In therapy lately I am learning to identify my feelings. Maybe you’re thinking this is elementary, but did you know that envy is about wanting something you don’t have, but jealousy is the fear of losing something you already have?
I am thinking about those two things. I am almost never envious, but I am often jealous. Most of my emotions, in fact, are rooted in fear.
I am thinking a lot lately about where my joy comes from, and one thing I love is writing well. When I have a blog post that people love I am happy for weeks. And the excitement of doing good creative work gives me energy to do more. Read more
I have never been great at picking my own clothes. I’m great at interior design, but I have a blind spot for clothes. So I email Melissa photos of my outfits, and she uses her photographic memory of my closet to edit my outfits.
When I sent her this photo, she said: “What is this?”
I only wanted her opinion about the color of the shirt, so I thought it was okay that it was blurry. But the more I look at the picture, the more I think that it’s how I feel about myself right now.
I am not quite sure who I am, right now. And given the current career climate, this is actually how most people see themselves, too—blurry from constant movement, settled on the basics, but unclear on the specifics.
And then I read an article in Fast Company this month titled Generation Flux. The article is about how careers are constantly moving and our identity is therefore moving as well.
So I am focused on how to make myself more clear about what I look like. At least right now. And here are things I think we each need to do to pin down our moving-target, career-jumping selves. Read more
If I look back on my blog, I can see that each year there were one or two ideas that just blew me away and ended up dominating my thinking. For example, 2011 my year to be obsessed with school – homeschooling and higher ed, 2010 was my year for disillusionment with happiness research, 2009 was when I started writing honestly about how unglamorousstartup life really is.
1. Nature vs. nurture
An important book came out at the end of 2011 that got very little play in the media: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, by Bryan Caplan The title of the book is just awful. Which is probably why it has been roundly ignored. The title should have been Why Nothing You Do As a Parent Matters. That title would have gotten a lot of media coverage, but who would have purchased the book? Read more
Somehow, last year, I got too big-picture. It’s not surprising since I’m an ENTJ. I understand my deficit, which is one reason I picked the Farmer, an ISTP-—extremely short-term thinking.
At the end of the day, the Farmer walks in the house and talks about his day’s accomplishments, and the weather. I used to tell him that the weather is such a stupid topic that it actually makes me uncomfortable to have him bring it up. But now I realize that the weather is a segue to talking about what is happening right now. And that’s something I need to get better at.
1. Pay attention to the short term.
So my first resolution is to be more excited with what’s going on in my life in the near-term.
On January 1st the Farmer separated from his parents’ farm, and he has pigs are at our farm now. (I am saying our farm now. It shows us being a team more. It’s hard to write, but I guess this is a sub-resolution within the resolution: Think like a team.) He used to make the pigs have babies in crates, at his parent’s farm. The birthing process was confinement—the moms couldn’t move so they couldn’t roll onto the babies. Now he is letting the pigs breed while they wallow in grassy mud, and he’s letting the moms have babies wherever they choose in a barn full of soft hay bedding. The pig will roll on some of the babies probably, but probably that’s why pigs have big litters.
It’s been four days since I documented my own domestic violence, in almost real-time, between me and the Farmer. The most common response I’ve heard is some variation of: “Zero tolerance for domestic abuse!”
And you know what? I have zero tolerance for things I am not prone to tolerate as well. That’s easy, isn’t it?
It’s much harder to see the issue from the person’s perspective who has the issue.
I’ve spent days reading the 500 comments on my blog and the comments about my situation on other blogs, and I’m absolutely shocked by the collective hatred and disdain for women who are in violent relationships. Read more
I think this year was a year of me looking for stuff. Trying to figure stuff out. Maybe trying to figure out what I’m looking for.
It was also the year I discovered pictures for my blog, and I even redesigned the whole blog so the photos are more prominent. So it makes sense to me to end with a picture of me looking for something — who knows what? — when I was a child. Because some things are just part of us. They don’t change, even when the year changes.
