One of the keys to my ability to work 40 hours a week and homeschool two kids is that I have great time management. Which is to say, I say no to just about everything. But learning when to say no is still a work in progress. Here's what I know about saying no to phone calls:

1. It's more efficient to read the book than talk to the author.
I get about ten emails a day asking me if I want to talk to someone about their book so I’ll recommend it on the blog. My answer is always no.

I said yes once because it was Gloria Steinem. And it turned out to be a really disappointing phone call. If she is disappointing pitching to me, then everyone else will be, too.

Now I ask people to send me the book. If I like the idea of it, I’ll read it. I just read a book by Alexandra Robbins about why high school is destroying the kids who go there. She didn’t come to that conclusion, I did. But see, that’s why it’s good that I read the book myself instead of talking to her.

2. Interviews are a faster form of entertainment than going to a movie.
But I do try to say yes to all interviews. I like the Russian Roulette aspect of interviews in that I never know what I’ll get. I liked getting grilled on CNN about my miscarriage. They didn’t tell me that was the topic, but it’s okay. It was interesting to answer the questions.

And I didn’t like talking to Steve Roy about his career, but whenever I listen to the recording of the call, I laugh out loud, so in hindsight, even that was a good interview to say yes to.

So this guy, Michael Zenn, sent me this email:

Subject hed: Your Input

…I am currently in the process of producing a new edition of my book and reaching out to interview some of the leading female thought leaders in the nation, which I believe you are one.  

I will be adding a brand new material to the book and am looking for female influencers, bloggers, websites, resources and ideas that I could potentially feature in the new book that would benefit women readers.  

Please let me know when you might have a few minutes for us to chat.

I replied with a yes. I figured I’d give him 15 minutes, and anyway, people never call me about food, so it might be fun to answer questions about that.

3. Smalltalk goes faster with short responses.
Here’s what happened. He opened up with some platitudes. Like, who he is and that his book is sold in Whole Foods and it’s the only book the CEO of Whole Foods has ever endorsed.

I think a few things. I think, I hope he gets to the questions fast.  Then I think, he must be the illicit lover of the Whole Foods CEO to be leveraging the checkout counter in the way that he is. He is telling me how his first printing will sell out in one month. And I am thinking, something is fishy here.

Then he says he reads my blog, and he wonders if I have always been so direct and unfiltered.

I say, "Yes."

He asks, “Do you know why?”

I say, “Yes. I have Asperger's Syndrome.”

He has never heard of it.

“It’s like autism,” I say. “But with a high IQ. I’m smart about some things, but not social skills. So I have no patience for you making small talk with me.”

He laughs.  He says “Oh, it’s like you can’t tell a lie.”

“Yeah.”

“I wish I had more people in my life like that,” he says.

“No you don’t,” I say. “You’d get sick of it.”

Pause.

4. Tirades take too long (and they're hard to stop once you get going) 

He asks, “What is your goal? What do you want to tell the world?”

“I don’t want to stand in front of everyone and tell them what to do. Because I don’t know. Life is hard. I’m trying to figure out how to deal with the difficulties of life, and I like that people do that with me, on my blog.”

He says, “Yeah, it’s much better to just be honest about what you’re doing.”

Pause.

Then he asks me if I have written at all about the food I eat.

I think to myself that he is either illiterate or a liar. I say, “Yeah, I live on a farm. With animals that we eat. I write a lot about that. With pictures.”

I can’t remember what happens next. I think I decide to tell him that all of the goat cheese that’s labeled by Whole Foods is made by killing the boy goats as soon as they are born. I hear nothing on his end. So I add that they are crushed underfoot, in the snow.

I tell him people need to pay a lot more money for pork if they want to have pork from mothers who are not chained like prisoners while they are having their babies. It costs a lot more money to raise pork if the farmer lets the mom roll on top of some of the piglets, but it’s what she would naturally do.

5. A fast way to feel good is to attack a caller you're sick of. (Childish but effective.)
I don’t know what he says next. He is saying something about how I have strong opinions or something. He is not used to this.

I tell him people don’t have enough money to pay 50% more for groceries at Whole Foods. I tell him that group child care for kids under two is very bad for the kids and people should spend their money solving that problem. It’s a lot more important than not having food additives.

He says his book tells people to do small steps.

“Like what?”

“Like eggs.”

I say, “Do you buy your eggs at Whole Foods?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they suck compared to my free range farm eggs.”

“The eggs at Whole Foods are free range.”

“What does that mean? Free range for one day a year? Who regulates the words free range? Free range on sawdust? You can look at my eggs and the eggs you eat and you can see a huge difference in how yellow the yolk is.”

“People need to know what they are eating.”

“You don’t even know what you’re eating. This is a black hole for spending and it’s not appropriate for poor people. You can buy pork at Whole Foods where the moms are chained at birth and the pork could be organic.”

5. Get off the phone as fast as possible. 
Then I tell him it’s time to go to skateboarding. I tell him that my son gets more out of the money I spend on skateboarding lessons than the money I spend on organic juice with 50% less sugar which he thinks taste terrible, by the way.

