My first day of marriage counseling

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We have been together for fifteen years and we have two kids. We have been in couples therapy enough different times for me to know that I hate being in couples therapy with him because he never changes. It’s always been more productive for me to go to therapy alone, where at least I can get things done. But now we are desperate, so I’ve capitulated.

We park the car and walk into the building of the couples’ therapist. I remember one couples therapist telling us that we are in good shape because we drove there together. Today I know that we would have driven in separate cars if we had two cars.

I delegated finding a therapist to my husband. After all, my first book just came out and I blog almost every day. I am busy. I know my penchant for delegating is part of the problem, but I thought this would be one last hurrah.

We get to the office. The sign on the door says “Divorce Law Offices” and there is a list of people with Esq’s at the end.

I say, “We’re going to a divorce lawyer? I don’t want a divorce.”

“It’s Wisconsin,” he says, “It’s not like New York City where there are skyscrapers devoted to therapist offices.”

We see a mediator.

I start talking. I tell him we are not there to get a divorce. We’re there to keep our marriage together. Is there someone else we can see?

My husband says he’s thinking he might be there to get a divorce.

I see we are a parody of a couple who cannot communicate. When I was doing research for a column about divorce law, I talked with a lot of divorce lawyers, and each one said that so many divorces could be avoided if the people would talk. One attorney told me he helps one couple a month get back together, and that’s his favorite part of his job. I tell myself, based on this, that divorce lawyers are good at keeping marriages together because they see so many marriages fall apart.

We talk about our marriage. I think things are difficult because my husband gave up working to take care of our kids and it didn’t work out.

My husband thinks things got bad because taking care of our son who has autism is extremely difficult and we take it out on each other so we don’t take it out on him.

There is truth to what my husband says. Eighty percent of parents who have a child with autism get a divorce. But I don’t want to blame my failing marriage on my cute little five-year-old. Not that I don’t want someone to blame. I do. But I think it is more complicated than that.

I explain how my career is going great. I tell the mediator I have a busy speaking schedule and a six-figure contract for my next book. I even talk about my blog, and the estimated 450,000 page views a month, even though you can trust me on this: Our divorce mediator from Middleton, Wisconsin does not read blogs.

At this point, I think my husband is going to tell the mediator about how he gave up his career for the kids and me and he is totally disappointed. But instead he says to me, “A lot of people I talk with say that I am being abused by you.”

I am shocked. It’s a big allegation. But I say, “A lot of people I talk with think I should get rid of you.”

That’s as bad as it gets, right there. Because the mediator interjects and says that if you want to try to stay together for the kids, it’s worth it. He says, “The research shows divorce is very hard on kids, and especially kids under five.” But he adds, “You won’t be able to hold things together just to parent the kids. You will need some love for each other.”

I say quickly that I have that. It is easy for me to remember how much fun I had with my husband before we had kids. It’s easy for me to remember that every time I look-but-don’t-really-look for men to have an affair with, I find myself looking at someone who is like my husband: I still love him.

My husband is not so quick to say he still loves me.

So all I can do is think while he thinks. I think about the research about how a career does not make people happy. When you are in love and someone asks you how you are, you say, “I’m so happy” even if you are unemployed. When your career is going well and your marriage isn’t when someone asks you how you are you say, “My career is going great.”

The mediator starts talking about how the next step will be a contract to follow rules of engagement. “You have to start being nice to each other,” says the mediator. Right now that seems almost impossible.

We have to wait, though. My husband is deciding if he has any love for me.

He asks the mediator, “How do I know if it’s love?”

The mediator says, “If you care about her life, for right now, that’s enough.”

Finally my husband says to me, “I’m so sorry that life is not better for you when your career is going so well. You’ve worked so hard for this.”

The mediator nods. Next meeting we will move on to the rules of engagement.

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Letter to new graduates. And how about a braided career?

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Are you switching jobs every two years? Are you draining your savings to start companies with no business plan? Are you hiring a headhunter to find you a spouse? These are things you should be doing to find the success you’re looking for in the new workplace. Sure, they create instability, but what else are you going to do? Work for IBM until you get a gold watch?

