Plastic surgery is the next must-have career tool. Maybe

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Brace yourself for the most thorough compendium of research I’ve seen about how good-looking people get more of everything. The book is Looks: Why They Matter More than You Ever Imagined, by Gordon Patzer, professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago and former dean at California State University.

It is well-documented that good-looking people make more money than everyone else. Taller men make more money than shorter men. If a woman is just 13 pounds overweight, she is penalized at work. (Hat tip: Recruiting Animal.)

We are hard-wired to treat good-looking people better and it’s pretty much impossible to overcome this tendency. Patzer shows that this salary discrepancy is true even in law firms, where the partners doing the hiring are acutely aware of how illegal it is to favor good-looking people. Researchers at University of Texas, found that even mothers treat good-looking children better than average-looking ones.

Unintentionally, of course.

Before you complain about how unfair all this is, Patzer shows that good-looking people are actually better for the company’s bottom line. This is because highly attractive people actually earn more money for a company than average looking people. One study in Holland, for example, showed that companies with better looking management consistently billed more hours at higher rates than companies with average looking management.

And, while good-looking executives cost a company more money (because they have higher salaries), they actually increase the bottom line so much that the unconscious premium in pay that people give to the good-looking is actually a wise investment.

So what should you do if you are not good looking?

1. Stay out of sales and management.
These areas are where tall, good-looking people have the strongest advantage in objective performance measures, according to a study by management professors Daniel Cable, of the University of North Carolina, and Timothy Judge of University of Florida. This makes sense to me because leadership is so much about charisma, and charisma is so much about looks. And it makes sense that people will buy more stuff from you if they are attracted to you. (Hence the huge industry of turning cheerleaders into salesgirls.)

2. Be honest with yourself.
The more honest we are about where looks matter a lot, the less time we’ll waste doing something we probably won’t excel at. (This is where women have an advantage over men because women better understand where they fall in the spectrum of good-looking.)

For example, all else being equal, a good-looking woman will negotiate better for a company than anyone else—even a good-looking man, according to research by Sara Solnick of the University of Miami and Maurice Schweitzer from Wharton. Good-looking women drive harder bargains than everyone else, and good-looking women get more concessions than anyone else. (Makes sense, right? Since these are the women in highest demand for reproducing, the genes for good looks must come with genes for having a sense of entitlement when it comes to negotiating a good deal.)

3. Get plastic surgery. Maybe.
Before you get all over me about how insane this advice is, think about this: When I was a young girl, I remember hearing women talk about if it was “okay to dye your hair.” Today we don’t think twice about it. No one cares if you do or don’t, and many styles actually emphasize unnatural hair colors.

To be honest, I am way too scared to cut anything on myself. But still, plastic surgery makes total sense to me.

We don’t flinch when we hear that Cameron Diaz got a nose job or Brad Pitt had his ears pinned. It seems like a reasonable thing to do given their profession. And look at Chelsea Clinton. She did a few changes just as she hit the adult world as a consultant at McKinsey. She’s not an idiot, and she certainly does not seem obsessed by her appearance. But she realized that she was not great looking, and the plastic surgery seems to have made some improvements.

And just ten years ago, I remember talking with my friends about how gross Botox is. But my friend Sharon, who is a hairstylist in Los Angeles, says that the majority of her clients—who range from normal housewives to corporate lawyers—have had some sort of Botox injection. She says it’s so mainstream in Los Angeles that it’s almost a statement if you don’t have it.

My editor tells me that I’m going to get killed with this post. So here is my first pre-emptive strike: This post stems from my genuine worry that I will be behind the curve. I worry that I will be philosophizing about plastic surgery while everyone else is getting it and not even thinking about it. Like Botox. Or, here’s another example: Shaving off all of one’s pubic hair. Gen Xers debate it and philosophize about it while I just learned from Cosmo magazine that more than 75% of women in their 20’s just do it. No big deal.

Second pre-emptive strike: Every woman I know who is considering plastic surgery after having kids never ever would have considered it before that. It’s a time-of-life thing more than anything else, I think.

