You are the sum of the people you play with

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Who you hang out with has so much to do with the quality of your life. I think about this all the time, so I was happy to see that the neurobiologists finally came up with some evidence that if you hang out with positive people, your brain actually starts thinking more positively (subscription soon).

I also think that friends who do cool things make your own life more exciting. My friend, Dennis, at Techdirt, sent the press releases to me about his company’s new product, and he was so excited that it made me excited, too. There is no neurobiology to support this — yet — but I am convinced that people who love their jobs give us more energy for our own.

When I played professional beach volleyball, everyone was always angling to be the worst on the court during practice, because that’s the fastest way to get better. This was no small feat when you’re at the top of a sport. But the day I had a match against Olympic gold medallists, I learned more about myself and my game than from 20 matches with people at my level.

A blogroll, to me, is a metaphor for all of these issues. If you are the sum of who you play with, then I want to choose my list of blog playmates carefully. When it comes to blogrolls, some people have very thorough lists of everyone in their field.

My list — which I’ve titled, What I’m Reading — is the blogs that make me excited and get my brain moving in new directions. The list changes all the time. A lot of the blogs aren’t career blogs. After all, I dream up ideas about careers all day. But you could say that your career is closely related to the people you play with, and in that sense, these are all people who have helped my career most recently.

(Hat tip: Willy in Wisconsin)

Forget about asking yourself if you’re likeable

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I write a lot about how people have to be likeable to get what they want in life. I get so frustrated, though, because everyone thinks they are likeable. Maybe to their dog, yes, but in my experience most people are not nearly as likeable as they think they are.

I thought of this because I was reading a list of five tips to be likeable:

1. Be positive
2. Control your insecurities
3. Provide value
4. Eliminate all judgments
5. Become a person of conviction

And I thought, this is a great list. I should put it on my blog. Then I thought, forget it. People will read the list and think they have all these qualities and then move on. But don’t do that.

The problem is that the most unlikeable people are the most clueless so they are the least able to become more likeable. Harvard Business Review ran a whole issue on incompetence (via Ben Casnocha) and the conclusion is, among other things, the incompetent don’t know they are incompetent.

So here’s an idea that can apply to likeable and unlikeable people while avoiding the uphill battle of getting the unlikeable to confess: Find the item on the list that is your weak point and force yourself to get better at it. No one is equally good at all five things. Improve on one. Taziana Cascario, professor at Harvard, does research in this area, and she told me that the biggest barrier to being likeable is not caring. So just pick something on the list and improve on it and stop analyzing whether or not people like you.

I am going to improve on number four by being less judgmental. After all, I just wrote a whole post about the misguided-and-unlikeable and how much they annoy me.

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The funeral industry can teach you how to specialize in your career

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I write a lot about the importance of specializing in your career. The bottom line is that if you are great at what you do, you will get better hours, better pay, and more flexibility in how you run your life. But no one is great at everything.

Specializing means figuring out what you don’t do. If you are a programmer, you can’t be great at hardware and software. If you are in marketing, you won’t be great at marketing to kids and business-to-business marketing. You need to know your niche if you want to be great.

But I receive tons of mail from people arguing that if you specialize, you run the risk of being great in an area that no one hires for anymore. This is true. Especially now, when the workplace is changing so quickly. The solution to this problem is that everyone, no matter what their career, must be not only a specialist, but a trend spotter as well.

For a good look at how people become trend spotters in order to stay relevant in their field, check out the new book, Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death, by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen. The book is filled with characters like Lou Stellato, a sort of a futurist of funeral directors, who declares, “Funeral service as we know it is over.”

Cullen’s book explains the issues of the shifting funeral industry, and incidentally, the process that individuals take to shift their careers so as not to get left behind. This is a great lesson in specializing because the funeral information is hilarious (for example Costco breaking the casket monopoly) and shocking (people turning their loved ones into diamonds – yes, there’s a new process…).

The biggest problem for funeral directors is that by 2025 most funerals will not involve caskets. This means no big profit from the panic of a last minute, overpriced casket. No profit from renting a room for a viewing. In fact, there is the possibility that most funerals could bypass the funeral home altogether.

