that it snowballs: The better we did together the more attracted I became, and the more attracted I was, the more tuned in I was to his thinking, and that made me better at work.

I have never slept with a boss. I like to think that I would have said no. (Though I’m not sure.) But I did find, through advice and personal experience, that women who work for men who are attracted to them have a little bit of power from that attraction. But the women lose that power if they give in and sleep with the guy. This seems right. (Hopefully you will all provide great case studies in the comments.)

2. Not knowing whether a meeting is a date.

Recently I met a guy for lunch. On the weekend. He is a big name. Big enough that developers have wet dreams about meeting him in person. Big enough that one of the first things he said to me when I met him was that I can’t use his name in a blog post.  So I’m not telling who he is, but it’s just as well, because while his email was innocuous, the farmer happened to read it and said, “This guy wants to get in your pants.”

I pointed out to the farmer that the email could have been written exactly the same way if Mr. King-of-Developers had been sending it to a guy.

The farmer didn’t care. Maybe the farmer is uppity because he also sent a sort-of innocuous email to me in order to get me to come to his farm, and, presumably, date him. So maybe he would know what that kind of email looks like.

I never know. One time I thought it was a date and the guy really just wanted to know what I was like in person. He genuinely had no romantic interest in me even though he took me to a restaurant that seemed to specialize in romantic dinners.

But it’s nearly impossible to tell for sure. I am a single woman, and when I get an email from a single guy who just wants to get together and meet because we both know we are both interesting, well, who knows if it is a date or not? And really, it doesn’t matter. I mean, we do the same thing at a business lunch and a date: figure out if we like talking enough to talk more.

So I just usually try to ignore that I never know if something is a date or not. But I have to say that the King of Developers was cute and fun and interesting and am I the only woman in the world who has this problem? No, right? But why aren’t people talking about it more?

3. Figuring out what to wear to the office at 10pm.

Since I’m at a startup, and I also work odd hours, I find myself in the office at odd hours. For example, I often leave work in the afternoon to pick up my kids, so it seems reasonable that if people want to meet with me later, after the kids are in bed, I say yes.

But I go running at night. And one thing I know about myself is that if I don’t put on running clothes before 9pm, I’ll never actually go running. So what do I wear to a 10pm meeting? Running clothes, of course.

I run a lot late at night, and I usually run in very dumpy clothes. After all, the only people seeing me at that hour are potential rapists. (Note to women: You are more likely to get attacked while running if you wear a pony tail. So I never do.)  But if I go to work first, I feel like I need to look good in the running clothes. So, I confess to wearing Lululemon brand pants because they make my butt look so good. Well, not just my butt, but every butt in New York City. And San Francisco, and Boulder, and everywhere else where women who have enough money to prop up their butt for on-lookers do so.

But I feel a bit guilty. Of course workout clothes are not appropriate for work. But it’s 10pm. And the people at work at 10pm are often about to spend the night at the office and they’ll smell bad the next morning. And that’s not appropriate either, but just in a different way.

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So it’s a safe bet that once you peg a trait in a generation, it likely won’t change much over time. But it could play out in interesting ways over time. Here are some ways that the traits of Generation Z might play out in the workforce of the future.

Generation Z will not be team players.
We know from Strauss and Howe that as generations cycle, the team generations (such as gen y) are usually followed by individualist generations. So it is not surprising to see trends that the same thing will happen over the next decade.
Gen Y are great team players.  In fact, they are so team oriented that they often feel that nothing is getting accomplished at work unless there has been a team meeting about it.

But they are not likely to teach the value to their kids. In typical parent fashion, parents stress what they are lacking so that their kids don’t lack it. This is why, for example, first generation immigrants often do not teach their native tongue to their American kids.

One way to read this trend is with baby naming. Gen Y is naming their kids eccentrically.  Throughout history, most people have had common names, and common names help people to fit in and be part of a group. Uncommon names make people feel different and encourage them to think of themselves more as individuals.

(For those of you who doubt the power of naming, check this out: If your name begins with a K you will strike out more often in baseball. If your name begins with a letter toward the end of the alphabet you could be economically penalized.)

Generation Z will be more self-directed.
One of the failings of the helicopter parent generation is that kids had parents telling them what to do all the time. And Gen Y is known for being good kids: rule-followers, close to their parents, very good students.

Which means they are terrible at figuring out what they want to do at any given time. No one taught them. Gen X, on the other hand, was left to their own devices at an early age and is very self-directed. (So self-directed that they are basically unmanageable, but that’s another story.) For Gen Y, the quarterlife crisis is not figuring out what you like or dislike by the time you’re 30.