So my prediction is that soon we will all capitulate to the undeniable evidence that we have more opportunity in life if we are better looking, and it’s relatively easy to buy good looks. So we will. It will be something everyone does as they graduate from college, and not just the most rich and privileged kids. Plastic surgery will be for the go-getters and career-minded. Just you wait and see.

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The best career tool is self-knowledge

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Most career questions are actually identity questions. It seems like maybe we need to know which job to take, or which boss is better, or which line to delete on our resume. But really, we need to know who we are.

I learn the most about identity when I’m lost and I have to make a tough career decision. Here’s the first time it happened:

When I graduated from college, I knew I wanted to play professional beach volleyball, but I was actually in Chicago, being a bike messenger in the snow, and I had no idea how I was going to get enough money to get to Los Angeles.

So I answered an ad someone ran for posing nude. I thought I could do it and get enough cash to get to LA. I went to the guy’s apartment. Insane, right? You are thinking this was not a safe move. I know. But I was young and sheltered, and I had never been faced with the problem of not having money.

I knocked.

The guy opened his door, and while I was still standing in his hallway he said, “Nice legs. But I can look at you and see this isn’t going to work.”

I said, “Huh?”

He said, “Well. What can you do? You can’t just stand there. That won’t work.”

“What should I do?”

“See,” he said, “I told you this won’t work.”

He told me to stand on my toes and toss my hair.

I couldn’t do it.

He told me to practice and then come back.

On my way home, I thought. “That guy sucks. And I should be in Playboy. In the centerfold. I could do a great job at the written interview.”

But by the time I got home, I was thinking how stupid it would be to spend my time figuring out how to get into nude modeling. That is only a stop-gap measure. Not a long-term way to make a living.

And I asked myself why I was doing that? Why wasn’t I doing something I’d be more proud of? I realized that the ways I choose to make money reflect who I am and how I see myself, and I need to start seeing myself as smart and clever. I always knew I was smart, but I didn’t present myself that way in the world.

That’s the moment I decided to switch. It seems obvious in hindsight, right? Of course getting paid to be smart is better than getting paid to be naked because it’s getting paid to be who I really am inside.

But we each struggle with this constantly, throughout our careers. How to figure out who we are inside and what career will be right for how we see ourselves now. It’s a constantly shifting alliance — what is our identity and what is the career that will reflect that.

Don’t be so arrogant as to think you do not consider such mismatched career moves for yourself as my nude modelling was for me. It’s very hard to define a career that honors our identity. Identity changes as life changes And it’s hard to know what’s true to us at any given point. It takes a lot of vigilance and honesty and a willingness to shift when we’re totally off base.

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Try to be funny, even if you’re not

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Men are hard-wired to think they are funny. They use it as a courtship technique. A study by Eric Brassler at McMaster University finds that women rate men as more attractive if they make more jokes. And men are somehow aware of this, because they are more likely to make jokes if women are around.

This is probably part of women being hard-wired to select an appropriate mate; people who are funny are generally smart and creative people, because humor is about putting two unlikely things together in a clever way, according to an interview with Chris Robert, professor of management at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Also, Robert says his research shows that people who are funny are more likely to be promoted.

In the category of research to support what we already know, Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher surveyed more than one million employees to find out that people like fun offices. This news is revealed in their book, The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up.

Anyway, their point is that fun people are more likable. Which is the problem with women: We are not as funny as men. That is not their point. It is my point.

But my gut tells me it’s right. My gut tells me that most funny women are gay. First of all, Brassler’s research found that men do not think women who are funny are more attractive. Also, Christopher Hitchins has a great piece in Vanity Fair, Why Women Aren’t Funny, where he points out that Jewish women are funny, but only because they have male qualities of humor -angst and self-deprecation.

All this makes me happy because people often ask me if I’m gay, and I used to think it’s because I am awkward when it comes to flirting. (Quote from the first guy I dated since the onset of my divorce: “You are an incompetent flirt.”) But now I take the question of my sexual orientation as a compliment: it means that I’m leveraging my angst-riddled Jewish upbringing to be the funny girl.

But back to The Levity Effect. Gostick and Christopher define lighthearted as something more broad than humor. Maybe this is because their book lacks the amount of humor you’d expect from people who write about the importance of levity. But they have a few chapters about how you don’t need to be a comedian in order to create levity. (Which may or may not be justified encouragement to the unfunny.)

