Five steps to make yourself great

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The best way to get control of your career and stability in your life is to be great at what you do. Superstars are not out of work right now. Really. Even in finance. If you have an amazing track record in your field of work, you'll have a job. And if you need to change jobs, or adjust what you're doing, you'll be able to do it if you're great at what you do.

Here are five steps to follow:

1. Aim to be great at something that matters in the world.
The process of being great is long and hard. It requires you to try a lot of stuff to figure out the intersection of your gifts and what the world will pay for.

It's hard to be great at something you have to stop doing. But that's the reality you face if you are going to be a star performer. It's about self-discipline. When I was in graduate school, my writing professor was reviewing my writing, and he announced to the class, “She writes the best sex scenes I have ever read. Week after week she surprises me with her wry, funny, salacious approach.”

I had to look up the word salacious to make sure it was good.

Then I had to stop writing about sex. Because it was clear to me that being great at writing literary sex is too narrow. The greatness is so small it doesn't matter. Greatness needs context that has value.

2. Expect that being great will entail many levels of disappointment.
So I got a job in a marketing department in a Fortune 100 company where we spent lots of time talking about whether HTML accommodates a proper em dash. Read more

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How to pick the people you work with

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Pick who you work with very carefully. Because you are likely to become like them. So the first thing is to know what's important to you about you — what you want to become. What you like about yourself. And then, surround yourself with people who match your aspirations for yourself.

Here are some ideas:

Choose people who are good-looking, but not better looking than you.
You become like the people you hang out with, according to Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Harvard. He found, for example, that if the people around you are overweight, you are likely to join them. And the more overweight you are, the more trouble you have at work, for a lot of reasons, but a new reason I just found is that in stressful work situations, fat people do not think as clearly as thin people. Yep. That's right. Stonybrook University School of Medicine found that the more body fat you have, the higher your levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that hampers cognitive abilities. (Hat tip: Self magazine.)

But if the people around you are models, you will look ugly. Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at MIT, says that if you're going to a bar, you have the best chances of getting picked up if you go with people who are almost as good-looking as you are. It makes sense that you will feel best if you do this at work as well.

Choose women who are happy, but they shouldn’t smile too easily.
This is hard for men to do. Because men are hard-wired to be drawn to women who laugh at their jokes. Men want to be funny. But women who are slower to smile do better at work, according to communications consultant Leil Lowndes. So you should date women who smile a lot, but work with women who don't. (Hat tip: Derek Scruggs.) Read more

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6 Tips for being a CEO without ruining your kids' lives. I hope.

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I get questions all the time about how I manage having kids and a startup at the same time. After trying to answer the question a few times, I realized that there’s the pretty-much-BS answer about how it’s all about being clear on your values. Or there's the complicated, too-long-for-interviews answer.

To really get tips for being a CEO with young kids, you’d have to hang out with me for a day. Like, last Tuesday. Which was just another day of being a parent and running a startup. Except this day starts at midnight. When I decide that I am not going to go to sleep because I have to get up at 3:30 a.m. to drive to Milwaukee to catch a plane to Atlanta at 7 a.m. And here's the first tip:

1. Get sleep. The kind that is not warm and sweet.
I decide I'll stay up late and work but what I find is that I'm mostly eating. First coffee. Then coffee doused in sugar. Then peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which I covet each morning I make them for school lunches. But normally I restrain myself.

I see now I'm too stressed for normal restraint, so I go to bed.

My three-year-old is in my bed. If I get in, he will snuggle and whisper “I love you” in his sleep. But when I get up to go to the airport, he'll have a fit, because what kid wouldn't hate to wake to his mom leaving his house in the middle of the night?

To shield my son from childhood trauma I take him out of my bed and put him in bed with my ex husband, who is sleeping in the bedroom down the hall so that I can leave on business trips.

