A good manager is someone who makes everyone feel like he or she is creative in their work. Because creative work is the most fulfilling work, and we are each capable of that kind of work.

My favorite research on this topic is from John Mirowsky, professor of sociology at University of Texas, Austin.

Mirowsky finds that people who work are happier than people who don’t because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative. This was true regardless of age and race and the amount of creativity that a given job had.

He concludes that people make choices to be more creative if they are gainfully employed. But also that we have more control than we realize over how creative we make our worklife. He says, “One thing that surprised us was that the daily activities of employed persons are more creative than those of non-employed persons of the same sex, age and level of education.”

How can you tell if you are creative at work? You could just ask yourself if you like your job. It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging. And if you are doing that, well, that is creative. Read more

My company just launched, all-new, at BrazenCareerist.com. For those of you who have been asking for the past year: “What’s your business model?” You can read about it on TechCrunch. If you want the full pitch, you can read the press release, (and you should know that all last week, when I wasn’t blogging, I was writing six thousand versions of our press release.)

Here’s some advice for everyone who is starting a company: Write your big press release first, before you do anything at all. And then work backwards. Map out the milestones you need to make the press release come true, and that tells you how to run the first stage of your startup.

To be clear: we did not do that. I mean, if we did, our press release would have had to say, “Ryan Paugh announces that he has just made it through two years of Ryan Healy and Penelope Trunk fighting tooth and nail over totally irrelevant details of building a social network that is a career management tool for the next generation workforce.”

Then Ryan Healy and I would rewrite that press release ten times because Tech Crunch announced that they are sick of people using the term “next generation” and Ryan doesn’t want to use it but I think it’s fine because it’s in a different context. (LinkedIn is for gen x. Brazen Careerist is the job site for the next generation, demographically speaking. ) Read more

I’m growing sour on travel. I have always disliked it. When I was a kid my parents took us all over Europe and the Caribbean, and it really exhausted me. Now that I’m a grown up, I am better able to articulate why I think travel is a waste of time. Here are four reasons why I think the benefits of travel are largely delusional:

1. There are more effective ways to try new things.

While it’s true that learning and broadening your experience is important, doing that one time is quite different from consistently integrating something new into your life. It’s low risk to try something for a week. Which will make more impact on your life: going to Africa for a week and seeing wildlife and living in the jungle, or retooling your weekly schedule so that you take a walk through your local forest preserve once a week? You will have a stronger connection to the forest preserve than the jungle, and you will have a deeper sense of how it grows and changes and how you respond. So if you hope that travel will change how you see the world, doing something each week to see the world differently will have more impact than doing it one time, seven days in a row. Read more

I don’t usually write question and answer columns. (Although I have once or twice before.) I do read every single question that people send me. And these are three questions I’ve been answering a lot lately.

Q: Why do you pay $50,000 a year for a house manager?

A: The short answer is that I am buying a stay-at-home wife. Most people, who are at a similar spot in their career and have young kids at home, have a stay-at-home wife. (This is, of course, because I have the type of career that is dominated by men, and women without kids.)

I know you are thinking that most stay-at-home wives are taking care of kids. But almost all kids are in school most of the day. But the women are still busy. They are doing the infinite number of things required to run a household. Here is a sampling of things that I am sure that none of the startup CEOs I met with last week thought about for one second:

–What should we get my niece for her birthday?
–Who is the best teacher to request for third grade?
–Should the kids have private swimming lessons or is group okay?
–What’s the best way to train the dog not to pee on the sofa?

Those questions actually require thinking and planning, and they are constant. Running a house is like running a business, and very few people can do both well. Read more

There are some things about work that are difficult for even me to write about. These are the issues that I have not quite worked out for myself. I wonder if I am normal in these areas? Maybe no one is talking about them, but they are thinking still. And if no one else is thinking about this stuff, why do I think about it?

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. Read more

Most of us think of a dream career as one that affords us flexibility for personal relationships and high engagement for personal growth. And while flexible work used to be limited to women, USA Today reports that increasingly, men, too, feel stress from the personal impact of inflexible work. So the question for everyone is: What’s the best path to get this dream career?

Retail is a great way to get flexible work, (which is why I think we should see a surge in educated people taking retail jobs.) But most people don’t aspire to retail because the work is not intellectually engaging. On the other hand, most of the intellectually challenging work in this world comes with inflexible schedules.

So the trick is not to get flexibility, the trick is to get it without losing engaging work and avoiding a pay cut. Also, keep in mind that flexible work is not about the hours, it’s about control. Because most of us are fine with working long hours as long as we have control over those hours. Read more