I want to tell you to be careful about being funny – because trying to be funny and failing is so lame. But I am certain that men are hard-wired to try no matter what, because they want to mate. Which means they get a lot of practice outside the office. So women should try, too. It won’t help us get a mate, but it will help us get the career we want, (which, in many cases, does help find a mate).

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Test yourself to find what you need to be happier

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Happiness is not really different in each person. In fact, science shows us happiness is basically the same for all of us. And our roadblocks to happiness are all basically the same as well — that we each think we are special and the research doesn’t apply to us, so we just keep trying to earn more accolades or more money.

That said, here are some checkup tests to take to see how you’re doing in the happiness department.

You were born with a genetic disposition to being happy (or not).
Scientific American writes about hedonic adaptation which is basically our ability to return to our regular level of happiness no matter how much money we have. (The classic study for this is from the 1970s which found that after two years, lottery winners were no more happy than they were before the big win.)

So instead of making the irrational assumption that you are different than the rest of the human race, try accepting that you aren’t, and look for happiness somewhere other than money.

In fact, your set point for happiness is mostly genetic – based on how optimistically you approach the world. But you can make a 40% impact on your optimism level by changing your daily routine in relatively small ways – like doing a bunch of random acts of kindness in one day, on a weekly basis.

Sonja Lyubomirsky’s new book, the How of Happiness is packaged to look like a sequel to Daniel Gilbert’s bestselling book, Stumbling on Happiness, and it sort of is a sequel. Lyubomirsky is a professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside, and she describes twelve steps you can take to change your happiness set point – and the science behind those suggestions.

Wondering if you’re an optimistic thinker? Here’s the test. (middle of the page)

Burnout undermines your happiness, and it’s not about time.
Burnout has little to do with how many hours you work and a lot to do with the type of work you’re doing. Burnout comes from not being able to achieve what you want to achieve even though you are working hard to get it. It’s a situation where you have goals you can’t pin down (like if you work for four bosses) or goals you can’t meet (like if you have an impossible deadline).

People who are most susceptible to burnout are nurses in pediatric burn units because the goal is so clear and so urgent – stop the pain in small children – but it’s an impossible goal to meet.

Other people who are susceptible, though, are lawyers, who are at the beck and call of clients who generally cannot be pleased because they are in legal trouble and upset about it, and even if they are not in legal trouble, who likes spending money on a lawyer?

The thing is that a lot of lawyers make a lot of money. So the money part does not ward off against burnout and might even make you feel more compelled to stay in a bad situation.

Are you on the road to burnout? Here’s the test. (middle of the page)

Stop telling yourself it’s about your job.
One of the first things people think when they are unhappy is that they need to change their job. Maybe they’ll get a job that pays more, or that allows them to be their true self, or will be their dream job.

But you know what? A job does not make you happy, it only makes you unhappy. And forget about that raise, because the incremental happiness you get from earning more than, say, $100,000 is barely noticeable. (Yes, even if you have a family of four in San Francisco. Stop thinking you’re the exception to every rule. It’s a flaw that undermines your ability to change.)

The thing that increases our happiness is our relationships. A job cannot make those better. However a job can make you so unhappy that you can’t relish the relationships in your life.

Do you want to know if the problem is your job? It’s not likely, but here’s the test.

Align your goals with what really makes you happy.
A lot of you are probably incredulous. Maybe you think the American Dream is about getting a good job and earning more money than your parents. But the American Dream used to be about moving west and buying land, and now we see that as something for older generations that doesn’t apply to us. So maybe the idea of more money and better jobs is the new detritus of the American dream, and if you don’t believe me, maybe you have an outdated outlook.

Wondering if you think like your grandma? Here’s the test.

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What would happen if you were blind to your weakness?

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I have a disorder called prosopagnosia, more commonly called face blindness. It means that I have a hard time seeing faces.