The guy says, “Can I send my book to you?”

I can’t believe it. I want to tell him that he should have just sent that email to me, instead of wasting my time talking to me about his book. I would have said yes to just an email but now I hate him. I hate that he told me he wants to interview me for his book but he doesn’t. He’s a lifestyle guy, really. He’s telling people how to have a good life. And he’s lying to me.

So I say, “Why do you need to pitch your book to me? You have a monopoly in Whole Foods checkout lines. Your book is selling out it’s first printing. Why don’t you do something more interesting than marketing a book?”

He says, “I want to change the world. Obesity is a huge problem in this country.”

“You’re going to solve obesity by telling people to buy free-range eggs?”

“Yes. Education is the key to curbing obesity.”

“You think fat people are too stupid to know that if you pay double for your food you get better food? I think they know that. Try being a single mom with two jobs and four kids and then tell her she has weight problems because she doesn’t buy free range eggs.”

He asks, “Well what do you think is the panacea?”

And I say, “Panacea? You are looking for a panacea? There aren’t those in this world.”

And then I decide writing seems too hard. And I decide I should take a bath.

You might think this is my way of relaxing, but it’s not. We don’t have a shower. We are in the hygiene part of the slow food movement. And anyway, at some insane point in the day when I thought I might be able to write, I told the kids to try to train the dog to fetch. I am not sure what they ended up training him to do.

But I have to clean the bath before I can take a bath.

Then I am in the bath, and the September Vogue is calling to me, but it's too heavy for the bath. So I grab a magazine that looks like it’s been wet before. Newsweek. I stole if from the doctor’s office because the cover article is The Mormon Moment and it looked too interesting to read between kids getting shots.

I open to page 45, and I see at the top there are bunch of Mormons in business. They are saying how their religion affects their work. I look for women. I always look for women. I am looking for the magic they use in order to have a big career and kids as well and not lose their mind. I land on Whitney Johnson. I look a little lower on the page to see what she has to say.

She quotes me. I have to read it twice because I can't believe it.

She says, “In Penelope Trunk’s words, ‘Religion is the best preparation for a career.’”  I did say that. In this post. And it’s a good post. My next thought is: Maybe I can pass that off as a new post and then I’ll have a post for tomorrow.

But then I remember writing the post. It took me about ten months. Because I thought I was right about that – that all career decisions are religious decisions. But I was so scared to write it because everyone thinks I just write to be intentionally controversial. But I really write to be smart; if I don’t say something that makes you think in a new way, you won’t keep reading.

So I remember putting that post off for months. And I am thinking, lately, that I need to write faster. I need to trust myself more and not think and think and think.

As I’m worried that I can’t think straight anyway. I read an article in the New York Times about how people can’t keep making decisions well all day: Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?  Judges give pardons at the beginning of the day, but by the end of the day they are so tired of hearing cases that they can’t sort facts well enough to trust themselves to give pardons.

Another example: Poor people make so many money decisions that the non-poor never think of (like, there’s only enough money for either toilet paper or detergent,) that poor people get emotionally and intellectually exhausted and go on a binge. It’s not because they are irresponsible. It’s because no one has unlimited daily capacity to make decisions.

So I’m exhausted from decision-making. It’s the end of the summer. I just spent three months deciding every day what my kids should do. Don’t tell me I should have decided at the beginning of the summer.  I’m in a new town, a new culture, and far away from everything. I didn’t know what would be right for us.

But that’s my problem, I think. That I tell you not to tell me it could be better. Because someone mired in having to make tons of decisions probably needs help. I think this is a lot of moms who work and have kids. I think it’s also people in their early 20s who are freaking out that their life is not coming together and they don’t know what to fix first.

It’s lots of people. And I’m not sure what everyone needs.

But seeing that Whitney Johnson quoted me makes me see myself differently. Just for that minute. Instead of seeing myself as an exhausted person who can’t get anything done tonight, I see myself as someone who has an unexpectedly wide impact.

One of the only books about happiness that doesn't make me want to slit my wrists is by Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness. It’s a rulebook for happiness. Like, do these things and you’ll be happier. It’s not stuff like go to the gym. Because everyone knows they should do that and everyone knows it’s nearly impossible except for the people who don’t even need to go to the gym because they’d exercise anywhere.

Lyubomirsky says, among other things, that you should give three, unexpected compliments in one day. Once a week. You get happier just from doing it.

But I think, now that I’ve gotten out of the bath and written a post, that those three compliments are going to be easier for me to do. Because a random person noticing you, changes you, just a little bit. And I'd like to do that for someone.

And also, sometimes you have to look in far reaches and odd corners to get back to feeling okay. It doesn't have to be anything huge. I think hot water or a good book or even just cleaning the bathroom floor, helps you get to whatever is next for you. You just have to do something.

I used to feel sorry for Brad and Angelina because they had photographers trailing them all the time. Now I think they are lucky because if they had a blog, they’d have so many good photos to use.

