Did you notice there is a person in hiding on the Quistic team page?  He won’t let me show you his picture or give you his real name because he’s scared people will find out he works for an American company and they will come to his house to take his money.

“What? Who would do that?” I ask.

“The mob. Or the police. In Ukraine it’s the same thing.”

So I used this site that picks Russian names to find one for our team page. I suggested some and we settled on Dmitry Petrov.
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This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for More magazine titled, Could Your Boss Have Aspergers? I was thinking that the article is so good and someone should give me a book deal from it. Then when an agent contacted me I remembered that I can’t stand having a book contract hanging over my head. But I like this article, so I’m posting an excerpt below, and you can read the whole article at More magazine.

Roughly 80 percent of adults with Asperger’s syndrome do not have full-time work, according to some studies. By the time I figured out I had the disorder, I had been fired from every job I had ever held. I had offended everyone I knew. Think of all the thoughts and judgments that go through your head that you’d never say aloud: You’re fat. You’re lazy. Your clothes don’t fit. Your office smells. I say these things because they’re true, and I’ve since built a career on saying what no one else will say—or maybe I have a career in spite of that.
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While Generation X did not give a crap about building corporate America, Generation Y defined its own paths through corporate life, all largely non-linear, family-centric, and gold-star focused. If an achievement can’t be conveyed through social media then it doesn’t exist. The Organiziation Man is no more.

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I took my eleven-year-old son to Colorado for a paleontology adventure. Digging up shards of tibia bone with a toothbrush is so not what I want to do with my time, but I want to support my son in finding his passion, and he is enthralled with paleontology.
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I am the poster-child for the saying “You have to spend money to make money”. I make a lot of money but I spend most of it on people who help me to do things so I can keep making money. For example, I have an assistant, a driver, a nanny, an editor, and a research maven. None are full-time but all make my life much better.

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I have tons of debt after launching four companies. There has never been a launch that didn’t mess up my personal finances. Most entrepreneurs have no credit – I am like that as well – so I have learned to live with debt and without credit. This is what has enabled me to take risks, set lofty goals, and go after dreams that lots of people tell themselves their debt precludes.

How do I do it? It’s all mental. Here are thirteen ways to think about debt to keep it from ruining your life.

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I am in the car about forty hours a week. I hired a driver. She won’t drive all the times I have to drive. Of course she won’t. Her life would suck.

It doesn’t matter. I have to be in the car for so much anyway.

I can’t ditch my son’s therapy appointments. I need to be there to say, “Of course nose picking is like cutting.” I’m an expert on cutting. Digging out eyebrow hairs so they bleed or tearing cuticles so they hurt all day. I need to be there to translate for the therapist the world of comfort through pain.
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After a long break from new courses, Melissa and I did a course on how to start freelancing. This is especially timely because over the last six months while I have been rejiggering my online courses Melissa has launched a freelance business.

My first thought was: Oh. Crap. Melissa is too busy to do courses with me. But she says that will never happen.

So join me for Get the Guts to Start Freelancing: it’s a four-day online course with chat and constant chatter from me, and from Melissa who will sometimes moderate and sometimes cut me off to make her own points. You’ll learn how to make a strategy to start and create tactics for attracting more clients as you grow.

This course includes four days of of video sessions and email-based course materials.  You can purchase this webinar for anytime, on-demand access. The cost is $195.

Enroll now.
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One of my favorite twitter feeds is GSElevator. It’s stuff people overhear in the Goldman Sachs elevator, and most of it features bad behavior that confirms it was better for me to marry a farmer than the bankers I dated before him. But sometimes there is a gem like this one:  “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence because it’s fertilized with bullshit.”

That is how I feel about women watching other women run their lives.

I am constantly wondering about other peoples’ lives. I’m fascinated by how we don’t tell each other what sucks about our life. We don’t tell our partners why we hate ourselves. We don’t tell our friends why our marriage or our job sucks.
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My personal hygiene is holding back the growth of my startup.

This month I am teaching a course: Get the Guts to Start Freelancing. If you are sick of me promoting my courses on this blog, then please note that this is not the post where I am promoting this course. That’ll be another one. In this post I am going to tell you that the course is four days and I will probably not change clothes for any of the days.

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