Job hunt tips I’ve collected

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I am always coming across new ideas for being more effective when you look for a job. Here are some I’ve collected:

1. Don’t answer the phone when it wakes you up.
I know people get giddy for interview call backs like they get giddy for good-date callbacks. But the combination of giddy for phone calls, and sleeping late because you’re unemployed could be lethal.

Time magazine reports that “the morning haze you experience when the alarm clock goes off is known as sleep inertia, and it clouds your brain more than sleep deprivation. The impairment is most severe in the first ten minutes but can linger for up to two hours.” Bottom line: Let the call go to voicemail and go get some coffee.

2. Edit a wikipedia entry to show you’re an expert.
Writing a blog on a given topic is great for your career. It shows that you specialize and you know you’re stuff. But a blog is a big time investment. I got the idea of taking charge of a wikipedia entry from reading this blog post. It seemed totally natural to this woman to contribute to wikipedia in an area she was becoming knowledgeable in.

We should all think this way. In general, editing wikipedia is not rocket science. It shows that we are good at working in a team (which is what a wikipedia entry is), and that we have expertise.

3. Handle hard interview questions with a positive bent.
“Most times people ask trick questions, the person is looking for you to go negative,” says Cynthia Shapiro, former human resource executive and author of Corporate Confidential. An example of one of these questions is, Tell me about a difficult boss and how you got around it.

The impact of being positive in an interview, and in life, cannot be overestimated. Optimistic people are happier and more fulfilled than the not-so-optimistic.

4. Don’t provide two email addresses.
Why do I see so many resumes with multiple email addresses? If you can’t make up your mind which email address is best, then how will you make decisions for anything once you’re hired? Providing two email addresses is not being thorough. It’s being annoying. Know the difference.

5. Make your resume a tease.
I write all the time about how a resume is a marketing document and not a list of your achievements or (worse yet) your job duties.

But David Perry, author of the Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters, takes that one step further and says a resume should be a tease. You don’t want to tell absolutely everything. You want to tell someone enough to get them to call you to ask for more.

6. Pitch your cover letter from the right angle.
A reader, Harry Hollenberg, wrote in with this tip: “Don’t spend your cover letter telling me why my firm is perfect for you. Tell me why you’re perfect for our firm.”

7. Turn your job hunt into a publicity campaign.
This is actually something to do before you need the job. Debra Feldman, Job Whiz (and Coachology veteran) writes:

“Try Googling yourself. If you can’t find anything that promotes you as an expert in your field, take steps to establish a web presence so recruiters and colleagues can find you and learn about your strengths. You can do this and control the content by establishing your own professional website (not family trips) and including information detailing your achievements, links to other references, white papers, articles, presentations at industry conferences and keynote speeches, internal training you’ve developed or delivered, PowerPoint presentations of general interest.”

“The idea,” writes Feldman, “is to let yourself be found by recruiters and others who are looking for certain skills or qualifications. This tends to make you a more interesting and attractive potential candidate than if you submit a resume or write to introduce yourself. Think how you feel when you unearth a gem.”

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Twentysomething: 7 Ways to motivate your millennial

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By Ryan Healy – I want to work, I want to grow and I want to learn. What I’d really like is challenging, fascinating projects and the perfect mentor. The typical entry-level job doesn’t always allow this to happen. Below are a few simple ways to keep me interested and motivated.

1. Be Spontaneous
You don’t have to make any drastic changes. Something as small as going out for a long lunch with a few co workers could be enough to keep me from going insane in my cubicle. If you want to get a little crazy, tell me to go home at 1pm every once in a while – and really mean it. If I think you don’t really mean it, I won’t use it. Even holding a scheduled meeting in a different location, like a local coffee shop or deli can throw a wrench in the status quo.

2 Give me feedback
I love feedback. In fact, I need fairly consistent feedback and encouragement to know if I am performing up to par or not. And bring on the criticism. In fact, if I know that I’m not doing something right I will ask you how to improve, so be prepared to give me some guidance as well. Further, if I exceed your expectations on something please let me know. This won’t go to my head and I won’t think I am overqualified for the job, I just need an idea of what is expected from me.