2. Be great at business travel. But get out of it whenever you can.
I set the Blackberry for 3:30 a.m. And when it wakes me I feel like I slept for ten seconds. But this crappy itinerary was my idea. Because I was so excited to go in and out in one day and not have to stay in a hotel. Read more

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How to deal with reference checks

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Reference checks used to matter a lot. Fifty years ago. When people only changed jobs twice in their life, and they didn't know anyone outside of their company, it made sense that the second company called the first company.

Then, when it became clear that the first company could say one, tiny bad thing and then make this person unemployable (because they had only worked for one person their whole life), giving bad references basically became illegal.

So that pretty much put the kibosh on the usefulness of corporate references. Yet people still ask for them today. So here are some ways to get a good reference.

Get a ringer lined up ahead of time.

There is no rule that says you have to use your last employer as a reference. Explain to a prospective employer that you are giving the name of a person who knows you well and can speak to the issues this particular employer is interested in. Then give the name of a ringer. For almost a decade my favorite ringer was my boyfriend, who dated me and hired me and gave me glowing reviews even after he dumped me. Read more

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How to blog about a co-worker (or someone else close to you)

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What you know the most about is what you can offer the most insight about. And you probably know that telling stories is always more compelling than talking in generalities. But if you tell stories, you need people to be in the stories. So if you want to write insightfully, then using stories about people close to you makes sense.

Writing about a co-worker is similar to writing about a sex partner: you know a lot about the person, both good and bad. So you could ruin your relationship by writing about them. So you have to get good at writing about co-workers without pissing them off.

As someone who writes about co-workers, boyfriends and family members all the time, I have a few tips for doing it in a way that keeps your writing interesting without getting you into trouble.

Negotiate before you write
Readers always complain that I'm ruining my relationships by blogging about them. (The record-breaker number of these complaints is on this post about my ex-husband.) But I know a bit about this terrain: I sold a novel in my 20s that included all my sex partners. And in graduate school for creative writing, I wrote my master's thesis on my sex life, in real time. (Stop Googling: It's under a pen name. Remember? I’m the queen of pen names.)

Anyway, from that experience, and from writing a column about my workplace for three years in the 90s, I have a lot of practice negotiating with people before I write about them. Read more

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Does it work to mix work and dating?

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I met D at a party. I was there with Ryan Paugh and a few bloggers from the Brazen Careerist network, and because it was SXSW and it was all parties all the time, I was pretty partied out. But the party was for Kirtsy, and I love the women who run Kirtsy, so I went.

Also, Holly Hoffman wanted to meet Guy Kawasaki. And really, it’s not like I’m his best friend, but because I know him, I could say to Holly, “Oh, I’ll introduce you.” And I did that. And Holly was thank-you-thank-you, even though Guy is so nice that you can just walk up to him and introduce yourself and he’ll be nice. To everyone.

And I’m standing there with a bunch of 25 year olds, because I’m always hanging out with 25 year olds because that’s basically my job—I work with them and my business is for them. But I was not with THE 25 year old because the night before, I woke up to him peeing on the carpet in my hotel room.

When I asked what he was doing, he said, “Oh, sorry” and then he went back to bed. So I woke him up. And yelled at him.

He said he was drunk. He went back to sleep. I woke him up. I said, “I told you you had to go down on me and you didn’t. You asked a woman out after she wrote a whole blog post about oral sex and you don’t even do oral sex.

I’m pissed.” Read more

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Take Your Child to Work Day should be cancelled

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It's time to admit that Take Your Child to Work Day is an outdated relic of 1970s feminism, and we can put the whole thing to rest.

Do you remember that the day started as Take Our Daughters to Work? It was the 70s, and women wanted their daughters to know that they could do anything. Here's what came of that era: Latchkey kids who never saw their parents after school except on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. And, then later, those same little girls grew up to feel intense pressure to put work before kids which ushered in the biggest fertility train wreck in history, with Gen X thinking it would be fine to wait until after 30 to have kids.

