Create your own unemployment insurance

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Unemployment is traumatic, and people who have been there never shake the fear of going back. If you've spent five months job-hunting (an average amount of time) you have probably faced worry, uncertainty and financial desperation.

Here are some things you can do while you are employed so that next time you're looking for work, the task is much, much easier:

Save money
The worst job hunt experiences are when you have to take the first job you get because you are risking financial ruin. If you save money when you are employed you'll be able to be a lot more picky when you're looking for a new job. Almost everyone is desperate when they are unemployed, and one of the hardest things to do in an interview is act self-confident when you're feeling down. This task if even harder if you're going to be out on the street in three weeks.

Also, unemployment gives you lots of time but little money to spend. If you have some savings you'll be able to enjoy the time you have when you're not working. After all, you can't job hunt all day every day — it would make you crazy.

Network
This isn't something you do when you need a job. It's something you do when you have one, when you're feeling confident. If you are good at making connections with people, and you do it regularly, then people will be there to help you when you need a job. If you contact people only when you need help you are not a networker, you are a sponge.

You don't need to be friends with everyone, but you need to have some real friends. Note that friends are not people you go out drinking with occasionally. Friends are people you are very honest and forthcoming with, and people who depend on you. When it comes time to get help, it's not the people you're friends with who will help — they have the same information that you do. It's the friends of friends who will help. And they don't come by way of superficial connections.

Focus on achievements
Your resume is what gets you an interview. Even if you are using connections from your network, sooner or later, someone will say, “Send me your resume and I'll take a look.” Your resume should have a few, huge achievements that the rest of the lines are built around. When you are gainfully employed, look for opportunities to create these achievements.

This means being selective in what projects you take on. Projects that are going to do very little for your resume should not take up a lot of your time — do them as quickly as possible and move on. Projects that will give you the chance to highlight grand and quantifiable results on your resume are projects you should be willing to volunteer for. These projects are worth working late nights, taking on huge risk, and working with people you hate.

On a well-crafted resume, one line of greatness can cut months off your unemployment suffering.

Be creative
The jobs that are staying in the US feature some form of creativity — from troubleshooting, to management to strategy. Hone your skills as a creative thinker so that you can sell yourself that way next time you need to find a job.

So many people who are in non-creative jobs tell me that they are creative and their job is safe from off-shoring. They are delusional. Here's a test to give yourself:
Do you come up with new product ideas or features?
Does set up intra-departmental process?
Do you work face-to-face with other people all day?

If you answered no to all three questions think hard about how to make your job more creative and people-oriented so that you can find a new job without moving to India.

The good news is that each of these recommendations will improve your career. Your work will be more interesting and you will bring more joy to your job and the people you meet. The added benefit is that you will have it easier next time you are unemployed, which means a little less worrying now.

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6 most violated resume writing rules

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This is the problem with the resume-writing world: Everyone thinks they're an exception to the rules. Everyone thinks they can pick and choose which rules are important. Do not do this. Until you work in human resources and personally scan 300 resumes a day, you are in no position to discard rules of resume writing. Here are the six most violated rules among the resumes that people send to me to review:

1. One page. The job of a resume is to get you an interview, not get you a job. A hiring manager has to sift through a pile of resumes to figure out which person to interview. Each resume gets about a ten-second look. If you think you need a longer resume, give someone one page of your resume and have them look at it for ten seconds. Ask them what they remember; it won't be much. They are not going to remember any more information in ten seconds if you give them two pages to look at; ten seconds is ten seconds.

2. Ditch the line about references on request. It's implied. Of course, if someone wants a reference, you will give one. No one presumes that you will not. So when you write that you will provide a reference you seem to not understand how the game is played. (Bonus tip: If you have an excellent reference, like a CEO of a Fortune 500 company who vacations with your Mom, have the reference call before you even go to the interview. Sets the tone for the employer to think you are amazing.)

3. Tread lightly on the personal interests line. Your personal interests are not there to make you look interesting. They are there to get you an interview. Every line on your resume is there to get you an interview. So only list personal interests that reveal a quality that will help you meet the employer's needs. If you are in sports marketing, then by all means, list that you kayak. If you were an Olympic athlete, put it down because it shows focus and achievement. If you are a mediocre hobbyist, leave it off. Personal interests that don't make you stand out as an achiever do not help you. And personal interests that are weird make you look weird and you don't know if your interviewer likes weird or not, so leave weird off the resume.