I feel like the parent of a twenty-something who wants their kid to stop feeling lost, but wants that feeling of being unlost to happen a little closer to home. I know that’s selfish. And anyway, I’m not even Melissa's mom. But I think I want to be because I wonder where my place is in her life.

I have not told you this about Melissa: She is smarter than I am. There are not many people I think this about. And definitely not a lot of women. I know this is not politically correct for me to say, but look, Larry Summers, the ex-president of Harvard staked his whole academic career on the research that shows that at the very very tip of the spectrum of high intelligence, it’s mostly men. So it makes sense that only female I have ever met who lives on that tip is Melissa.

She has a photographic memory. I’m not sure what that gets her except the ability to talk endlessly about a wide range of topics to people who, for the most part, are not interested. She can’t really read whether or not it’s time to shut up, so sometimes I have to tell her.

Other times I am completely dumbfounded by her memory. She is like a Vaudeville act or something.

Her new boss, who I feared would ruin her life, has turned out to be great for her. He basically pays her to memorize stuff and hang out with him. I call Melissa ask if I can use his name.

“No," she says. And, "Can we talk later? I'm on my horse."

“But I'm going to write that he's great. I'm going to write that I love him for seeing you for who you are and creating a job for you around that. “

“Show me the post before you run it.”

So forget it. And who answers a phone when they are on a horse? I am not going to use his name because I have to confess that I’m a little worried that he is paying Melissa for companionship. He loves, for example, that she doesn’t have good work/home boundaries. And that she is a good sounding board for his ideas because he has to think out loud.

I can see why he would love that. I love hanging out with Melissa, too. She is very weird and very smart. It’s hard to stomach weird without smart, but with her they come together, with commensurate amounts of very.

The boss is very weird and very smart, too. Probably not as smart as Melissa. But whatever. Smart only goes so far.

In case you find yourself overvaluing your own IQ, there’s an investment banker in New York City who was recently getting a divorce and tried to convince the judge that he should get more than half of the assets because his IQ is so high that you can presume that his wife could never have earned her half.

The judge threw out the argument. And I’m sure that any goodwill the judge might have had for this guy went straight to the garbage with the argument.

I miss Melissa popping up in the middle of my day to say something like, “Have you heard of the term social skydiving? You should look into it. Even though you'd never do it.”

Sometimes I’d say, “Melissa, look: Can’t you see we’re in the middle of practicing violin?”

She’d look and say, “Oh. Sorry.”

But other times, I’d say, “Melissa, will you come talk to me while I cook?”

The New Yorker is fixated lately on distraction: in the early 1900s some company in Buffalo found that giving workers breaks made them more productive. Psychologist Roy Baumeister shows that asking people to regulate their behavior without interruption probably makes them less focused overall.

I am thinking that Melissa is like a coffee break for me. Or for her new boss. If you hire an assistant the top priority is not having him or her do the work you don’t want to do. The top priority should be to hire someone you want access to because their presence improves your day.

An assistant is the co-worker you have always wanted to make your workday great.

A great co-worker can change your job  and, in some cases, change your life. You can hire them or sign on to work next to them, but don't underestimate the importance of finding that someone who is a friend who you can take your breaks with. We each need someone who shows us new aspects of ourselves and opens doors we wouldn’t open ourselves.

I tell this to Melissa, and she says, “I know. That’s what my horse is like for me.”

This is a picture of me deluding myself that I was working last week:

But of course I was not working. I was doing Passover which means dealing with the family's withdrawal from our bread addiction. This would be a good time to have a photo of some gross, unleavened food that I made for dinner one night during Passover, but I mostly just spent the week stressing having the only Seder in our county (yes, we imported Jews for the Seder) and having three days off for Easter (yes, the school calls it spring break and then passes out Easter eggs to my kids).

I was in denial the whole time about having no time for work. And when I don't blog I actually start to feel lonely and disconnected. As if when I'm not writing, my life is not really happening.

Tuesday was going to be my first day in five days that I did not have the kids home with me, but the dog bit my son's eye. This would be a good time for a picture of his eye bleeding all over the house while our big dog cowered in the corner and our little dog licked up the blood.

Later, in the hospital, after the second pediatric ophthalmologist checked out the rip in the tear duct, I said to my son:

"What were you doing with the dog?"

He said, "I was showing him my strongest Pokemon cards. But on the last one, I think he wanted it."

My son had bites on his leg and his head as well. The dog tried to kill him, I think. I mean, I just try not to think about it. We put the dog to sleep. That was a hard lesson for the kids.

And for me. I used to think dog breeders are evil and there are enough dogs in the world and we should all go to dog shelters. Now I think dogs are like babies. You want to know what you're getting, and it's not always the most ethical, humane thing to bring more life into the world, but it's what we do. And I want a purebred. I want to know what I'm getting into before I get into it. I know, no dog is certain, like no kid is certain. But kids and dogs are like playing the odds. I picked a smart, good-looking guy to have kids with, and I want to control the ingredients for my dog, too.