This will probably not happen to the next generation, because parenting is less focused (via Dr. Eades), which means self-discovery is more prominent in childhood.  In an article in the New York Times magazine, Lisa Belkin explores the trend that parents are no longer spending tons of time and money dragging their kids to classes and specialists and guides to the world of overachievers. Parents are hanging out at home instead. And so are the kids. And everyone is learning about self-discovery. Because what else do you do with a chunk of unstructured time?

Generation Z will process information at lightning speed.
So much of the workplace today is about processing information. And the information sector will grow at twice the rate as all other jobs .  We see that the more native one is to Internet technology, the better one is at processing information.  We can spend time lamenting the fact that people don’t write essay-long memos by hand, and people don’t sit at their desks uninterrupted for eight hours a day. But what is the point of the lament? It won’t change. Successful leaders of the next generation will move past the lament, to watching how people adapt to the change and leveraging that happens in the workplace.

Besides, the next generation will be so good at processing information that they will open doors we can only knock on today.

Sam Anderson writes in New York magazine that, “The brain is designed to change based on experience, a feature called neuroplasticity. London taxi drivers, for instance, have enlarged hippocampi, a neural reward for paying attention to the tangle of the city’s streets. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task [of moving through bits of information quickly] the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. Neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools."

It’s not surprising, then, that when Matthew Robson, a fifteen-year-old Morgan Stanley intern, analyzed his generation, the report he generated is basically a summary of how his generation collects and processes information. This ability will be the defining feature of his generation.

Generation Z will be smarter.
Generation Y is the most educated generation in US history. By far. It’s not just that they have access to more information and teaching. But also, they did way more homework than any of their predecessors (which, by the way, is thought to be maybe damaging, and another reason that Gen Y is no good at self-direction.)

But the next generation could be even smarter, thanks to neuro-enhancers. Today kids experiment with ADHD medications to use in off-label ways, mostly to be more focused on getting more homework done, so they can have time to party at school.

But today’s off-label users are mostly smart, rich, at-a-great-college kids who will have wild success in life anyway. And the downside to neuro-enhancers—squashed creativity—hits these kids too hard to keep up the habit.

Another approach would be to give less privileged kids access to neuro-enhancers. Scientists and sociologists surmise that this would actually be a socioeconomic leveling mechanism that we have not been able to achieve with education.

Margaret  Talbot wrote in the New Yorker that a “pretty clear trend across the studies say neuro-enhancers will be less helpful for people who score above average” and cognitive enhancing pills could actually become levelers, if they are dispensed cheaply. And Talbot quotes The British Medical Association as declaring: “Universal access to enhancing interventions would bring up the base-line of cognitive ability, which is generally seen to be a good thing.”

How does this affect the workplace? A wider range of people can do cognitively challenging jobs. And, if you think Gen Y is obnoxious about being better at processing information than the older people, think how Gen Y will feel when the next generation tells them their IQ is much higher. And they’re right. Gen Y will be getting on the Adderall bandwagon to stay competitive the way Baby Boomers today get on Facebook.

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1. Focus on something you can control.
You might have noticed that my blog posts are very frequent right now. It’s a way to cope with the funding drama. I have so much control over my blog. And if I obsess over the traffic statistics then I have that crack-head feeling of immediate feedback, and it feels good, and even if half the people are telling me how much they hate me: Traffic is traffic.

Another part of the out-of-funding routine is fighting with Ryan. When I am totally focused on running the company, and I’m not worried about payroll, then things go smoothly and Ryan and I have great conversations about the future of social media and the future of resumes and where we fit.

When we run out of money, Ryan and I focus on our cycle of miscommunication: I say something rude that I don’t know is rude. Ryan gets defensive because he isn’t able to say, “That’s rude. Please don’t talk like that.” I have no idea why he is defensive, he just sounds like he’s up in arms about nothing to me, because if I knew I had been rude in the first place, I would not have been, so of course I don’t know. And when he is up in arms, I yell back. And then he says that I am impossible to deal with because I’m rude and I yell.

So we did that fight routine last week at least twice. I lost count. But I know that the first time, Ryan said, “You know what? Sometimes I hate you so much I have to restrain myself from punching you.”

My jaw dropped. I did not expect him to say that. And then I said, “I feel the same way about you.”

The second time, Ryan Paugh yelled out from his office, “Shut up! Both of you shut up!” And we did. (Though I think Ryan Paugh felt like it was hopeless that we might actually stop, so he took a walk to the coffee shop.)