The most important thing in your life is the people you love, so you need to figure out how to create a work life that will accommodate that. Do you love your dad? Tell your new boss that before you even start working, you need a week off for your dad’s birthday cruise. If your boss says no then thank goodness you learned ahead of time that you don’t want to work there. Do you love your girlfriend? Pack your sleeping bag and follow her to Costa Rica to save a village. You can get a job saving the rain forest, or, better yet, spend the six months making a plan for how you two are going to do shared-care parenting.

The best way to make sure you will have time and money to create the life you want is to have what I am going to start calling a braided career. Intertwine the needs of the people you love, with the work you are doing, and the work you are planning to do, when it’s time for a switch. This way, when you run out of money you can get a corporate job for a year. If life as a stay-at-home mom is unfulfilling, you can start a side business from the cafe on the corner. If your COBRA runs out, you can get a hard-core job that involves a lot of travel, pick up the free miles and the international experience and once you’ve earned the ability to do COBRA again, take a trip around the world with a backpack and sleeping bag. And don’t forget to use those upgrade miles. Who says you can’t store a sleeping bag in the first-class cabin?

Does this sound unstable to you? It’s not. The voice inside your head that’s screaming about instability is your mom’s. She’s saying, “I lived through the feminist movement so you can quit your job to follow your boyfriend? I didn’t raise you to do that.” The voice inside your head is your dad’s saying, “You want to have fun? You have one minute’s worth of experience. Who’s going to pay you to have fun?” And, unfortunately, the voices might also be at your dinner table, because you might also be living with your mom and dad.

But tune them out. Because you’re on the right track. And really, it’s a track. It feels like you’re all over the place, it feels like you have no plan, it feels like you’re always about to spend your last cent. But you are learning to create stability through transition. You can become a master of transition and you are achieve the thing you want most: A work life that supports the values you hold dear – time, family, friends, community, passion, and fun.

So look, this is what you need to do. You need to stop thinking that the transitions are going to end as soon as you grow up. This is not reality talking, this is your uncle talking — to your dad to console him that you just quit grad school. What is going to end is the bad feeling about transitions. You’re going to get great at them because you are not the first person to have a quarterlife crisis. You’re not the first person to quit a traveling sales job so you’ll be home to have sex when you’re ovulating. You’re not the first person to run out of money and have to take a 70-hour a week corporate job – for awhile, just to catch up on bills. Lots of people are making these sorts of decisions, and they’re great decisions, in the context of good transition skills, and a good understanding of the new, braided career.

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New financial data highlights generational rifts

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A group of think tanks, lead by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that for the first time, men in their 30s are earning less than their parents. For the first time ever, this generation will not be more well-off financially than their parents. What should we make of this new finding? Does this mean the American Dream is no longer attainable?

Probably not. Because this statistic is just a magnified section of a much larger picture — of the great generational shift taking place in America since Generation X became adults.

The shift is in the definition of the American Dream. Our dream is about time, not money. No generation wants to live with financial instability. And we are no exception. But finances alone do not define someone’s American Dream. Especially when our dream is about how we spend our time.

Those who are magnifying a different part of the picture of this generational shift will tell you that what defines it is the inability of corporate American to keep generation Y from quitting their jobs.

The best of Generation X and Y are slow to move into the work force and quick to leave it. According to the department of labor, people in their 20s change jobs, on average, every two years. And Generation X is shifting in and out of the workplace in order to spend more time with kids. It’s costing companies a lot of money, and they’re paying millions of dollars a year in consulting fees to figure out how to decrease turnover.

There are many reasons for high turnover, but the most fundamental one is that baby boomers have set up a work place that uses financial bribes to get people to give up their time: Work sixty hours a week and we’ll pay you six figures. Generation Y will not have this. To hold out money as a carrot is insulting to a generation raised to think personal development is the holy grail of time spent well.

Baby boomers are also baffled by women who grow large careers in their 20s and then dump them in order to spend time with kids. Newsflash: Generation X values their family more than their money. Our American Dream is not about buying a big house, our dream is about keeping a family together. You can tell a lot about values by the terms that are coined. When baby boomers were raising kids they invented the term latchkey kid and yuppie we invented the terms shared care and stay-at-home-dad. The divorce rate for baby boomers was higher than any other generation. We can afford to have less money because most of us don’t need to fund two separate households.

