The best way to be happier at work is to take personal responsibility for your workplace well-being. Once you do that, any job can be better than it is right now.
Here are four ways you can improve your job yourself instead of relying on your boss or your company to change:
1. Make a friend at work
People with one friend at work are much more likely to find their work interesting. And people with three friends at work are virtually guaranteed to be very satisfied with their life, according to extensive research from Gallup published in the book Vital Friends by Tom Rath. These findings are independent of what a person’s job entails, and what their home life is like.
On one level, this isn’t surprising. We’re better equipped to deal with hardship if we have friends near us, and we have more fun when we’re with friends. So a friend allows us to deal with the ups and downs of work much more easily.
We often think of work and life as separate, and consequently fortify our home life with friends. But we need different friends for different contexts. Having someone you can count on at work to care about you and understand you feeds your soul in a way that used to apply only at home.
Of course, once you have this information, you have to figure out the most effective ways to make friends at work. Because friends don’t just materialize in your cubicle — you need to cultivate them.
2. Decrease your commute time by moving closer to work.
More than three million people have a commute that lasts more than 90 minutes. Many of them justify this commute by saying that their job is worth it, or that it allows them to have a bigger house. But the commute may be doing them great harm at home and at work.
Humans can adjust to almost any amount of bad news, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. In his book “Stumbling on Happiness,” he shows that we think losing a limb will be terrible, but in fact we adjust to it pretty well. In fact, in the long run it generally doesn’t affect our level of happiness.
A commute is different, though. It’s impossible to adjust to because the way in which it’s bad changes every day. So the tension of not knowing what will be bad, and when it will be bad, and not being able to control those things, means we’re unable to use our outstanding mental abilities to adjust.
Here’s the clincher, though: Even though people tell themselves it won’t happen to them, a bad commute spills over into the rest of the day for almost everyone. If you have a bad commute on the way to work and you walk into the office in a bad mood, that’s the mood you’re likely to have all day. And if you have a bad commute on the way home, you’ll probably still be grouchy by the time you go to bed.
3. Know when it’s not about your job.
I’m not certain whether this is good news or bad news, but the connection between your job and your happiness is overrated. In general, the kind of work you do isn’t going to have huge bearing on whether you’re happy or not.
To be sure, your work can make you unhappy (see No. 2 above, for example), but work isn’t going to give you the key to the meaning of life or anything like that.
Still, you can do a quick check to make sure you have a job that’s good for you. A good job:
• Stretches you without defeating you
• Provides clear goals
• Provides unambiguous feedback
• Provides a sense of control
If you have these things in your job and you’re still not happy, it’s not your job — it’s you.
So maybe it’s time to start looking inside yourself to figure out what’s wrong, instead of blaming everything on your job. I’m a big fan of getting help when you feel stuck. Sure, we can all get ourselves through life, but it’s often easier to get where you want to be faster if you have someone to help you overcome your barriers.
To this end, you need to know if you need a career coach or a shrink. And if your job meets the criteria on the above list, you could probably use help from a mental health professional in order to find ways to get happier.
4. Do good deeds.
Help people. Be kind. Don’t think about what you get in return. Just be nice. In this way, you can make the world a better place in the job you have right now.
Take personal responsibility for your happiness during the day, and do things that make you feel good. You’ve heard a lot of this before. If you go to the gym, your mood will get better (and your mind will be sharper). If you eat healthy food, you feel better than if you go to McDonald’s for lunch. And if you do random acts of kindness, you get as much out of it as the person you’re being kind to.
But most importantly, stop looking for your work to give your life meaning. The meaning of life is in your relationships. Cultivate them. A good job is a nice thing to have, but only in the context of larger meaning.
If you’re happy outside of work, where you don’t rely on your boss or your company, then finding happiness at work will be that much easier.
By Will Schwalbe — Even the most placid soul can find her or himself in the midst of a full-fledged, take-no-prisoners flame war. One minute you are scoring a minor point, then a few more emails go back and forth, and soon you are choosing the perfect vicious barb to complete an angry screed.