3. Ask for feedback
I understand that a lower level employee does not typically openly critique their superiors, but why shouldn’t we? We are the ones who see your management style first hand and know what works and what doesn’t. The key to this one is providing an open, knowledge sharing atmosphere where no one will take offense or belittle anyone else.

If a manager makes it clear to me that they want honest feedback about their performance, I have no problem giving both positive feedback and constructive criticism. The normal performance evaluation gives the impression that you are the teacher and I am being graded. A two way performance evaluation will greatly increase communication and allow for a more engaged relationship.

4. An Optional Reward System
Sometimes a minimal percentage raise is not the most exciting reward for someone who will probably just put it toward their massive college loan debt or next week’s happy hour. A bonus is a more exciting performance reward for me, but an optional performance reward system would be a great way to keep me motivated.

For a twenty-two-year-old, an extra few days of vacation time is a lot more exciting then a small percentage raise that is barely noticeable after taxes. Other options might include extra flex time or occasionally working from home. I’m sure if you asked your twentysomething about possible performance rewards they would come back with a page full of options the very next day.

5. Keep me in the loop
Not having any idea about major business events on the horizon can be really frustrating. I realize there is often confidential information that needs to stay in the hands of upper management, but I want to understand where I fit in. For example, if I’m on the iMac team then it’s fine if you don’t tell me about the iPhone. But if you want me to do work on the iPhone, you have to tell explain to me what I’m working on. If you don’t trust me to keep confidential information confidential, you should fire me.

What makes business fun is seeing how management operates and executes on its strategies. I like hearing what you are working on and thinking about. Not only will this keep me interested and motivated, but it’s a great learning experience for someone who will eventually be in a management position. Also, I like to have some input. You probably won’t take my advice, but hearing a different perspective can’t hurt.

6. Be my friend
Don’t worry I don’t want to be your drinking buddy, and I’m not going to tell you my deepest, darkest secrets. But a little friendly interaction goes a long way. This could mean talking sports for a few minutes in the office or going out for a quick lunch and discussing both work related and non-work-related issues.

I have an excellent relationship with my manager right now. Not only do we get along in the office, but we play in a non-work-related basketball league together. This has created an actual friendship that doesn’t always revolve around work. And it transfers over to the job by creating a loyalty to my manager that I wouldn’t otherwise have.

7. It doesn’t hurt to smile
I can’t think of anything that would turn me off more than a manager who comes in every day with a scowl on their face, looking like they can’t wait to go home. If I have any plans of staying with the company, then most likely my goal will be to move up the ranks and take over my manager’s position.

If I see that this person does not enjoy what they are doing, then why would I want to stick around to take over that position? Obviously, I can make up my own mind about whether or not a job is a good fit for me, but dealing with a disgruntled manager every day will send me running for the exits. Be positive and at least pretend you enjoy your job.

If you don’t think these techniques will work, go ahead and ask your twentysomething what they think, I bet you will get some good feedback.

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This is a replacement post for the post that used to be here

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I took down a blog post today. I made a pretty big mistake in taking a critique of a book and making a personal attack. I am sure sorry that I did that. I sure don’t want to be that kind of writer. I probably made a bunch of other mistakes in that post too, but the blogosphere goes fast, and I can’t process them all fast enough to tell you about them now.

Here’s what I can tell you, though. Media Bistro linked here today – and it’s a blog and community that I really respect. And CareerJournal.com is featuring this blog on Monday. And I really don’t want any of those people to think the blog is about personal attacks and controversy.

This is what I think my blog is about: Community.

People have always asked me why I write every day about career advice. I mean, there are more glamorous topics in the world, for sure. I tell those people, first of all, that my career saved me at lots of very bad moments in my life, and I’m grateful that I have it to fall back on, and I want other people to have that, too.

But the other reason I write is because I want to be happy in my life, and I know that somehow, my career is involved in that, and I am not totally sure the best way to do it, and I want a community of people around me who are also trying to figure this out. I want us to do it together.

So, you can see that the post I deleted (well, if you saw it at all) is not turning out to be in line with my vision for my writing life. I wish I had never even thought of writing a personal attack. I can only tell you that I’ve learned a lesson. Maybe ten lessons.

To be honest, I am used to having an editor reining me in, which I don’t have on the blog. And it makes me nervous all the time. At Business 2.0 my editor told me never to write about sex, ever. At Warner Books, my editor took out two fat references and told me that no one wants to hear me writing about fat.

