Not many commencement speakers give away such advice, so it's a breath of fresh air to read a commencement address by P.J. O'Rourke
Go out and make a bunch of money.
--
There's nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.
--
Don't chain yourself to a redwood tree. Instead, be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. No matter how much you cheat the IRS, you'll still end up paying $100,000 in property, sales and excise taxes. That's $100,000 to schools, sewers, roads, firefighters and police. You'll be doing good for society. Does chaining yourself to a redwood tree do society $100,000 worth of good?
I can’t imagine how a young employee learning the ropes can acquire what she needs to know, as speedily, without the advantage of eavesdropping on her boss’s phone conversations.
How can anyone get a grasp of an industry’s pertinent relationships or decision-making time frames, let alone the fragility of a particular office’s egos, if there are so few chances to hear these people talking to the outside world? The office phone call, properly overheard, is really the cheapest, easiest way to transmit institutional knowledge.
--
That brings up another reason the office phone call is worth preserving: there’s no ready substitute for practicing the necessary summoning of courage for potentially fraught encounters. Advancing in business is often a matter of gaining capacity for confrontation; to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever had to steel herself before sitting down to type a tough e-mail message.
The Office Phone Call Was Music to the Ears.
Quality of life for lawyers 'is a huge raw nerve" says attorney Dan Lukasik who posted a web site to help depressed lawyers.
That lawyers are among the most miserable of men -- and women -- is well-known. Some 19% of lawyers suffer depression at any given time, compared with 6.7% of the population as a whole, says the University of Arizona's Connie Beck, a leading researcher on the subject; one in five lawyers is a problem drinker, twice the national rate. Escalating billable-hours quotas fuel chronic overload, and the ceaseless deadlines and adversarial nature of the work feed anxiety. Some 19% of associate attorneys quit law firms every year, research shows.
You know that kid in school who never quite got the skill of reading in hand but always had trouble reading aloud, tripping over words.
You probably thought they would have trouble all their lives, but no. They compensated and became small business owners.
Over a third of entrepreneurs identify themselves as dyslexic.
Think Nelson Rockefeller , Richard Branson, Charles Scwab.
Tracing Business Acumen to Dyslexia
The study also concluded that dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to delegate authority, to excel in oral communication and problem solving and were twice as likely to own two or more businesses.
“We found that dyslexics who succeed had overcome an awful lot in their lives by developing compensatory skills,”
--
One reason that dyslexics are drawn to entrepreneurship, Professor Logan said, is that strategies they have used since childhood to offset their weaknesses in written communication and organizational ability — identifying trustworthy people and handing over major responsibilities to them — can be applied to businesses.
Successful dyslexics probably make a whole lot more money than you or readers like me.
I've never liked the way Hollywood and the mainstream media depicts the world of business as if everyone in business were greedy, arrogant and corrupt. So, I was happy to learn about a new documentary entitled The Call of the Entrepreneur that follows the stories of three entrepreneurs, a farmer, a merchant banker and a fashion CEO. The trailer gives a fine taste of
In his review at First Things Saint Duncan of Wall Street, Ryan Anderson finds that commerce can be a pathway to holiness.
So, what do these three stories in The Call of the Entrepreneur demonstrate? They show that an entrepreneur—even when just trying to keep his family farm afloat—is always other-regarding: always looking and reaching outside of himself to think of a product that others need and of innovative ways to make it. And in this creative act he cooperates with God and participates in divine creativity. Creation is an ongoing reality in which God upholds the world and empowers human agents to participate.
The emphasis, thus, is not on free markets as an end in themselves but rather, as Gilder points out, as a means to free human beings—free inventors, free producers, and free consumers. Brad Morgan took an unlikely resource and turned it into a highly demanded product. Frank Hanna identified the people who had entrepreneurial vision and enabled them to succeed. And Jimmy Lai worked his way from factory worker to fashion and media CEO thanks to the structures in place in Hong Kong. He now works to make the freedom and prosperity he enjoys available to the country he left behind.