4. You must list achievements, not job duties. Anyone can do a job. Achievements show you did the job well. Past performance is the best indicator of future performance, so don't let someone think you just showed up for your last job and didn't do it well. It's very hard to see your achievements from the trenches; you might think you did not have achievements because your boss doesn't ask you to do achievements, your boss asks you to do tasks and projects. But you need to recognize that you do not see achievements and ask for help to see them. A resume coach, or even a friend, can help you to see them more clearly.

5. Don't be a designer unless you are. If you have more than three fonts on your resume and you're not a designer, I can promise you that you've botched the layout. If design were easy, no one would get paid for it. Recognize your strengths and keep design elements to the bare minimum. And please, save Photoshop for cards to your mom: Just because you know how to use the shading tools doesn't mean you know how to use them well.

6. List your most recent job first. Chronological order is only a good idea if you are looking to get hired to go back in time. Otherwise you look like you're bucking resume writing convention in order to hide something, which you probably are, but you have to do it with a better sleight of hand than that.

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8 steps to a perfect cover letter

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Most cover letters are addressed to people you don't know, so let's just stop referring to them as cover letters since what they really are is sales letters. You are trying to sell yourself to a stranger.

The best way to think about this letter is in terms of direct mail, so pay attention to the well-funded, unsolicited offers you find at your doorstep. Many of those envelopes have been created by the finest writers in the direct mail business.

Here are eight rules from the direct mail experts that should guide your cover letter writing:

1. Open with a bang.
This is the line I used to write: “I am writing to apply for the position you advertised blah blah blah.” But DUH, of course you are writing to get a job. Why else does anyone write a cover letter? So use your first line to sell yourself and make yourself stand out. For example, “I think your company can use my exceptional sales skills and ten years of experience in your industry.”

2. Be clear about your purpose.
Your cover letter is the introduction to your resume. If your cover letter is longer than a page then it is likely longer than your resume, and who ever heard of an introduction that is longer than the main event? Also, write a separate letter for each job, because each sentence of your cover letter should be specifically relevant to the job at hand.

3. Use your time wisely.
A hiring manager spends ten seconds on a resume to decide if she'll reject it or not. This ten seconds includes your cover letter. Don't let your cover letter waste your ten seconds. The rule of a resume is that every single line of the resume sells you. This is true of the cover letter, too. In fact, it's shorter, so it should sell with more punch. Every sentence of the cover letter should give a specific reason for hiring you because you never know which sentence will catch the reader's eye during your precious ten seconds.

4. Format strategically.
Bullets work well in a cover letter to highlight your relevant achievements immediately. Odd numbers of bullets are proven to be easier to read than even numbers, so use either three or five. Seven is too many — the list will look so long that people will skip it.

5. Tell the reader the next step.
A cover letter introduces a resume and the point of the resume is to get an interview. So in the cover letter say flat out that you want a phone call or an email, because that's how someone sets up an interview. This call to action makes a nice last paragraph.

6. Say it, and then say it again.
Put your email address and phone number at the top of the letter, and on the bottom, too. The hiring manager should not have to hunt for your contact info because each second of that hunt is a second the person could change her mind about calling.

7. Come back to it.
If you copy and pasted and have the wrong company name in your opening sentence Spellcheck won't catch it and probably neither will you because it's very hard to catch errors when you've been rewriting the same letter for an hour. So come back to the letter in two hours, proofread, and then send. You'll be amazed and grateful at the errors you catch.

8. Follow up
You have to. I know it is a discouraging call to make because the odds are that you won't get through to a real person. And if you do get through to a real person he will give you no information. But there is a very slim chance that you will get someone on the phone who will take a good look at your resume just because you called, and that will get you the interview. That's why you need to make the call — because it just might work. Besides, picking up the phone is a lot easier than finding another job opening and writing another cover letter.

