Will taking drugs help your career? Maybe you need Adderall

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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 is also why kids love to whine to get what they want. Parents give in only when they are at their wit's end, creating, from a child's perspective, a similar, randomly yummy reward system.)

Each time we interrupt ourselves at work, the process to get us back to that point of focus takes twenty-five minutes. So we spend nearly a third of our work day recovering from interruptions, trying to recover our focus.

The time management gurus are all over this problem.

Winifred Gallagher is the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The thesis of the book is that the ability to positively wield your attention is the key to your quality of life. Gallagher says (in either her book or in the article that I am liberally quoting from — I'm not sure which, but I am distracted enough by the issue that I feel compelled to distract you as well) “You can't be happy all the time but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.” Read more

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How to decide how much to reveal about yourself

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People ask me all the time how I can be so honest about my life in my blog. They want to know how I can write about marriage, sex, abortions, or running out of money over and over again. It's an endless list really, of the stuff I write about that people can’t believe I'm writing about.

But each of you has a list of things in your life similar to that, it’s just a list you don't want to talk about. I'm not special—I don't have more stuff that is difficult to talk about. I just have more difficulty not talking about difficult stuff.

This is why.

I’m going to start by telling you that I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. I was in a post-traumatic stress support group afterward. People were divided into groups of ten based on their experience at the site—how bad things were for you that day. I was in a group comprised mostly of people who narrowly escaped the building before it fell and, as they were running out of the building, were splattered by body parts from people who were jumping out of the building.

We had individual therapy as well. Here's what my therapist said to me: “Your childhood was so terrible that your experience at the World Trade Center was nothing compared to what you experienced as a kid. Your post-traumatic stress therapy needs to focus on your childhood.” Read more

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How to feel steady in a shaky economy

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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 is just so much interesting that a person can take. When the world becomes too unstable, that lack of stability consumes us.

Jeff Tweedy, from the band Wilco, describes the senselessness of living on the financial edge: “Having a solid [fiscal] base allows you to look at darker things and actually think about them. I debate people about this suffering myth, this tortured artists stuff, and they almost never buy it.” Tweedy is a harbinger of the trend to come, where the demographic you would expect to be holding out against stability for its own sake are actually leading the push for more of it. Because too much instability can ruin anyone, at any age.

Here are five new ways to approach your career so you can create stability in an unstable workforce: Read more

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Sarah Palin’s resignation inspires me

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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 be more brave in my own career. She's running her career in ways I intuitively think we should all be running our careers. And she's reflecting my own experience back to me in a positive way: That breaking new ground is difficult but it pays off.

Here are four new career management ideas that Sarah Palin’s modeling, in an inspiring way, right now:

1. Get out of a job when you’re done doing it

We know that the old ways of managing a career aren't working. But it's so scary to try something new. For example, you know you should job hop, but it's not what careers used to be. And it's scary. People are constantly telling you you'll destroy your career if you job hop.

But Palin is refusing to waste her time in the Alaska governor's office. Who can blame her? It's a lot of small-issue local politics that take away from her establishing big, national-level ideas. Of course quitting a local job is a good idea if you want to run for national office. Read more

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How to face cash-flow issues in a start-up

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When I launched my company, Wired magazine contacted me to write a column about how to run a start-up. The editor, Dylan Tweney, blew me away with his offer. It wasn't just that he took me to lunch in the grown-local lunchroom at Wired. He also had this unbelievable faith in me that I knew what I was doing as a CEO.

Here is a confession of lameness: I said I'd write the column and then I lost confidence. I thought I didn't know enough about running a company to give other people advice.

Since then, I’ve spent two years running a start-up in the worst funding market in decades. After insane amounts of struggling, we have raised about $1 million, and for the first time, I do not feel panicked about keeping the company in business. We will have to raise more money, but I can see the path to that, and I think I can do it.

At the same time, I had a recent flurry of outside affirmation: Psychology Today featured me as a person who has outstanding resilience, and Self magazine is featuring me in their August “success” issue. So even though I squandered my opportunity to have a column in Wired, I am ready to give advice about how to run a start-up.

I'm going to answer the question people ask me most often: “What do I do when my company is out of money?”

Here is the answer: Read more

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How to have more self-discipline

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For a while I have been fascinated by the research about happiness. Some of my favorite research is from Sonja Lyumbomirsky, psychology professor at University of California Riverside. (She’s great at listing really small things you can do to impact your happiness.) And from Dan Gilbert's Hedonic Psychology Lab at Harvard. (I follow PhD students from that lab like other people follow favorite quarterbacks.)

But something I've noticed in the last year is that most of our happiness is actually dependent on our self-discipline. For example, we are happier if we exercise, but the barriers to getting to the gym are so high that it takes a lot more than missives from the Hedonic Psychology Lab to get us there. Also, Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University, has studied self-esteem for decades, and finds that when it comes to success, self-discipline is much more important than self-esteem.

