Social media rules for Jews on High Holidays

As the High Holidays approach I start feeling anxiety about whether I’ll work during the holidays. Will I do two days or one? Will I write emails and send them? Or not hit send until sundown, or just not write emails at all?

It’s part of being Jewish to have a workaround for everything. For example, this is a picture of my sons participating in a not-real bat mitzvah for their cousin so we can take pictures because you can’t take pictures during the real bat mitzvah.

I’ve read that people who have willpower don’t actually have willpower. Rather they make decisions for themselves that have clear parameters and then they don’t reconsider them, so those people don’t need any willpower.

I’m pretty sure that my everything-is-negotiable approach to Jewish holidays requires an insane amount of willpower that I’ll never even come close to having. But I in that vein, I propose a few guidelines for those of you who are like me and trying to figure out what to do with social media on High Holidays. Read more

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5 Things you have to unlearn to succeed at work

A big theme in my life has been how much I had to unlearn to come to the decision to homeschool my kids.

I had to unlearn all my assumptions about parenting (it turns out that kids don’t need teachers, they need love). I unlearned my assumptions about self‑management (well-roundedness is a false goal). And I had to change my assumptions about how much respect each child deserves (freedom to choose what we learn is a fundamental right).

Now that I’ve been homeschooling for a while, I understand that the reason it’s traumatic for most young adults to enter the workforce is because they have to unlearn so many things from school in order to survive in adult life.

No matter what age you are, the faster you start your unlearning the faster you can shed the weights that hold you back from moving forward in today’s knowledge-based workforce. Here are five things most people need to unlearn. Read more

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Assess yourself: Should you launch a startup?

I fired Melissa.

We were bickering all the time. And she was saying I’m impossible to work for and I was saying she’s impossible to manage. The problem is I’m a mad raving lunatic about making sure that people who work for me like working for me.

When Ian, the guy who I was going to do a company with but then ended up not doing a company with, asked Ryan Healy and Ryan Paugh for references for me, they said I was loyal and caring and they both gave me so much credit for helping their careers and it just made me really really happy. I want to know I am making peoples’ lives better.

So when I told Melissa I was going to launch a company, she asked what her job would be, and I said, “Nothing. You are not in my company.” Read more

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How to measure your own progress

I have big goals for myself, but I try to measure my progress day by day instead of looking at the big picture. The big picture is overwhelming. For example, for the last three years, I’ve known I wanted to launch another company, but I didn’t have an idea. Or I had an idea that couldn’t grow big enough. Or I had a great idea but the investors wanted me to relocate. There was always a problem.

This is a picture of where I sulk when I feel overwhelmed. (It’s actually also the music room, and I get so frustrated forcing my kids to practice, that the room is already sort of a torture chamber, so I figure why fill another room with sulking karma when I have already ruined this one?)

But on good days, I measure my progress with three questions: Read more

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What I’m reading. Really.

Willem de Kooning

I get asked so often to publish a list of what I’m reading. People tell me to make a discussion board. Make a Facebook group. Have an online book club. I don’t do that because I worry I’d feel pressure to be a reader of substance.

And I’m not. Here’s what I’m reading.

1. Tabloids
My reading list would start with the Enquirer. I have surveyed all the supermarket newsstand material and I think the Enquirer does the best reporting. I read Us Magazine for reports on the Royal Family because those of us in the know understand that Will and Kate’s baby means more than mere tabloid fodder.

But also tabloids are a diet mechanism, because if I need to feel better about my life and I don’t want to be fat later, the only thing left is reading about other people getting fat. Or doing some similarly ruinous thing to their life. Read more

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How to tell a tidy story of an untidy life

We flew first class to Seattle so we could get the cello on board without a fight for overhead space. So imagine the come down when my son walked into the dorm room at cello camp. “Oh,” he said. “A dorm room is like a one-star hotel.”

I thought to myself: Who am I? Am I a person who flies first class, or am I a person who shares a bathroom with ten strangers?

There are cello lessons all day and we run around Seattle Pacific University with me marveling at the dahlias (are they perennials here?) and my son doing too-risky parkour (“Mom. I think my penis broke.”)

My son tells me I have to sleep in the top bunk because he doesn’t want to fall out. I climb up there and remember the kid down the hall who rolled out my freshman year, so I sleep on the floor.

Am I a person who has a garden that covers an acre? Am I a person who has no bed? Read more

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How to make a good first impression

My brother was getting his Ph.D in chemistry last week, and my mom and dad and my two brothers and I went to the dissertation defense. I would like to tell you what my brother talked about but I have no idea. Seriously. The topic was alcohol dehydrogenase.

I remember from the chemistry class I failed in high school that -ase is a suffix that means something. I just can’t remember what. And let me tell you, listening to my brother talk about whatever he was talking about cleared up nothing in the suffix department. Or in any other department.
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Your spouse is always a partner in your business. Here’s how to make it work.

I stay up way too late at night running numbers for my new company. It’s incredible—me doing spreadsheets of financial projections—because I have dyscalculia, which means I was in special ed math and cannot do simple arithmetic, even now. But if you ask me how many people will take three or more seminars over the next four years, I can tell you the math I did to make that projection. Five-year projections come easily to me.

It’s just that I stay up all night doing it.

So when Matthew wakes me up to deal with pigs, the first thing I think is no. Not that I say no. He almost never asks for help with the animals, because I have no idea how to farm and we live next door to his parents, who have both been farming their whole lives, so of course when there is something important to do he asks them and not me.

Read more

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5 Things I was wrong about

These will be small, okay? Because on the big stuff, like divorce is for losers, I am right. But here is some stuff I was wrong on:

1. Get plastic surgery. I said that people should get it because good looking people earn more money. But in fact, plastic surgery doesn’t change what people think of you. If you were an 8 before surgery you’re an 8 after. The human eye can subconsciously adjust maybe – I’m not sure what it is. But I talked to Gordon Patzer , author of Looks, on the phone, and he assured me this is true. So don’t bother with the surgery. Just get botox so you don’t look tired.

2. Certifications are stupid. I really really think certifications are stupid. I tell everyone to not get them. Just get a job doing whatever you were thinking of getting certified to do. But, it turns out that PayScale has research to show that human resource certifications help. I don’t know what to make of this, except that LinkedIn has research to show that human resources attracts people who are most averse to risk. So it makes sense to me that people who are scared of risk would need to trust a certificate rather than their instincts when making a hiring decision. Read more

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Webinar: Reach your goals by blogging

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This webinar will show you how to use a blog to meet your goals. It includes five days of of video sessions and email-based course materials. You can purchase this workshop for anytime, on-demand access. The cost is $195.

Get access now.

The webinar people ask for most often is one about how to blog. So, here it is! By the end of the course, whatever your goals are for yourself or your company, you will know how to leverage a blog to meet them. I’ve been blogging for ten years and I have received hundreds of awards for my blog. I’ve also made about $300K a year from my blog for a long time, and that revenue is almost never from banner ads. I’ll show you creative ways to make money from blogging and creative ways to think about goals for your career that go far beyond how much money you make.

Here’s an outline of what we’ll cover: Read more

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