How to manage a career right now

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I have never been great at picking my own clothes. I’m great at interior design, but I have a blind spot for clothes. So I email Melissa photos of my outfits, and she uses her photographic memory of my closet to edit my outfits.

When I sent her this photo, she said: “What is this?”

I only wanted her opinion about the color of the shirt, so I thought it was okay that it was blurry. But the more I look at the picture, the more I think that it’s how I feel about myself right now.

I am not quite sure who I am, right now. And given the current career climate, this is actually how most people see themselves, too—blurry from constant movement, settled on the basics, but unclear on the specifics.

And then I read an article in Fast Company this month titled Generation Flux. The article is about how careers are constantly moving and our identity is therefore moving as well.

So I am focused on how to make myself more clear about what I look like. At least right now. And here are things I think we each need to do to pin down our moving-target, career-jumping selves. Read more

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My New Year’s resolution: pay attention

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Somehow, last year, I got too big-picture. It’s not surprising since I’m an ENTJ. I understand my deficit, which is one reason I picked the Farmer, an ISTP-—extremely short-term thinking.

At the end of the day, the Farmer walks in the house and talks about his day’s accomplishments, and the weather. I used to tell him that the weather is such a stupid topic that it actually makes me uncomfortable to have him bring it up. But now I realize that the weather is a segue to talking about what is happening right now. And that’s something I need to get better at.

1. Pay attention to the short term.
So my first resolution is to be more excited with what’s going on in my life in the near-term.

On January 1st the Farmer separated from his parents’ farm, and he has pigs are at our farm now. (I am saying our farm now. It shows us being a team more. It’s hard to write, but I guess this is a sub-resolution within the resolution: Think like a team.) He used to make the pigs have babies in crates, at his parent’s farm. The birthing process was confinement—the moms couldn’t move so they couldn’t roll onto the babies. Now he is letting the pigs breed while they wallow in grassy mud, and he’s letting the moms have babies wherever they choose in a barn full of soft hay bedding. The pig will roll on some of the babies probably, but probably that’s why pigs have big litters.

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This is me battling impostor syndrome

This is the big test. Right here. This is the test to see if you will stick with me even when you know everything. There is lameness about me. Not the lameness commenters point out. Not like, I don’t know anything about graduate school. Or I’m not fair to David Dellifield. No. It’s more fundamental than that.

I want you to recall that when I was growing up, the police came to our house pretty frequently. (And, in fact, to our hotel rooms. And you might be interested to know that when rich people trash a hotel room they do not get thrown out of the hotel. But rather, the kids get their own hotel room.) Every time, my dad would tell them that I was fine, that it was only a spanking, that I was exaggerating. He would tell them I have a behavioral problem. Read more

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Overcome the willpower myth

This post is sponsored by Tempur-Pedic because we think you deserve to get your best night's sleep every night.

I’ve been reading a lot about willpower to find out how to get more. It turns out that we only have a very little bit, and we cannot be demanding it of ourselves all day long because that would exhaust our supply and make us nuts. Which is, of course, what I do.

But I have watched the farmer for a few years now, and I see that he substitutes three things for willpower which allows him to seem to have willpower beyond his actual willpower reserve.

Here they are:

1. Rigid schedule
It came to me when I started to understand the ebb and flow of the pigs.

There are about 500 pigs on the farm at any given time. Someone who does not do routine well—someone like me—would say, I’ll feed the pigs later. But the Farmer gets up every morning, at 6am, eats breakfast with us, and then feeds the pigs. And he’s blown away by the fact that every single morning I think we need to make a fresh decision about what we are going to do that morning.

He is like, what? Are you kidding? We’re eating breakfast and doing chores. Read more

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What Gen Yers don’t know about themselves

Now that I’m not the CEO of Brazen Careerist, I don’t have to be the national cheerleader for Generation Y. I fantasized about this moment for years: the moment when I’d write the post titled, 10 Things I Hate about Generation Y.

But it’s hard to hate people you hang out with all the time, and the truth is, I’ve spent the last ten years being a Gen Xer surrounded by Gen Yers. The pinnacle, I thought, was me spending my days fighting with Ryan Healy about work. But in fact, it turns out the pinnacle of my education on Gen Y is my arguments with Melissa about her peers that end in a snippy impasse.

Millennials

Sometimes, I think Gen Y is lame and she won’t admit to it.

But I find, as I think about all the things I hate about Gen Y, that it’s hard to hate something you know so much about. And in fact, I have become a way better person myself from studying Gen Y. I have noticed that my worst traits are the aspects of myself I least understand. And that is true of Gen Y, too.