The positive psychology movement has taken a large hold among those in generation X and Y. We are convinced that money does not buy happiness, and this conviction is rooted in hard science. More than 150 universities offer courses in positive psychology. It’s the most popular class among Harvard undergrads.

Our dreams are tied to time. So it’s no surprise that many of the most popular blogs offer tips for time management. And topics like productivity are favorites among hipsters who know that “getting things done” (GTD in blog-speak) is the key to having a fulfilling life. And believe me, GTD doesn’t take money, it takes massive respect for one’s time.

The new American dream is that we will have fulfilling work that leaves plenty of time for the other things in life we love. In this respect, Generation X is doing better than our parents: We are spending more time with our kids, and we are keeping our marriages together more than twice as effectively as our parents did. And Generation Y is doing better than their parents, too: They refuse to waste their time on meaningless entry level work because they value their time and their ability to grow more than that.

The new American dream is about time. It’s not a race to earn the most to buy the biggest. It’s a dream of personal growth and quality relationships. And, despite the declarations coming from Pew about unreachable dreams, our dream is not about accumulating money to do what we love at the end. We are hell-bent on doing what we love the whole way. That’s our dream, and we’re doing it better than the baby boomers ever did.

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Coachology: Train yourself to be happier

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Advice for getting happier: Instead of focusing on what’s wrong with people, try focusing on what’s right with people -what makes people happy, successful and more productive. This is what the positive psychologists do.

Senia Maymin (pronounced Sen-ya) has a master’s degree in applied positive psychology. What this means is that she uses the science of happiness to help people make their lives better. She divides what we know about happiness into five categories, and she explains how we can make headway in each one of them in order to improve our lives.

1. Increase our positive thinking.
The key to thinking positively is being optimistic. The way you determine if you are optimistic or pessimistic is how you explain things. When the copy machine doesn’t work, is the world out to get you? Do all copy machines never work ever? Or is this something that sometimes happens and you can deal with it by calling a repair person?

You can teach yourself to be more optimistic by teaching yourself to reframe situations by telling different stories. The stories we tell shape how we see the world. If you tell stories about your ability to get what you want then you are more likely to believe you can do it. As super-optimist (and radio host) Karen Salmansohn says, “You can take your story of woe and turn it into a story of wow.”

2. Increase your positive emotions.
When you are feeling good, you can come up with more solutions to your problems. So the world looks more like something you can affect to get what you want. The less positive you are feeling, the fewer possibilities you see for creating success.

Also, if you have practice feeling positive, then when bad things happen you are accustomed to going to a wide solution space, so you will go there reflexively. This means you’ll get out of a bad spot faster and more effectively.

One way to increase positive feelings is to write a list of things you’re grateful for every night before you go to bed. Doing this actually changes how you think.

3. Increase your authenticity and your strength.
It’s very hard to figure out what you’re really good at. And by the time most of us figure out what we are good at we think it’s too late to change what we’re doing. So we just sort of pretend that we are doing what we are really good at.

Don’t do that. You’ll be happier if you are true to your strengths. To figure out what you are best at try taking the strengths assessment at the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center or try taking the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator.

And then believe the results. Act on them. Don’t make excuses for why you can continue doing something you’re not great at.

4. Increase your positive choices and decisions
First of all, having more choices does not make us happier. In fact it makes the decision making process less positive because we spend too much time obsessing over what we should do. An example of this is that you don’t need 15 Chinese restaurants to choose from in order to have a nice night out eating Chinese food.

Another way to think about choices is that if you train yourself how to be at decision points, then you can simplify your life in a way that makes you choose better. Take going to the gym. If you tell yourself there is no choice but go to the gym then there is not a huge process of deciding what is most important each evening after work.

Telling stories helps here, too. If you remind yourself of all the bad things that happened with a bad decision then you will less likely to feel that that is a decision point going forward. Example of what works: The French government puts gruesome photos of car accidents on billboards to get people to wear seatbelts.