At the end of the day, we are exhausted. I watch The Social Network with the Farmer and I want to be Mark Zuckerberg and I think, I am messed up that I want to be a twenty-year-old guy. But let me tell you something: worrying about a gazillion-dollar company is so much easier than worrying about a kid.

The Farmer cannot stay awake for the movie, so I watch it alone. Then I get into bed. It's late, but the farmer wakes up.

Farmers always get up early for chores. It's non-negotiable even though when I took care of baby goat I proved that completely erratic feeding does not kill animals. Sleep is sacred on a farm and the only thing farmers wake up in the middle of the night for is sex. He says, "How was the movie?"

I take that as a mating call and do not answer. Instead I say, "Remember the flea bites I was telling you about? Look. I got another."

He lifts up my shirt to check for bites.

I tell him that the bites are on my arm.

Probably now he is wishing he had just stayed asleep. But I told him, once, or maybe a million times, that talking to me and caring about my feelings is good foreplay for me.So maybe this is why he says, "We had fleas in our house every summer when I was growing up. And no one complained as much as you. I thought you said you have high pain tolerance."

"Oh my gosh. Your mom had to deal with four little kids with flea bites?"

"No. Just three. Fleas don't bite men."

"Wait. You just told me I have low pain tolerance and you have never been covered in flea bites? Are you nuts? What about child birth? Do you think you could handle that better than me, too?"

"Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's just that I can't believe how much you go to the doctor. People in the country wait 'til their arm falls off to go to a doctor."

"You think I'm excessive?"

"Well, look at the bite. It's next to the thing that you think is cancer."

"Oh yeah. That's right. Look at it again. Has the shape changed? Do you think it's cancer?"

He looks. He genuinely looks to see if the shape of my cancer has changed into a more cancer-y looking cancer spot. He says no. It looks the same.  He says, "You should have a doctor look at it because that makes you feel better."

That makes me feel so loved. So I reach over to my nightstand and get the foam stuff that we are using for birth control ever since I told him I had been lying to him about using birth control.

So I fill the applicator thing with foam, but the applicator is a dyslexic nightmare because I can never remember which part fills and which part pushes out the foam.

I squirt the foam and it's the wrong end of the tube and it flies everywhere. Most notably covering the wall and the ceiling. I look over at the Farmer. His head is under the sheet.

I say, "What are you doing?"

He says, "You always make a mess – I didn't want to get squirted."

We have sex while contraceptive foam drips down the wall. I can't write about the sex because the Farmer really wants us to have some part of our lives that is not on the blog. Not that I really understand intimacy. I'm trying, though.

The thing is that he is so good at sex and so annoying about keeping our morning routines on schedule, but I'm left to write only about the annoying part: the next morning.

The kids get to school, the farmer leaves to do his own chores, and there I am, stuck on the sofa. I can't move. I tell myself to do my to-do list.

I stand up. Find the newest issue of the Atlantic. Read about Tiger Moms and wonder how Tiger Moms stay awake when their kids are at school. I go to bed. I wake up and tell myself I will have coffee and do my to-do list. I bring the coffee to bed and fall asleep next to it.

When the coffee is cold, when I'm awake, I drink it and eat more bagels and then lay on the sofa telling myself I can't say I'm leading an honest life if every time I cannot cope with my life I eat a bagel to avoid having to think of what to do next.
I eat another bagel to confirm that I am leading a dishonest life shrouded in bagel consumption. And by the time the kids come home, I hate myself not just for eating bagels all day, but also for getting nothing done.

Now, a day later, I look back and wonder why I didn't just take a day off. There was too much. Too much taking care of people, too much medical drama, too much trying to work and not working. What I really needed was a day in bed with coffee and the Atlantic.

The only way to really get things done is to be in touch with how we are feeling and what we need. I wish I had been able to do that in the moment. But maybe seeing clearly in hindsight is a good step to seeing clearly in the moment, next time.

This would be a good time for a picture of me relaxing. But all I have is a Buddha that Melissa left for me to remind me to relax.

5 Time management tips I learned from years of hating Tim Ferriss

And, here are some other posts you might enjoy:

What it's like to have sex with someone who has Aspergers Syndrome

Bad career advice: Do what you love

Tim Ferriss Diet

I hope you enjoy my blog!

Penelope

Then Paul said that he would be my editor. So I said yes. I love Paul. He is fun and smart and he (almost) always answers his phone when I want to talk about my marital problems. (Although he will not publish my marital problems, which, again, is why I love my blog.)

So I tried to negotiate really hard to get a lot of money from BNET. I had Paul get his boss Eric on the phone. I worked with Eric when we were both at Business 2.0. When that magazine went under, Paul, Eric and I all got fired together. Or, wait. Maybe Paul or Eric fired me.

