Now that I am committed to living on a farm, which is sort of the anti-New York City, visiting New York City no longer brings up flashbacks to a really, really difficult lifestyle. Instead, New York fills my head with ideas.
The first one is a billboard I saw as soon as I got off the plane: A good question is the new answer.
That rings true to me. I have been writing about asking questions for a long time. It’s the best way to have a meaningful conversation and it’s the best way to rope in a mentor or look like a star performer. People spend more time thinking about answers than questions, but it’s the questions that make you look smart.
Guess what? I’m going to Seth Godin’s house for my next webinar, which is super exciting to me because I’ve never met Seth, but I love his ideas. (It’s 1p est on April 29. Sign up here.) Seth and I will talk about his book, Linchpin. And I will thank him a thousand times for the encouraging emails he sent to me when I was moping on my blog that I was in my dip and I was worried that I couldn’t make it.
And you guys will ask questions that we will answer.
When I was talking with Seth about what we will talk about he wrote this back to me:
My take is that [generation Y] is the last one that will be as totally brainwashed by the system, by the schools and by companies and by society to believe that the industrial age (and compliance) is their ticket to the carnival. The smart ones will see that and play a different game, and the sooner they realize how bad the scam is, the faster they’ll recover.
I’m excited to hear him talk about this. And I’m excited to hear the questions you’ll have for him.
The vast majority of electronic communication today is via social media, according to Paul Greenberg, a relationship management consultant. At first I didn't believe it. But then I thought about the viral nature of communication via social networks, and the statistic started to make sense.
So, I have been thinking for a while that I need to stop using email, but I was never sure my hunch was right. Finally, through the process of deciding to put photos of my kids on my blog, I realized that email is now old-fashioned. Here's why:
1. Email is inefficient.
Email is one-to-one communication and social networks one-to-many communication. (Here’s a good link about that.) If you have something meaningful or thoughtful to say, why not say it to many people? It would mean that more people share ideas and more people understand your way of thinking. Also, there are so many pieces of our life that we tell at different times to different people. Why not just say it once? We all have email overload: we parse our messages into 40 one-to-one messages instead of just a single one-to-many message.
Email is also an inefficient way to hone your writing skills. A Stanford study shows that people develop better writing in social media than in the classroom. In the classroom you write for a single reader, the teacher, who is a captive audience—it's her job to read your writing. But in social media, you have to persuade a group of readers to accept your way of thinking, and you have to be interesting. So you will get better and better at your job—which is, for all of us on some level, communicating—if you use social media instead of email. Read more
When the kids and I arrived at the farm the day of the wedding, I got out of the car and the farmer said, “You’re wearing black?”
My son went to the hen house to collect eggs. The farm cats love eating raw eggs, but on a farm, you only feed the cats scraps. My son saw a chance for an exception. He said to the farmer, “Since it’s your wedding day, can we give the cats an egg to celebrate?”
Coats are very important on the farm. Mine are always not dry enough, not warm enough, or not dirty enough for going into the chicken house. So when I'm on the farm I just wear one of the farmer's coats.
1. Clarify personal needs that are threatened by the conflict.
And hats. Do you see the red hat in the picture? It's from Amsoil Lubricants. When I first met the farmer I thought it was hilarious to have a hat that said lubricants. So the first time he dumped me I tried to get the lubricants hat as a relationship souvenir.
Later I realized that he would dump me a lot. It was his way of coping with the feeling that intimacy is scary. So then I focused more on learning conflict resolution and less on who gets the hat.
2. Accept conflict as a natural part of personal progress.
In fact, most of life is about conflict resolution. It's either internal conflict or external conflict, but if you don't have conflict then you are probably not trying to do something interesting with your life. (Not that interesting is everyone's goal, of course.)
Michael Stainer, who writes The Great Work Blog, once told me that if you are not annoying someone you are not doing anything new. I think this is true. (Sometimes I think it could all come down to this: you either scare your mom by creating an unstable life or you scare yourself that you are living merely the life your mom wants for you instead of the life you want for yourself.) Read more
I’m getting married on Saturday. We will talk about that in a minute. First, I want to address the recent onslaught of complainers who have entered my life.
- People who tell me I’ve jumped the shark. Honestly, I had never even heard this idiom until people started writing it in my comments section. But I’ve been writing about my personal life for ten years, and anyway, the people who complain that I don’t write enough career advice are always the people who most love to read my posts about sex.
- People who tell me I should record the webinars. Look. I know I should. But I don’t control it. Ryan Paugh does. Fortunately, we have a bitch session network on Brazen Careerist, and Ryan is in charge of it. So you should go there and tell him to record the webinar this Friday.