Misbegotten since its conception, the Times Select wall is coming down and I'm delighted because I'll get to read David Brooks regularly.
I only happened upon Truck Stop Confidential because the Independent Women's Forum reprinted long excerpts.
"He has one of those hard jobs, like mining and steel-working, that comes with its own masculine mythology and way of being in the world. Jobs performed in front of a keyboard don’t supply a code of dignity, which explains the spiritual anxiety that plagues the service economy.
"As the trucker spoke, I was reminded of a book that came out a few years ago called ‘The Dignity of Working Men,’ by the sociologist, Michèle Lamont, who is now at Harvard. Lamont interviewed working-class men, and described what she calls ‘the moral centrality of work.’
"Her subjects placed tremendous emphasis on working hard, struggling against adversity and mastering their craft. Her book is an antidote to simplistic notions of class structure, because it makes clear that these men define who is above and below them in the pecking order primarily in moral, not economic terms. …
A code of dignity for working men.
The most prestigious job in America is that of firefighter.
61% of those interviewed by Harris surveys said that job had very great prestige. Coming close were scientists (54%), teachers (54%); doctors (52%), military officers (52%) and nurses.
The least prestigious are real estate brokers (5%), actors (9%), bankers (10%), accountants (11%), entertainers (12%), stockbrokers (12%), union leaders (13%) and journalists (13%).
Selfless service to others seems to me the common thread. Interestingly, "celebrities" rank so low even if stories about them obsess the media. Seems as if we can tell the difference between glamourous work and work worthy of respect.
Full results here, The Harris Poll, 2007
Careerbuilder calls them jobs with staying power, the top indestructible careers.
Doctor
Teacher
Mortician
Waste Disposal Manager
Scientist
Tax Collector
Barber
Soldier
Religious Leader
Law Enforcement Officer
Farmer
Don't you love it when economists start putting numbers on intangibles?
Friends worth their weight in cash
On the plus side
Seeing friends and family every day + $205,000
Chatting up the neighbors regularly + $90,000
Getting married + $120,500
On the debit side
Losing a job -- $344,500
Painful divorce -- $335,000
The conclusion, priceless.
An increase in the level of social involvements is often worth many tens of thousands of pounds a year extra in terms of life satisfaction," said Nattavudh Powdthavee, of the University of London's Institute of Education, which carried out the research.
Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness.
Who knew that our first president, George Washington, after retiring from office began another career as a whiskey entrepreneur and became probably the No. 1 whiskey producer in colonial America?
Mount Vernon is opening on March 31 a complete reconstruction of his distillery.
When it came to his own future career as a distiller, Washington paid careful attention to the business. Mount Vernon owns the original financial ledger for the operation. This was no retiree's hobby; the ledger shows many important local families were customers and made the distillery very successful. The good times ended after Washington's sudden death in 1799 at age 67. His distillery passed into the hands of other owners and by 1814 had been dismantled to provide construction materials for nearby homes.
--
But for all of Washington's commendable belief in moderate alcohol use, he very much appreciated its utility. Esther White, a Mount Vernon archaeologist, told me Washington once lost a 1755 campaign for the Virginia House of Delegates because he didn't treat prospective supporters to a drink. Two years later, he rolled out 144 gallons of refreshment. He won with 307 votes, a return on his investment of better than two votes per gallon. He never lost another campaign.
---
We could say he was First in War, First in Peace and First in Smooth Libations."
George Washington, Whiskey Entrepreneur
Why career planning is a waste of time
Or why your best guess beats careful planning.
In reality, people frequently don't know what they want and psychology has proved it.
We are very poor at what will make us happy in the future, We "miswant."
The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives which involves making a prediction about what we might like in the future. Career planning becomes painful precisely because it's such an important decision and we come to understand that we have only very limited useful information.
Maybe the Chaos Theory of Career Development makes more sense.
if you ask people about their career decisions, almost 70% report that they have been significantly influenced by chance events.