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The art of silence in an interview: 3 things to not say

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Preparation for an interview should include preparing to be silent. An interview is a sales call, not a chat session. So you shouldn't answer every question you get. Sometimes, you need to give a non-answer. This might feel a little weird to you, especially if you're a genuinely honest person. But remember that in most cases, not answering is not dishonest, it's just smart. Here are three areas of questioning that you should skirt.

1. Don't talk about the hunt. Everyone wants to hire a superstar. And superstars do not have to go through a big job hunt — the jobs come to them. So you devalue yourself by discussing your exhaustive hunt, and how long it's taken, how sick of it you are, etc. Hunting for a job is not a position of power. It is situation of neediness.

A way around this topic is to focus on how many interesting things you are doing while you are unemployed. Or, if you still have a job, talk about how much you love your current job and that you only interviewed for this position because it is such an incredibly perfect match for you and the company. Goal: Keep the focus on how happy and involved you are. Those are the kind of people companies want to hire.

2. Don't give a number when negotiating salary. You will never gain anything by giving the first number in salary negotiations. If the person asks you how much you make, how much you want to make, what ballpark you expect, etc., your best response is a non-response. If you give a number that is lower than they expected, then that's what you'll get. If you give a number that's higher than they expected, they'll tell you.

In order to successfully avoid saying a number, you need to be ready with other things to say. A good start is saying you'd like to know the range the position pays. If they keep pressing you, say you think your salary history is not relevant because this is a different job. In the end, you might have to say flat out that you're not going to give a number. Someone who has pressed you very hard for a number will respect this answer — after all, no one presses this hard unless he understands that knowing a number gives them a huge advantage.

3. Don't say you want reasonable hours. Ninety percent of the world will tell you they respect that request. Twenty percent of the world will, in fact, be able to accommodate that. So instead of talking about reasonable hours, observe the office to see the hours people keep.

People who have no respect for reasonable hours will make that clear in an interview. Either by announcing it, or by doing something like scheduling the interview for the middle of the day on Saturday. If you have to make a point of reasonable hours in the interview then you're probably in trouble. If the office culture is long hours, then even if they tell you that you can go home at 6pm, you will be marginalized among workaholics.

But while you're concentrating on keeping your mouth shut, remember also that you have to talk in order to be likeable. It's important to be yourself in an interview. You need to trust that your true self is likeable, and you need to let that self show through. So don't talk about things that will make you look unemployable, but don't be so uptight about what you say that you can't be yourself. Being your likeable self is what will get you the job.

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How to job hunt when you’re pregnant

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I am pregnant. Due on June 21.

The last time I had a baby was not a great moment in the history of gender discrimination in America. For one thing, as soon as I announced I was pregnant, my editor at a business magazine fired me and recommended that I “try writing for women's magazines.”

I also got laid off from my corporate job right before I got pregnant, so I found myself job hunting when I was five months along. No one mentioned the pregnancy in the interviews, (after all, it would be illegal,) but I gave new meaning to “the elephant in the room.” And why, really, would anyone hire a pregnant woman when there surely are other qualified people who would not take maternity leave?

What I learned from that pregnancy was that there is no good time in one's career to get pregnant because there are so many things you cannot control.

But there are some things you can control, and this pregnancy I have tried to do better planning. For one thing, I have set up my life so that I can work at my home while I eat ice cream, and wear maternity pants that look like pajamas. And I thought I was a genius during my book auction when I went from publisher to publisher hiding a three-month pregnancy under a very-hip poncho, selling myself as an author who could get the book written quickly: “By June 1st” I'd say. And the publishers always said, “Great.” No one said, “Why? Are you pregnant?”

I finally told my agent about the pregnancy right before I accepted the winning bid. “I want to make sure I'm not doing anything dishonest by hiding the pregnancy,” I told her.

Before I tell you what my agent said, let me just say that I would never advise anyone to tell a perspective employer about a pregnancy. You are under no legal obligation to disclose this information. And it can only hurt you, so employers are insane to think anyone would disclose until negotiations are done.

That said, more than one woman has written to me that she feels guilty hiding the information. And I have to admit that I had that guilt, too.

But my agent said, “By all means, don't tell anyone yet!” She said, “Congratulations!” and “You have a right to get pregnant and work too!” I loved my agent as much for her reaction to my pregnancy as I did for her selling my book.

