At its core, meaningful work is helping people. But that makes you think you need to save children dying in Africa. But, really, you can push papers for multinational conglomerates and feel like you’re doing good for the world. Here’s how:
1. Take care of yourself—have the basics covered.
The most important thing about making meaningful work is that if you are always worried about paying rent, it’s very hard to add goodness back to the rest of the world. Giving back to the world requires a sense of personal well-being and stability that only people who have a roof over their head can manage.
Back when I was doing what most of you would call meaningful work, I was totally preoccupied with budgeting my meager salary to make sure I didn’t run out of money at the end of the month. At the end of that stint, when I landed in the hospital for a kidney infection, it turned out I was severely anemic, and I’m sure it was because I had such a poor diet from making so little money.
So before you worry about meaningful work, you need to be able to support yourself. Your first job in life is to figure out how to do that. It takes a while. You actually have to figure out what you are good at and what you like doing. This doesn’t mean you have to dedicate your life to that work. But it means that you are learning and growing, and someone values the level of skill you have to pay you a wage with which you can support yourself, and others you might need to support.
The market crash is going to mean a new era of banking, but it is also bringing along with it a few new ideas about how to manage one’s career. This is not the first sector to experience catastrophe, but it might be the wealthiest one. And we can all learn a little about managing our careers from watching what happens with the super-rich.
1. Use the downturn to figure out where you stand.
Wall Street ticks with rainmakers and math geniuses. Usually these guys (almost always guys) are tough to come by. Everyone wants them, everyone knows where they are and where they are going, and they are so powerful that they usually come and go in teams. So you can probably guess that recruiting this talent is extremely difficult.
I have a friend who specializes in headhunting finance talent, and he reports that it is unprecedented that these guys would all be fired, flailing individually, and available to the next taker. So in this downswing, where investment banking layoffs are fast and furious, the management at the places that can still hire finance talent (true banks, and other corporations that have so much money that they could be a bank, like GE or Harvard University) are finally enjoying a buyer’s market.
My friend’s phone is ringing all day with hiring managers scared that they’re missing out on a shopping binge, all of them simmering in a sick feeling that their competitors might be getting a good deal this week.
There’s a saying on the trading floor that up or down doesn’t matter, because as long as there is volatility, you can make money. And it turns out that this is true of recruiting, too.
So, if your sector is tanking, test your star power. There will be a feeding frenzy for top-talent. Learn where you stand by calling a headhunter. If he or she will work with you, you have star power, or at least you’re at the top of your game.
One of the most popular posts here is What Generation are You? Take the Test. I’m sure one reason it’s popular is that people like tests. We all want self-knowledge, but we want it handed to us on a silver platter, not thrown at us in clumps of dirt by our families, or served up with Kleenex at therapy.
But the other reason I think that post is so popular is because people are generally indignant that they are pinned into a generation merely because of the date they were born.
People don’t like to be told they are similar to everyone else. But that’s ridiculous, really. Because feeling special and different is a luxury only for those who are very mainstream. I can tell you, as a person who does not fit in that well, I work very hard to fit in. You think the eccentrics are trying to be eccentric, but they are not. It’s not fun to be eccentric if you really are. It’s only fun to be eccentric if you aren’t.
People ask me all the time how they can get a book deal. So I had my agent write a post on how to get a book deal. But really, I’m telling you, you probably don’t need to write a book. Every time I ask someone why they want to write a book, they have a terrible answer.
So instead of worrying about how maybe you need to get a book deal, consider these reasons why a book deal is no good for you:
1. People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book.
A blog is more immediate, so you'll get better feedback. And getting feedback as you go is much more intellectually rigorous than printing a final compendium of your ideas and getting feedback from the public only when it’s too late to change anything.
Many people think they have a ton of ideas and they are brimming with book possibilities when in fact, most of us have very few new ideas. If you have so many ideas, prove it to the world and start blogging. There is nothing like a blog to help you realize you have nothing new to say.
And, if you do end up having an amazing blog that focuses on one, big grand idea with great writing to boot, then you can get a book deal from your blog.
The slowest moment in my whole life was the time between when the World Trade Center fell next to me, and when someone broke a window and I climbed in to get air. In my memory this time span is about fifteen minutes. But from the historical record, I know it was about one minute.