2. Take time to talk about what's still going well.
So today I sort of kept to myself except that I had to go meet a board member to talk about the funding. The board member, Erik, is so fun to visit because he has this huge, stable company, and this gorgeous lair where he has an office and a secretary and a shiny deep-brown meeting table that my papers slide across while we figure out how to keep my company running. Erik is a great board member for a lot of reasons, but maybe the most important is that he’s so stable. Brazen Careerist needs a lot of things, but really, it needs stability.

But before I go into the board meeting, I remember that I have been named one of the top 30 women running Internet companies.

I call Ryan Healy. He says, “What is that site? I’ve never heard of them.”

I have not heard of them either. But the women on the list are amazing. Arianna Huffington, Caterina Fake, Michelle Malkin. I am happy to be there.

There is one more good thing about today. Flowers. Another bouquet. From a blog reader. I think he might be in love with me. But whatever. He leaves great comments, and now he sent flowers, and the flowers make me happy. They make me want to sit at my desk and write one more blog post.

3. Accept help, but continue to exhibit your strengths.
After my meeting, it’s 2:30 p.m. — Violin time. I leave to do school pickup, and Business Week calls. It’s a conundrum. Should I talk to Business Week and be late? Or should I risk that Business Week uses a different source because I was unavailable?

I take the call. I try to summarize all my ideas about intergenerational offices in five minutes, and I try to hide sort of out of the way of my son’s view, but he sees me. The rest of the call is about me getting off the call.

I buy my son his favorite after-school snack: Gatorade and KitKats. I tell myself it’s an example of optimistic spending that only a top-30 entrepreneur would do.

We go to the violin lesson and I want to tell you I love violin, but I don’t. I love the idea of the Suzuki program for violin. It teaches self-discipline, and perseverance, and working well in a group. I love that my son is getting all this, and he’s so proud and works so hard, and I love the teacher.

But look. I’m out of money in my company and that’s really all I have to think about for the half-hour they practice for his group recital. I am getting anxious about maybe not getting funding and I’m biting my nails.

Not biting sort-of-casually biting. But biting like I would imagine a serial killer does when he is trying to distract himself from thinking about the badness. Like, biting with way too much enthusiasm. And on top of this, I really really like my son’s violin teacher and I worry that she is going to see me biting like a crazy person and not want to be my son’s teacher.

And then I don’t have to worry about the biting anymore, because he is unfocused and too squirmy, so I scream at him: “Put the violin under your arm and take a bow!”

Has that ever been yelled at a child? It’s not normal. I know. And I know he is just anxious for his recital. The violin teacher gets very nice after that. To compensate for me being a psycho: This is how we are a team.

There is an hour break before the dress rehearsal. We go to the bagel shop for a snack. I have already prepared myself mentally for this snack. Normally, if I am having a bad day, I will have four bagels. But then I would be fat. Really. Four bagels can do that to you. They are like sponges in your stomach. So I told myself no bagels. Not even one, which would be okay, if I could actually eat only one.

To cope, I check my email. There is a note about me talking to CBS. I call them while my son is in the bathroom. They want to do a story about how Gen Y and Gen X don’t get along.

I tell the guy from CBS that I manage five people in their 20s and they would all be happy to talk about why I’m annoying. The CBS guy is shocked. I give him Ryan Healy’s phone number. Things go very well, of course. I know what I can count on Ryan for.

4. Hold things together, of course. But be okay if you can't.
After my son has eaten two bagels, he is not chatty. So I look through my purse for something to do. I find the form for signing him up for classes to help him stay organized. By the time I am done filling it out we are late for the rehearsal and he tells me that I am unorganized.

I help him get his recital clothes on in the bagel bathroom, and we are not the last people to arrive. We wait. I take my son to get his violin tuned and his teacher says, “Black bottom.”

I say, “Huh?” Then I say, “Oh. Shit. I can’t believe it.”

There are 100 kids ready to play their violins and only one of those kids is wearing khaki bottoms: My son.

Luckily, the violin teacher reads my blog, so this is not a huge surprise to her. And we acknowledge that I do have a second chance to get it right since this is only the dress rehearsal.

I almost cry. But I tell myself that if I’m not going to cry about running out of money in two days, then I'm not going to cry about khaki pants. I tell myself to focus on being a top-30 entrepreneur: Success does not come in a linear fashion.

My son and I wait for the teacher to call his group. And I am trying hard to not get blood on his shirt. Because his shirt is actually the proper shirt to be wearing, and my fingers are actually bleeding from aggressive bites.