Then reality set in. A TV agent wants to represent me, but he can't work with me until I'm not pregnant. He doesn't want to tell me this himself, so my agent tells me.
“In July?” I ask.
“No,” she says, “When you lose the weight.”

I've gained 40 pounds and I'm not even done. And yes, it's my own fault. I admit it. I have not counted a calorie since the second month. But here's my point. Pregnancy is always a problem in a career, no matter where you are, no matter how much you plan.

The best thing I did this time, though, was to get myself into a situation where I would not be fired for being pregnant (yes, it's illegal, but it happens all the time). I also set up my life so that I can take things as slowly as I want to after the pregnancy. (The cost, of course, is that my family is taking a huge financial hit. But at least we have our sanity.)

For those of you who are trying to plan, flexibility is important. The more flexibility you have the better. But it's the kind of thing you have to build into a career way before the day you conceive. Essentially, I have been planning my current pregnancy ever since I got pregnant the first time, three years ago, and saw that starting a plan in the first month is about two years too late.

Pregnancy planning for careerists should begin before you even have a partner, let alone conceive. But most of the women who contact me about pregnancy planning are already pregnant. And to you, I say, the worst thing I ever did was think I could job hunt while I was showing, and the best thing I ever did was buy a poncho.

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Moving back home with your parents is a good career move

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In the list of what’s hot and what’s not, blowing all your money on an overpriced apartment is out and sleeping on the twin bed at your parents’ house is in. Bobby Jackson is a senior at Williams College who will graduate this June. He will load up a moving container, head back to Washington, D.C. after graduation, and look for a public relations job from the comfort of his parents’ home. Jackson typifies the remarkable shift of inter-generational attitudes when he declares, “I love hanging out with my parents.”

According to market research company Twentysomething Inc., 65% of college seniors expect to live with their parents after graduation. The job web site MonsterTRAK reports that 50% of the class of 2003 continues to live at home. “Boomerangers” is what analysts call the twentysomethings moving back home, and the consensus among researchers (who grew up in an era when moving back was a sign of failure) is that being a boomeranger is a strategically sound way to head toward an independent life.

Neil Howe, author of Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation says that moving back with parents is a way to avoid wasting a lot of time. According to Howe, when it comes to careers, “Boomerangers want to get it right the first time.” If you don’t have to worry about paying rent, you have more flexibility to wait for the right job and to take a job that feels very right but pays very poorly. The rise of the prestigious but unpaid internship intersects perfectly with the rise of the boomeranger.

Today it’s almost impossible to become self-sufficient on an entry-level salary, especially in coastal cities like Boston, where rents are skyrocketing. Barbara Mitchell, professor of sociology at Simon Fraser University and author of the upcoming book, The Boomerang Age: Transition to Adulthood, says, “Most entry-level jobs won’t be permanent or stable,” so saving money is difficult. Twentysomethings have to manage the costs of rent, college loans and insurance premiums all of which are rising faster than wages.

With these economic factors, it’s hard for a boomeranger to leave again, and according to Mitchell, many underestimate the amount of time they’ll be staying. Jackson, for example, estimates that, “Most entry level jobs pay thirty thousand dollars, so I’ll stay at home for six months and save ten to fifteen thousand.” This plan would work only if he didn’t buy work clothes, go out with friends, or pay taxes — at least not with his own money.

And this is where the problems start. Boomerangers who think their time with mom and dad will last fewer than seven months are statistically delusional, and setting themselves up for emotional crisis. The typical stay is so long that researchers don’t even count someone as a boomeranger until they’ve been home four months.

Elina Furman knows this problem first hand: She ended up living with her family until she was twenty-nine, and she does not describe the time as a constant joy ride. In fact, she says, after the initial thrill of college graduation and the return of home-cooked meals, boomerangers find themselves in the midst of crisis — usually financial or relationship-oriented — and suffering from feelings of isolation and loss of self-esteem.