5. Increase positive habits.
If you do one positive thing in your life, there is spillover into other aspects of your life. In the big picture, this can explain why if you are living in poverty and you enter into a loving relationship you are likely to get out of poverty.

In a study by Roy Baumeister, college students who were asked to take better care of their finances for a few weeks found that they unexpectedly also found themselves going to the gym more often, eating better, and getting better grades.

But you should remove temptation, because you can only withstand it so many times before it wears you down. This means you should get the m&m’s off your desk.

Creating one positive habit encourages you to live your life more consciously and more positively all around.

I loved talking with Senia about this. At the end of a half-hour conversation, I swear I am living my life more positively because of the tools she was able to give me in so short a time. Fortunately, Senia is doing Coachology this week, so someone is going to get to work with her for free, for 90 minutes.

Here is the best candidate to work with Senia; she focuses on entrepreneurs and career changers: You should be a high-achiever, because the person who is most successful in self-discipline and self-control is the person who is in the best position to apply positive psychology research on their life. You should also be ready to make a big change in your work life in order to increase your happiness. Senia can help you do this.

Send three sentences to me about why you want to work with Senia, and she’ll pick someone. Please send the email by Monday, May 28.

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Coachology: Finally, the men place high value on personal life. Get on the bandwagon

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The biggest difference between the workplace today and the workplace twenty years ago is where the friction is. It used to be that the frontier of workplace change was feminism. Today it is time.

Women pushed for equal opportunity, equal pay, equal respect at home. Men pushed to hold their ground, hold their sense of self, hold their vision of what work is like. It was men against women. Baby boomers like Sylvia Hewlett and Leslie Bennetts cannot stop fighting this fight, and the media helps them. But these are old, outdated baby boomer tropes.

Today men and women have shared goals: More time for family and friends, and more respect for personal growth at work for everyone, not just the high-ranking or the hardest-working. We are at a shift. The majority of men under thirty say they are willing to give up pay and power to spend time with kids, according to Phyllis Moen, sociologist at University of Minnesota.

My favorite story about this shift is about the publishing of the book, The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke. My agent represented that book. She tells me that it was initially geared toward women, and men were outraged that people would call the infringement of work on home life a women’s issue. So at the last minute, they shifted the target of the book to include men.

If Generation Y has made its mark as entrepreneurs, Generation X has made its mark by valuing family. Both men and women in this generation are scaling back work to take care of family. And we’re doing it at precisely the time in life when baby boomers were inventing the word Yuppie and Latchkey Kid.

Generation X and Y are valuing time in a new way: we are trading money for time. Baby boomers assumed they would get a lot of money and then buy time at the end – their retirement. We want time now, and we’re willing to give up a lot to get it.

These are hard decisions to make, though. And there’s huge structural pushback in the workplace. The same way that women had to figure out how to change the workplace to accommodate them twenty years ago, men and women today have to figure out how to restructure the workplace to accommodate their personal time.

Women get guidance all the time for how to make the decisions, but the discussion is more muted for men. The way that I usually contribute to that male half of the discussion is through my husband, who has given up a lot to take care of our kids and can’t really figure how to get back on track.

But today I also want to add David Bohl to the discussion. He is a career coach who specializes in helping people create well-balanced, fulfilled lives and lifestyles. He focuses on the topics you’d expect – productivity, aligning values and setting priorities.

I liked him immediately when we started emailing because he is living the life he talks about in his coaching – that is, he adjusted his work to accommodate his personal life, and is always thinking about how to make this lifestyle work better. It’s a hard shift, especially for men, so I appreciate that he’s already done it, and now he is helping others make the shift in the American dream from focusing on money to focusing on time.

If you want to work with David for 90 minutes, for free. Send an email to me about why you think he’d be a good fit for you. The deadline is Sunday, May 20.

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Twentysomething: Constantly laying groundwork for the next career move

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By Ryan Healy — A question I have been thinking about for months is, what is more beneficial to a young person’s career; putting in the extra time to do great work for a company that undervalues them, or finding a hobby that will positively contribute to the career they hope to have in the long run?