I have been writing for seven years about how the World Trade Center changed me.
And I have been writing, too, about how much I want to change. Sometimes it’s about productivity, sometimes it’s about compassion, sometimes it’s managing my own money. I always want to change something.
I always thought that my success is due to my fast pace. My quick thinking, quick delivery, quick judgment, quick shift. I tell myself that I can get what I want if I try hard enough. And then I translate that to a faster pace.
Don’t tell me about meditation, and yoga, and being present. I’ve done all that. The problem is that a fast-paced overachiever can undermine even those being-present techniques. For example, I am sure that I’m better at Ashtanga yoga than you are: See. That’s how the mind of the fast-paced works.
There is the step you take where you change what your body is doing, and then there is the second step, where you change what you believe. So I have had a hard time believing that I’d be okay with a slower pace.
But this year, I tried going slower. I tried to trust that I’d change the most by changing my pace.
Changing my pace has been about trusting that good things will come from being slow, just as they do from being fast. It’s hard to trust in that, because if you’ve been fast your whole life, you don’t know what you’ll get from slow. Instead, you only see what you cut out of the fast life to make room for the slow life. You know what you lose but not what you’ll gain.
Some of you know what I mean. Others of you are sitting in your chair, smugly thinking that you are great at slow. But those of you who hate a fast pace, you still have a pace problem, it’s just the opposite: Speed makes you anxious. You might miss something. You might do something wrong. You might get lost. These are the worries of slow people that are foreign to the fast.
Pace matters. It opens doors if you use it well. I am not sure if I would be able to change my pace if I had not had an inescapable, defining moment that forced me to try slow. So today I am taking a moment to have gratitude to all the lessons I learned, during my slowest moment..
Two Months After 9/11: Trying to Make Work Normal Again
Wall Street After 9/11: The Support Group Starts at 5pm Sharp
Lessons Learned from New Orleans
I wish I didn’t love watching Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican convention so much. I love her hair. I love her outfit. I love that she is a great speaker even without a lot of time to train for the convention. I love her sort-of-Wisconsin accent that I sort-of hear myself getting the longer I live in Wisconsin.
I saw her husband hold the baby when she talked about family. I saw her husband give the baby away when she talked about how strong her marriage is. I saw the strain in his face when he smiled. He is a stay-at-home dad, and she didn’t mention that. He just quit his job after twenty years at work. She didn’t mention that.
I can relate to all of that.
I could follow yesterday’s post with a post clarifying my disdain for her. Believe me, I hate her politics. Her politics are so foreign to me that I don’t think I’ve ever even spoken in person with anyone who honestly believes rape victims should not get abortions.
But really, I’ve been like her. Like when she signed up for the PTA to make her kid’s school better. I tried that. It sucked. The lack of power and influence you have in the PTA sucks. It’s the tip of the iceberg of why it sucks to be at home with kids if you are a woman who is a leader — when there is no one to lead, but leading is in your DNA.
On some level, I admire her. I understand how women with big jobs and young kids manage: Compartmentalize, prioritize, multi-task. I am great at that stuff, and so are all the women I know who have big jobs and young kids.
But there is a spot about Palin as VP that mystifies me: Travel. In my life, I have found there is no way to have time with kids when you travel because there is no chance to carve out time; you’re just not there.
And you can’t average it out—kids don’t add up the cumulative time over a month. Maybe an older kid does, but not my three-year-old. Three days away from a three-year-old is a lot. Even for a three-year-old who is supposedly used to it, like mine. Every time (even now) when I’m gone, my husband, who is sort of my ex-husband but not yet, is right there, in the house, taking care of my sons. And it still feels bad for it not to be me.
So I love watching Palin because she makes me believe that I can handle all the travel I do. She is so pretty and capable and somehow, if I ignore that her daughter is pregnant and her husband is lost and her special needs child does not have a mom who is meeting the doctors and therapists and specialists involved in the child’s treatment. If I ignore that, I think that I can travel five times a month and not have a nervous breakdown from the sadness of leaving my kids.