This seems to tie in with Purposive Drift: Making it Up as We Go Along by Richard Oliver at Change This
Your life is not a project plan. Nobody knows where they will be in five years time.
Life is more open, much messier, more ambiguous, more complex, more mysterious, more surprising and filled with more possibilities for good or for ill than we can possibly imagine.
He argues that we revert to "machine-like' thinking because it promises a world of predictability and certainty to mask the frightening thought of our own fragility.
He says we are all more ignorant than we know and smarter than we think and believes our real compass point is our sense of well-being.
Making it up as you go along, he calls Purposive Drift and that's a perfectly reasonable, responsible and realistic approach to life.
Seems to be the one I took.
For professional women who have dropped out of the workforce to take care of children or an elderly parent , the Wharton School and UBS have teamed up to design a program just for them.
At no charge, thanks to support for UBS.
Career Comeback - a program to be praised and copied.
From the Wall Street Journal comes good advice to consider in 2007.
Eight steps to enhance your career
1. Create your own board of advisors. You are your own CEO. Act like one.
2. Spread the word. When other people give you a compliment, ask them to repeat it to your boss.
3. Try something new. What new skill can you learn this year that will help out your boss and company.
4. Take inventory. Enhance your capabilities, work on deficiencies.
5. Watch your company. Don't be the last to find out trouble is brewing.
6. Beware of burnout. If you are reaching a breaking point, start looking around.
7. Get involved. It's easier to network if you volunteer for a committee
8. Asset yourself. Try Toastmasters.
Sue Shellenberger is following three trends she says are gaining momentum, just in time to counter the discontented more people feel with their work-life balance
Reasons to Hold Out Hope for Balancing Work and Home (Wall St Journal subscription only.
Some you might expect - more job flexibility, more telecommuting, fewer transfers and flex hours.
But this surprised me. Overseeing Mom or Dad from afar will get easier.
Two vendors are about to begin marketing in-home electronic monitoring systems to consumers. The systems track a resident's movements through wireless sensors mounted on walls, switches, doors, medicine cabinets or appliances, and alert 24-hour emergency-response workers of irregular activity patterns. Caregivers can monitor the systems via the Internet or request notification of irregularities via email, phone calls or text messages.
Living Independently Group, New York, plans this month to start targeting working caregivers with cable-TV ads for its QuietCare system, says George Boyajian, executive vice president. The system will be priced at $199 to install and $79.95 a month thereafter. Lusora, Austin, Texas, also expects in the first quarter to start marketing its "Lisa" personal-security system, for $249 to install plus $50 a month, says COO Scott Gurley.
Marguerite McCullough, 67, who lives alone in a Florida retirement community, had QuietCare installed after she spent five hours one night alone and helpless in her bathroom, disabled by a bad case of stomach flu. The system, which is set to alert her four children or a neighbor of any problems, "does give you peace of mind," she says.
Women bosses are significantly more likely to discriminate against female employees and are prone to mark down women's prospects of promotion.
So say the findings of the authors based at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and published in the journal sex roles.
Office Queen bees hold back women's careers.
The findings, based on experiments carried out among more than 700 people, suggest that the “queen bee syndrome” of female rivalry in the workplace may sometimes be as important as sexism in holding back women’s careers.
----
Nicola Horlick, the City financier nicknamed “Superwoman” for combining a demanding job with a large family, said some women looked on other women as a threat and preferred to surround themselves with men.
“It is called the ‘queen bee syndrome’,” she said. “I have seen women in managerial positions discriminating against other women, possibly because they like to be the only female manager or woman in the workplace.”
We all know women like that.
Hat tip to Dr. Helen who writes in Fight the Matriachy
I guess the "Sisterhood" is only alive and well when the drones know their place.
Hugh MacLeod at The Gaping Void is encouraging readers to send in their brief manifestos. He has his down to four words.
This one on Work by Pamela Slim who posts at Escape from Cubicle Nation is so good, I'm going to post it in its entirety.