So I have a bad taste in my mouth from the era of Take Our Daughters to Work. But then we had the era of boys underperforming. That's right: Boys are doing so much worse than girls in school that it's officially easier to get into college if you're a boy (scores are lower and so are GPAs) and once these kids enter the workforce, girls make more than boys do.

So some probably-drumming, angry, white male decided that it shouldn't just be daughters. It should be sons, too. So now we have Take Your Child to Work. Read more

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Reality check: You’re not going to make money from your blog

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Almost everyone should forget about making money directly from blogging. It’s so unlikely that it’s a total waste of your time trying. I am actually shocked at how ubiquitous the idea is that blogging is a get-rich-quick scheme. Or even a get-rich-slowly scheme. It’s not. Blogging is a great career tool for creating opportunities for yourself. But here are eight reasons you should stop thinking about money from blogging:

1. Big bloggers come from big media.
Usually I’m the first person to rip on print media as outdated and a dead-end career. But here’s something that maybe you don’t realize: Most big bloggers today have a strong background writing for print. For example: Erik Schoenfeld (TechCrunch), Owen Thomas (Valleywag), and I all wrote for Business 2.0 magazine at the same time. Ten years ago. Which means we had a ton of national media experience before we started blogging. Anya Kamenetz (Yahoo Finance) wrote for the Village Voice and had a very serious book published—before she started blogging.

2. Sure, there are exceptions. But you’re probably not one of them.
Let’s look at some people who have big blogs who didn’t come from big media. Heather Armstrong at Dooce. She’s a good one. Here’s what she has that you don’t: She’s a talented writer and a talented designer. She’s married to a developer who does all her tech stuff for free. And she has an amazing story to tell. She has the ability to translate her genius across many media—photography, memoir, twitter, and so on. She is a marvel. And you are not. None of us is. That’s why she is making so much money from her blog. Read more

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4 Frequent questions about Gen Y answered (via a PR disaster)

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I do a lot of public speaking, mostly on the topic of how to bridge generational differences in the workplace. And I field tons of questions from corporate audiences. Here are four of the most common questions:

How can you tell if a member of Gen Y hates his or her boss?
You can't. This is a non-confrontational generation. They change politics by voting, not screaming in the streets. And they change the workplace by quitting, rather than complaining. This is a generation that enjoyed mutual respect with their parents and their parents' friends. Gen Y at large feel uncomfortable being openly confrontational than other, less cared-for generations.

This doesn't mean that they are not complaining about their bosses. They are just doing it in a better way. For example, quitting, which members of Gen Y end up doing about once every 18 months. And leaking totally insane emails like the one that was picked up on Dealbreaker and Valleywag, from John Soden, a managing director at the investment bank, Thomas Weisel, who said this to his underlings on Good Friday:

“Everyone below the MD level —

“We are an investment bank. Unless you are an orthodox something, please get into the office. We are getting paid minimum wage for a reason — we are not making money, which is hard to do from home.

“Join Wells Fargo and become a teller if you want to take bank holidays.”

Why does Gen Y feel so entitled to a huge salary?
They don't. In fact, they choose other things over salary: respect for other people, for example. Employers: You could save money in salaries by being a socially responsible company that Gen Y (and the rest of us) want to work for. Read more

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Gold digging Web 2.0 style

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The guy I'm sort of dating asks me, “Do you know Glenda Bautista?”

I say, “No.”

He says, “We're trying to hire her.”

So I check out her blog and dis her and he says, “She was dating Matt Mullenweg.”

I say, “Really.”

He says, “Yeah. I was talking with my business partner and we both thought it must really suck for her that they are not dating anymore but they are still mentioned in the same breath a lot.”

“Really? Like how?”

“Google Glenda Bautista Matt.”

I do that. Their life looks really fun. They do cool stuff, meet cool people, and how can you not think Matt is great? He is. Who knows what he's like to date, but he's a great online brand.

That conversation was four weeks ago. And I have talked with this guy I'm sort of dating, D, a lot since then. But I am not saying that he's my boyfriend because maybe I want my boyfriend to have as big a brand as Matt. Read more

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