I want to be that. I want to be the CEO who can travel all the time. Because I get invitations to travel to appear on TV, and to travel to deliver speeches, and to travel to wrangle investment in the company. And recently I have been that CEO: I traveled every week for twelve weeks, sometimes twice a week. And everyone said, how do you do it? And I said I don’t know. Because I didn’t know if I was pulling it off or pulling my family apart. I wasn’t sure.
And then I took a break. And when it was time to start traveling again, I had a panic attack. I was driving with my kids to the farm and I remembered how I would be traveling again and I started crying uncontrollably and I snapped at the kids and I drove the car to the farmer‘s house and told him to drive up and down the dirt road for a few minutes while I called my friend who is the only friend I know with both a venture-backed company and the mom responsibilities for a young child, and I told her I can’t do it anymore and she told me she doesn’t know why I didn’t have a breakdown earlier.
She said stop with the speeches and the media and the sky-high aspirations. And after a while I stopped crying and I said okay. And I got back in the car. And I drove to the farm. And we played with chicks and baby pigs and cooked over an open fire.
And then I resumed my travel schedule.
Because I am trying to figure out what’s right. And canceling everything is not what’s right for me. I did the PTA. It sucks. And I’ve done travel every week. It sucks. I don’t know how Palin will do it.
But part of me wants to watch. Will she take her baby? (I’ve done that. It’s impossible to focus.) Will she travel with a nanny? (Done that. It’s awkwardly intimate.) Will she cut back on travel? (Done that. People started doubting me.) What will she do? I want to see because I need some new ideas.
Okay. Look. I wasn’t going to tell you what I think of Sarah Palin, but so many people are asking, so fine. Here it is. She is nuts. And the Republicans are nuts for putting her on a ticket. She has a five-month-old kid with Down’s Syndrome.
Why is no one writing about this? I have a special needs kid. I have two. Here’s what happens when you have a special needs kid. You are in shock. You love the kid. I loved my first one so much that even though there was something like an 80% chance of having another kid with autism, I had a second kid.
And guess what? The second kid had a different disability than the first. Amazing. Statistically phenomenal, really. But my point here is that I’m very qualified to tell you what it’s like to be a breadwinner mom of a five-month-old special needs kid. And, it’s not just from my perspective. I am a magnet for breadwinner moms. They constantly write to me. And when I write about this topic—being the breadwinner and having a special needs kid—women come out of the woodwork. They all say exactly what I’m telling you now: it’s insane. It’s insanely hard.
Here’s what’s insanely hard. You go through a mourning period. Don’t tell me about love and how everyone is different. Because everyone is the same about their kids: They love their kids no matter what, and they didn’t plan on having a special needs kid, no matter what. So you need adjusting time.
And here’s more I know from both statistics and first-hand experience: It’s nearly impossible to keep a marriage together with a special needs kid. And it’s nearly impossible to keep a marriage together when the husband quits his job to take care of the kids (which Palin’s husband just did). And Sarah needs her marriage to stay together pretty badly right now.
And who will take care of the newest member of the family? Certainly not the 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant with the newest kid. So the dad now has three teens at home and soon two kids under one year old at home and one has special needs. This is not a reasonable job. For anyone.
I know that I’m going to be reminded me that I have a nanny, a house manager, and a cleaning woman (who actually shows up every day). But I also have a job that allows me to leave at 2:30. It’s a compromise for me. Because every parent in the world has had to compromise, and it’s fair to judge public figures on the choices they make.
It’s really hard to know where to compromise. Here’s what I was doing when my kid was five months old: I was at home. Hating it. Telling myself that I was not cut out to be at home. I was sort of a columnist and sort of a mom and sort of a psychopath. Because having a five-month-old with special needs is very very hard. Not just learning to take care of the baby, but mentally coping.
Why is no one talking about this? The Republicans should dump Palin. She’s got too much responsibility at home.
Don’t tell me that this is not fair to women. Because you know what? People should have railed against John Edwards running for President when he had two young kids at home and a wife fighting cancer. Fine if she wants him to run for office while she fights the cancer. I get it. But I don’t get how the President of the United States was going to have time to console two school age kids about their mom’s death while leading the country. It’s irresponsible.
I know it’s not cool to tell people how to parent. I know it’s not cool because every day someone asks me how I run my company when I have two young kids and what they are really saying is “you suck as a parent.” It’s hard to hear every day, so I have empathy for the idea that everyone should shut up about how other people parent.