It took me about a month to know what each of my babies looked like. I remember thinking how it’s a miracle that the human race survived when it is so difficult to remember what your baby looks like. And it took me three months of dating my husband before I could imagine what he looked like when I wasn’t with him. In the beginning, each time we had another date, I would think, “I sure hope I’m attracted to him. I think I am. I was the last time.”

When I played professional volleyball, I knew if I was playing someone with a tough serve, or a hard cut shot. I recognized opponents during a match. But away from the beach, many times I didn’t recognize those same players. They were always surprised. And I always said, “I don’t recognize you with clothes on.”

What I meant was, “I keep track of people by how their bodies move, and it’s easiest for me if you are wearing a bikini.” I thought everyone kept track this way. I thought I was just stating the obvious. I thought I was normal.

But now that I know it’s a deficit, I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I play games with myself – can I recall someone one minute later? One hour later? Can I recall someone I had two lunches with? It used to be incredible to me that anyone remembered a face. Now it’s incredible to me that I have walked around with this disorder my whole life and not known.

Today, I read a lot about catering to our strengths. The research instructs us to focus on using our natural strengths and not worry about our weaknesses. It’s tough advice to follow, though. Because once we know our weaknesses, they become a source of embarrassment and we want to fix them.

A weakness, after all, is a potential vulnerability, and we feel like we will appear stronger if we make sure to hide our weaknesses. It’s one reason why people are shocked when I blog about getting fired, or not being able to contain my own jealousy. But to me, it’s a relief to show the weakness because then I don’t need to spend energy hiding it.

And the faceblindness is such a good example of how to ignore a weakness. I am very in tune with bodies–I can identify people by how they walk and how they carry themselves. I never stopped to think about how weird I am in the world because I can’t remember faces–because I didn’t know. Instead, all those years, I practiced remembering everyone’s voice and gait, instead of stewing over the fact that I couldn’t remember their faces.

It’s a great model for how to operate with any weakness. It’s an extreme example of not focusing on fixing a weakness but compensating with strengths.

If you say, “I’m disappointed that I have this weakness. I wish I were born differently,” then there’s nothing you can do to see things more optimistically. But if you say, “There are pluses and minuses to this situation, and I do get to have a different perspective on the world that is interesting,” then there is room not to live with such regret.

Focusing on how to overcome a problem, instead of focusing on the problem itself, is a healthy thing to do, of course, but it’s nice to know that there’s research to back this up. Thinking about how I compensated for faceblindness gives me confidence that I could do that for other skills where I am aware of a weakness.

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Three specific ways to improve your social skills

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Now that I do a lot of public speaking, I am flying a lot – two or three times a month. There are a lot of perks to travel, like expensive hotel rooms and a break from my kids. But my favorite perk is meeting sales guys.

Warning: here come generalizations with no data to back them up. Most people who fly on Sunday night and Thursday night are consultants – all those young people who clawed their way to the popular starter jobs at Deloitte and Ernst & Young. But most of the people flying during the week are speaking or selling, and the people in those careers who travel a lot are men. So it’s no surprise that I’ve been meeting a lot of sales guys.

It’s great for me, because I was not born with good social skills, I’ve learned them. So I see the time on the airplane as a time for learning specific tips from people who make a living from having good emotional intelligence.

Here are three things I’ve learned from the sales guys I’ve met.

1. Count how many times you interrupt someone.

If you ask a sales guy why they are good at sales, they always say they are good listeners. And then, in fact, they display those skills during the flight.

I am not a good listener. I spend the flight hearing myself interrupt. Constantly.

It sounds like a moment that is bad for my emotional intelligence work, but really, it’s good. It’s good because it allows me to go to the next step, which is asking myself why I am so reluctant to wait to hear what someone has to say. That’s where I am now – asking myself that.

And I think I’m on the right track, because I think better social skills come from asking yourself better questions about why you are the way you are.

2. Learn to read very specific types of language.

Last week I was having lunch with a guy I met on a plane. He will have a fit when he reads this because the first thing someone with high emotional intelligence tells me when they sit down with me is that I can’t write about them in my blog.

We were talking about what his company could do for a blog strategy, and I was thinking about how I could convince him that his company should pay my company to do something. And Mr. Salesguy asked me a question, and I didn’t like what the answer was going to be, so I started trying to think of another answer.