As a veteran of boomerang life, Furman supplies methods for success in her book, Boomerang Nation: How to Survive Living with Your Parents…the Second Time Around. She recommends making changes to your bedroom so it reflects who you are now. Otherwise, it becomes a “permanent purgatory” of high school trophies and reminders that you are not where you want to be. Also, “Do your own laundry and cook for yourself” because it’s more empowering than reverting to living like a seventeen-year-old. Chapters on financial planning and exit strategies belie other dangerous pitfalls of boomerang life.

And Furman warns, “The stigma is more than people realize.” (Which explains why the only people willing to be interviewed for this column are people who are just starting or have made it out of the house again.) Older generations are often stuck in outdated attitudes about the transition to adulthood, and they ask grating questions like, “You live where? At your age? What’s wrong with you?”

But in fact, moving back home is probably the first step in the post-boomer revolution of the workplace. Expectations for work are higher than ever — it should be fulfilling, fun, and accommodating to a substantial personal life. The logical way to meet such revolutionary expectations is to start out on a revolutionary path. So hold your head high as a boomeranger, but don’t leave your dirty dishes in the sink.

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Career change is inevitable, so plan for it

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Everyone should plan for a change in career. Statistically, you are likely to wish you could change. Financially, you are likely to be too scared to take action, unless you plan for change early, before you want to make a leap.

Today people start working when they are 22 and don't stop until they are 65 or older. It makes sense that the career you pick when you are a 22 will not be appropriate when you are 44. People change. Thank goodness, or else we would get bored being ourselves.

Many people are already aware of this problem: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 67% of American workers don't like their jobs. One look at the Amazon.com business books bestsellers list reveals the biggest career problem — at least for people who buy business books: Fear of changing careers. People get to a certain point in their life, somewhere between 35 and 55, and they want to switch careers, but it's too scary.

No one is immune from the desire to change career — even people who love their job. Maybe your heath will dictate change, maybe relocating for a spouse will. If you're still feeling smug that you will never stop loving your job, remember that the divorce rate is 50% and those people felt love at first, too.

So part of everyone's planning should entail leaving doors open for career change. And the biggest barrier to career change is money.

When you have worked in one field for a while, you become an expert, and your salary reflects that. When you want to change careers, you will likely take a cut in salary. Fine for someone who is in their twenties. But for a 35-year-old, who has kids and a mortgage, almost any salary cut is terrifying.

You need to do something to ensure that you are not terrified. Otherwise, career change will be out of the question. For most people this preparation means living way below your earning power starting immediately.

Phyllis Moen, professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, says that one of the most common barriers to changing career paths is having to pay a hefty mortgage. She says, “The one thing that people seem to equate with adulthood is buying a house. This is true for single people, too. In the past – for Boomer generation especially — advice was to buy the best house you can afford. But now it's an albatross.”

Another career trap is a job that entails very bad conditions for what people tell you will be only a limited period of time — associates at law firms, medical residents, consultants who travel nonstop are all examples of this sort of position. Be careful planning for the future by telling yourself you're “paying dues” now for more fulfillment down the road. If you pay dues for too long then switching careers means, in a way, paying dues for nothing, which is a large psychic cost to come to terms with.

Many people in very lucrative fields say: “I am going to earn so much money that I can save enough to switch careers.” This may be true, if you don't want to switch careers too early, and if you are realistic about how much money you have to save. However this level of self-discipline is rare; Richard Easterlin, professor of Economics at University of Southern California finds in his research that people are hard-wired to always want more money. For most people, saying, “I could live on a lot less money and be fine,” is like saying, “I could stop drinking any time I want.” Theoretically it should be easy, but in practice, it's not. So start doing it immediately to make sure you can.

The Baby Boomers had midlife crises because they were so frequently trapped in careers that felt wrong. The next generation has a chance to be visionaries with their careers so as to not repeat the Boomers' mistakes. Hopefully, twenty years from now, the bestsellers list on Amazon.om will be filled with books about a new career problem — one we could not have foreseen.

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Ode to the backup plan

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The idea that someone will stay at one company for a whole career went out the window more than a decade ago. Now most people will have more than eight jobs between the time they're 18 and 32 years old. To Baby Boomers, this is a shift in thinking, but for those of us who came after them, it's business as usual.