I sure wish I had listened to her.

At Yahoo, the readers write in scathing comments every week, (Example: “Terrible advice but I’d take her for something else.” Yes. I’m not kidding.) But it never bothers me. The comments are so absurd that I know the people are not part of my community.

The comments I got today were thoughtful, heartfelt, and definitely were from people I consider part of my community. So, in an effort to keep us all on the right track – looking for how to do work and life in a way that makes us happy – I deleted this post. And you should know that I’m not above taking some advice, either.

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Coachology: Get angel funding for your business idea

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There is a glut of people who are dying to fund business plans. Especially now, as starting a business online becomes less and less expensive, people require less money from investors, so investors have to look harder for startups to fund.

The problem is that people only want to fund good business ideas. It’s very hard to tell if an idea is stupendous. But it is easy to tell if an idea is terrible. And it’s easy to tell if you are pitching your idea for a company in an incompetent way.

Of course, there are a lot of resources online to help you get started with a business plan and a pitch. Entrepreneur.com is full of great resources. Pamela Slim’s blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation is a great community for getting moral support to make the leap into entrepreneurship. And Guy Kawasaki has a classic list of ways to screw up your pitch.

To get funding, you need to know how much money you require to execute the business idea. If you need a lot of money you need to go to a venture capital firm. If you only need a little money (e.g. $50,000) you can go to an angel fund. Guy Kawasaki lists ways you can get to a venture capitalist, and Paul Graham has an essay on how to fund a company on a shoestring.

But to make any of this work, you need a plan that is good enough to make people who know business plans think, “Hm. I wonder if this will work?” So you need a great elevator pitch — the one-minute summary of why your idea is good — and you need a smart business plan that you can send to potential investors.

This week’s Coachology will match you with an angel fund manager, Teresa Esser. She oversees Silicon Pastures, a group that funds early stage startups. She wrote Venture Cafe, a book about entrepreneurship, and she teaches entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin. Teresa will help you sharpen your elevator pitch and business plan so you can land the angel funding you’re looking for.

To work with Teresa, email three sentences to me about the business idea you have. The deadline for sending an email is Sunday, April 8.

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Five steps for getting a raise

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More money is good, right? You’re going to be doing your job anyway, so you might as well ask to get paid more for doing it.

But you actually have to do a lot of preparation in order to ask for a raise effectively. The most obvious preparation is to find out what everyone else is getting paid for what you do. A recent New York Times story gives a good overview of online resources for salary comparisons.

Here are five other things you can do to get a salary increase:

1. Understand your boss’s perspective.
This is not a moment of truth, it’s a moment of negotiation. You convince your boss you’re worth more and your boss convinces you he or she is fair, and you reach some sort of compromise that makes everyone happy.

So be reasonable in your approach. You don’t deserve a raise just because you’ve been doing your job well for x number of months. It’s your job to do your job well — that’s why you were hired. You need to show that you’re doing more than you were hired to do, or that you’re doing different work that’s typically paid at a higher rate.
Gather as much information about your boss’s perspective as possible in order to form your strongest negotiating position. Consider this list of 10 things bosses hate most about employees.

2. Expand your job duties.
Get really good at your job immediately so that you can take on more responsibility in another job, in another capacity. Look around for something more to do, and figure out how to do it. Then tell your boss you’re doing more than one job and you want to be paid extra for doing the other job you’ve already been doing.

If you think your boss will balk at the idea of you taking on more responsibility, start looking like your current job is under control. One way to do this is to have a completely clean desk. A clean desk says, “I’m totally on top of my workload. Please give me more.” A cluttered desk says, “Help. I’m drowning.”

(I’m not making this stuff up — researchers actually study offices. Here’s a summary of why you should have a clean desk.)

3. Consistently over-deliver.
Even during a salary freeze there’s always more money for superstars, because losing a superstar costs a company a lot of money. So getting a raise is about conveying to the office that you’re a superstar. This could be in the form of taking on more areas of responsibility, but it could also be in the form of exceeding expectations in a very obvious way.