Anyway, I did not get a lot of money from them. But I did get them to agree to a steady stream of money that could support my family so I could tell my startup, which I am still a majority shareholder in, that I can’t cope with being CEO anymore. The job is too much about execution, and I’m not an execution person. I’m an idea person. I need to quit my startup and do a new startup. I have too many ideas. Yeah. That’s what I said. And I told myself I don’t need the salary I was drawing from my startup because I will have the money I get from BNET.

But here's the problem. My kids are going to starve or something. Not that this hasn't happened before. Where I ran out of money. But it was for a decent reason. Like, my company ran out of funding and our electricity got turned off and I nearly went blind, and things got very bad, but I could not totally control the financing. I mean, look, I kept my company going through one of the worst financial crises in U.S. history. So a few nights without electricity is sort of explainable.

But why is it that now, when I could have a stable income, I am not writing columns for BNET? Am I retarded? Paul investigates this question each time he calls me. He says things like, "Are you okay?" and "What are you doing? What do you do all day?"

These are fair questions. I tell Paul some reasons why I am not writing.

I say, "You guys pay 90 days out. It's too long to wait."

He says, "That's not an excuse. If you wrote regularly you wouldn't even notice the delay. You'd get money regularly."

He is right.

I say, "I don't like how you guys handle comments. It's not interactive enough."

He says, "We changed all that in the redesign. Months ago. If you'd pay more attention to your comments, you'd notice."

He is probably right.

I say, "You never let me write about good stuff. Remember the post I wrote about your stupid invoicing system? You said no."

He says, "Try me again. If you bitch about me, I'll publish it."

Hmm.

I think I am not writing because I have never had financial stability before. I am always running startups. I just finished my third. It takes about four years to run the startup and a year to recuperate financially from the damage that a startup does. (Note: Don't tell me about exits. The first time I exited I put all the money into the next company. Don't ever do that.)

So, am I scared of financial stability? I am certainly sabotaging myself. I spent my last therapy session talking about why I am not earning money when I have a way of getting paid to do something I love.

My therapist told me to splash my face with cold water. Not kidding. I have been in therapy for 40 years because my parents were incompetent except for knowing enough to send me to therapy as a five-year-old to deal with it. So, I've been in therapy forever and I need something new. And DBT is new. So I'm doing it. All behaviorally focused.

My therapist sent this email to me:

I am writing to remind you of some exercises you can do when your anxiety is very high. These exercises are designed to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. This system is designed to do the OPPOSITE of fight or flight. It's sometimes termed "rest and digest"

Temperature Regulation – If you submerge your face in cold water, it will induce the mammalian diving reflex, which is built in by evolution to help mammals stay alive in cold water. Among other things, this reflex results in a slowing of your heart rate down to 25%. This is a very effective, highly recommended strategy for reducing anxiety immediately. Many people use it for panic attacks.

So, do you know how I got myself to write this post? Splashed water on my face. Seriously. Well, first I went to make myself lunch and realized that I was going to be eating a lot of pasta this month. My therapist says that sometimes we need to hit rock bottom before we take action. Look out: There are going to be a lot of posts this Spring.

1. Geographic stereotypes are true.
When I moved from LA to NYC, I was horrified at the lack of yoga studios in NY. Yoga was already huge in LA, but not yet in NY. I was also scared that New Yorkers were always a little bedraggled, and I had just spent ten years learning how to look perfect everywhere I went in LA. It’s fun. It’s fun to have no weather and no fat and no rushing in LA. It’s fun to get a day off from work to prepare for watching the Oscars. I grew up in Illinois, but I got used to living in LA.

The panic about New York was unnecessary, though. After ten years of living in NYC, when I imagined leaving, I thought I could never leave because the cultural opportunities are so amazing. The expertise people have in NYC is so vast and varied and I thought I’d never get that anywhere else.

When I left NYC I didn’t care about looking perfect everywhere I went. I didn’t care about the kind of car I drove. I was  a New Yorker.

2. Never say never.
When I moved to Madison, WI, there were some things that were just plain shocking. There are no foreign cars here. I mean, maybe there are. Maybe ten percent of all people drive a foreign car. It’s usually someone from out of state. Recently moved here. Because after you live here for a while, you get so used to the idea of driving a Ford that it doesn’t seem weird.

You know the pictures of Midwesterners in NYC? I spent ten years learning how to spot a Midwesterner in NYC but really, it only takes ten minutes. Because people in the Midwest have no style. It’s plain top, plain pants, plain shoes. You can rarely peg the decade their outfit comes from because it is tied to no particular style. I have made fun of this for years. And now I'm pretty sure it's what I look like.

3. It’s not about genes.
If your friends are fat, you’ll be fat. This is true irrelevant of class, education, race, etc. The Framingham Heart Study goes a good distance to show who you hang out with is who you become. Not just for fat. For drinking and smoking and dying early. (Interesting tidbit from the Framingham Study: You are likely to drink the amount the women in your life drink. Men don't like drinking without women.)

4. It’s not about values.
How many people go to law school thinking they are going to represent the underdog and save the world?  Thousands. And how many people can pay off law school loans and support a family and save the world? None. You have to marry someone who makes more money.

