I have often thought that we choose to marry someone who has something we don't have, but we wish we had. So it makes sense that now that I feel secure in my relationship with the farmer, I am going to tell you what he has that I want: Photos for my blog.
I'm so bad [...]

I am a person who lives and dies by her to-do list. And right now, I’m dying.
I’m dying because I am following all the prescribed rules except one.
Here are things I’m doing well:
1. I clear my inbox.  I deal with each email the second I read it–by responding, deleting, or transferring to my to do [...]

I’m in the midst of dumping my happiness obsession for something else, but I wonder what is the key to a good life if I’m giving up on happiness? I thought maybe it was interestingness, but I am a little worried because I confess that I’d rather fall asleep in the farmer’s arms than solve [...]

I've been walking around with the July/August 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review constantly, for close to three years. Sometimes, if I’m getting on a plane, I’ll put it with the other heavy stuff into my luggage, and then get it out later. When my last car broke down in the middle of an [...]

I collect data points constantly, and I index them by topic, and I always hope that they will come together in an interesting, useful way. Lots of times, that doesn’t happen, and I  just have to throw ideas away, because I have a rule for myself that I have to be useful in every post.
But today [...]

I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. We know that people keep less than 5% of New Year's resolutions, and I think a big reason for this is that anything we are trying to change in our lives is really about self-discipline.
I realized this after spending two years reading what positive psychologists have discovered [...]

This is what I thought yesterday: I thought, today is the day I’m going to start going to the gym again. I am certain that no one recovers from sadness until they go back to the gym: Endorphins, routine, self-control, these are all the pieces of getting back to normal.
I have said, every day for [...]

I have always thought that blogging is a way to reach your career goals. It’s hard to write a blog if you don’t have a goal. You need to know what blogging success looks like to you, so you know what you're aiming for.
Like most goals in life, my definition of blogging success has shifted [...]

Last year I traveled almost every week. Some weeks I traveled to three different cities.
If you are excited about business travel, thinking it’s a free ticket to see the world, you should stop reading now. But if you are having trouble maintaining your personal life in the face of tons of travel, these tips from [...]

Someone once asked me to think of a moment in my childhood that was really nice. I thought of one.
Wait. You think of one, now. Quick. Just any one…
So I thought of a time:  it was in my grandparents’ huge yard with fruit trees and flower gardens and grass for running. And it was so [...]

Most of us have a terrible time focusing on our work.
Left uninterrupted, we are likely to interrupt ourselves. The Internet, everyone’s interrupter of choice, is the most tantalizing type of reward system to our brain: intermittent but unpredictable rewards, in the form of a randomly great video or a juicy email here or there. (This [...]

Now that we have a recession, and maybe not so much a recession but a new way of doing business, people are starting to look at their career goals differently. And while interesting was the big goal when we were flush with cash, security will be the brass ring of the near future.
Because really, there [...]

There are a million times we intuitively know what we should be doing in our careers, but the chatter around us makes us question ourselves. Too much. If I have one regret in my career it’s that I didn’t trust myself more, earlier.
Watching Sarah Palin resign from her governor post in Alaska inspires me to [...]

The cocktail party conversations I have about what I do for a living reveal so much about the world. For example, if I say I have an Internet startup, people generally think: She’s unemployed. If I say I write a syndicated newspaper column that runs in 200 papers, people are impressed. If I tell people [...]

I never watch American Idol, or other talent shows. I think I got my fill of them in the 1970s, watching year after year of the mind-numbing Miss American pageant. But there was too much hoop-la with Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent, so I had to see what I was missing. I ended up [...]

Be careful who you take career advice from. Knowing who to take advice from is a really good skill for any aspect of your life, but especially in the field of work, because work is changing very fast right now. A lot of advice that was good ten years ago is not good now. And [...]

One of the best parts about blogging is meeting people I would never meet in real life. Often, this means psychopaths, who use the C word in my comments section. But the best times, the people I meet are like Tony Morgan. He is a pastor and chief strategy officer at NewSpring Church, based in [...]

Consistency is an important part of any career. It’s not just doing good work all the time. It goes beyond what quality your work is to what quality of person you are. Being consistent is letting people know they can rely on you, and it’s following through on what you say you’ll do because that’s [...]

As the recession persists, we can watch social shifts and cultural trends. Some are good, some are bad. But in either case, one way to control how the recession affects you is to watch the larger trends and decide where you want to fit.
Here are five trends that are emerging in the face of the [...]

A recession is typically a good time for graduate schools. Their application pool goes up because people see them as safe shelter from the storm. The scariest part of a down economy is the idea of having no income. Of course, graduate school does not solve for that. But graduate school does solve the second [...]