- People at my office who wonder why I’m not there. Have I ever told you guys how much I love waking up every day and having a wide span of time to be by myself? I wish I had paid more attention to recess. I always spent recess alone. Just to get a break from everyone. Nothing has changed since fourth grade except that it’s not the playground, it’s Starbucks.
Now. For the wedding. Here’s what I’m wearing:
I have often thought that we choose to marry someone who has something we don’t have, but we wish we had. So it makes sense that now that I feel secure in my relationship with the farmer, I am going to tell you what he has that I want: Photos for my blog.
I’m so bad at taking photos of the farm, and he is great at it, so I stole one of the photos he took to document the mud. He says March is the mud month.
I have tried a few times to take pictures of the farm. I am in love with the farmer, but also, I am in love with the farm. And the farmer will never let me put a picture of him on my blog, so I decided to show you how beautiful the farm is. But I am realizing that photos are like writing: You can only show a fresh perspective of something you know very well.
I remember when I taught creative writing to freshmen at Boston University. The first month almost every student wrote about sex. I went to my advisor and asked him why I am getting twenty stories about having sex. Read more
You would not know from my blog that I actually make money from it. The first reason you wouldn’t know is that there are no ads on the blog. The second reason you wouldn’t know is that I haven’t posted in a week.
In fact, though, blogging has made me tons of money. I could say millions. It’s sort of semantic though, the millions part, because even being the Big Mac guy at McDonald’s makes you millions if you add up salary from a forty-year career of burger flipping.
I tell you guys all the time to forget about making money from your blog. But I also tell you to post at least three times a week to have a blog that is useful. And look, I’m violating that rule. So I think I’ll just go ahead and violate my other rule, too: I’m going to do a webinar about how to make money from blogging without running ads. (It’s Wednesday, March 31 at 8 pm eastern. Sign up here. )
I guess that another thing about my webinar about making money from a blog will be that it takes a lot of self-discipline.
I think I have self-discipline, but honestly, I’m not sure. Because right now the only thing I’m doing on a daily basis is obsessing about what color to paint the dining room of the farmhouse that I want to treat as the historical building that it is, but I’m drawn to geographically inappropriate color schemes from French provincial life. Read more
It is not lost on me that my blog is slowly becoming a platform to announce video chats. So I think I’m going to have to do some fast confessing so that you guys don’t all unsubscribe.
I’m getting married to the farmer. Yep. April 17. Well, not really. I mean, I can’t totally get married because at the beginning of Brazen Careerist, I funded the company by not paying my taxes, so I owe a ton of taxes, and if the farmer and I got married, the IRS would put a lien on his farm.
So we are having an unofficial wedding. Very small. I would tell you how small, but I am not allowed to write details about the farmer’s family. Suffice it to say that on my side, only two people are coming.
And my kids. The kids really want to see a wedding. They would actually like to see me dressed like Cinderella. Because that’s what they know about weddings and princesses, two things that my kids are pretty sure go together. Instead, we will just go out to dinner and bring a wedding cake. The cake will be extravagant, and that’s what will let the kids know something big has happened. Read more
I keep wanting to use the word webinar, but I can’t decide if it is too jargony. This lexical conundrum reminds me of when the word workout went mainstream. It sounded too jargony to me, and I used to say go-to-the-gym and a not-so-snappy stand-in.
Should I use the word webinar?
Should I tell you how many times Ryan Paugh told me that I have to announce the webinar if I want people to come to it? I kept not announcing anything because I didn’t know what to call it.
Whatever we are calling it, it will happen on this Friday, 1pm est. (Sign up here.) I know that people in Australia cannot listen at this time slot. You have told me before, and I’m listening. One day I will do a webinar at midnight. One day I will record webinars so it won’t matter so much what time slot they happen in. One day there will be world peace.
On Friday we will talk about finding fulfillment, which is actually like establishing world peace, just doing it one person at a time. In an act of full disclosure, I’m going to tell you that knowing what to do is not the hard part of finding fulfillment. Doing it is the hard part. It’s like breaking up with a terrible boyfriend when the sex is really good. Not that I have ever had this problem. I have found that part of what makes a terrible boyfriend is terrible sex. But whatever. I can imagine the problem. The problem is that you know what to do and you don’t do it.
Wait. Actually, that’s the problem with everything. Like, I knew I was going to have to write a post about the webinar where I don’t know if I should use the word webinar. I knew it wasn’t going to change if I waited so long to write the post that Ryan Paugh wants to kill me. But I waited anyway. Why do we not take the action that we know is the right action? I will not be covering this problem in the webinar.
But sign up anyway. Here.