1. Gen Y mistakes the speed of the Internet for their own speed.
Gen Y are not risk takers, they are not conflict-seekers, and they are generally respectful of institutions and organizations. When Gen Y doesn’t like something, you probably won’t hear about it. They just won’t show up. I have written before about the conservative nature of Gen Y. Read more

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How to reinvent your career

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If you ask the Farmer, he would tell you that I was really really nice to him last week while he was in bed, immobile, strung out on six Percocet a day. I made him pies, and French toast, and meat at every meal because there is no amount of Percocet that would make him not want to eat meat.

I watched gunslinger movies with him when he was groggy and I made sure to talk only about innocuous topics like the state of world politics, something that we’d never fight about.

I can’t tell you everything went smoothly. I forgot to let the chickens out a few days. I lost the new bag of Cat Chow and served ground beef for two days of heaven on earth for the cats. And, there were a few times the goats got into the house. But we figured out how to handle everything.

Until the Farmer felt better: His back didn’t hurt so he wanted to work. So, he just stopped taking the Percocet. Cold turkey. And because we live in the country, the doctor gave the Farmer sixty Percocet pills with no instructions for how to go off narcotics. Read more

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Keys to getting unlost

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My garden is full of vegetables that I never would have guessed I could grow. There is so much that I am not sure what to do with it all.

Because the acorn falls close to the tree, my son decided he wanted to sell rhubarb at our local farmers market. To be clear, a farmers market looks very different in a community of farmers. It’s very unregulated, and people sell stuff off their trucks. Also, two farms sell heirloom rhubarb, ours and one owned by an Amish family. If you haven’t noticed, the Amish are very good at what they do. They know their customers, and they always have something fun to sell, no matter what’s in season.

My relationship with my customers centers on my ability to always piss off someone, no matter if it’s on my blog or in person. To make up for that, I tied ribbons around the rhubarb. I think the only thing I accomplished was a nice picture.

My son is enterprising, though. And he realized that what people really want is our eggs. (Farm eggs are way better than supermarket eggs — even organic ones.) So he sold those at the market, and we took the rhubarb home. Read more

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Bill Zeller, Congresswoman Giffords, and mental health

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Two things really rocked me today. One is the suicide letter from Bill Zeller. The other is the shooting in Arizona.

First, Bill Zeller. I am not going to reprint the suicide letter here. He killed himself, and he left a 4000 —line note. He asked that people do not reprint excerpts, but he would like a wide range of people to read the letter. So, here is a link to the letter in full. I really recommend reading it.

Zeller wrote a lucid account of what happens to one's insides after sexual abuse. It's the best account I've ever read, actually. And, having my own history of sexual abuse , I can say that his feelings are very familiar to me.

Though I know the feelings are not normal, what I'm telling you is that there are a lot of people walking around with feelings like Zeller. I'm sure of it. One reason I know is that I just read research that the more children a woman has, the less likely she is to kill herself. Which means that people who kill themselves think they are not worthwhile and are not doing anything good for the world. And I completely understand that.

This is why I want to write. Because I've been in therapy for 35 years. Some days suicide seems so obviously the right choice that it's amazing to me that more people don't do it. I don't really understand why more people don't do it.

Read more

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My new path to self-discipline: DBT

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My new thing is self-discipline. I am going to get better at it. I am nervous writing this, because I don't want to fail.

So this is the first thing I know: If you are really serious about doing something, it's painful to tell people, because fear of failure is so high. Once you decide that you really want something enough to shift your life to get it — at that point you want it so much that you will feel like your life is somehow incomplete if you don't get it. So it is scary just to talk about it.

This is how I'm feeling about sugar and bread. I think it only leads to bad things. I think it makes me crazy and I have googled a thousand different sites about addiction to sugar and bread, and I think it's true. Here's what I think: Read more

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Career change looks like Halloween

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When the kids and I moved to the farm, last Spring, the first thing we did was plant seeds. The farmer took the kids out to an open patch next to a corn field, and he planted ten pumpkin seeds with them.

I took the kids next to a rhubarb patch that has been growing for about 75 years, and I dumped a package of 300 seeds in a three-foot square area and I told the kids you can’t expect all the seeds to grow.

And this is how we started out lives together: the farmer being completely optimistic about the future and me wanting to hedge so no one is disappointed.

Here’s what happened: all the seeds grew. My vegetables mostly died because I hadn’t planted them assuming they’d need space to grow. But we had a crop of little pumpkins:

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