So I have started tracking my own self-discipline rather than my happiness. And I think that the process is making me happier, because I am teaching myself how to bounce back quickly when my self-discipline falls apart. Here's what I've learned: Read more

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How to divorce new-millennium style (and I love Kate Gosselin)

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The generation leading the revolution in divorce is, of course, Gen X. The biggest change is that there is a generation of people getting a divorce who were more or less equals in parenting and in work. Baby boomers talked about it, but when the women went to work, they did all the housework and childcare as well. Not as true with Gen X.

Don’t get me wrong – women still do more than their male counterparts — for example, even women who have stay-at-home husbands are more involved in parenting than men who have stay-at-home wives. But Gen X men have been more involved in parenting than any generation before. And Gen X women have done a better job of mixing high-powered careers and family than anyone else.

There is another trend here as well: Gen X is much more family-focused than previous generations. Baby boomers talk about putting kids before work, but Gen X actually does it. For example, even with full-time jobs outside the home, Gen X spends more time playing with their kids than housewives did in the 1950s. (I can’t remember where I read this. I think it’s from Sylvia Hewlett.)

The result is a new sort of divorce, especially in the case where the woman earns more than the man. The woman cannot stop working. We already know the laws require the breadwinner before the divorce to continue to be the breadwinner. But when the difference between breadwinner and caretaker are not as clear cut, it’s not so clear where the kids should live. Read more

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Hatemail: Email I get that I hate

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People always ask me to answer questions on my blog. So I am sort of going to answer questions. Questions I hate (that I have edited to save people from the trauma I probably caused David Dellifield):

Email number one: The obnoxious reference check

[Name redacted] is applying for a position at our company and listed you as a reference. I was hoping that you could complete the brief questionnaire attached to this email to provide your feedback. Thank you in advance for your help, and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

This email is from InvestorGuide.com. Let me tell you something: That questionnaire was not brief. It was about ten essay questions and then insanely inapplicable multiple choice questions.

This company is ridiculous for sending an onerous questionnaire to references. For one thing, it puts me in a bad spot because I loved working with the guy who gave my name as a reference, so I want to give him a good report, so I have no choice but to fill out the BS questions and try to have a good attitude.

The other reason the company should not send a form like this is they look incompetent. Not just for destroying the relationships potential new hires have with their references, but also for not being able to make hiring decisions without asking a third-party if the candidate is professional. Seriously. Open your eyes in the interview, guys. Read more

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What’s the connection between abortion and careers?

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I have had two abortions.

The first one was when I was twenty-seven. I was playing professional beach volleyball. I was playing volleyball eight hours a day and I spent two hours a day at the gym. I noticed that I was getting tired more easily, but I thought it meant I needed to train harder.

Then one weekend, a doctor friend on a visit saw me drop a plate one day, and a vase the next. I told her my hands just gave out because they were so tired.

She said I was anemic. Then she said, “Maybe you're pregnant.”

“I'm not,” I said. “I have a regular period.”

It turns out, though, that you can have a regular period and still be pregnant.

And I was. Fourteen weeks.

My friend said, “Schedule the abortion now. You're already late for it.”

I didn't do anything. I was in shock. My boyfriend was in shock. Neither of us had ever had a pregnancy. I couldn't believe the whole process actually worked, to be honest.

I told my mom I was pregnant. She said, “Get an abortion.” Read more

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How to be a tall person at work

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The Institute of Social and Economic Research recently published a study about the connection between popularity in high school and earning power later in life. New York magazine, information source to the rich and popular, summarized the study like this: “This study may seem to burst our Revenge of the Nerds fantasies, but it’s logical that people who are attractive, likable, and socially comfortable”?the class officers, the cheerleaders”?should get ahead in corporate settings.”

There is absolutely irrefutable data to support the idea that good-looking people do better in life than everyone else. Gordon Patzer, in his book, Looks, draws from a wide body of research to describe the advantaged life of a good-looking person from the time they are a baby (good-looking babies get better parenting) to the time they are in sales (the whole sales team performs better if there are more good-looking people on the team.)

As a result, I have jumped on the plastic surgery bandwagon. Super-smarty Chelsea Clinton got plastic surgery before she entered the work world. We should all do that. And while I haven’t taken my own advice, I do find myself pinching and pulling at my nose to see what it would look like after a $10,000 investment.

But wait. Before you take out a loan to straighten your nose, maybe you should just start thinking like a tall person. Being good-looking means having the right mix of a lot of things, and for you, being tall might be the final keystone to hold it all in place. (Wondering if you’re already tall? Fast Company has the answer: over 6’3″ for men and over 5’9″ for women, which, by the way, makes me half-an-inch into the land of the tall.) Read more

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