Exceeding expectations is something that must be announced. If you finish your project, that’s what people will understand. If you finish your project with incredible results, you need to remind everyone what the expectations were and what you delivered. If you don’t toot your horn, no one else will. A hallmark of a superstar is they know how to toot their horn with out being annoying.

Superstars aren’t overnight sensations — they work at it. So start performing like a superstar six months before you want to ask for a raise.

4. Get a mentor.
Employees who have mentors are twice as likely to be promoted as those who don’t, according to Ellen Fagenson Eland, a professor at George Mason University. A mentor can help you position yourself, time and again, to receive a raise.

An effective mentor helps you see your path in a way that maximizes your talents and stays consistent with your goals for life. This isn’t small task, and almost all successful people say they have more than one mentor. But start with one, because that will significantly increase the likelihood that you’ll get the raise you’re going to ask for.

Unfortunately, for some people finding a mentor is almost as difficult as asking for a raise. So here are seven ways to find and keep a mentor.

5. Think in non-financial terms.
If more money isn’t happening for you, try asking for something else. Telecommuting, a job for your spouse, extra vacation time, training, even relocation to a company branch in a city with a lower cost of living — these are all things that are worth a lot of money to you, but look a lot less expensive than a salary increase in a company’s budget. So non-financial rewards are a good place to compromise in salary negotiations.

Also, you can turn these benefits to cash next time you change jobs. When you negotiate salary at your next company and they ask you how much you made in your last job, add up all the benefits and include them in the number you give. Some people’s benefits total up to 30 percent of their salary.

If the shy ones among you are thinking this isn’t a fair negotiating tactic, get that thought out of your head. Even CareerHub, a group blog of career coaches, recommends that you include benefits in the total calculation of your salary next time you negotiate.

If none of these steps work, try not to be so obsessed with getting a raise. Think about it — most raises amount to about 4 percent of your salary. That’s nothing. Even if you earn six figures, 4 percent isn’t going to be life-altering.

There are so many more things you can ask for that will actually improve your life, like training in a skill area you’re interested in, or the ability to telecommute a few days a week.

Try focusing on the things that really matter to you instead of the dollar amount attached to your title. You may find that your salary will increase as a natural offshoot of the passion you develop for your work.

 

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Lessons from the drug trade, and other entrepreneurial tips

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One of the important lessons in entrepreneurship is to figure out your goal: Do you want to run a small business forever? Grow into a multinational corporation? Or do you want to sell as fast as possible? Your business should fit your personality and your vision for your life.

New York magazine profiles a drug dealer trying to find an exit strategy for his mid-size company. Which sells cocaine, of course. Believe it or not, there’s a market for drug dealerships. And you can tell this guy is an overachiever in the business world because he keeps his client list on an Excel spreadsheet.

Here’s how he explains his plan: “The rule in any business is that you don’t sell your company for what it makes in a year, but for what it makes in two or three or four years, right? Well in my business, you can’t do that. Someone gets arrested and — boom– it’s over. So you gotta sell it based on what you make in, like, six months.”

For those of you who are thinking about entrepreneurship in a less life-threatening product category, try taking Pairwise’s entrepreneurial personality test (scroll down the page to find it). This test tells you if you have the personality similar to other scrappy Internet company founders who Y Combinator has funded.

Y Combinator typically funds young technical-type guys in college or just out of college, (although every time I write this, Y Combinator asks me to say that this is an overstatement and they actually fund a wide range of people.) If you know you are not this type even without taking the test, and you know you can’t stomach the drug trade, there’s still hope.

Current research from the academics says that there is no one personality type for a successful entrepreneur. There are so many ways to be an entrepreneur today that you can create a business to fit your strengths.

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Video blog: Each person requires different management techniques

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By Bruce Tulgan – Each person is different. There are six questions managers need to answer about each employee in order to know how to manage that person. What if you’re not a manager? Consider asking yourself these questions to figure out how to manage yourself better.

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Happy Passover from my blended life

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Yesterday Ryan posted about creating a blended life. His post makes me think a lot about my own set up. I am pretty sure people would say I have a blended life:

1. I work from 8-1pm and 8pm to 12pm seven days a week. Except when I don’t, because my two young sons need something.

2. I take care of my kids from 1pm to 8pm. Except when I don’t because some inflexible business partner needs something.

3. My husband takes care of the kids in the morning, and sometimes in the afternoon, if I have a lot of work. And sometimes I do a whole day of kids when he needs to have more alone time.