And he said, “Hey, are you going to lie to me right now?”

I said, “What?” I tried to say it in an incredulous way, but in hindsight I’m sure I just sounded panicked.

He said, “When you ask someone a question, if they are right-handed and they look to the left before they answer, then they are trying to recall the information. If they look to the right then they are trying to make up something new. You looked to the right.”

It was so smart of him. Because for the rest of the lunch I was very honest. Not that I’m not honest in general, but I basically gave the first answer that came to my head for everything because I was so nervous that I wouldn’t be able to control my eye movement. It’s a great way to get the upper hand in a conversation.

I can’t wait to catch someone else in this act.

3. Stop thinking your situation is special. It’s not. Rules are useful to everyone.

Here’s another thing I learned from sales guys. They ask the same questions everyone else asks on the plane, like, “Are you going home or leaving home?” I would feel stupid asking that, because it’s so conventional, but it works as a way to start a conversation. Every time.

These routine conversations are just social conventions to allow strangers to start talking. Which drives home to me that social conventions are there to help.

Take something as simple as holding a door for someone. Social convention says do it if someone is right behind you. But the rule is actually just there so the door doesn’t slam in someone’s face.

A lot of times, people think that their particular situation is so complicated that you can’t have rules – you just have to wing it. This is where having a threesome comes in.

I get a lot of books in the mail from publishers who want me to write a review. When I got The Threesome Handbook by Vicki Vantoch, I thought the publisher had gone nuts. But I noticed she is a sex historian and she writes for the Washington Post. So I took a look at the book.

And it turns out that a threesome is actually a very complicated social situation, and the best way to make sure everyone stays happy is to have rules that people follow. I’m not going to into the intricacies of negotiations, but chapter four is called “Strategies for Navigating Freak-outs, Jealousy, and General Messiness.”

And, winging it actually means guessing what people want. But guessing is hard.

So asking for rules is important, listening is important, practicing very specific skills is important. Also, making a public commitment to having better social skills is important, which is why, I think, I blog about this topic so often.

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Do you think you’re a strategist? You’re probably wrong.

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It is a cliche that everyone thinks they’re a strategist. The reason everyone thinks they’re a strategist is because they don’t know what a strategist does.

Get a reality check. Odds are you are not a strategist.
Strategy requires thinking conceptually and creating something from nothing. So, for the most part, if you need to see something in order to do strategy then you are not doing strategy, you’re doing editing. 

Strategists usually favor thinking about the future instead of the present; strategists I admire are bored by what is and focus on what could be.

Also, strategy means constantly making decisions based on incomplete information. It means taking intellectual leaps of faith that could derail many departments in an organization, and doing that with confidence.

The best thing you can do for your career is take a personality test to understand your strengths. If you are an INTJ you really are a strategist. If you are not an INTJ, the fewer letters you have that match that, the further away from strategist you are. So get some self-knowledge before you declare yourself a strategist.

If you’re not a strategist, find work that plays to your strengths.
So look, most of you aren’t strategists. But so what? It doesn’t mean you’re not brilliant. There are many ways to be brilliant.

It is a misconception that the strategists do all the important work and everyone else does grunt work. There’s plenty of important, interesting work that is detail-oriented and highly creative, such as building a space ship or doing cinematography.

A lot of people think that if they are not creative or technical then they are strategists. This is not always true. A strategist thinks very big picture and also thinks ahead in time. People who are not artists or programmers and think in terms of the here and now are managers. If you do that with charisma, you’re a leader.

If you are a strategist, then quit talking about it and do it.
Most people I have managed have told me, at one point or another, that their strength is strategy. For the most part, I hear this as “I don’t know how to execute what you’re asking me to execute.” This is why the best way to understand how to do strategy is to execute on other peoples’ strategies. You see first-hand what the common pitfalls of strategy are.

Stop complaining that you are a frustrated strategist because today people at all levels in the organization are getting more opportunity to show their talent as strategists.