But something happened after 9/11. People needed to hold funerals without having any part of the body to bury. And, since many of the dead were very young and well-connected in the community, the funerals included literally thousands of people. So funeral directors became event planners.

And then, the smart funeral directors noticed that if they honed their event planning skills then they would be useful even as the industry shifts away from casket-centered funerals.

Your industry is like this one. Whatever industry you’re in is shifting because all aspects of culture and business are shifting. These funeral directors are not happy about having to change, but they face the need head on and they figure out, in the funeral world, how they can be specialists in a way that will keep them relevant to their customers.

Remember Me shows that there are many ways to adapt to change, and you only need to find one that works. For example, not everyone is abandoning the casket world. Some are adapting it – Goliath Casket Co. is making caskets to fit the obese (at least one overweight body was squeezed into a standard-sized casket with a shoehorn.) And Batesville offers low-cost wood veneer alternatives (positively revolutionary for the price-gouging industry). And to address the fact that more people are choosing cremation, some funeral directors are focusing on audio add-ons, a one casket company partnered with Nambe – the renowned purveyor of wedding registry silver — to create coffee-table quality containers for cremains.

To become a specialist in your field takes a little vision and a little luck. Usually one’s specialty comes by dint of the opportunities that present themselves. The way I got to be a career writer is a process of finding a specialty. I started writing fiction, but I was not that great at it. I realized the only thing I was getting paid good money for was business writing. And within that field, I found that the way I really stood out was in my approach to writing about careers.

Trend spotting takes diligent information gathering with an open mind, but there’s big payoff in having a relevant, specialized career. I always aim for a dynamic, innovative career like one of those trend-spotting funeral directors, and you should, too.

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How my friend copes with her disability at work

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Wendy Waters suggested that I write about how to deal with disabilities in the workplace. So here’s a story about my friend Ann, who has a really deep voice. It isn’t a sexy deep voice; it sounds more like Oscar the Grouch with a sore throat or Darth Vader on Prozac.

Her voice, which is a result of a birth complication, is a disability that she must deal with daily and for the most part, has overcome. While I know this now, and it’s the basis for this story, I didn't always see things that way.

I knew Ann in grade school where I confess to having had evil thoughts:

1. Why is she first chair in saxophone and I am last chair in oboe? She has the right mouth for wind instruments, and I don't. It's not fair.
2. Why is she class president and I am not even getting invited to boy-girl parties? How can someone with such an awful voice be so much more popular than I am?

But Ann and I ended up on the high-school track team together, and we became close friends. I spent so much time with her that I stopped noticing that her voice was different than other people’s. It seemed normal to me.

But there were constant reminders: restaurant customers stared when they heard us talking. Often sales people did not hear what she wanted because they were so stunned by the sound of her voice. Ann never lost patience, never seemed uncomfortable. I never knew how she did it.

In the track world you meet tons of kids from schools all over the state, and when Ann walked by, I heard lots of them say: “What's wrong with her voice?”

When I asked Ann if she felt weird about how she sounded, she'd say no. “A deep voice sounds authoritative,” she’d tell me.

Ann flourished in college. She learned to be extra nice to people because they usually would be extra nice back. She became very loyal to friends who stuck by her because so many others shied away after hearing her speak. Naturally, she knew she was different, but good grades could help her overcome prejudices and she excelled in school.

After college she went to a top advertising firm. I assume that her voice was not a problem during job interviews, or at least that interviewers believed Ann could overcome her voice impediment enough to impress potential clients.

But then she was assigned to a manager who hated her. He berated her intelligence, made sexually offensive comments around her, and generally let her know he did not want her around. In truth, his actions amounted to harassment. But her harasser had leverage, so Ann had to leave the company.

Once you leave a high-profile company without recommendations, you can pretty much forget going to another company in the same industry. So Ann returned to where she flourished — school. She took programming classes, and a classmate liked her so much that he got her a job. His software firm needed someone who knew advertising and someone who knew programming, and the company liked the idea of Ann wearing two hats.

