The All-Star Rodeo Challenge came to Madison, WI last weekend, and the farmer took me and my kids. I was not thrilled about going, but I try to be open-minded when it comes to stuff that is new to me that I am not ever wishing I will get a chance to experience.
I asked the farmer if rodeos are bad for the animals.
He said, “City people probably think so. But most farmers don’t.”
He told me that if I really hated it, we could leave.
I really hated it before there were any animals. Before there were animals there was the flag, rising above the dirt ring, and the announcer saying everyone should sing the Star Spangled Banner to honor “the flag that protects our troops, and our churches and our great country.”
I looked over at the farmer for churches, and before I could roll my eyes, the announcer said, “Everyone please rise in the name of Jesus and sing the Star Spangled Banner.”
I told my kids to stay seated.
The farmer stayed seated out of solidarity even though he hates standing out. It was a great moment of compromise for us. Read more
I think I'm over the happiness thing. I think I am thinking that the pursuit of happiness is, well, vacuous. I don't think people are happy or unhappy. Because I think knowing if we are happy would require knowing the meaning of life, or the ultimate goal, or the key to the world, or something that, which really, we are not going to find outside of blind religious fanaticism.
The first thing I have to grapple with, besides having spent the last three years of my life completely enthralled and ensconced in the happiness research from positive psychologists, is if I don't want a happy life, what sort of life do I want?
I think I want an interesting life. Not that I want to be interesting, but I want to be interested. I’m talking about what I think is interesting to me. I want to choose things that are interesting to me over things that would make me happy. For example, this post. I am not sure if I’m right on this, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of telling me I’m an idiot in the comments. But it’s going to be interesting.
I think choosing a life that is interesting to us and choosing a life that makes us feel happy are probably very different choices.
For one thing, people who are happy do not look for a lot of choices, according to Barry Schwartz, in his book, The Paradox of Choice. People who want to have an interesting life are always looking for more choices and better choices, and they make decisions for their life based on maximizing choices. Read more
People talk about leadership like it's a business crisis, and the exit of the baby boomers leaves a huge gap, and there are no aspiring leaders in the younger workforce.
But what we have is actually a semantic problem rather than a leadership problem. The issue is that in the age of the Internet, what it means to be a leader is changing. And we need a new way to talk about leadership so we can talk about identifying leaders.
The old view of leadership is doing it from the top.
To baby boomers, leadership is a game where you try to get to the top and then everyone will follow you. Baby boomers have had to compete forever, for everything, because there were so many of them trying to get on the same “path for success.”
Tammy Erickson's book, What's Next Gen X, has lots of fun tidbits about generational conflict. To Gen X she says, “Your expectation to be treated individually — to be allowed to play the game by our own rules — contrasts with boomers' willingness to play by established rules in competition for individual rewards.”
Baby boomers competed for a big salary which they translated to a visual trophy: a McMansion. This gives us a visual for the lack of interest Gen X has in Baby Boomer style managment: McMansions for sale with no buyers. Read more
People at work are asking me why I am not working as many hours as I used to. I am. But I am working on anger management. Here are seven tips I’ve tried using:
1. Face the problem and make it a priority.
I used to think anger management problem is a thing for men who are in prison for setting their wives on fire. Now I see it's a problem for people who think they will get fired for being unpleasant. Or for people who think their kids will grow up and hate them for being emotionally unpredictable.
I am both those people.
2. Focus on your trigger points.
The time I most consistently lose my temper is trying to get the kids out of the house in the morning. So I told myself to not lose my temper.
That didn't work.
So I have been waking up at 5:30 because I need to give myself two hours to be completely organized and calm so that I can get the kids and myself out the door for school and work at 7:30 without screaming at the kids for not eating fast enough because I changed my clothes for work three times and got behind and forgot to make lunches. Read more
I'm pretty sure that the people who pay attention to happiness research are actually happier people. And happiness begets happiness. So I have a feeling that me just writing a post about happiness, and you reading it makes us all happier.
Here is why I think that:
Recently, Gretchen Rubin sent me her new book, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.
Let me tell you now, I am not a huge fan of the book. She is writing about her life, but her life is not all that interesting. The thing about reading stories about people’s lives is that we like conflict. That's what every novel is, it's what every memoir is. If there's no conflict then there is no path to follow in a story line.