But it’s absurd how extreme these presidential-wanna-be cases are. I don’t want someone in the White House who has kids at home who desperately need them. I don’t want to watch that scenario unfold on national TV. So at some point, it must be okay to speak up. At some point we have to say that we have standards for parenting and we want the community to uphold them.
This is the last thing I should be writing on my blog. Because it’s now clear that the blog is a great dating tool. Propositions all the time. So I should not tell you this, but here it is: It turns out that I’m a lousy girlfriend.
Not the bad in bed type. Well, sort of. Because I’m game for anything, but only as long as I don’t have to be vulnerable.
At work, I’m great because all workplace vulnerability is based in talking—everyone gets to talk all the time—and I’m a very good talker. I can say things that would seem vulnerable, but really, talking is a way for me to constantly make sure that I am in charge.
The farmer likes less talk.
When I was with the farmer, the first night, and we were having intellectual banter about if he should date someone who will never move to the farm and never make him apple pies, I was winning. I won when we argued if he needed to call God “He” in a prayer. I told him that I read Hebrew, and in Hebrew the word for God is gender neutral.
So after a bunch of verbal sparring, I leaned across the sofa and kissed him. Even though he said he didn’t want to kiss. He kissed back, and I felt victorious.
Flash forward: To now. To me next to his bed, typing. Because he told me that absolutely today we were not going to do arguing in bed.
“But that’s my favorite thing to do,” I told him. In bed. Gearing up for an argument.
“Let’s just have fun,” he said.
“That is fun.”
“Let’s go running in the corn field.”
He loves that. He says he loves running in his fields because he’s a guy and women feel close talking and men feel close doing things. But I think he loves running in the corn because the corn is high now, and it makes you feel cozy, and he runs too fast for me to keep up and talk at the same time.
Ten million times a year I write about how people would rather work with people they like than people who are competent. And then everyone asks, “How can I be more likable?”
So I tell people the answer: “Be more vulnerable.” And then I suggest stuff that is easy for me but hard for most people: Admit shortcomings, confess stuff you are having trouble fixing, ask for advice on things you cannot figure out. If you let people see the cracks in your surface, that is where they will find a way in.
But in my personal life, this is extremely hard for me. So my own process for figuring out how to be vulnerable with the farmer is actually a good step-by step lesson on how to be vulnerable in any relationship.
Later, hours after the run, the farmer sits up in bed, head propped on a pillow. I am undressing at the foot of the bed.
I take down my pants and my underwear in one fell swoop.
“Hey. Hold it,” he says. “Do you even have underwear on? Why so fast? What about undressing slower?”
I think about it. I see he wants some sort of strip tease. Not the kind with a pole. But the kind that is sort of casual but has some zing.
It already took me three weeks to get rid of the underwear that could have passed for a bathing suit. So now I have the sexy underwear, but I can’t really use it. I’m very comfortable talking about it, not so comfortable seducing with it.
And then there is the bed. And we are on it. And I cannot cope. We are not sparring verbally. So I wait to hear him talk. He talks about things like the cattle, like my day. My meetings. The grass. His sister. Not small talk but not conflict. Something in between that surely is a building block of intimacy, but I cannot figure out how to do it.
I am quiet. And then, I think, he feels close to me because I am not arguing with him, so he rolls over on top of me and I nearly cry. From the stress of having to be vulnerable and intimate and not connect with words.
I want to talk about my meeting. We got a new board member and he was fun and he liked talking with me and I like when someone likes talking with me because I am so comfortable with that. He said there are not a lot of people in Madison like me and I took that to mean that when I told him that he was full of crap and he should talk to people with his heart, he liked me. I am good with words. I am good with talking.
People think I’m being intimate with the talking, because for example, I told the guy who I want to be on my board that I waxed off all my pubic hair because I read that 90% of Generation Y girls wax it off and I wanted to see what I was missing. So he thinks I’m all vulnerable and intimate with him and we are connecting, but look, I’ll tell that stuff to anyone.
For years I was the manager telling employees their career will tank if they don’t become more vulnerable with their co-workers. At the farm, I’m like my employees, but it’s the non-verbal stuff that flummoxes me. A hand on a chest. A peck on the arm. A stroke on the back. And no talking.