We all know jerks who live for this kind of angry exchange. This post is not for them. This is for those of us who would rather not spend our lives composing savage emails – and who realize the enormous danger they post to our careers. One livid email, especially if taken out of context, can seriously damage your reputation.
Recently, a distinguished UK television producer wrote an angry email to her staff when they had neglected (or purposefully forgotten?) to ask her to sign a birthday card that was to be presented to one of the employees. That peeved email is now enjoying a very active and healthy life online and in the UK press. Perhaps some major aggravation was the spark for the boss’s intemperate email outburst? No one will ever know or really care. The birthday card email lives on forever.
So why do angry email exchanges happen to even placid souls?
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, wrote the following New York Times Op-Ed about conflicts around the world. It seems to apply equally well to the subject of flame wars.
“In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.
“The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed among of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on.”
The results were fascinating. The researchers reported that the volunteers typically responded with 40 percent more pressure than they had experienced. Concludes Gilbert:
“Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we receive.”
Moral of story? For preservation of your job, your business relationships, and your friendships – next time you find yourself in a situation where the emails are flying fast and furious, do consider that you may be as responsible for the escalation as the other party. When you feel your temperature rising, it’s a good sign that it’s time stop emailing and, perhaps, to pick up the phone or schedule a meeting or just let the issue go. Unless, of course, you want your version of the birthday card email to appear on the nightly news. In that case, in the immortal words of Clint Eastwood: “Make my day.”
Will Schwalbe is the co-author with David Shipley of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.
Will’s new book is Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.
But let me take a step back and say that I get five or six books a week from publicists, and most of them seem to be some version of pictures of mountains on the cover with inscrutable management theory titles floating on snowcaps. I hate those books because it takes so long to figure out the author’s point. I understood Send in five seconds. I liked that. And I liked that each page is written like a blog post. Because at this point, that is what my attention span is geared up for.
So I called the publicist right away, and I told her I loved the book idea, and I loved the cover. (It’s a great cover that screams, This will be a quirky book!)
And now, look. Here is Will.
Will is actually a Big Whig in the publishing world, and you should definitely try to lure him into your life by commenting on his posts. And going to his blog. And testing out all those other Web 2.0 networking tricks we’ve been discussing here. He is the editor in chief at Hyperion Books, and his co-author, David Shipley, is the Op-Ed editor of the New York Times.
Yes. Of course, the book is very well written. But you know what? A lot of well written books land on my doorstep. Send is very fun. And so is Will. So I’m really happy to have him blogging on Brazen Careerist.
Time is more important than money. You think that you know this, but you probably don’t act on it as much as you could. If you spend your time buying material things then you are using up the one thing that can make you happy (time) on things that definitely don’t make you happy (stuff).
In terms of happiness, time matters a lot more than money. The most important factors of happiness — the quality and intensity of your relationships, how often you have sex, how much sleep you get — all come from an investment in time rather than money. (For those of you who think money buys sex, stop yourself: “It's true that money impacts which person you marry,” says professor of economics David Blanchflower, “but money doesn't impact the amount of sex you have.”)
So if you’re considering taking a job that requires long hours so that you can make a load of money, don’t do it. Authors of the book Your Money or Your Life, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, present a fresh way to think about this tradeoff:
“Try turning around the old maxim ‘time is money’ and look at it this way: ‘We pay for money with our time.’ Those hours on the job (or our partner’s hours on the job) are what bring money into our lives. Money, by definition, is simply something for which we choose to trade hours of our life — what we’ll call ‘life energy.’ While money has no intrinsic reality, our life energy does — at least to us. It is precious because it is limited and irretrievable, and because our choices about how we use it express the meaning and purpose of our time here on earth.”
This way of thinking gives you a more concrete way to value your time. And, once you start thinking this way, you can see the astounding ways that people undervalue their own time.