This trend is partly a result of management theorists focusing on improving work for the lower ranks–not because improving entry-level work is ethical, but because the topic of how to be a better leader is exhausted, and academics need something fresh to write about, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

An example of this trend toward glorifying the low-ranking employee is the book Followership: How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders, by Barbara Kellerman, professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Research like Kellerman’s should drive home to you that if you’re a strategist, you can do it from anywhere in the org chart. So think of a great strategy in your entry-level job and then develop a strategy to convince people in the company to listen to you. That’s a test of your strategic strength right there.

And if you’re not doing strategy in your current job, you might consider that you are like the guy who thinks he is a novelist but is not writing a novel: People do what their strengths are regardless of what their job description is. Real leaders will lead in any situation they find themselves. Real writers will always write, no matter what their day job is. And real strategists will always think in terms of the conceptual future, from any job they have.

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Stop worrying that your twentysomething is lost

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Here is an open letter to all the parents, aunts and uncles who write to me asking for advice about the twentysomething in their life who is an incorrigible underachiever:

Lighten up! No one should be labeled an underachiever in their twenties! The first thing you should ask yourself is whose standards are you using? This is not the same workplace that existed ten years ago. There are new rules, and you need to stop applying the old rules to someone who has no need for them.

The people who know exactly what they want to do when they are 22 are called, in the land of sociology, “fast starters.” And today that is only 12% of the workforce. In general, these people are conservative, taking paths their parents took, and do not ask a lot of questions. The majority of twentysomethings today move back home with their parents , job hop every 18 months, and refuse to pay their dues.

And you know what? These are all good decisions. To you, these decisions might look like decisions that losers make, but the world is different. Do you know what a loser is today? A loser is someone who doesn’t take the time to get to know herself. A loser is someone who saw his parents earn a lot of money and not get happiness from it and still deludes himself that money will make him happy. A loser is someone who looks for fame or prestige. A loser is someone who lets someone else tell them what success looks like.

Today success is personal. It’s about using the years of emerging adulthood to figure out what works for you. This is time to experiment – try things and quit them and try other things. This is a time to have gaps in resumes, red in bank accounts, and a suitcase packed, ready to go at a moment’s notice. These are symptoms of someone who is learning a lot and growing a lot.

Personal growth looks a lot like being lost. Lost is okay. Who wouldn’t be with twenty years of schooling and no preparation for adult life? People grow more when they are lost then when they are on a straight path with a clear view of where they are going.

Don’t tell me that your kid is a bartender and will never grow up. Bar tenders have some of the best social skills in the workforce, and social skills are what matters. Bar tenders are not underachievers. Also, did you ever stop to ask your bar-tender kid what he does during the day when he’s not pouring drinks? He’s probably doing something fun and cool and a little risky that you didn’t have the guts to try til you had a midlife crisis.

And don’t tell me about your kid who isn’t finishing college. No one said college has to happen right away. No one has research to show that if you do college right after high school you will be a happier person. But people do have research to show that if you take time to find yourself during your twenties then you will avoid a quarterlife crisis. So maybe it’s okay that your niece is taking a year off of college to travel in Thailand. Or knit sweaters.

Stop judging the twentysomethings. Instead, look at yourself. Why is it so important for your twentysomething to make choices that you like? In fact, the most successful people in today’s workplace are making choices that would have seemed absurd ten years ago. And things that are true today were not true ten years ago.

And have a heart. It’s not easy to be a twentysomething today. These young people grew up with tons of structure, tons of adults watching over them, tons of accolades. It’s a hard adjustment to go into the adult world where there is none of this. The most successful transitions happen when the person making the change receives time to adjust, space to grow, and support for tough decisions.

Have some patience. Most people find what they want to do with their life by the time they are 30. Really. And they are already putting so much pressure on themselves to find a good life. They don’t need more pressure from you.

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4 Weight-loss tips from my month in the mental ward

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Most people who are overweight blame their job for their inability to eat right and get enough exercise. Too much work, too tired after work, too much travel. The list is endless. But losing weight is so important for you career that you should go so far as to cut back on your work-officially or furtively — in order to lose the weight.

Because beware: Heavier people do worse at work than everyone else, employers discriminate against overweight people, and it’s even legal to do. (via Management Line).