The company went under in the tech meltdown of 2002, but Ann found that by switching gears, she had developed a new specialty, which is in a very narrow niche that she now dominates (and doesn’t want me to identify because she wasn’t thrilled that I was writing about any of this). But the bottom line is that things are good for Ann now. She weathered many storms and is successful despite her disability. Here are her tips for others who are struggling with some kind of impediment. But the tips are applicable to all of us:

1. Don't blame other people for your failures. Take responsibility for your life and move past people who don't help you.
2. Have patience with yourself if you don't choose the right career on the first try. Trust that you will find a place that’s right for you, and keep looking.
3. Convince yourself you are great. Then convincing other people is much easier.

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Don’t post naked photos of yourself. From work. Duh.

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Check out this experiment, which shocked even me. Here is the description of it from Waxy.org:

A Seattle web developer named Jason Fortuny started his own Craigslist experiment. The goal: “Posing as a submissive woman looking for an aggressive dom, how many responses can we get?”

He took the text and photo from a sexually explicit ad (warning: not safe for work) in another area, reposted it to Craigslist Seattle. In 24 hours he received 178 responses, with 145 photos of men in various states of undress.

In a staggering move, he published every single response, including full names, phone numbers, and email addresses. Read the responses (warning: sexually explicit material).

So why is this on Brazen Careerist? Because among the many responders was a guy who used his Microsoft company email address. And included a naked photo of himself. Or at least a part of himself.

Casual sex on Craigslist is a lifestyle. Whatever. But the work email address. That’s another story. My first reaction was, what an idiot. But then I decided that it’s not that idiotic.

At this point in the history of the Internet, adults understand not to use their work email to send naked photos of themselves. Adults know this will come back to haunt them. So I am convinced that people who flagrantly ignore common workplace precautions are actually looking to get caught.

Guy Kawasaki addresses this issue on a smaller scale. He didn’t back up his computer, and it crashed, and a friend recommended he read Why Smart People Do Dumb Things. The four reasons people do stupid things apply to Mr. Kawasaki and Mr. Microsoft as well: Hubris, arrogance, narcissism, unconscious need to fail.

The question is, degree. If you are very [arrogant, narcissistic or in need of failure] you will do something very big and stupid. Most of us just do small stupid acts. I immediately recognized my problem as unconcsious need to fail. I wish I could say it was arrogance, because I think that might sound better.

But, as usual, understanding what motivates someone to do something stupid at work automatically makes me have more empathy and less judgment. Understanding peoples’ motivations is a good exercise to keep you evenhanded and compassionate at work — two skills that are essential to leadership success. And if it can work with Mr. Microsoft, it can work with anyone.

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How to deal with depression at work

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Kristen Ryan graduated a year ago and accepted a position in public relations. After two months on the job, she started having anxiety attacks, and after six months on the job, anxiety attacks were almost daily. Ryan says the anxiety was from the “pressures of life changes: Moving away from family, staring new job, transitioning to a completely different life from school to work. And,” she says, “I broke up with my long-time boyfriend.”

The most common age to experience depression for the first time is in one's twenties. Typical triggers are those Ryan cited, resulting from the stress of entering the workforce. Recently, these triggers have been exacerbated, as the new generation of workers takes for granted that challenging and rewarding work will come their way. This is a generation whose parents oversaw each moment of their schedule to ensure proper mentoring and enrichment. So a job standing at the office copier is a big comedown that many new workers are not prepared to accept. For those who have no choice, the result can be depression.

Depression is serious: Fifteen percent of clinically depressed people die by suicide. The illness is more common in women than men, and according to the Canadian Mental Health Association, one in five working women has suffered from depression or anxiety.

The good news is that depression is very treatable, so getting help is important. Dr. Stuart Koman, president of the mental health clinic Walden Behavioral Care, says there is a preponderance of scientific evidence to show that a combination of medicine and talk therapy can solve most cases of depression.