While you’re thinking about what is worth giving up your time for, take a look at the research about materialism; fantasizing from your cubicle about the grand purchases you will make actually makes when you finish work will actually make you UNhappy.
“Seeing the BMW may make you feel unhappy, but psychological studies show that obtaining the BMW would not make you happy,” says Gregg Easterbrook, psychologist and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute. And the more emphasis one puts on materialism the more likely that person is to be depressed and anxious. So look, it’s a wild goose chase with the stuff — you will never buy the thing that’ll set you on the happiness track.
Most people, when looking back on their lives, wish they had done things that cost time, not money. The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, has conducted long-term research about terminally ill patients. The findings: “It is much more common for people to regret not the things they did, but that there were so many things they didn't have the time to do.” So consider seriously the idea of making more time for yourself by agreeing to earn less money. And if you have to work a lot, use your money to buy time — takeout food, a cleaning service, a personal assistant.
Think of all the time you spend planning how you spend your money — balancing your checkbook, preparing taxes, reading financial advice. Spend at least that much time and energy planning how you will spend your hours. People know that if they don’t pay tons of attention to how they spend their money then they’ll never be rich. But think about this: If you don’t pay tons of attention to how you spend your time, you’ll never be happy.
Hat tip: Occupational Adventure
One of the biggest issues for writers today is how to move between print and online. The issue is really authority. For print people, moving online is difficult because their established offline authority has relatively little meaning online. Conversely people who are mostly online understand that there is a much more structured way to earn authority offline, and they want to feel they are respected in that way.
In both cases, the way to get to the other side is, first and foremost, to care about the other side in a way that is deeper than prestige and self-preservation.
There’s advice here for online writers first, print writers second, and everyone who isn’t a writer and worries about the length of this too-long-to-be-a-post post can skip to the last two paragraphs.
Here are three ways for people to move from online to print:
1. Understand that it’s about paying dues.
And surely you know what I think about paying dues. But you need to work your way up in the print world. Even if you’re great. Sure, there are exceptions, but not so many that you should build a career plan based on them. So if you are doing a lot of work you don’t like doing, and a lot of work you’re not really learning from, you might be on a solid path toward an essay in the New Yorker.
2. Write all the time and expect to be rejected all the time.
You absolutely have to believe that you are a good writer. You must believe this independently of what the rejection slips tell you. Or there is no way to go on. You also absolutely must figure out what you are good at, and this will make rejections in other areas not hurt so much.
No one is good at everything. Very few people really are essayists. Very few are columnists. Very few people give good advice about sex. Fortunately there are lots of different specialties. Figure out what’s right for you. Some people can write for Maxim and some can write for The Atlantic. Few can write for both, but both take talent.
3. Learn the rules.
You have to know how to write a good query. Just stop everything you’re doing and learn how to write one. And have someone you trust review your queries at the beginning. Good resources for this are Media Bistro’s How to Pitch section, and the classes for writing queries at Freelance Success.
The rules for print are arcane. How to get a column is arcane. Mostly, you can’t ask for one — an editor asks you. How to get syndicated is arcane. (But here is some advice on that anyway.) The only thing that is not arcane is the rule that people hire who they like. It’s true in every industry and publishing is no different. So get to know editors if you want writing assignments.
Soul search tip: Ask yourself why you want the prestige of writing for a big-name publication. Prestige is not an end in itself. It doesn’t change who you are, and it doesn’t change how good (or not-so-good) your writing is. Sure, prestige opens doors, but what door do you want to walk through? And why? Because maybe you don’t actually need that particular type of prestige to get where you want to go.
Here are three ways for people to move from print to online:
1. Get a voice and have opinions.
The world does not need another Associated Press. We already have it. So making a name for yourself online is not going to be about duplicating the reporting that the AP is doing just fine. Online success will be something different. It will be about taking a stand. Even if it turns out to be wrong, just take one. This means you have to unlearn all that impartiality.