This is not a perfect arrangement. For example, I feel guilt when I travel to New York City to promote my book — which I’ve done a couple of times in the past few months. And my husband doesn’t have a career he loves.

But what I want to say is that the hardest part of this blended life for me is not the kids or the career decisions or the marital decisions, but transitioning between the everything.

For example, it’s so hard to be with the kids and not think about work. If nothing else, work is just plain easier to deal with. A blended life is great, but focus on the moment is important, as well. Moving fluidly between such totally different worlds often makes it hard for me to keep my mind in one place when it needs to be.

Last night, at my aunt’s house, there were thirty people around a table all focused on telling the story of Passover. For those of you who don’t know, Passover celebrates when the slavery of the Jews in Egypt ended — thousands of years ago. Who knows how much of the story is true? I’m not sure. But we tell it every year, and it’s a very organized meal, and the point is to teach the story to the kids in an organized way. And last night the only kids there were mine. For much of the story, they were actually paying attention. After all, when does a kid get 30 adults telling a story for your benefit?

What I noticed is that I was so happy to be doing the Passover story and meal with my kids that I stopped worrying about work. Stopped thinking about my blog posts and my book sales and all the other things that hum in my mind most moments of the day.

A lot of times it takes doing something out of the ordinary for you to see what you need to be doing now. Passover did this for me. I realized that even though I’m going through the motions of separating from work each day, I’m not making the mental transition as effectively as I could. I hike with the kids, I go to the gym, do the things you’d think would allow me to stop thinking about work. But I’m not always successful.

Passover was so nice because I had a great ability to focus on stuff that wasn’t work. I want to get that more, in my blended life.

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Five ways to do better in phone interviews

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The last phone interview I did was for my job at the Boston Globe. And let me just confess that I wasn’t that great in the interview, and I stressed a lot afterwards about not getting the job. But, of course, I did get the job, which I think might be evidence that I write so much about career advice that I am becoming way too hard on myself.

At any rate, I have done tons of phone interviews—on both sides of the hiring equation—so when Sia asked me to write a post on how to do a phone interview, I was surprised that I hadn’t written one already. (Although I have written a bunch about interviews.)

So, here are five tips for doing well in a phone interview:

1. Attend to your surroundings.
If you have an interview scheduled, take precautions beforehand to get in a good spot physically.

Don’t take the interview when you are at your desk and can’t talk freely. Don’t take the call when there is too much noise in the background. And don’t walk from one place to another because the breathlessness that comes from walking and talking at the same time subconsciously conveys lack of authority to someone who doesn’t know you.

If you did not schedule it beforehand, feel free to ask the interviewer if you can call back at a better time. You will not sound disinterested, but rather, you will sound concerned for managing your life by organizing your commitments.

2. Dress for the part.
Consider getting dressed up for your interview, even though no one will see you.

The emails you write to a hiring manager are different than your emails to your friends. You can’t talk to an interviewer the same way you talk with your friends. You know this, but the shift is difficult without practice. And if you are not practiced at talking about business on the phone, it’s hard to get into business mode for the call.

A way to compensate for this is to dress for an interview even though the interviewer can’t see you. In the 90s when people debated the virtues of dumping suits at the workplace in favor of business casual, there was a fair amount of research to show that people took their work more seriously when they were in a suit. That makes sense. Girls act more like a princess when they’re in a prom dress than when they’re in running shorts, and the same happens with people in work clothes.

I’m not saying you should wear a suit all the time. I’m saying that when there’s a risk of sounding too casual or unprofessional on the phone, dressing up a little can actually change how you sound.

3. Stand up.
No kidding. You’ll sound more self confident and dynamic if you stand while you speak than if you sit. Walking around a bit, but not too much, also keeps the call going smoothly. If your body is confined, your speech sounds different than if you have run of the room. It’s one reason that the best speakers walk around instead of standing in one place at the podium.

Using hand gestures is very natural for talking, so allow yourself to use them, even though you’re on the phone. You don’t have to force it. They will just come, as long as your hands are free. And you want to sound natural on the phone because authentic is more likeable. So walking around a room with a headset will actually give you the freedom to be more yourself on the call.