The farm is absolutely lovely right now. But I see the corn growing taller and blocking the views I’ve almost become used to. And I am worried that I don’t know what the winter will bring.
It all makes me nervous. And, like an employee who does not have the social skills for management, I wonder if I will get good at this girlfriend stuff any time soon.
I haven’t posted for two weeks. This is the first time in ten years that I have gone two weeks without writing a column. Really. I have a track record for continuing to write when every other sane person would take a break: I wrote a column right after I delivered a baby, I wrote a column from the admitting room of a mental ward, and I wrote a column four hours after the World Trade Center fell on me.
So you can imagine that I did not plan this blogging break. Of course, I tell people that planning a break from routine work is very important for learning. And of course, I don’t take my own advice. So, the break was accidental, but I did learn a lot. Here’s what I’ve been learning about myself.
1. I am sick of straight-up career advice.
Do you want to know what I was writing when I wasn’t writing? I wrote ten thousand random paragraphs about the farmer. I wrote about him considering dumping me for being Jewish, and me having to argue with his pastor about our interfaith relationship. And I wrote about the farmer borrowing my books about business.
Every time I wrote something that was straight career advice (like how to change departments in your company—a question people ask me a lot) the post sucked and I didn’t run it.
But at lunch—I had a lot of lunches while I was not taking time to write posts—I met with a potential investor, and he said, “I read your blog for two hours last night.” And I said, “Oh, did you get a lot of career advice?” And he said, “I read mostly the personal stuff.”
It hit me then that it’s okay for me to write personal stuff all the time. You have to write what interests you. I want to tell you that stuff that is not me is interesting to me. And it is. But only in relation to me.
2. I missed my editor.
In case you didn’t know, I have an editor for my blog. This comes from being a columnist for so long. My editors were incredible—one was from Vanity Fair, one went on to the Harvard Business Review, and they definitely made me a better writer. So I have an editor for my blog, and if you think that’s over the top, consider this: he also edits my Twitters. I mean, you can’t write about sex and investors in the same 140-character phrase and still get funding unless you have an editor to save you from yourself.
So anyway, when I am posting regularly, I talk with my editor three or four times a day. When I stopped posting, he called me to see if something was wrong. And when I said, “Yes, of course something is wrong. I have too much to do,” he changed his tune and started telling me that if I have to cut something, writing on my blog probably wasn’t the best idea. And then I snapped at him: “When someone is cutting out something they love as much as I love blogging, then you can imagine that person is really, really busy.”
The problem with being friends with someone who works for you is when you snap at him about time management issues, it’s hard for him to come back to you with something like, “You are being a brat and a bitch and I’m sure you have twenty minutes to crank out a post about how everyone should be lost in life or something like that.”
So I missed writing a lot. Every night I would tell myself, “Tomorrow I will write. I will have time tomorrow.” It didn’t surprise me that I missed writing because I’m addicted to the process of self-discovery through words. But it did surprise me that I missed my editor. Talking with someone about things that matter—like does the sentence have better rhythm with an and or an also—is a foundation for talking about everything else.
3. My traffic is mysteriously not related to my rate of posting.
On days when my blog is rocking, like when I write about transparent salaries and the New York Times quotes me and I get 200,000 page views from the intelligentsia, Ryan Healy will point out that my blog is not really a blog—it is something else—because I have the same traffic no matter how often I post.
But this is not totally true. For example I experimented by canceling my whole life and posting five days in a row, and yes, my traffic went up a bit. But only a bit. And after not posting for two weeks, my traffic only went down a tiny bit.
4. Some things don’t change. Even after a break.
Look, I’m still writing lists. Right? And I’m still telling myself that for me, blogging is mental, and if I would just take any free half-hour of the day to sit down and write what I care about, I’d have enough posts in the hopper.
And even though I spend tons of my time meeting with investors who tell me that I should use my blog as a way to plug my company, I continue to write posts about me instead of my company, and I still insist on tossing in off-color missives about the investors for good measure.