This is so common that people are making parodies about the save-the-world-types who apply to law school.

Once you get to corporate law, you don’t want to leave. This is what you tell yourself: You will just stay there to pay off your loans. Then you’ll stay there and do pro bono work. Then you tell yourself it’s silly to go to nonprofit law when you can earn so much in a big law firm and just donate the money.

It happens to everyone. It’s arrogant and delusional to think you’ll be the exception.

And that is true for everything. When you are deciding what you want to do with your life, look at peoples’ lifestyles. Ask yourself if you want that lifestyle. Don’t tell yourself you’ll be different. Statistically, that is absurd. And why put yourself in a situation where you have to be different than all the people you choose to be around every day?

5. Emotions are contagious.
If you have a happy person close to you, you'll increase your own happiness by 9%. I have announced, of course, that I am done looking for happiness in my life. I think it's overrated. Which means reading this blog is not going to boost your happiness by 9%. But I am hoping that interesting lives are also contagious and your life is much more interesting from spending time with me.

In fact, I think this is actually my wish list—stuff I wish I had been given over the years to keep my career on track.

1. A hall monitor for emails.

Email provides a chance to sidestep the problems of reading facial cues, which is what people with Asperger’s want. And email provides a chance for introverts to collect their thoughts before they talk to extroverts, which is what introverts want.

The problem with email is that the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says that emails are misinterpreted fifty percent of the time.

So, people who are really tone deaf, like people who have Asperger's, they won’t know they’re being an emotional idiot in email any better than they’ll know face-to-face. Also, people who are the most incompetent with social skills are the most likely to believe that they are doing fine.

This is why we need an emotional intelligence safety net in the form of software: Tone Check. The New York Times reports that the makers of Tone Check eventually plan to allow clients to prevent employees from sending e-mails that violate their “tone policy”. But really, this is already happening: People get fired for bad tone today, the verbiage is “you’re not a good cultural fit.”

2. Off-label psychiatric drugs.

Caffeine is a completely sanctioned drug at work. So if you feel like you want to curl up in a ball and sleep, if there’s no company culture to support that, and no office door to shut, you should probably try caffeine instead. For the hard-core few who don’t want to just stay up, but want to get a lot done in a short time, get a friend with Adderall and take it off-label.

For the other end of the emotion spectrum, like if you feel a surge of energy when you imagine killing the co-workers you hate, try Xanax. Some of you—probably the ones who totally abuse caffeine and tell yourself it’s not a drug—snub your nose at Xanax as a go-to drug of choice. You all will be good candidates for new-to-market relaxation drinks: Slow Cow, Vacation in a Bottle, and Mary Jane’s Relaxing Soda. The drinks ride on the backlash of the energy drink craze; if you trade in fast food for slow food, why not do the same with your soda?

3. A company.

Really. It’s a trend. Parents are buying their kids a company to run, according to Sue Shellenbarger, writing for The Wall Street Journal.

This makes sense. Gallup reports that 70% of kids want to start their own company, and author Scott Gerber has made a career for himself out of telling his Gen Y peers that they should Never Get a “Real” Job. A small franchise is relatively easy to set up, and it’s better than a stupid, entry-level job. And Richard Settersten’s book Not Quite Adults is a great explanation of the research showing how kids benefit in both the short-term and long-term from parents being overly involved in their kid’s early adult life.

For those of you who think buying a franchise is too expensive,  Zac Bissonnette points out in his book Debt-Free U – the smartest book I’ve ever read about funding college – that you’re better off using college savings to buy a kid a business than to pay for an over-priced college education.

4. An insanely expensive chandelier.

Here’s the one I’ve been coveting. It’s $4000 at Jak Home, in San Francisco (via More Ways to Waste Time).

I’ve looked at it from a few angles, and I decided it would be something I could make.

Then I tried to get all the lights wired together, and I nearly electrocuted myself. Then I tried to get an electrician to do it and he said he doesn’t have enough insurance to cover such a cockamamie scheme. He did not say cockamamie—there are no Yiddish speaking electricians in Southwest Wisconsin. But it would have been easier for him to say that than to spend an hour-and-a-half trying to wire stuff and trying to break it to me that my idea sucks. People tread lightly here in Wisconsin.

The thing is, if someone bought me this chandelier, I think I would probably return it. And get cash. Or I’d get a store credit and get something more practical, like, I don’t know, $4000 of light bulbs. Because I’m not really sure what else this store would sell that is practical.

Wait. Speaking of store credits, I just learned a new phrase: Gift Card Laundering (via Urbandaily) It’s when you have a gift card and you spend a little of it, and then you use it to buy a different gift card and you give it, fresh, to someone else. That’s probably what I’d do. I’d divide my $4000 credit into a bunch of gift cards and save a lot of money. (Or piss a lot of people off because there’s nothing at Jak Home store for less than $4000.)

When you buy someone a gift like this, what you really are trying to buy them, I think, is that feeling that they deserve to have something so gorgeous and glorious and expensive as that in their lives.