Ryan found that sessions with a social worker helped her to get back on track. But not everyone recovers so quickly. Like Ryan, Rachael Chaump joined a public relations firm last year, and after a few months, she realized that she had a severe problem. She says, “I was crying at my desk every day for no reason. And finally I called my dad and told him I hate my life and I can't go on like this.” Chaump ended up on temporary disability in a treatment program that included drug therapy to treat what was a chemical imbalance.

Both women had to move carefully in order to keep the jobs they had. Ryan took meditation classes and then, when she had an anxiety attack she “went to a secluded place at work to meditate.” She also took long walks outside in the middle of the workday. Chaump was not able to hide her depression as well, but she says that even with all her crying, “People just got used to it. As long as I kept answering the phone no one said anything to me.”

If you think you're depressed, you need to do two things: Figure out how to keep your job, and figure out how to get help. According to Jonathan Alpert, associate director of the Depression Clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital, “One of the most difficult calls is to recognize depression in oneself. This is true even for people in mental health fields. Often the first step is getting feedback from someone else.”

Enter the employee assistance program — EAP — that helps workers confidentially identify mental illness in themselves. Denise Curran is a therapist at ComPsych, an employee assistance program serving six thousand organizations. She describes her role as sort of a referral service. Curran, like most EAP therapists, can give you advice over the phone or online as to whether you seem depressed, and who you can go to, locally, to get help.

The EAP process is completely confidential, but crying at your desk is another story. Chaump's company, FCF Schmidt Public Relations, was incredibly supportive and gave her paid leave even though that is not the company policy, per se. Other companies are not likely to be so gracious, so be careful. A good resource is the book Working in the Dark: Keeping your job while dealing with depression. Author Beth Gulas, a specialist in corporate critical intervention, says the book can help you determine if it's a safe environment to tell your boss about your depression. The book also gives advice on how to keep working through depression if you have to (example: set fifteen-minute goals for yourself.)

Before you curse the fact that you have to show up for work every day, consider that work might be a godsend for someone who is depressed. According to Gulas, “One of the typical symptoms of depression is choosing to be alone. But it is likely that depression will be exacerbated if you stay at home.”

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TIME Magazine mentioned my blog. Now what?

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Yep, it’s true. This week TIME Magazine quotes me, tells tidbits of my life, and pretty much makes it sound like my job is blogging.

So next time someone asks me that all-important question, “What do you do?” I’m thinking of saying, “I’m a blogger.”

Right now, when someone asks me what I do, the conversation goes like this:

“I’m a career columnist.”

“Oh. Where is your column?”

“I write for the Boston Globe, and my syndicated column has appeared in about 100 publications.”

“Oh.”

That’s it. No fireworks. Maybe a nod. And then I ask the person what he or she does.

But if someone asked me what I do and I said, “I'm a blogger,” we’d talk about it. They’d remember me. And maybe they’d check out my blog. To most people, being a blogger for a profession is like being an astronaut: Shockingly cool.

But I’m starting to think that no one really is a blogger. In my quest to understand the blogsphere, I have easily spent 100 hours combing though Technorati to understand the ranking system. (I have a spreadsheet full of stats on all career-related blogs like I am playing fantasy baseball or something.) I have a good understanding of who the top bloggers are, and let me tell you, they are not blogging for a living. They are using their blog as a tool.

For example, Guy Kawasaki’s blog is part of his venture capitalist brand: He is in the know and you need to know who he knows to be in the know. Curt Rosengren’s blog, is a platform to launch a book career, speaking career, one of those multi-pronged adventures in passion that he promotes through his writing. Seth Godin’s blog, fuels his book sales which fuel his consulting business.