2. Get off your print pedestal.
Writing online doesn’t mean taking all the stuff that the New Yorker rejected and pasting it into blog software. Writing online means genuinely responding to the community you’re talking to.
If you “just want to write” then moving online is not for you. Because print is about writing from authority and everyone listens. Online is about establishing your authority and having conversations, and people dis you.
Also, be careful whom you emulate. Some people leveraging huge offline brands to move online are not necessarily the online writers you want to emulate. Malcolm Gladwell, for example, is not part of a conversation. He is a great print journalist posting his stuff online. Seth Godin is not having conversation. He doesn’t even accept comments. He is an extremely highly paid public speaker who writes an online diary.
You have to think about where you fit in this new world. And how you want to be. It’s not just writing. It’s a discussion, and there are a lot of different ways you can talk.
3. Educate yourself. Constantly.
The video titled The Machine is Us/ing Us is one of the most enthralling things I have seen about writing online. It has been viewed 2 million times and 5000 people left comments. This video shows what writing online is and what it will be and where we fit. I have watched this video fifteen times, and each time I learn something new.
Many of you will understand almost nothing of this video when you watch it the first time. But if you watch it, and then you read blogs, and you read your news online for a few weeks, and you set up a Google alert system, and then an RSS feed. And after each of those actions, you look at the video again, you will understand a lot.
Soul search tip:
I know this sounds like tons of work. But if you really want to move your print career online, this is the work you have to do. Are you totally annoyed to hear this? It’s okay to not want to learn about how information is spewed and sifted online. Maybe it’s not that interesting to you. But then be honest with yourself: If you don’t get excited about learning about it, why would you want to be a part of it? Think about other career options that get you really excited about learning.
And you know what? This is career advice that applies to everyone, in any career. You need to love learning and exploring in the career you choose. Or else what are you doing there? And you need to be going after something bigger than prestige. If nothing else, we know it’s inherently unsatisfying.
So find what you love to learn about, and find what you’re great at doing, and see where they intersect. That’s where your career potential is strongest.
Other posts from “A Week in Journalism” series:
How to be a freelance writer without starving
Why journalists misquote everyone (and how I met my husband)
Seven ways to get an agent’s attention (by my agent, Susan Rabiner)
I get a lot of email from people who want advice. I usually reply. Sometimes I get an email from someone who is clearly a pain but I’m impressed that he or she asked for help, so I answer. Sometimes I get such a good question from someone that I actually give him or her a call.
I learn a lot from answering peoples’ questions. First, I learn about how to ask for advice because I can listen to how people do it to me. Second, the more I hear myself give the same advice over and over again, the harder it is for me to not take it myself.
Here is an example of someone asking for help in an effective way: She sent one of the thirty press releases in my in box that week. I was interested in a few of her assumptions in the press release, so I emailed her. She wrote back lame answers. I ignored her. Then she wrote an email asking me how she can do better at addressing the press. She asked three, very specific questions. I was impressed at how well she asked me to help her. I made a note to myself to ask such good questions. Then I called her to give some advice.
Here is an example of a different exchange, but one that I have all the time:
Me: “Did you know that outside of schooling, the quality of your network of mentors is the most important factor in how successful your career will be?”
Other person: “But how do I get a mentor?”
Me: “You read a lot and find people you want to be like and send them an email.”
Other person: “What do I ask?”
Me: “How that person overcame the specific hurdles you see yourself facing. And what advice they would give to you to get on a path to achieve what they have.”
But to be honest, it’s not like I do this all the time. So, like I said, the more I give advice the more likely I am to take it, and finally, I decided to try contacting someone I read about. She got a big columnist position that is not in my genre, but the person seemed like a real go-getter and I like her writing. So I emailed her to ask if she could give me some career advice. I sent her some sample columns and I made a little joke about how even the career columnist needs career advice. After all, humility and humor go a long way in getting someone to want to help.