I don’t know if these are the best posts of the year. But they are some of the posts that received the most comments. My favorite post of the whole year is the one that’s first on this list. Hopefully I’ve picked a few of your favorites too, and a few that you missed, so there’s a fun one for you to read right now.
Happy new year, and thank you for reading my blog and commenting. You make me feel lucky. And here’s the list:
On Sunday my son sold his pig (271 comments)
Voices of the defenders of grad school. And me, crushing them. (249 comments)
Blueprint for a woman’s life (440 comments, 3,000 likes on Facebook)
5 Reasons to stop trying to be happy (146 comments)
Salaries top out at age 40 (102 comments, 471 likes on facebook)
What gen-yers don’t know about themselves (250 comments)
Generation Z will revolutionize education (175 comments)
I am at a hotel. I think I’m dying. I have a bruise from where the Farmer slammed me into our bed post.
I took the kids and went to a hotel so I could have time to think. I think I need to move into a hotel for a month.
The Farmer told me that he will not beat me up any more if I do not make him stay up late talking to me.
If you asked him why he is still being violent to me, he would tell you that I’m impossible to live with. That I never stop talking. That I never leave him alone. How he can’t get any peace and quiet in his own house. That’s what he’d tell you.
And he’d tell you that I should be medicated.
I’m trying to make sure this is a career blog, because, if nothing else, if I don’t have a career then it’s pretty hard to have the discussion of why I am not leaving.
I am having trouble writing, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m not great at faking things. I am trying to do business as usual because we all know that I should have left the last time there was violence.
Look. I can’t even write “the last time he beat me up.” I tried to, but then I thought: “No. It’s my fault. I deserve it. He’s right. I’m impossible to live with.” Read more
One reason I have achieved so much in my own career is that I’ve taken shortcuts. For example, I played professional beach volleyball without learning how to play indoor sixes very well—I can really only play doubles, which is what people play on the sand. But it allowed me to skip a lot of years of indoor volleyball training and still play pro.
I’m always fascinated by people who find shortcuts. Tim Ferriss is a shortcut taker, but he totally annoys me because he pretends his shortcuts don’t mean he still had to do hard work. One of the reasons I was initially attracted to the Farmer is that he is good at knowing what shortcuts to take and he values hard work.
Just last week, in fact, he moved his pigs to a new barn, where they will be able to mix with the cattle herd. It’s not something anyone in our area does, but he had a hunch it would work, and now he manages one herd instead of two. I love that I’m learning the rules of farming by watching the Farmer cut corners.
In lists of the most common New Year’s resolutions, most are career-related. So I thought I’d take a look at the most common things people tell me they want to do, and I’d tell you shortcuts to getting to that goal. Because I’m pretty good at learning the rules and then figuring out how to work around them. This still means you have to do some hard work, of course, but it’s a smarter way to spend your energy and still get to what you want. Read more
When we were at LegoLand I was struck by the high emotional intelligence of the employees. Their job is to make everyone feel like their Lego project is great. (You’d be surprised how many parents are there, swiping the white blocks from little kids at the Lego snowman contest.)
High emotional-intelligence jobs are very hard, and I would rather sweep floors. But I force myself to try to improve my emotional intelligence because people who don’t try to improve it generally suck at it. And people with high emotional intelligence are fascinated by how to get even better at reading people.
So I’m always seeking out new data points for emotional intelligence so I can get that social skills boost I most definitely need.
Here’s what I’ve learned about the social skills secrets of successful people:
This post is cross-posted at TechCrunch.
We need to get more guys who are running tech startups to decide instead to be stay-at-home dads.
What do you think of that? Stupid, right? That’s what it sounds like when anyone suggests that we need to get more women doing startups.
If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying. Women outperform men in school at such a huge rate that it’s easier to get into college as a male than a female. And women take that to the bank by earning more than men in their 20s. Women would probably continue out-earning men except that when men and women have kids, women choose to downshift way more often than men do.
Clearly, women have a choice. There are plenty of opportunities out there for women if the women would just continue working in their 30s the same way they did in their 20s. So clearly, women don’t want to. Women are choosing children over startups. Read more