Let’s look outside the work world, though. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who writes DailyKos is not a blogger per se, he’s a political pundit, and maybe a political fundraiser, or political gate-breaker. But you can’t just be a blogger and get all that attention. Cory, at BoingBoing, quit his day job to blog. Maybe is the closest thing we have to blogger, only blogger. But really, he is a cultural critic. Maybe a community organizer. Or, you could argue, blogging gatekeeper, since it’s hard to hit blog paydirt without getting a link from someone like BoingBoing. (HintHint)

But I don’t care that blogging is an amorphous job. I want to call myself a blogger because I want to see what happens when I do that. The way you answer the question, What do you do? tells the world how you see yourself and what’s important to you. And the world responds differently, depending on what you project. Maybe I’ll think of myself or my career in a fresh light. At least I will get to talk to people about blogging, which is what is at the front of my mind right now.

But one thing is for sure: My syndicator will tell me this is not a good idea. He is adamant that my blog is an offshoot of my print columns and not the other way around. I am not so sure. But, as always, it comes down to this: I get paid for the columns, not for my blog. So I’d be hard-pressed to talk about my blog if the question were not “What do you do?” but, “How do you keep a roof over your head?”

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What to do in college to be successful in your career

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For those of you about to start another year at school, here’s a list of things to keep in mind: Twenty things to do in college to set yourself up for a great job when you graduate.

1. Get out of the library.
“You can have a degree and a huge GPA and not be ready for the workplace. A student should plan that college is four years of experience rather than 120 credits,” says William Coplin, professor at Syracuse University and author of the book, 10 Things Employers Want You to Learn in College. Many people recommend not hiring someone with a 4.0 because that student probably has little experience beyond schoolwork.

2. Start a business in your dorm room.
It’s relatively easy, and Google and Yahoo are dying to buy your business early, when it’s cheap. Besides, running a company in your room is better than washing dishes in the cafeteria. Note to those who play poker online until 4am: Gambling isn’t a business. It’s an addiction.

3. Don’t take on debt that is too limiting.
This is not a reference to online gambling, although it could be. This is about choosing a state school over a pricey private school. If that’s still too tough financially, then consider starting at a community college or look into online degrees vs traditional ones. Almost everyone agrees you can get a great education at an inexpensive school. So in many cases the debt from a private school is more career-limiting than the lack of brand name on your diploma.

4. Get involved on campus.
When it comes to career success, emotional intelligence — social skills to read and lead others —get you farther than knowledge or job competence, according to Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School. Julie Albert, a junior at Brandeis University, is the director of her a-cappella group and head of orientation this year. She hones her leadership skills outside the classroom, which is exactly the place to do it.

5. Avoid grad school in the humanities.
Survival rates in this field are very close to survival rates on the Titanic. One in five English PhD’s find stable university jobs, and the degree won’t help outside the university: “Schooling only gives you the capacity to stand behind a cash register,” says Thomas Benton, a columnist at the Chronicle of Higher Education (who has a degree in American Civilization from Harvard and a tenured teaching job.)

6. Skip the law-school track.
Lawyers are the most depressed of all professionals. Stress in itself does not make a job bad, says Alan Krueger, economist at Princeton University. Not having control over one’s work does make a bad job, though, and lawyers are always acting on behalf of someone else. Suicide is the leading cause of premature death among lawyers. (Evan Shaeffer has a great post on this topic.)

7. Play a sport in college.
People who play sports earn more money than couch potatoes, and women executives who played sports attribute much of their career success to their athletic experience, says Jennifer Cripsen, of Sweet Briar College. You don’t need to be great at sports, you just need to be part of a team.

8. Separate your expectations from those of your parents.
“Otherwise you wake up and realize you’re not living your own life,” says Alexandra Robbins, author of the popular new book The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids. (Note to parents: If you cringe as you read this list then you need to read this book.)

9. Try new things that you’re not good at.
“Ditch the superstar mentality that if you don’t reach the top, president, A+, editor in chief, then the efforts were worthless. It’s important to learn to enjoy things without getting recognition,” says Robbins.

10. Define success for yourself.
“Society defines success very narrowly. Rather than defining success as financial gain or accolades, define it in terms of individual interests and personal happiness,” says Robbins.

11. Make your job search a top priority.
A job does not fall in your lap, you have to chase it. Especially a good one. It’s a job to look for a job. Stay organized by using Excel spreadsheets or online tools to track your progress. And plan early. Goldman Sachs, for example, starts their information sessions in September.