So I am really overwhelmed now, between the violins and the fashion faux-pas and the blood, and then an investor calls. Yes. In the middle of violin even though I am certain that every investor I talk to knows that I am with the kids in the afternoon because they all bitch about it in a subtle way like, “Oh, that’s great,” with body language like, “She is fucked.”

So I ignore the investor's call because on my death bed I don’t want to remember the day I took a call during my kid’s dress rehearsal.

The teacher calls groups to the stage by the piece of music they are playing: "Allegro! Gavotte! Song of the Wind!" It looks like The Price is Right for the cultural elite, and the kids are walking up, nodding to their teacher as they go.

Each kid has a teacher there, except for my son, who has two. Because this program is really about the parent teaching the child and the teacher teaching the parent and the child and parent bonding through music. And that ended for us the time I got so frustrated that I broke my son’s bow. Well, actually, the fourth time. So now we have two teachers. And when investors want to know why my salary is not the same as all those god-forsaken 22-year-old guys that Y Combinator funds, I want to say, “You try running a startup and teaching your kid violin. Violin lessons cost way more when you are running a startup.”

Okay. So there are 100 kids together on the stage playing. And it’s stunning to see.

For a minute I forget that I am running a company that is running out of money.

All the parents in the audience are motionless; those tiny violins all together sound like a chorus of angels.

My son comes back to me in the audience when he’s done. I say, “I’m so proud of you for working so hard.”

He says, “Are you proud of me for playing perfect notes?”

I say, “No. You don’t need to be perfect. You need to just keep trying every day to be your best. And you are doing that. You should be happy for yourself.”

And he says, “You are trying to be your best every day, too, Mommy. You don’t need to have everything be right. You should be happy for yourself.”

I cry.

Comment on: Tips for coping when your startup is out of cash

Here are some ideas:

Choose people who are good-looking, but not better looking than you.
You become like the people you hang out with, according to Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Harvard. He found, for example, that if the people around you are overweight, you are likely to join them. And the more overweight you are, the more trouble you have at work, for a lot of reasons, but a new reason I just found is that in stressful work situations, fat people do not think as clearly as thin people. Yep. That’s right. Stonybrook University School of Medicine found that the more body fat you have, the higher your levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that hampers cognitive abilities. (Hat tip: Self magazine.)

But if the people around you are models, you will look ugly. Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at MIT, says that if you’re going to a bar, you have the best chances of getting picked up if you go with people who are almost as good-looking as you are. It makes sense that you will feel best if you do this at work as well.

Choose women who are happy, but they shouldn't smile too easily.
This is hard for men to do. Because men are hard-wired to be drawn to women who laugh at their jokes. Men want to be funny. But women who are slower to smile do better at work, according to communications consultant Neil Lowndes. So you should date women who smile a lot, but work with women who don’t. (Hat tip: Derek Scruggs.)

But this doesn’t mean that you should work with grouchy women. Christakis also found that if you are around happy people you will be happier. So, when it comes to work, find that subset of women who are very optimistic but a tough audience for your jokes.

Choose people who swear, but don’t choose someone who's trashy.
It turns out that a little off-color language is good for the workplace. For example, if you use not-too-vulgar swear words at work, you inspire more teamwork. Of course, the standards for vulgarity will vary, but it’s probably like porn: You know it when you see it.

Which is why using something innocuous, like the word asshole, is okay, but not if you are talking about intercourse. People who talk about sex at work decrease morale. Well, the research actually says that it’s the raunchiness of the sex talk that affects the workplace negatively. So I think factual talk about sex, without the raunch, is okay. (Hat tip: Chris Yeh)

Also, while we’re on the topic: double-bonus for choosing a boss: Pick one that will send you to sex conferences.

Choose people you admire.
This seems like a no-brainer, but we rarely choose a job based on this. We usually choose a job based on the job description, or the title. The problem with choosing a job this way is that a job description is not a contract. It is a way to lure you into the job. And it’s a hiring manager’s best guess on who he or she is looking for. In general, we do not end up doing what we are hired for.

So choose your next job based on the people you’ll be working with. You will learn the most on a job by having a great mentor looking after you, rather than a good job description preceding you. And you’ll be happiest at work if you focus on having friends at work instead of looking for a boss who pays high salaries – those bosses don’t understand what really matters.

The problem, of course, with choosing to work with people you admire is that you have to understand yourself enough to know, of all the traits you admire in people, what are the most important.

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