She replied to my email ten minutes later. I couldn’t believe it. I rarely respond to my emails that fast. I decided she was very organized and on top of things and she would really have a lot to teach me. I got excited. And then I got nervous that I wouldn’t have good questions, or that I wouldn’t know how to steer the conversation. So I didn’t call her for three weeks.
Finally, I called. She was so incredibly useless that I can’t believe she writes an advice column. She said she had no career plan for herself. She said she just fell into everything. She said she just lives day to day. I don't believe any of that. She fought too hard to get where she is.
But you know what? I felt great after that call. I felt great that I took action to get a new mentor, even if it didn’t work. I felt great that I read about someone and talked to her. That’s what people should do, and I knew that after having done it once, I would do it again. It wasn’t difficult at all.
By Ryan Healy — Most of my friends would love to run their own business some day. Me too. However, we believe the first logical step is to get a few years of work experience, make connections, and save money.
A couple of months ago, my good friends from college, Matt, Cole and Adam, came to visit for the weekend. These three want none of that work experience I’m talking about, so they are opening up a sandwich shop in a college town.
The first thing Adam said when he saw me was, “What does it feel like to be in 17th grade?”
He was referring to the fact that I live in an apartment complex with hundreds of other “young professionals” who are basically living the same boring (his words) lives. At first I laughed it off and told him that he was just jealous that I was making money and could afford to live in a nice place like this.
But after thinking about it, I understand what he means. I more or less live in an adult dorm, albeit a super-sized and super-expensive dorm. Every morning I wake up and put on a suit, or as my buddies call it, a “uniform.” I walk to the subway with all the other young workers or “students,” and I take the subway or “school bus” to work, or as Adam would say, to “17 th grade.”
I have to admit, thinking about post-college years in this way can make me question why I am doing this instead of pursuing something I love. But I have chosen to take a different perspective about this whole 17th grade idea.
Of my college friends, about half are in graduate school. They are in 17th grade much like me; however they are paying for it while I am being paid, and I’m learning how to live in the real world at the same time.
I do not consider myself to be an adult. Whether you think there is something wrong with this or not, it’s a fact. And I would say it’s safe to assume that if you took an inventory of recent college grads in the workplace or grad school, the majority would give you the same answer. I don’t know when or if I am supposed to be an adult. I’m thinking it will be around the time I start a family.
Because of this, I guess you could say that my company has replaced my parents as my support system. They provide me with money to put a roof over my head, they pay the insurance companies to cover most of my medical needs, and instead of asking mom and dad for my weekly allowance, I just wait for that good old bi-weekly paycheck to appear in my bank account.
I try to learn something from everything I do. This so-called 17th grade is just what it sounds like — an educational opportunity for me to master before I graduate to the next phase of my life or the next “grade.” What that grade will be, I have no idea, but I hope to figure it out while I’m here. It might be my own business, it might be a management position in a small company, or it may have absolutely nothing to do with business at all.
My ideal 17th grade will teach me how a successful company runs, how to improve my public speaking skills, and how to work with and eventually manage a diverse group of people. The question I ask myself is, which company or “school” as my buddies would say, will provide me with the best “education?”
Here’s how I became a writer. I started writing when I was six and wrote nonstop, about things no one cared about.
Nineteen years later I thought, I like to write, I should get paid for this.
So I went to graduate school for writing, and the first day, the teacher said, “If any of you can imagine yourselves doing anything but writing, you should do that. Writing is hard, and lonely and full of rejection and you’ll never make any money.”
I stayed in school (I had a fellowship – who can give up free money?) but after school I got a job in marketing at a Fortune 500 company. And I made a lot of money.
But I kept writing. For ten more years. I wrote after work, and when my jobs were slow, I wrote at work. I used my vacation time to send writing to publishers who rejected me. But then they stopped rejecting me. And slowly, I realized that I could support my family with my writing. So I took the leap. (And, note, a huge salary cut.)