For me, the answer is the latter. Until I find the perfect career that I yearn for, I will keep searching for areas that interest me outside of work. Searching requires time and effort outside of work, but my career is my personal responsibility, so I refuse to rely solely on a company to develop the skills necessary to become successful in the business world.

When I first started out in the corporate world I listened to all of the typical corporate advice. I networked within my company as much as I could. I tried my best to do amazing work to prove myself to my managers. I stayed around the office until my superiors went home. I did everything in my power to get noticed within the company. And of course, I sucked up to every bigwig I happened to meet.

Wow was I wrong. Listening to this advice and doing all of these things probably are really good for my career — if I want to go to the corner office. But working 20 years to make it to the corner office is the last thing on my mind right now, and statistics show that I probably won’t even stick around long enough to make it the corner cubicle.

So I’ve decided to work hard and participate in some of the office politics. But I’m going to devote a large portion of my time to a new hobby that will probably be more valuable to my career in the long run– blogging.

Most of my friends don’t love their jobs and aren’t sure what they want to do. Of course, many of them just go through the motions at work and relish in their “play time,” which is completely respectable; but some of my most motivated friends are trying to find their next hobby that could spark a great career.

My girlfriend Niki really wants to help children with disabilities. So she wrote some emails and made some calls to local learning centers. Two days later she had leads on multiple volunteer opportunities. Niki found a new hobby that allows her to test the waters in her new field of interest and potential career.

My friend and blog partner Ryan Paugh is teaching himself about web design and plans to take a class to improve his skills. Ryan knows that working hard and networking at his current writing job can be somewhat beneficial to his career. But his new web interest will probably do more for his career in the long run.

One of my friends spends his free time writing screen plays for a potential future in the movie business. Another friend is so bored with work that he decided to take advantage of downtime at work and he’s learning Spanish.

Investing all of your energy into a corporate job is extremely limiting. If I love my current line of work and want to climb the corporate ladder all the way to the top, then making the right contacts, waiting around the office for my supervisor to leave and sucking up to the bigwigs might be the best career move. But my current work probably isn’t what I will do for the rest of my life, and anyway there is always a risk of being fired. So I will do good work, network a little, and put the rest of my energy into a hobby that just might take me where I really want to go.

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Twentysomething: Paychecks are boring

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By Ryan Healy — Unless you are a professional athlete or working on Wall Street, an entry-level salary is not very exciting. When you couple this with the fact that the average college student graduates with tens of thousands in student loan and credit card debt and the cost of renting a place in any major city is an absolute rip off, a paycheck does not go very far. If I am paying an arm and a leg just to have a roof over my head and pay back an education that wasn’t exactly optional, how can I possibly save any decent amount of money? Realistically, I can’t. But that is alright.

If I stay in the corporate world, the paychecks will keep coming, I will pay down debt, I will pay my rent and I will spend the majority of the rest on food, entertainment and happy hours. The remainder will go to savings. One thing I will not waste my money on is “stuff.” Nothing bothers me more than seeing people living in houses above their means and driving cars they can’t afford.

I am not foolish enough to believe a paycheck will ever make me rich. The only reason I get excited about a 3% raise is because of what it represents; my hard work. The increase in money is barely noticeable and will disappear into my 3% lifestyle increase. Sure, I could invest that 3% in stocks, mutual funds or better yet an IRA, but what exactly am I saving for?

It’s a forgone conclusion that I will never retire, and anyone my age who believes they will, is mistaken. First of all, by the time I have children to send off to college, the average tuition will probably be around $100,000 a year. If I have “2.5 kids” that is $1 million dollars out of my pocket (or more realistically out of loans). Even if I deprive myself of vacations, entertainment and fun to save throughout my twenties, I can’t possibly save enough money to retire.

I can’t imagine what I would do if I ever did retire. Sure you may be thinking that I’m barely out of college and wouldn’t be saying this if I had been working for 10 or 20 years. But this is exactly why I am so desperate to find meaning and happiness out of work, rather than just a paycheck.