4. Prepare for the most obvious questions.
A resume is to get someone to pay attention to you. An in-person interview is to see if people like you. Somewhere in between those two events, people need to make sure you are qualified and you don’t have any huge red flags. So in a phone interview you can expect people to focus on those two concerns.

You will probably get questions asking you to show that you actually have the skills to accomplish the goals for the open position. Be prepared to give organized, rehearsed examples of how you have performed at work in the past in order to show your skill set.

Also, be ready for a question about the most obvious problem on your resume—often frequent job changes or big gaps in work. These are answers you should practice. Even if your answer isn’t great, a good delivery can make the difference between getting through a phone screen or not.

5. Don’t forget to close.
An interview is about selling yourself, and the best salespeople are closers. Your goal for a phone interview is to get an in-person interview. So don’t get off the phone until you have made some efforts to get to that step. Ask what the process is for deciding who to interview face-to-face. Ask for decision-making timelines, and try to find out who is making the decisions. Don’t barrage the interviewer with questions in this regard, but the more information you have, the more able you will be to get yourself to the next step.

And don’t forget a key component of a successful close—even for a phone interview–is a thank you note to followup.

Finally, after you get done with a phone interview, send out a few more resumes, or go fill out a few more job applications. Hopefully, you won’t need to keep hunting because the phone interview will clinch the job. But it will make you crazy to just sit and wait for the interviewer to take action. If you keep job hunting you are taking action yourself which will make you feel more in control over your situation.

The best way to ace an interview is to be interviewing for your dream job. It’s so easy to sell yourself when you are a perfect fit for a job you’re dying to have. But it’s really hard to identify what that dream job is. And then, of course, you need a path to get to that job. Here’s a course helps you identify the best job for you and shows you how to get it: Get Your Dream Job Now!

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Twentysomething: Why I don’t want work/life balance

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By Ryan Healy – At the office full of twentysomethings where my girlfriend, Niki, works, everyone was comparing their salaries, and the owner of the company got really angry. And his being angry made for a tough week, so Niki asked him if she could take Friday off.

He said, “If you’re going to be successful you need to start putting your career before your life.”

Of course she took the day off.

When she told her mother about the situation, her mother said, “If you don’t put your life before work you will never be happy.”

Hearing this conflicting advice from two of the most influential elders in your life is confusing. What does Niki’s boss say to his kids when he gets home? Does he tell them to put work before life? What would Niki’s mom say to young people she works with? Would she tell them to go home early?

This whole notion of needing to separate work and life implies that your career, which takes up about 75% of your day, is something you simply try to get through so you can go home and do what you really enjoy for the other 25%. What a terrible way to live.

I wholeheartedly believe that my life has a purpose. My purpose is to be successful, genuinely happy and to make a difference in this world somewhere along the way. Not a single one of these values can take a backseat to another. The balance doesn’t work, we already know this. I don’t want to choose. I want a blended life.

Occasionally I need to contact an older co-worker late at night or on a Sunday. Typically, I email the person, receive no response and the work waits until the next day’s business hours. Usually, I am hesitant to call and bother older people during their “home time.” My home time is not sacred. I have grown up being connected twenty-four hours a day, I have no problem with sending a quick work email or organizing my inbox during these supposed “off” hours.

There is no need for me to keep work life and home life separate. The majority of week nights you can find me in front of the computer chatting with a friend, watching TV and messing around with MySpace or Facebook. I may as well send out an email or finish up a work briefing at the same time. When I told my friend about this post, he said, “Work/life balance? That doesn’t even make sense.”

Think about it, he is absolutely right. I would never dream of saying I want a Family/Life balance or I want a Friend/Life balance. Is work so terrible that people don’t want to consider it a part of their lives? I sure hope not, because if that’s the case than the next fifty years of my life are going to suck!

The lines between work and life have been blurred for years. I have decided to embrace this fact and work on the best blend for my life. Whether this means working hours that fit around my schedule or being paid for results rather than the amount of hours worked, I’m not sure. I will leave that question to the management consultants and human resource experts. In the meantime my peers and I will keep searching for this blended life, while everyone else continues to run in circles failing to achieve their so-called balance.

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