I told Melissa that black and white photos look stupid on my blog.
Did you know Melissa edits my photos? It started out that she lived with me, and she took all the photos. Her photos are gorgeous. When she moved out of my house I knew I couldn’t take pictures as well as she did, so I asked James Maher to take photos. He brought a gritty street photographer’s eye to the blog. Read more
This is a guest post by Cassie Boorn. She works with me at Quistic, and she blogs at cassieboorn.com.
We are packing up our trunk outside of a friend’s house when he approaches the car.
It was late at night. We’d spent all day at a funeral. We were so distracted that we didn’t even see him walking towards us.
We think it is a joke.
We are in a nice quiet neighborhood. This guy couldn’t possibly be mugging us right now.
He tells us to get in the car.
We see the gun.
Everyone is silent. Read more
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. Read more
This year I finally admitted I’m not the climb-my-way-to-the-top type I was when I first started writing. Probably this happened a long time ago, and I was in denial. After all, so much of my identity was wrapped up in being a higher performer.
But I look at the most popular posts of the last year, and I see the change.
I remember when my agent said she could get me a $100,000 book deal to write about Generation Y. I thought, “That’s not me. I’m not even part of Generation Y.” But it was me. I just didn’t see it.
And now I see that the most popular posts are about admitting that life is not turning out how I expected. I don’t have any posts in this list about being king of the hill. But I do have a lot of posts about coping with adjusted expectations. And, based on your comments, it seems like we are adjusting together. Thank you for doing that with me. Read more
It used to be that internships were just for college kids. But today, the internship is for anyone who wants to do work they have no track record for doing. The internship is learning ground and proving ground for any age. It’s true that kids in college absolutely must get work experience to be employable after college, and an internship is a good way to do that, at any age.
My favorite internship story is when my eight-year-old son got an internship as a stylist and found himself dressing a model.
People in their 30s get internships to make up for lost time in their 20s. And also to land hipster jobs that are impossibly hard to get—this internship at Versace, for example, went for $3200. That’s right. Some internships are so cool that you have to pay for them.
I’ve been an amazingly consistent blogger lately. My secret is that I’ve been calling Carmen a lot and dictating my posts to her.
In the middle of my blogging flurry, I read this book to my son, Flat Broke by Gary Paulsen. Its about this kid who can see businesses everywhere in all kinds of talents that other people have, and he ends up making money from all his friends.
Throughout the book I was thinking, “Oh my God, I have to do this with Carmen. I have to start selling her services because everyone can be a great blogger if they could dictate posts while they’re driving. Now all the people who are driving to and from work can now be big bloggers and love their commute too! Stay‑at‑home moms can do a blog post every time they drive to ballet lessons!”
So I pitched the idea to Carmen, except I didn’t tell Carmen about how the boy in the book pissed everyone off because he was making money from all the things they do, and he ended up with no friends and no money. Instead, I just told her that I thought I could sell her services as a court reporter. Read more
Whenever I write about grad school, someone writes in the comments about how I’m just bitter that I didn’t get a degree.
But what I’m really bitter about is that no one wanted to have sex with me. Some famous poet was a visiting professor, hitting on every grad student but me. And Leslie Epstein was there, who is not only king of the Jews but the father of Theo Epstein, a big name in baseball. Leslie said I’m the best sex writer he’s ever read. So why wasn’t he asking me for sex?
Probably because I’m the master of bad sex. There is no anal penetration that I cannot ruin with a piece of poop at the end of the paragraph.
So no one hit on me in grad school except maybe Susanna Kaysen. I was starving and homeless and she was getting movie deals that included Winona Ryder riders. And if I had not been so Aspergery I would have done anything to get her to edit my memoir – she is a master of the line edit. I’ll always worry that my memoir could have been edited better. Read more
For those of you who don’t remember, a film crew came for three days to make a demo reel for a reality show based on my family.
Here is the problem: we are too normal. I’m not kidding. That’s what the TV people ultimately concluded. But I take being too normal for reality TV as new-millennium Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
The other thing the TV people said was that listening to my coaching sessions was magical. Really. They said that. So I’m writing it for you again: magical. They filmed at our house for three days, which means they heard my side of a dozen calls, and in each case, they couldn’t believe how fast I could figure out the person’s problems and solve them. (And then, of course, I started doing that for the producer of the demo reel. That was a big hit.)
So there is probably not going to be a reality show based on my family. But the good news is that I’m going to focus on doing my own video podcast/reality show where I coach people. I am not totally sure how I’m going to execute that, so if you have ideas, please let me know.
And if you want to know how to specialize, this is the process. You think you’ll be great at one thing, but people tell you you’re great at something else, so do what people tell you you’re great at. Don’t fight it.
So somehow I’m going to be great at reality TV coaching. In the meantime, here is a peek into my too-normal-for-TV family.
This post is about productivity. I have to tell you that because this is a career blog and career blogs need topics that fall into the career space. You can’t have a blog that doesn’t have a topic. Even Mark Cuban, who seems to not have a topic because he writes about basketball and colleges and eating at the iHop still has a clear topic: How to make a ton of money.
1. Life is easier if you embrace hardship instead of trying to avoid it.
My blog topic is not how to make a ton of money. It used to be. When I was in my twenties, and early 30s, my focus was money. But somewhere I realized that I wanted an interesting life more than money. I think it was when I was at Ingram Micro, a Fortune 50 company, and I was blown away at how boring and risk averse everyone was. The Fortune 50 is a study is seeking safety in product lines, in workplace practices, and in a stable life. Read more
I took the kids to New York City for a week, and while Melissa was trying to figure out what to do with the kids for the day I was working, she came up with this idea that my seven-year-old son should do an internship with a stylist.
He wants to be a stylist. He talks about it all the time. And it’s hard for me because I’m so bad at dressing myself that he has actually reprimanded me: “Mom. That’s okay for the farm, but not for Boca Raton.” Read more