In keeping with my fellow Gen-Xers, I changed jobs ten times in the ten years just after college. And I adapted well to the Internet economy where star players switched jobs every year or so to gain those (now incredible) 25% raises. But at this point, I have to confess that I feel a little worn out.

At first, the free-agent no-one-owns-me attitude seemed great with all that flexibility, room to move up, the brand of you rah-rah. But the reality of a free-agent nation is hard. Friendships made at work are generally short term because the jobs are short term. Frequent insurance changes mean frequent changes in doctors. And there are too many times when the gaps between full-time jobs for free agent hunters are too big for a savings account to bear.

At this point, the free agent nation feels alienating, unstable, and financially risky. I long for a company that I can stay at for the next fifteen or twenty years even though I know the odds of that happening are slim.

It won't happen because most companies that have jobs that last forever take forever to make any other changes also: Slow and boring. Gen-Xers and Ys expect more from careers than any workforce in history. Fun, flexible jobs with new challenges around each bend are the typical goal, and like my peers, I am prepared to give up stability in exchange for that.

But I feel like maybe things need to be more calibrated. I have lived through layoffs, dot-com bankruptcies, and terrible economies. And I have lost jobs because of my own stupidity, too; pushing too hard on a good boss for more flexibility than was reasonable. All these situations have added up to constant, low-grade worry that I have no idea where I'll be five years from now.

I spend a lot of time figuring out how to keep this worry from overpowering me.

I have a five-year and ten-year plan for my personal life and my career. That helps a little because even though my career is not predictable, I have a steady vision for where I'm aiming to be, so I can adjust my tactics to accommodate both unexpected opportunities and unexpected setbacks.

But the thing that really has helped me succeed in the free agent universe is that I am always working on two or three ways to reach my career goals. I have found that putting all my eggs in one basket is too much pressure — I become too scared to take action on anything, because I start feeling like every phone call, every meeting, means so much.

Keeping a few eggs in my basket is like job insurance. I am never sure what will work out, but something always seems to go well when I have a few options. For example, when I was running my own software company I wrote articles on the side. And I also taught college courses. I didn't know what would come of any of that. As it turns out, the teaching never amounted to much. But the writing took off after 9/11 when my software market fell apart.

Now most of my income comes from a book contract. But I continue with lots of freelance projects because I never know what avenue I'll end up taking to get to my long-term goals. I admit that I also peruse help wanted ads. I don't think I'd take a corporate job now, but in a free agent nation, I wouldn't rule anything out.

Having a long-term vision for my career gets me excited about the possibilities in my life, but having a backup plan keeps me from going nuts over the lack of stability in the workforce of the new millennium.

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6 ways to give your job hunt spunk

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Hunting for a job is almost always difficult. So it's unfortunate that the truism that good things happen to optimistic people cannot be overstated when it comes to job hunting.

Of course, I've had my share of announcing to the world there were no jobs for me and sleeping until mid-afternoon. But experience with misery breeds experience with how to beat it, and here is a list of things I have found helpful to do when the job hunt starts feeling desperate:

1. Check your attitude.
Write a list of things that are going well in your life. You are not your job, and you are not your savings account. There are many facets to yourself and some remain unscathed, even during a terrible job hunt. Don't just think the list. Writing is a powerful tool, because whatever you take the time to write will feel more important to you than if you just thought about it. In fact, you should write a list of your personality traits that you like, too.

2. Check your focus.
Decide if you are looking for the right kind of job. If you are applying to tons of jobs and not getting them, think about if your resume stands out enough to get a job in this field. Be honest. After applying to 200 jobs and not getting one interview, it's safe to say that you need to change what you're doing. Ask for outside advice to figure out if you need a new resume or a new field. Start with friends and colleagues. If no one gives you new insight, hire a professional. Resume consultants are everywhere, and good ones end up giving career advice when a resume is obviously going nowhere.

3. Check your pace.
If you have a strong network, set a goal of three networking opportunities each week. They can be a lunch, a conference, even a coffee break as long as you're meeting someone who might be able to help. If you are not particularly good at networking, you'll have to rely on your resume. So send it out as often as you can. One resume a day would be a reasonable goal. If you can't find a job to apply to, send a resume, cold, to the CEO of a company you like. You never know what will happen from a shot in the dark like that, but if you send nothing, then you do know what will happen: Nothing.