Does anyone deserve that?  I don’t know. I know that every piece of research in the world says that buying experiences, not things, makes us happier. So I guess the gift recommendation really is to buy the experience of waking up to a gorgeous chandelier every morning.

5. A coach.

Sometimes, when I’ve thought my kids were going to starve or at least have to live without electricity, I’ve thought, "Well I could always fall back on coaching."  There is a huge market, for example, for getting paid by parents to coach their twenty-something kids. But I always end up telling the parents their kids are fine, just be emotionally supportive.  And I coach a lot of people, but really, the thing that makes me is a good coach is that I love being coached myself.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks so much about how hard work makes you great, but the hard work has to be focused and productive, which he says comes from good coaching. So I can’t stand doing anything when I don’t have a great coach.

So you will not be surprised to hear that I found myself a coach for taking pictures. I mean, I already have an editor for my blog—with an editor I can take huge risks because the editor will always tell me if I’ve gone too far.  If I were a good enough photographer, I’d call my coach an editor. But right now, I think she’s still coaching me. Telling me what photos to throw out. (Which, by the way, is how I learned to write. I handed in a page of writing each week and my teacher would either edit it or write “no” at the bottom of it.)

Here's how I know I have a great photography coach: one of my favorite photos from my coach's website. It inspires me to look more closely. And that's really what we should aim for in every gift we give: inspiration.

So this is the first thing I know: If you are really serious about doing something, it’s painful to tell people, because fear of failure is so high. Once you decide that you really want something enough to shift your life to get it – at that point you want it so much that you will feel like your life is somehow incomplete if you don’t get it. So it is scary just to talk about it.

This is how I’m feeling about sugar and bread. I think it only leads to bad things. I think it makes me crazy and I have googled a thousand different sites about addiction to sugar and bread, and I think it’s true. Here’s what I think:

1. Food acts like drugs, and some foods make us crave more and more and more like an addictive drug.  Eating carbohydrates and sugar is totally unnatural to the human diet.

2. There is some sort of link between Asperger’s and bread. I’m not sure what it is, but we tried taking my son off gluten when he was younger, because so many people say it makes a difference with autism. And while I couldn’t really tell with him, I ate the same diet, and I could tell that I was more calm. Most people I know who have Asperger’s also have an obsession with gluten. I’m not sure what this means except that I should stay away from it.

3. I definitely notice a difference when I stay off gluten. I have more energy and I lose weight effortlessly. I think this is because when I eat for emotional reasons I always choose wheat-based products.

4. When I take myself off bread, I start craving sugar. So I think I also have a problem with sugar. And, confession: I eat a lot of it. No soda or deserts, but tons of sugar in my coffee. All day long.

There is a lot that I want to change in my life:

More yoga
Less nervous eating
More weight lifting
Less yelling at kids
More leaving the house
Less acting like an agoraphobic
More blog posts
Less mindless email administrating

This is way too big a list, though. What I really want, if I boil it down, is to have more confidence in myself. Then I would believe I could have a good life and I’d do the things I think I need to do to have a good life.

Here’s what happens, though. I say, “Oh. Forget it. I’ll never stop eating sugar really.”And then I dump five spoonfuls into my coffee.  You have to believe in yourself that you can create a good life in order to do the life you want.

Why is that so hard? I don’t know. I mean, I have a pretty good track record for getting what I want. And still: Plagued by the bread crumbs left from last night’s dinner.

So I am starting dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). Actually, I started it a while ago but I thought I would sound like a crackpot on the blog if I wrote about it. But it’s so cool, that I have to tell you.

First, I’m going to tell you my version of DBT, and it’s sort of cultish, to be honest, so if you want to get an official version, click here.

I know you didn’t click, though; of course my version will be more interesting.

The idea is that you identify a behavior you want to change, and then, each time you don’t do the change, you write down everything you were feeling while you were deciding to not do the change.

It looks something like this:

I am on a conference call.

I feel frustrated that things are not more clear cut with a right path for my company.
(You have to always use feeling words.)

I feel anxious that I can't help think of a solution.

Then I overreact to feeling powerless and I worry that I'll be a terrible parent and I'll never fix it. And maybe I'm terrible at everything.
(DBT makes you more in touch with how you feel.)

I tell myself don’t go into the kitchen because you will eat bread. I tell myself to just be with the feelings.

Then I go in the kitchen anyway. I tell myself I can eat just one piece.
I don't. I eat ten.

I feel a strong love for Wonderbread.

Not now. Then.

Okay. So you do this a million times for DBT, and what you end up seeing is a pattern—just as you start having strong feelings, you do your vice so you avoid experiencing the feelings.

So the only way to know your feelings and understand who you really are is to not do the thing that separates you from the feelings. It’s actually a lot more persuasive to me to tell myself I will never have self-knowledge if I eat the bread.

