You have to specialize. Not right away, but figure out how to own some sort of niche. It is the key to your freedom. A specialist in a large company can demand flexibility, but a specialist also has an ability to leave corporate life and succeed on her own, which is something generalists can’t easily […]
According to Newsweek, more than 3.4 million people have a daily commute that is longer than 90 minutes. Insane. I know it’s insane because I used to do it – Los Angeles to Orange County — and I went nuts. My whole life was organized around getting up at 4am to beat traffic and getting […]
The best jobs are the ones where you are learning; the work is not too easy and not too hard. (The Yerkes-Dodson law says that optimum difficulty leads to optimum performance.) So forget looking for a pay increase (what is three percent of your salary going to buy you, really?) and forget a new title […]
I founded a company with a guy who was single and good looking and everyone who met with us thought we were dating. We weren’t. He was almost twenty years older than I was, for one thing. But we did spend ten hours a day together, and at some point it’s hard to say it’s […]
In case you have had your head in the sand for forever, emotional intelligence is what you need if you want to work with other people successfully. At this point, about four thousand studies have shown that emotional intelligence (“EQ” as in “emotional IQ”) makes people more successful at work. For you doubters, here is […]
Salary.com and Money magazine just released a list of the top fifty jobs. Here’s how they did the rankings: Things that are bad are less than $50,000 average salary, dangerous, and small field with little room for advancement. Things that are good are a growing field, low stress, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, […]
If you work the most hours you look the most desperate. You shouldn’t look lazy, but don’t be the hardest worker. After all, why do you need to work so much harder than the next person? Are you not as smart? Not as organized? Not as confident in your ability to navigate a non-work world? […]
If you don’t organize your life with a list then you won’t know what is most important. Here are the problems with not knowing what is most important: 1. You spend your life doing things that don’t matter. 2. You drive yourself crazy by doing things of little importance all day long and then having […]
When is comes to aspirational reading, the Title 9 catalogue is my favorite. I don’t know anyone at the company, but I curl up on the sofa and read the catalogue like it’s a letter from a good friend. Great things about this catalogue: The women who model the clothes. No pro athletes here and […]
Here is my first post to my blog. About two years too late. I know this because two years ago, my readers started telling me that I should blog. I ignored them, mostly, because it seemed like too much work to write every day. After all, I write two columns a week and I invariably […]