1. Work is your real life
. It is the way you translate your feelings, your thoughts, your hopes and your desires into something valuable, tangible and useful every day. You can choose to make work into a dreaded, necessary evil that you can't wait to finish so that you can get busy with your "real life." Why not just do work you love?
2. Good work will improve your sex life. Frustrated employees desperately long for excitement and release in the form of fantasy football, internet surfing, porn, and the affections of their stressed and overworked spouses. No superhero could fill the gigantic void of a passionless man or woman in a 15-minute tryst in bed. Express your passion through your work every day, all day, and find that you will be less needy, more attentive, open, giving and loving to your partner. Which makes for better sex.
3. Your secret desire holds the clue to your best work. You say that you would love to do meaningful work, but don't know how to find it. What is your secret desire? What idea are you a little embarrassed to share with someone because it is so delicate or bold or crazy or exciting? You often claim to not know what you want to do, but in fact censor yourself from what you know you want for fear of appearing ridiculous.
4. You can't fool your kids. Many of you claim passionless, dull and frustrating careers with the excuse that you must provide for your family. Providing for your family is noble; using it as an excuse to hide from your own greatness is a bad example for your kids. If you want them to grow up motivated, creative, free and enterprising, be that yourself. They are watching and emulating your every move.
5. Fear is the great inhibitor. All of the excuses that you find for not doing work you love have solutions. You do not enact them because you are afraid: of showing up too big in the world; of failing; of appearing as an imposter; of living in poverty. There is nothing wrong with fear. Feel it, talk to it, examine it and walk with it. Then step out and let yourself show up, warts and all. It will liberate you.
6. Owning is better than renting. While you may feel "safer" renting out your skills for a paycheck and benefits, you often sell all your energy this way and have nothing left at the end of the day. If you don't get what you need in this employment arrangement in terms of money, recognition, power or responsibility, you feel angry and frustrated. Own the means of production and the factory, and at least your glorious disasters will be your disasters. Accountability breeds passion and desire.
So you want to be a spy?
Here's what Stalin's master spy recruiter looked for
“....people who are hurt by fate or nature — the ugly, those craving power or influence but defeated by unfavourable circumstances. In co-operation with us, all these find a peculiar compensation. The sense of belonging to an influential, powerful organisation will give them a feeling of superiority over the handsome and prosperous people around them.”
Says Ben MacIntyre
This comes close to a perfect definition of the mentality of espionage. It brings together such different characters as Kim Philby, the upper-class British traitor, Melita Norwood, the octogenarian British KGB mole, and Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB officer murdered last week with radioactive polonium-210. Spies spy for many reasons: ideology, greed, sex, revenge, honour, fear of blackmail. As a trade, espionage attracts more than its share of the damaged, the lonely and the plain weird. But all spies crave undetected influence, that secret compensation. Espionage may spring from patriotism or treachery, but ultimately it is an act of imagination.
When medicine and the law ceased to be professions and became businesses, we shouldn't be surprised when many lawyers and doctors as well as would-be teachers leave it all behind to go to Wall St.
When posting an online resume, be sure to clear it of all personal information. Never ever post your social security number. Be sure you are dealing with legitimate companies and recruiters before giving up any of your personal info.
Just assume that Identity Thieves are Reading Your Online Resumes.
When you post a resume, clear it of personal information. Cyberthieves have been able to gain access to resume databases and troll for Social Security numbers and other personal information, such as where you live and your contact information, says Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a public interest research group in San Diego.
---
Think twice before revealing personal information by email or phone. Con artists "phishing" for information through fake interviews may ask for, say, information such as your Social Security number or a scan of your driver's license or passport, says Ms. Dixon, and claim it will expedite the application process.
---
You can start by searching on the company's name on the Better Business Bureau's Web site. Another helpful Web site is Lookstoogoodtobetrue.com, maintained by a joint federal law-enforcement and industry task force.