12. Take a course in happiness.
Happiness studies is revolutionizing how we think of psychology, economics, and sociology. How to be happy is a science that 150 schools in the country teach. Preview: Learn to be more optimistic. This class will show you how.

13. Take an acting course.
The best actors are actually being their most authentic selves, says Lindy Amos, of communications coaching firm TAI Resources. Amos teaches executives to communicate authentically so that people will listen and feel connected. You need to learn to do this, too, and you may as well start in college.

14. Learn to give a compliment.
The best compliments are specific, so “good job” is not good, writes Lisa Laskow Lahey, psychologist at Harvard and co-author of How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. Practice on your professors. If you give a good compliment the recipient will think you’re smarter: Big payoff in college, but bigger payoff in the work world.

15. Use the career center.
These people are experts at positioning you in the workforce and their only job is to get you a job. How can you not love this place? If you find yourself thinking the people at your college’s career center are idiots, it’s probably a sign that you really, really don’t know what you’re doing.

16. Develop a strong sense of self by dissing colleges that reject you.
Happy people have “a more durable sense of self and aren’t as buffeted by outside events,” writes Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California-Riverside. When bad things happen, don’t take it personally. This is how the most successful business people bounce back quickly from setback.

17. Apply to Harvard as a transfer student.
Sure people have wild success after going to an Ivy League school but this success is no more grand than that of the people who applied and got rejected. People who apply to Ivy League schools seem to have similar high-self-confidence and ambition, even if they don’t get in, according to research by Krueger.

18. Get rid of your perfectionist streak.
It is rewarded in college, but it leads to insane job stress, and an inability to feel satisfied with your work. And for all of you still stuck on #6 about ditching the law school applications: The Utah Bar Journal says that lawyers are disproportionately perfectionists.

19. Work your way through college.
Getting involved in student organizations counts, and so does feeding children in Sierra Leone or sweeping floors in the chemistry building. Each experience you have can grow into something bigger. Albert was an orientation leader last year, and she turned that experience into a full-time summer job that morphed into a position managing 130 orientation leaders. A great bullet on the resume for a junior in college.

20. Make to do lists.
You can’t achieve dreams if you don’t have a plan to get there.

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How to sort through career advice

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When it comes to career advice, it seems that everyone has some. The trouble is figuring out who to listen to. Most people field advice from friends, parents, teachers and significant others. John Clark, a music producer and sound engineer, even found information technology consultants tossing advice his way.

Before you tell everyone to shut up, consider the idea that there is no bad advice, just people who are bad at sifting advice. Which means if you want to figure out the career that's right for you, get good at sifting.

Rosalind Hoffa, director of the Amherst College Career Center says, “Approach many people and gather all sorts of information. No one has the absolute answer. So the best way to proceed is to explore and experiment.” When it comes to finding the right career, “Everyone has the answer inside them and unlocking it is the question.”

Clark reports that, “The best advice I ever got was from my parents. They told me to follow my heart. They also showed me where my talents are by recognizing a love for music and giving me piano lessons early.”

When sorting through input remember each person has their own perspective, including your parents. Someone who values power gives advice that leans toward the acquisition of power, and someone who values work-life balance steers people toward that. You need to know your own values to figure out how each person's input applies to your situation.

The advice Clark received in college was about performance, because at Tufts, where he was, that's what studying music is all about. Clark tuned out the advice and took pre-med courses with a big paycheck in mind. But sometimes career advice comes in odd packages, and for Clark, it was an award. The first piece of music he produced received national honors, and he realized he had talent for advising musicians artistically and arranging music.

If you know yourself very well, sorting through career advice will be a breeze. The problem is, how can you know yourself that well before you are 70 and your career is over? Even people like Clark, who were raised to focus on their inherent skills, still have trouble figuring out their true calling: After college he took a job creating PowerPoint presentations.