I guess if the end goal is riding off into the sunset and retiring, then you can put up with a boring, well paid job for 30 years (I guess). This is not my end goal. I would rather find fulfillment in a job that gives me flexible hours and is accommodating to my lifestyle.

Of course, if I am lucky enough to make it to my golden years, I will cut back on the amount I work and supplement my smaller income with the earnings from the smart investments I made along the way. But I certainly won’t be moving south to sit around and do nothing for the last ten years of my life.

The way I see it my life will turn out one of two ways.

1. I will get lucky somewhere along the way and strike it rich. I will pay for my kids’ education, I will buy a moderate house and moderate cars and I will make smart investments for the future. I will use the money to make a difference in one way or another. I will be happy.

2. I will find meaningful, fulfilling jobs with decent salaries or start a mildly successful business. My kids will take out loans for their education, I will buy a moderate house and moderate cars and I will continue to work and invest a reasonable amount. I will donate my time rather than my money to make a difference in one way or another. I will be happy.

Before you assume I am a naïve kid, who needs some financial education, keep in mind, I have a degree in accounting and finance and I regularly read financial books, magazines, newspapers and blogs. Despite all of this, I have come to the conclusion that life is too short to spend worrying about how much money is in my bank account. I will not chase a paycheck.

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Coachology: Knowing when to stop and hear the music

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There is room to be true to yourself within the framework of a career. Today we have so many options that when we are not being true to ourselves we cannot really blame the system. We make our own choices and create our own lives.

It’s very hard to know what we want, though. So often our priorities get sucked up into a blender and spit out as a smoothie. I am having this problem right now with going to the gym. I was already just barely holding things together having added the blog on top of what I normally do for work. And now I’m adding promoting a book.

So it seemed really smart, one night, to skip going to the gym. I got so much done. Then it was four nights. And now I’m at that stage where I am so used to not going to the gym that the smell in the locker room is going to bug me. But going to the gym doesn’t just change my abs, it changes my mind and my heart, and it really disappoints me that I’ve let things get to this point.

So it makes sense that I was really touched by an article in the Washington Post by Gene Weingarten, Pearls Before Breakfast. With a genius combination of multimedia and journalism, The Post did an experiment with the world-famous violinist Josh Bell. He went to the subway in morning rush hour, unannounced, and he played classical music on his million-dollar Stradivarius violin, and left the case open for people to drop dollars. The Post documented the event on video.

When Bell plays in a concert hall he makes $1,000 a minute. Here’s how much money he made in the subway: $32.

Clearly, not everyone knew they were hearing something special. And it’s interesting to read Bell’s candid discussion of what it feels like to be ignored when he has been the focus of adoring fans since he was a young boy.

But the part of this piece that really gets me is the video of a commuter who clearly knows this music is special, but he looks at his watch, and he has to decide to stay or leave. It captures every issue on the earth for me right now: How to measure what is important minute by minute.

I am certain about what really matters: Love, kindness, relationships, respect. But let me tell you something, those issues are not on the table 90% of the time. It’s usually a way more complicated decision about how to spend my time, which is really adding up to how to spend my life. I have thought a lot about if I would have stopped to hear the music in the subway. The answer is that it depends on a lot of outside, mundane time factors. Like, did I need to run an errand before work.

This week’s Coachology is about getting help figuring out how much time you should pay attention to the music. We all have music playing inside of us, and we all make decisions about how much to listen. Some of us have actually made it so we don’t hear the music at all: There is no passion.

Peter Vajda is a career coach with decades of experience who is great when it comes to helping people match their work life with their values and their passions. Peter would be a good match for someone who feels like their work needs more meaning but they don’t know what to do about it. If this is you, send me three sentences about what you’d like to get from 90 free minutes with Peter. The deadline is midnight on April 15.

Hat tip: Ben from Amver.

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Beware: Incoming poem

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My friend Dylan sent me a warning that poetry can ruin your career.