That's why this is a particularly inspiring message for me:

via Oh She Glows

“May you live in interesting times,” a Chinese curse goes. It’s true: “Interestingness” is a dangerously broad term. Having a chronic illness can be interesting but it sucks. Wars can be interesting – but they suck even more. And maybe you too have used the classical “It tastes … interesting”-excuse when your dinner host didn’t really have a clue about cooking. Not as bad as wars and chronic illnesses, but still kind of sucky.

But interestingness in general is a lot more positive. Interestingness is finding the experiences that shape us as human beings, and enjoying them to the max. What we really don’t want is the bullshit part of life.

As far as I can see it, most of us want to live our lives something like this:

Sure, a bit more interestingness would be nice, but let’s be realistic, right? At least we’ll avoid the bullshit.

1. You can never make everything all nice, so stop trying.

Or that’s that we think. Because when we want to avoid bullshit so hard, we decide to play it safe. But “play it safe” too much and you’ll suffer:

• Play-it-safe is what keeps us in our boring job.
• Play-it-safe is what keeps us in our houses.
• Play it safe is what keeps us from building a business.
• Play it safe is what keeps us from writing about controversial topics.

We end up with a pretty normal, uninteresting life. But notice that you don’t ever get rid of bullshit completely. Stress at work, a flooded house (my windows aren’t the best, it seems), a stolen car, a break-up after a long relationship—you can’t avoid these things completely.

But because we try so hard, because of attempting to “play it safe”, we unintentionally drown our interestingness levels, and end up with a life like this:

2. Don’t mistake worry for reality.

The problems that really happen in our lives don’t account for the full 20% of bullshit. Realistically, it’s more like 2% bullshit and 18% worries:

• It’s not losing our job, it’s worrying that we might get fired.
• It’s not really that the house floods, it’s worrying that it might get flooded; and then, worrying about what insurance to get, and where to earn the money to pay for it.
• Will the same insurance cover the car? And should we really park it in that dark alley, or rather take it to a supervised parking lot, paying $5 an hour for someone to look after it?

Worrying too much is just not helpful. Especially if we consider that we’ve only got this one life.

I am great at worrying. For example, as a dogsitter I permanently worry that one of the dogs could get seriously ill. Even though these worries are exaggerated, I’ll be happy once my wife comes back to look after them again.

As kids, we still play freely and explore the world as if it was a big and beautiful Wonderland. Sometimes we fall down, sometimes we rip our clothes, sometimes we scratch our elbows. And still, we continue to explore, we continue to live an interesting life.

But then, over the years at school, we become more and more serious. And worried. The older we get, the more we learn to focus on avoiding bullshit and becoming upright citizens. Normality grows, worries grow, interestingness almost disappears. We go from Wonderland to Worryland.

3. Use people with interesting lives as role models; pay attention to what they don’t do.

I have some friends who live a very different life. I live it myself at times, and I see a couple of people on the web that seem to be living it, too. This other model looks something like this:

You see this? That’s a 50% increase in interestingness! Bullshit levels are down, as is normality. And while normality makes us comfortable, it also leads to the boredom. So if we ever feel that there’s a bit too much normality in our lives, we could maybe learn something here.

The mistake when trying to find out about interestingness is to look at what interesting people are actually doing. Because this only leads to even more passivity on the side of the spectator:

• “Oh, Tyler Tervooren can jump out of an airplane, but I couldn’t possibly do that because I don’t fly. Climate change is more important than having fun.”
• “Oh, Sean Ogle is traveling to South East Asia and checking off the points on his bucket list, but I couldn’t possibly do that because I love my home and wouldn’t want to leave.”
• “Oh, Karol Gadja is building a business around his Ridiculously Extraordinary blog, but I couldn’t possibly do that because I haven’t got any idea of internet marketing and writing.”

One thing is for sure: You will always find reasons not to do something interesting, even if other people are doing it. Often enough, these reasons will be pretty good. Sometimes, they won’t. But you’ll definitely find some!

I believe we have to look at what these people are not doing. And then we have to stop doing that, too. For example:

• Stop worrying 18% of your life.
• Stop overthinking everything.
• Stop remaining seated comfortably.
• Stop accepting things as they are, even if they suck.
• Stop taking the path of least resistance.
• Stop living the life other people planned for you.
• Stop worrying 18% of your life. (This comes twice, as it’s really the basics.)

Interesting people get rid of unnecessary worries – and accept that a little more real bullshit might turn up in their lives once they start stepping out of their comfort zone. If you do a lot more interesting things, from time to time you risk a bit more bullshit.

4. Make yourself uncomfortable.

The good thing is that interestingness doesn’t always have to be jumping from airplanes.

• Try unknown food at your supermarket.
• Go to a new restaurant.
• Watch a recommended movie from a genre you normally ignore.
• Engage in a street fight.
• Quit your boring job.
• Sell everything you own.
• Raise five children.

There’s one thing interesting lives have in common, though: you feel at least a tiny bit uncomfortable. Anxiety is the perfect indicator. Instead of worrying about or trying to ignore it, maybe we should let it be our guide.