If you think you want to be a writer, first pay heed to my teacher’s advice. If you still want to write, remember that most writers spend years and years writing before they get published in a national magazine. So keep your day job until you’re sure you won’t starve. Here are three other things to do as well:
1. Rethink your ideas about time and space.
The best way to build up a freelancing career is to have another job with a steady paycheck, to support you while you’re honing your skills as a freelancer. This means that you need to be able to write in small, disjointed spurts of time, because you have a day job, and responsibilities, and you don’t have three days to craft each sentence.
But maybe you’ve already quit your day job as an expression of commitment to the freelancing. That’s fine, but maybe you don’t have a lot of money. Writers do not need their own pristine office and gorgeous PowerBook. I wrote for years on my kitchen counter because our New York City apartment didn’t have room for a desk. It wasn’t great, but it was fine.
2. Accept self-promotion as a way of life.
No one likes to do self-promotion, but the people who really, really want to work for themselves force themselves to be good at it. There is no one to get work for you except you. And it takes a lot of time to get the word out about what you do and why you do it well.
There are a ton of freelancers who can do a competent job at any given job. The freelancer who gets the work is the one who is best at marketing herself. So don’t talk about the injustice of the world and how you are too much of an artist to promote yourself. Instead, set aside 40% of your day for self-marketing. I used to think that as I got to be a better writer I would do less self-promoting. But in fact, it never happens, as far as I can tell. It’s forty percent forever.
3. Give up the notion that there’s one, perfect way to do it.
Not that the perfect word doesn’t exist. But it’s in the eye of the beholder. Who, in this case, is your editor. But look, you’re not writing the next Magna Charta. Maybe you’re writing a how-to piece for a men’s magazine. Or, if you’re lucky, you’re writing some travel piece about a hotel that’s giving you free lodging. What I’m saying here is that the stuff you’re writing isn’t so precious that the editor can’t rip it to shreds and rewrite it in his voice.
So what? You still get a check. You still get to say you were published in that magazine. Don’t write for that editor again if it’s so upsetting to you. But remember that the best money does not come from the best assignments, and there’s a reason for that.
So be flexible. I have found that when I took assignments that I didn’t like, I still learned a lot, even if the editor didn’t love my word choice. Focus on the learning, and the side benefit will be that you’ll have better relationships with editors. For a freelancer, the steady work comes from a combination of good work and good relationships.
Other posts from “A Week in Journalism” series:
Why do journalists misquote everyone (and how I met my husband)
How to move from print journalism to online journalism
Seven ways to get an agent’s attention (by my agent, Susan Rabiner)
I am speaking at the American Society of Journalists and Authors in New York this Sunday. So I thought that in addition to regular posts, I’d do a little series this week on tips for writers.
I have never done a series, but I’ve seen them done on other blogs, so I thought I’d try it. When other bloggers do it, they give a schedule. So, here’s my schedule:
Monday: How to be a freelance writer without starving
Tuesday: How to move from print journalism to online journalism
Wednesday: How journalists can use LinkedIn
Thursday Sunday: Why journalists misquote everyone… or do they? (And how I met my husband)
Reviews of the Brazen Careerist book are starting to come in. Next week I’ll link to a bunch of reviews on blogs. This week, here are three of my favorite quotes:
Guy Kawasaki
author of The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
“Take everything you think you ‘know’ about career strategies, throw them away, and read this book because the rules have changed. ‘Brazen,’ ‘counter-intuitive,’ and ‘radical’ are the best three descriptions of Trunk’s work. Life is too short to be stuck in a rat hole…”
Bob Sutton
author of the New York Times Bestseller The No Asshole Rule
“A delightful book, with some edgy advice that made me squirm a bit at times. I agreed with 90% of it, found myself arguing with the other 10%, and was completely engaged from start to finish.”
Keith Ferrazzi
author of Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time
“Brazen Careerist has the street-smarts you need to make your career and life work for you from the start. Read it now, or you’ll wish you had when you’re 40!”