But before I knew that, when I was a blogging beginner with no idea what to post, I posted workplace Haikus. And my career was not ruined. So here’s another poem, from my friend Ben:

Employed

She just wants to be employed
for eight hours a day. She is not
interested in a career; she wants a job
with a paycheck and free parking. She
does not want to carry a briefcase filled with important papers to read
after dinner; she does not want to return phone calls. When she gets home,
she wants to kick off her shoes and waltz around her kitchen singing, “I am
a piece of work.”

by Beverly Rollwagen, from She Just Wants

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The connection between a good job and happiness is overrated

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One of my favorite topics is the science of happiness, which academia calls positive psychology. I love this topic because most of us think of our careers in terms of happiness. That is, we look for work that makes us happy. Positive psychology turns this hunt into a science. And then tells us to look elsewhere for happiness.

I was talking to Richard Florida, about his current research, which blends positive psychology and economic development, and he summarized what I have read in many other places as well: “Your level of optimism and quality of relationships impact your level of happiness more than your job does.” What this means is that asking a job to solve our unhappiness problems is asking too much of a job.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to focus on optimism and relationships so that we don’t feel so much pressure choosing our jobs. To this end, I was excited to see three different introductions to the psychology of happiness in the last month.

The New York Times magazine ran a long summary of the positive psycholgoy movement, titled Happiness 101 (subscription). For those of you who don’t know much about this movement, the article is a good primer.

Martin Seligman, founder of the movement and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, says, “Postive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity.”

This is not small stuff, but it’s the stuff that is scientifically proven to lead to a happy life. So when you think about what job to take, realize that this list of things that affect your sense of well-being is not overwhelmingly connected to the idea of doing what you love at work.

One of the most interesting parts of the article is where Daniel Gilbert, the man whose book on this topic was a bestseller, disses the movement as cultish, “I just wish it didn’t look so much like religion,” he says.

It does look like religion, because positive psychology promotes things religion promotes, like showing gratitude at the end of each day. But really, what this tells us is that the things that make us happy are much more basic than doing interesting work with interesting people.

Sonja Lyubomirsky says being happy comes from the way we think at our very core – and that thinking shapes the work we do. Not the other way around.

The Economist jumps on the positive psychology bandwagon in the article, “Economics Discovers Its Feelings.” This report contains some very practical advice. For example:

The traits of work that makes someone happy:
1. stretches a person without defeating him
2. provides clear goals
3. provides unambiguous feedback
4. provides a sense of control

But don’t panic if you can’t find a job like this, because when these traits do not exist in a job, people will often figure out how to add them back in and give the job meaning in their lives. For example, “hairdressers often see themselves as the confidants of clients they like, and they will fire clients they don’t…And there are janitors at a hospital who held patients’ hands, brightening their day as well as scrubbing their rooms.”

Before you smirk at this rationalizing behavior, realize that Gilbert says it actually does create genuine happiness in a job. Check out this video of Gilbert speaking at the TED Conference (thanks, Dennis). Gilbert’s a fun speaker, so it’s worth watching the whole twenty minutes.

Gilbert also says that even if things are not going well, humans have a deep ability to make ourselves think they’re going well. Which is why Gilbert told me that people should not ask other people if they like their jobs, because almost everyone says they do and it has no bearing on how good the job it is.

However he says that this rejiggered feeling of happiness is just as deep and good a feeling as the happiness when something really is going very well.

One of his pet topics is that what we think will make us happy rarely does. (When I spoke with him he told me this is the reason we should not sit at home and try to guess what career to pick, but instead we should just get off the chair and start trying stuff.)

Gilbert’s research shows that while we think being a paraplegic would be very bad and winning the lottery would be very good, three months after the event, neither really affects your happiness. And this goes back to happiness being a result of how we think at our very core — what Seligman calls our level of optimism. (If you are not buying this, watch the video.)

So you don’t have to make yourself crazy about finding the perfect job. All that stuff about how you need to find a job that you love is overstated. “Some people don’t seek fulfillment through their work and are still happy in life. All options are legitimate and possible,” says Amy Wrzesniewski professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

You need to find a job that meets those four basic standards for a decent job. But our brain is hard-wired to figure out how to enjoy it once you get there. So maybe you can lighten up about choosing your next job. There’s good research to show that a wide range of jobs can accommodate you in a way where you can find happiness. And there’s good research to show that finding “the perfect” job will not be the thing to make you happy.

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