So stop putting your work before your weight. Miss deadlines, cut corners, and disappear if need be. Do whatever you require to lose the weight because no amount of workplace genius can overcome being overweight – people subconsciously underestimate the quality of work a fat person is doing.

Now I want to address all the people who are going to say that it’s not fair to pick on fat people, and that I’m obsessed with fat, etc.

It is true that I am obsessed with fat. It started freshman year of college when I was under lots of stress from being a straight-A student (it was a miracle because I’m not the school success type) and from going on the kind of dates where girls take their clothes off (yes, believe it or not, I didn’t do that in high school.)

It was too much for me. So I hung out at the buffet to calm myself down. And I am a smart girl; It didn’t take me long to realize that I could take refuge in the buffet for hours and hours as long as I threw up at the end.

I did that all of freshman year. And I became an evangelist. Yep. You can do that if you’re a girl in college. You can talk with your friends about how handy throwing up is. Some people said, “You are messed up.” Most people said, “Can you show me how to do it?”

Of course I had it down to a science. You have to drink something milky first, or eat something really mushy, like pudding, so that everything comes up easier. After all, I was throwing up to decrease stress, not increase it, and nothing made me more anxious than eating something I couldn’t throw up. So I learned really fast what won’t work. (I don’t want this to be a primer for the uninitiated, but I know you’re curious. So here’s one: Plain, uncooked bagel. Very difficult.)

Here’s what happened the summer between my junior and senior year of college. I had a Ford Foundation grant to research mass movements in colonial America. I kept skipping out on the voting records in Salem, Massachusetts archives in order to throw up in the Salem Witch museum (very private bathroom there) and my research was going to be late. Very late.

I went to my parents’ house to gear up for what was supposed to be a summer of catching up on research, and my first night there, I ate pretty much everything in the refrigerator. And threw it up, of course.

My mom woke up and said, “Where’s the bread?” and “Where’s the ice cream?”

I told her I threw it up. I told my parents I was throwing up about five times a day and I was dying to stop but I couldn’t. They checked me into a hospital – a mental ward masquerading as an eating disorder clinic. There were not many eating disorder clinics back then, but I grew up in a really rich community where eating disorders are fashionable, and the place was filled with anorexics and bulimics.

1. Understand that any weight problem is an emotional problem
I learned a lot in that clinic. I learned that people who throw up or starve themselves treat food the same way as people who are obese: Obsessive patterns of trying to calm oneself down with food. I had to learn coping skills that did not hurt my health.

But the first thing I did was worry that my research on mass movements wasn’t getting done. I told everyone in the hospital that the Ford Foundation would be after me and I’d lose all my money. I also panicked that my professor — who was holding a chapter in her book for my reports on seventeenth-century town records in Marblehead Massachusetts — would kill me. Or at least not recommend me for graduate programs in history.

I went on and on about how my life as an historian would be ruined if I didn’t get out of the mental ward and go back to Marblehead. And this is how I know that you should stop working in order to deal with overeating: Because my work improved once I better understood my relationship to food.

2. Take time off so you can change bad patterns
The mental ward turned out to be one of my favorite places ever. It was so peaceful. No kidding. I spent most of my time with spritely vixens seducing young doctors (Yes, I dated one. Trust me. It’s common.) The hospital was a haven from all the stuff we distracted ourselves with. I couldn’t focus on food (it was regulated) or my professor (she couldn’t reach me) so I focused on all that was left: Myself. And it worked. I started to understand why I was eating and how I could change my patterns.

And once I changed my patterns with food, other things that require self-discipline improved as well. This phenomena is supported by lots of research – we want to change a lot of things in our life. For example, I wanted to stop thinking about food all the time and I wanted to work faster on the grant. Trying to do everything at once was overwhelming. But changing how I dealt with food had a positive ripple effect throughout my life.

3. Don’t be a snob
To be sure, I was not the worst off in the mental ward. There was shock therapy. There was suicide watch. I was surely one of the highest functioning patients: I was writing up my research at a brisk pace, I stopped wanting to throw up, and I got day passes from my shrink to date one of my ex-doctors.