Our SEO guy, who I love, told me to use the word Generation Y in a sentence and then link to Brazen Careerist. So I am doing that now. Because I want to be a good team player. But really, I took time off from the blog to raise funding for my company, and realized that I care too much about the blog to make the company come before it. They are together. The blog is where I experiment with ideas that end up driving the company.
5. I hate my photo.
This is something I’ve learned in the last two weeks. For those of you who don’t know, I never look like my photo on my blog. First, my hair is never that organized. I try to remember back to when Yahoo had the photo taken and I don’t remember hair like that, so maybe it was never like that and it’s all Photoshop. That wouldn’t be too outlandish an assumption since my skin also never looks like that, or my lips, and it might actually not even be a photo, but a Yahoo rendition of what a photo might look like.
A British women’s magazine did an article about me and my divorce. And they asked if I had three hours to do a photo session. I was like, I don’t even have a half hour for a blog post, so I’m definitely not doing three hours of photos. Then they told me it was a famous photographer, and he takes pictures for Vanity Fair and other big magazines that I figure surely starlets demand to look great in. So I said yes.
And it paid off. Because I have new photos that actually look like me. Here they are.
The idea that we somehow have a certain amount of potential that we must live up to is a complete crock. People who say they are not living up to their potential do not understand what living means.
Life is very hard. We each probably have some fundamental goals, even if we don’t think of them consciously. First of all, getting up in the morning is very hard. It is fundamentally an act of optimism. Because surely you have already realized that most days are not full of happiness. They are full, but with something else. Yet we still get out of bed every day, thinking that the day is going to be good. That’s a big deal. A huge leap of faith. I spend a lot of time wondering why more of us don’t kill ourselves, and I never come up with a great answer.
The next big goals we have are the spiritual kind: Be good, be kind, treat people with respect. You probably don’t write these on your to do list, but now that you read them, surely you are thinking to yourself, “Oh yeah, I want to remember to do that.”
So already, life is very full. For example, I just took the red eye home from San Francisco. But if you live in a little town like Madison, Wisconsin, there is, really, no red eye. There is only half a red eye to Chicago, a traumatic awakening at 5am, and then an 8am flight to Wisconsin. By the time I get to my gate, treating people with respect takes pretty much everything that is left of my potential.
Living up to your potential is not crossing off everything on your to do list on time, under budget. Or canonizing your ideas in a book deal. Really, no one cares. You are not on this earth to do that. Trust me. No one is. You are on this earth to be kind. That is your only potential.
And then you have to earn a living.
It’s no coincidence that everyone who is walking around bitching that they are not living up to their potential is talking about how they should be more successful at work. Because “living up to potential” is really just code for “not being recognized as the talented genius that I am.”
How about this? How about saying, “I was so good at getting high marks in school. Why am I not catapulting up the corporate ladder?” The answer, of course, is that most of getting what you want at work is about having social skills, and school doesn’t measure that. So there you go—if you insist on talking about living up to your amorphous potential, the reason you’re not doing it, most likely, is that you are not being kind enough at your work.
If you want to live up to your potential, be as nice as you can be. Be as respectful as you can be. Be as honest with yourself as you can be. Because you can’t be honest with other people if you are not honest with yourself.
What can you do if you think you are living below your potential?
1. Recognize that it’s delusional. You are who you are, and you should just be you. Have realistic, meaningful goals for your life, like: Be kind. Be engaged. Be optimistic. Be connected. Most people who say they are not living up to their potential are not talking about this most-important stuff.
2. Recognize that the world isn’t a race. A race assumes that everyone has an inborn ability to reach a personal best. If you stop racing, you stop wondering what that inborn ability is. I mean, really, “living up to one’s potential” is always relative. You are really talking about your ability to kick everyone else’s butt at something. And it’s not a pleasant thing to say. When you stop looking at the world as a competition, then you can stop wondering why you’re not coming in first place.
3. Recognize that you sound like your mother. “Living up to your potential” is a phrase from a grade-school report card. It is elementary-school speak. It is your parents saying you need to do more homework. It is your mother saying “Joey, you’re a genius. Why don’t you get straight A’s? Look what you do to your mother!” In almost every case when someone says, “You are not living up to your potential,” the proper answer is, “So what?” Because it’s always someone trying to tell you that the thing you should contribute to this world is something other than kindness.