For some people, especially those with patience to spare and money to burn, trial and error will work. And even if you are surrounded by friends who are as lost as you are, you still might find them useful: Hoffa says, “Friends can be a great resource. Sometimes just hearing yourself talk it out with friends is helpful.” Eventually, Clark's friend told him to take an internship at a music studio.

A faster way down the difficult path of career self-knowledge is to take an aptitude test. Deirdre McEachern, of VIP Coaching, says that a career aptitude test can tell you where your strengths lay. She gives her clients the Highlands Ability Battery, which takes three hours to complete and generates thirty pages of information. Other popular tests are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Strong Interest and Skills Confidence Inventory, each of which you can administer yourself via the Internet, though McEachern recommends you have a professional help you interpret your results.

McEachern's clients are generally people in their forties who wish they had come to her in their twenties, but some clients are as young as eighteen. “These people come to me to get help picking a college major,” she says. “Highlands test results don't change after age fourteen. Interests and motivations shift, but one's natural abilities are the same throughout life.”

But McEachern cautions that aptitude tests recommend a wide range of professions. So you also need to understand “your core beliefs and values.” To do this, McEachern asks questions such as: “If you could solve one world problem what would it be? What are the most proud moments of your life? What makes you angry in the world? What are traits you admire in other people?” And she doesn't just write down your answer. She also listens for intangible things like tone of voice and rate of speech. From this process she recommends a career you'd be good at doing that would satisfy your soul.

For those of you who cringe at the thought of hiring a coach or even sitting down for a test, trial and error might be right for you. The more experience you have making career decisions — good and bad — the better you'll get at making them quickly, effectively and on your own. Clinical psychologist Jason Greenberg advises people to go with their gut more often. “People don't listen to their gut. They listen to their head and other peoples' advice. The greater impact a decision has on one's life, the less likely the person is to trust their instinct.”

But the advice never stops, really. And you need to learn to take it. Because the biggest factor in career success, after education, is how effective your network of advisors is. And here's a piece of advice about taking advice from Clark, who now has a thriving business in a career he loves: “Have some humility.”

Three more ways to think about career happiness

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If you ask most people if they like their jobs, they’ll say yes. Alan Kreuger — scintillating economics professor at Princeton, whom I interviewed this morning — says that this is not because people have jobs they like, but because people have cognitive dissonance and are hard-programmed to like what they have.

On the positive side, this hard-wiring to be happy means that we can get through our days. Life is really difficult, and if we weren’t predisposed to think it’s fun, we would all jump off bridges. But Kreuger says that the cognitive dissonance could harm us in our work world if we could actually make a better decision for ourselves.

And, of course, most of us could choose better. If nothing else, you could look at the reams of new research I spew on this blog and make a decision about your job based on that. And here’s a little more research. Three more ways to think about career happiness:

1. Many people want fame, but it’s bad for you.
An article in today’s New York Times (read it now, because you’ll need a subscription in a few days) says that fame is a key motivator for people. Forty percent of people think they’ll be famous, but in reality, only one or two people in a hundred achieves fame.

Additionally, seeking fame will probably make you unhappy. “The participants in the study who focused on goals tied to others’ approval, like fame, reported significantly higher levels of distress than those interested primarily in self-acceptance and friendship. Aiming for a target as elusive as fame, and so dependent on the judgments of others, is psychologically treacherous.”

2. Rich people are not happier but they say they are.
Kreuger and a bunch of other economists and psychologists developed a new way to find out how happy people are — instead of asking them, have them report how they are feeling at short intervals throughout the day. The findings, published in Science magazine: More affluent people say they are, on balance, happier and less affluent people say they are, on balance, not as happy. But in fact, day in and day out, ones level of affluence does not make one happier.

3. Keep your commute short and your TV off.
Duh. These are so obvious, but so few people really do it. Which is the core problem with all this research. If you want to increase your happiness, you need to make significant changes in your life. Sorry. It’s bad news, but it’s true.

But it may console you to know that when I was talking to Kruger about how few people make changes –even though the advice stems from strong, scientific, psychological research — Kreuger said that when it comes to following advice “the psychologists are just as bad as everyone else.”

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