But I learned quickly that there is no point in being high and mighty. We each have problems, and the only way to solve them is to face them. You might be fifteen pounds overweight, or fifty, or ten pounds underweight, it’s all the same. It’s all about getting to know yourself so you can take care of yourself more effectively and you can start reaching your real dreams – the stuff that really matters to you.

4. Stop using your job as an excuse
I knew as early as my sophomore year that I needed to get serious help. I knew I wanted to stop throwing up but I wasn’t stopping myself. What I focused on was the idea that I needed to graduate on time. I couldn’t let people know I had a big problem or I’d never fit in. My teachers would dump me. I wanted the problem to go away.

But the truth is that I was not really fitting in anyway, because I had to hide so much of my eating life. And my professor did dump me eventually, but it wasn’t because I didn’t get the work done. I did. It was just late and on hospital letterhead. She dumped me because after I stopped focusing on food and focused on myself instead, we both realized that being a historian was not right for me.

Taking a big pause in my work in order to deal with my issues around food was crucial to getting to know myself and creating stability in my life. So I’m telling anyone with an eating problem – if you are overweight or underweight — work can wait. Stop kidding yourself that doing your work is more important. People are always worrying that they will mess up their career by stopping their work to fix themselves. But the worst job is the job that you use to avoid your personal life.

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Rosh Hashana forces big decisions about work

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One of the first major religious decisions that young, Jewish professionals make is whether or not to go into the office on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

Most Jewish holidays start at sundown, a safe time to leave the office. However, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are all-day affairs, and this year Rosh Hashannah starts tonight — right in the middle of the week. Rabbi David Lerner, says the first time you decide whether or not you are going to work is “a big decision.”

”I can’t think of another event like this in Jewish life,” he says.

Sarah Maltzman is typical of those twentysomethings deciding how to prioritize work and religion. She does not go to synagogue regularly but grew up in a family where people skipped work on the high holy days. Now, as a teacher, she, too, will take time off. But she will work one of the two days of Rosh Hashana, because she says she doesn’t want her students to have too many days in a row with substitute teachers. ”If I were in a 9-to-5 job I would feel more comfortable taking time off,” she says.

There is no law granting the right to take off work for religious holidays, but according to Linda Saiger, executive director of Chicago’s Council on Jewish Workplace Issues, most people are able to get the days off if they want them.

The question is: What do people want?

There is a lot of peer pressure to stay home and observe the holidays. By some estimates, more than 95 percent of the families affiliated with a synagogue show up on Yom Kippur for a day of fasting and self-reflection. In fact, such a large percentage of the Jewish population stays home, that some schools close, some stores close, and towns with large Jewish populations seem to completely shut down.

However, there is also a lot of pressure to go to work. In some industries, like investment banking, people rarely take time off for anything, doing what it takes to get the job done and make a good impression.

Jessie Bodzin is managing editor of Heeb, a magazine for hipster Jews. She says that one of her friends had a new job with a heavy workload, so she went to work and fasted to allay some of her guilt. But Bodzin doesn’t recommend this tactic.

”This is the worst of both worlds, because she got a headache from fasting without the benefit of self-reflection,” Bodzin said. Another friend of Bodzin’s went to synagogue in the morning, then to work, then back to synagogue. For him, maybe the guilt of going to work was abated because Bodzin said he ended up spending more time in synagogue than he would have had he not gone to work.

Some of the most complicated decisions arise when a twentysomething relocates for work far away from family. Many feel compelled to take the day off, but have nowhere to go.

Leah Furman, author of Single Jewish Female: A Modern Guide to Sex and Dating, says that some people don’t go into work because that would be breaking tradition, but they don’t necessarily go to synagogue all day.

”For some people, it’s a time to get together with Jewish friends,” she says. ”Maybe they go to synagogue for a little while and then they go with friends out to lunch.”

For those on looking for meaning, Lerner reminds them that the core issue is not about missed deadlines at work or used up vacation days: ”There is a lot that people can do to have impact on a broken world,” he says, ”and the high holy days call to us, motivate us to do this.”

For those who forgo the pursuit of synagogue tickets, Esther Kustanowitz, author of My Urban Kvetch, points out an enticing alternative: That’s two full days out of the work week for Rosh Hashana, and if you take three more vacation days you can go away on a trip for nine days.

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