Gretchen's conflict in this story about her is how can she be happier. Gretchen reports that she is already happy. She has an investment banker husband, two seemingly just fine daughters, a nice apartment in Manhattan, former-model good looks, etc. She basically (as she says in her forward to the book) needs something to talk about at cocktail parties. So she is writing a book so she can talk about it. Read more
I am back with the farmer.
This probably is not surprising to you, because admittedly, it is absurd to be engaged one day and not engaged the next day. But there are exacerbating factors, and basically, the way I got him back was to be more likable.
I have spent most of my career overcoming my lack of social skills by studying research about what makes people likable. And I think the research I’ve applied so systematically in my career is finally helping me in my personal life.
Here’s what we know about being likable:
1. Don’t give ultimatums. It’s disrespectful. Instead, be a negotiator.
The farmer does not want to be in this blog. As you might imagine, we have this discussion a lot.
First it was like this:
Him: I don’t want to be in the blog.
Me: You have to be. I can’t live without writing my life.
Then the conversation was like this:
Him: I don’t want to be in the blog.
Me: How about if you can edit whatever you want? Read more
I'm not a fan of New Year's resolutions. We know that people keep less than 5% of New Year’s resolutions, and I think a big reason for this is that anything we are trying to change in our lives is really about self-discipline.
I realized this after spending two years reading what positive psychologists have discovered makes people happy. And, it turns out, that everything we know about what makes us happy comes down to having self-discipline to do what we know we want to be doing.
So of course making a New Year's resolution doesn't work, because it's the act of saying, “I want to make a change, but I'm not going to do it now. I'm going to do it in January.” That's not self-discipline, that's procrastination, right?
If you want to make a change in your life, you can start right now, with something that is not that hard to change. Read more
It’s the time of year when I list my top posts of 2009. When I first started doing this top-posts-of-the-year thing, I felt obligated to actually give you the real version of what was most popular. Now I don’t feel so obligated.
If you’re wondering, some of the posts that brought in more than 400 comments are:
- Five time management tricks I learned from Tim Ferriss
- I hate David Dellifield. The one from Ada, Ohio.
- What’s the connection between abortion and careers?
- Miscarriage is a workplace event.
But whatever. I feel like I’ve been talking about those posts all year. What about some other posts? One’s that are so well researched and I love what I learned from writing them:
- Will taking drugs help your career? And maybe you need Adderall.
- High-income women get more oral sex. Maybe.
- Do you belong in NYC? Take the test.
Here are some firsts for me during the past year:
- First (mis)use of alcohol as a career tool: Try to give more hugs to more people at work.
- First fake tan: Consistently successful careers stem from consistent personal decisions. Read more
I am lost. I have been lost before in my career. It's just that I did not write about it while it was happening. I wrote about it after the fact. That's much easier. But in the past, during the time I was lost, I simply stopped writing.
For example, I quit playing volleyball and went to graduate school for English. And, at the same time that I realized that English professors make no money and have no job security, I also got dumped by the guy I had been living with for five years. So this is what I did in graduate school: Nothing. I had already written two full novels, so I turned in a little bit of them each week. And I had to take literature courses, which I passed by reading New York Times book reviews (you'd be surprised how far back those go.) And then, after burning every bridge possible at Boston University, I left, one credit short of a graduate degree.
There were other times I fell apart. And stopped writing. For example, when I had a baby, I stayed home with it, every hour of every day, while I had an identity crisis. I still needed to support the family, but I couldn't write anything because I couldn't imagine giving career advice when I was having a total career meltdown. So I took columns from five years earlier and turned them in as new columns. And, after about three months of that, I got fired.
The end of December is one of the hardest times of the year to be unemployed. The peer pressure for good cheer is outrageous, the financial pressure of gifts is huge even for those with a steady paycheck, and the constant catchup with friends and family means everyone will ask, “how are you doing?”
Here are ways to feel better in these situations if you are having a tough time right now.
1. Remember that most people have empathy.
The biggest shift in the workplace is that unemployment always looms, for everyone. It used to be that people who had “good careers” did not have to worry about being unemployed. These people had a ticket to retirement if they just stayed in one place and put in their hours. In those days, being unemployed was the equivalent of being a failure. Those days are over. Today everyone worries about being unemployed. Most people have been laid off more than once. Almost no one is so arrogant to think they are better than you because you can't find a job right now. And if you do meet someone who snubs their nose: They are delusional and out of touch, and should probably be more worried than everyone else about their own employment. Read more