Shortcuts to reinventing yourself

Reinvention is part of being human. The nature of our lives is that we learn more and collect new ideas and that makes us want to do new and different things with our lives. But we often never actually make that transition.

The problem is that we are hard-wired to think about the present. Even people who are great at planning get tangled up in daily details because, after all, this is how humans stayed alive as they evolved: never taking their eye completely away from their immediate needs. Read more

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How to not self-destruct

A famous person emailed me to ask about personality type. I don’t get a lot of emails from famous people. But I do get some. Like, when Melissa was being an executive assistant to billionaires, I was Melissa’s reference.

I could write fifty posts about giving those references, actually, because I was like, “Don’t hire Melissa, because she’ll quit. She can’t work for anyone for more than a year.” Read more

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Finding a mate isn’t luck. It’s about setting a goal and reaching it.

Photographer Dita Pepe has a series of photographs where she shows what she’d turn into with the different types of men she could could have married. The series is often hilarious for it’s ability to make fun of such a wide range of families that think they’re unique but are actually just living out their socioeconomic telos. Read more

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7 Ways to have a good marriage

Staying married is important for your career. If you’re the breadwinner, and you have kids but get divorced, you will need to earn enough money for two households instead of one. Bye-bye career change. If you are not the breadwinner, you’ll start being the breadwinner, and all the career flexibility your marriage provided will be gone. Now you’ll have a much more limited set of possibilities for your career choices. Read more

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5 Steps to successful reinvention. And a Melissa update.

The best way to get someone to call you from your LinkedIn profile is to put Confidential in the employer field. You might be wondering: Who does this?

Answer: Melissa. Read more

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Test yourself: Are you preachy, arrogant, and annoying?

The secret to the success of this blog is that instead of showing you how perfect my life is, I show myself drinking in the morning, before work.

My husband is always worrying that I make us look bad, so he makes up rules like how I can’t write about our sex life, and then I violate the rules while pretending to follow them. Like, I write about our not-having-sex life.  For example, it’s asparagus season so there is no oral sex because asparagus doesn’t change the smell of just your pee. Read more

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Report from my own happiness lab

Report from my own happiness lab

After about a decade of doing research on happiness, I realize that my favorite research comes from university labs that use self-reported data. Most of our happiness lab research is based on self-reported data about who feels happy.

Which means, maybe, that I am my own lab. I can self-report just as well as anyone else. So here is my self-reported research. And, like all good university lab results, there is a little third-party oversight at the end. Read more

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There’s a high price to hiding from the need to transition

This is our spring family portrait. The calf wandered into the photo.

Winter is peaceful on the farm because there’s nothing to do but keep the animals alive. It’s hard work, but it’s only a few hours a day. Summer is busy because all the fields are ready at different times—farmers cut hay many times in a season, farmers rotate the animals to graze different fields, and there are baby animals that have to grow and become independent by winter. But the rhythms of summer are predictable because everything is part of a system. Read more

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When is worry good?

Last night I was in bed with Matthew, and I was reading The Week, which I totally love because it’s like a summary of every idea that has been posed by mainstream media for the last seven days. My only gripe is they should be quoting my blog. Especially for topics about women and work. And in fact, I am putting a link here to Editor-in-Chief William Falk, so  this post comes up in his google alerts and he mends his misguided ways.

I worry that I should not be worrying about this. Why can’t I just enjoy a magazine I like? Read more

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How to tell if you’re headed to the top

While Generation X did not give a crap about building corporate America, Generation Y defined its own paths through corporate life, all largely non-linear, family-centric, and gold-star focused. If an achievement can’t be conveyed through social media then it doesn’t exist. The Organiziation Man is no more.

Read more

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