One of the first major religious decisions that young, Jewish professionals make is whether or not to go into the office on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Most Jewish holidays start at sundown, a safe time to leave the office. However, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are all-day affairs, and this year Rosh Hashannah starts […]
I write posts about how to quit because so many people ask me for advice, but I marvel that this is such a big issue. I have no memory of any of my Gen-X peers having this problem. Maybe because when we were in our twenties there were not jobs to consider quitting. But I […]
I was standing at the bottom of the Word Trade Center when it fell. I was standing so close that I didn’t know it fell. I thought earthquake, until I couldn’t breathe. Then I thought nuclear bomb. Now, when I let my head go back to that day, there are two moments I most easily […]
Stephanie Roberts and I hung out at the BlogHer conference, and she recently posted a recording of our conversation on her blog. She asks things people are scared to ask me in person, like how can I keep blogging about my husband? She asks me things no one ever asks, like how do I write […]
By A.J. Jacobs – For my last book, The Know-It-All, I tried to fill in the huge gaps in my learning by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. I read from A to Z. Or more precisely, from a-ak (East Asian music) to Zywiec (a town in Poland) — a total of 44 million words. Admittedly, […]
There’s a new guest blogger on Brazen Careerist: A.J. Jacobs. He is an editor-at-large at Esquire, and from what I can tell, it’s one of the cushiest jobs in the world. He doesn’t go to meetings, he seems to have some sort of tenure-track thing where he would never be fired, and he doesn’t even […]
The best questions are not necessarily those that get answers, but those that lead to sharper questions. My friend Marci Alboher, who writes for the New York Times, often calls me to ask questions about blogging and personal branding. I usually give her strongly opinionated answers and add a little emphasis about how I know […]
Today’s job market favors employees. The attitude of most workers is that they should have a job that makes them happy. So it’s no surprise that at any given time 70 percent of the workforce is job hunting, according to the Wall St. Journal. Everyone is looking for the right position. But what exactly does […]
Every generation revolutionizes something, and Generation X is revolutionizing the intersection of family and work. There’s a new emphasis on keeping families together over career aspirations, and it’s what makes me most proud to be a part of Gen X. Generation X knows that the belief that both parents in a family can have demanding, […]
Starting a company is cheap enough that you don’t need to raise a lot of money to do it, but you still need to feed yourself. A popular route is the in-between step of being an entrepreneur while still working in a corporate job. This means there are a lot of people running companies from […]