4. Check your personal life.
Don't forget to see your friends. Don't forget to kiss your boyfriend. It's always easier to retreat into misery when you're in the midst of a job hunt. But you need a home base, so stay connected to the people who provide one. These are people who love you even when you are living off your retirement savings.

5. Check your spending.
You can get a lot more time for your hunt if you keep your spending down. The faster you run out of money the faster your hunt is over — and you don't want to be in a bind where you have to take the only position you can find, and it entails flipping burgers. Also, if you can keep your spending down permanently, you open yourself up to opportunities that are a good next step for your career but require a cut in pay.

6. Turn off the TV and read.
One of the hardest parts of unemployment is the lack of intellectual stimulation. Spending a lot of the time in front of a TV reinforces your feelings of doing nothing. Networking is a pain, rewriting your resume to fit each job opening is monotonous. Read books that have new ideas. Try something that stretches you; gaining new knowledge is one of the best antidotes to feeling stuck.

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Here’s the real barrier to your career happiness

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Happiness in your career is not as elusive as it might seem. In fact, there is plenty of research to tell you exactly how to find happiness, yet most people ignore the advice. Most people think they are the exception to the rule, but the truth is, you are no different than everyone else, and the research does apply to you.

Here is a short list of things people should do to find happiness in a career, which people generally do not do. This advice is backed by years of research and it is not particularly controversial among the researchers.

1. Observe people. Find the people who look happy to you and do what they do. Don't ask people if they are happy in their career. Most people will tell you they are happy because they have a vested interest in validating their own choices. So decide for yourself who is happy. This means getting to know a bunch of people. Interview them about what their life is like. Watch them at work. Trust your instinct.

2. Put passion before money. Research shows that once you can feed yourself and keep your electricity turned on, more money will not make your happier; no matter how much money someone makes they think they need 20% more to be happy. On top of that, research shows that people who choose careers they are passionate about make more money than people who choose a career for money. So stay away from jobs that won't pay enough for you to eat. But beyond that, choosing a career based on how much money you'll earn is one of the worst decisions you can make.

3. Go to the gym. You will do better in your career if you workout. It's a fact. Maybe it's that working out clears your head for thinking. Maybe it's that if you workout you look better and good looking people make more money. Or maybe it's that people who work out have a lot of self-discipline and that is what it takes to succeed at work, also. Whatever the reason, you are better off spending the last hour of your day at the gym than the office.

4. Have consistent sex. When it comes to happiness, personal relationships have significantly more impact than your job does. The best way to measure if you are maximizing your happiness from social relationships is by looking at your sex life. Research shows that sex once a week with a regular, committed partner will increase your happiness. Consider this research when deciding to move 500 miles away from your partner for a high paying job.

These four pieces of advice are not particularly difficult to follow. You don't have to be a genius. You don't need to live in a particular city. You don't need to have a good body or a good track record. So why are people so unhappy in their jobs? Because they don't follow the advice. Everyone thinks they are special, the exception to the rule, the complicated one for whom statistical research does not apply.

This is where Daniel Gilbert's research becomes important. He is a psychology professor at Harvard who studies happiness and he's noticed that no one takes the advice that research supports. He found that the reason people do not take steps that will make them happy is that they think they do not fit the mold. But he is adamant that people are not exceptional. When it comes to research about how to find happiness, humans are basically the same.

First, it's a logical impossibility that most people are the exception to the rule, yet most people believe they are. Ninety percent of drivers think they are better than average. Most football players think they are better than average. Most people believe they are worse at juggling than the average person. Statistically speaking, almost all these people have to be wrong.

Our perception of peoples' differences is exaggerated because we spend our lives finding differences between people to choose teachers, band mates and spouses. Gilbert recommends you think of grapes: “If you spend seven years studying the differences between grapes, no two will look the same to you, but really a grape is a grape.”

So, the truth is, the odds are overwhelming that you are average, and the things that set you apart are negligible when it comes to research about career happiness. So start running your life according to what people have already discovered works for the average person. Otherwise, the real barrier to your career happiness is you.

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