--
If the company that contacts you appears to be a well-known employer, don't think you're in the clear. Criminals are copying company Web sites and tweaking the contact information or links, says Ms. Dixon of the World Privacy Forum. Although a Web site may look credible, do an Internet search of the company to make sure the URL of the official Web site matches the address the employer refers you to. If there's a mismatch, find the phone number of the company's corporate headquarters on the official Web site to verify that the hiring manager who contacted you is an employee.
Since we're speaking of the importance of safeguarding your personal information, here's an ultimate guide to identity theft .
It's not the alcohol, it's the social capital you build by nurturing relationships and meeting new people.
How a drink after work can increase your rate of pay.
Research from the US indicates that social drinkers earn, on average, up to 14 per cent more than teetotallers in the same profession, with women benefiting more than men.
From the Wall St Journal, Humanity's Greatest Achievement by Johan Norberg.
Think for a moment about what this morning would have looked like if it were 150 years ago. You wouldn't have had electric light, running water or indoor sanitation. You couldn't have gone to work by car, bus or train. You couldn't have used a computer, which performs calculations in seconds that would take decades with pen and paper. In short, you would probably not have found this morning very comfortable or enjoyable -- if you had been alive to experience it. Back then, the global average for life expectancy was around 30 years.
We tend to take our opportunities for granted, but our ancestors could not have imagined what we now have. In the last 100 years, we have created more wealth than in the 100,000 years before that, and not because we work more. To the contrary: In the last century, work hours have been halved in the Western world. It is because new ideas have made it possible for us to work smarter and find easier ways to satisfy our needs and demands.
The people we should thank are the innovators and entrepreneurs, the individuals who see new opportunities and risk exploring them -- the people who find new markets, create new products, think out new ways to handle commodities commercially, organize work in new ways, design new technology or transfer capital to more productive uses. The entrepreneur is an explorer, who ventures into uncharted territory and opens up the new routes along which we will all be traveling soon enough. Simply to look around is to understand that entrepreneurs have filled our lives with everyday miracles.
Entrepreneurs are serial problem-solvers who search out inefficiencies and find more practical ways of connecting possible supply with potential demand. In that way, they constantly revolutionize our economy, and have made it possible for average people today to live longer and healthier lives, with more access to technology than the kings had in previous generations.
With that in mind, take a look at Small Business Heroes on YouTube.
Get paid immediately as you work online part-time.
Wired magazine reports on ChaCah Search, a human-assisted search that offers its contracted workers the option of being paid immediately.
Beer money for college students, "pin money" for mothers at home.
Long before Harvard began teaching Happiness, soon to become the most popular introductory class there, Columbia was offering a course in the Meaning of Life.
"Creativity and Personal Mastery by Srikumar Rao aims at nothing less than to help each student "discover your unique purpose for existence". The "perennially oversubscribed" course is demanding, requiring extensive reading and time-consuming exercises. Now, he has a book covering much of the same material.
It's the Ivy League version of Rick Warren's A Purpose-Driven Life, a book that has sold an astonishing 20 million copies, People have an huge hunger for meaning and purpose in their lives. I've read Rao's book and I think it's quite good. If you want to get full value, be prepared to do the exercises.
Said Professor Rao who is considered a "life-long resource" for his students.
"At business schools, the vast majority of students don't have a clue what they really want to do."
"They're in business school for a number of reasons -- the most important one is economic security, they want to go out and make a ton of money, they want to be in a prestigious company."
However, many are also wary of the long hours and intensely competitive environment typical of post-MBA employers such as investment banks, he notes.
"My basic thesis is that work hours are getting longer and longer and more grueling. But if you don't get up in the morning with your blood singing at the thought of what you do, if you're not really into your life, then you're wasting your life. And life is short."
This can come as a shock to the traditional MBA student, many of whom have progressed seamlessly -- and successfully -- through school, university and the start of their business career.
"Just the thought that someone comes out and puts it so boldly is like getting hit in the face with a wet fish," Rao says. "They off and think about it, and they say: 'By golly, he's right!'"
More evidence that multitasking doesn't work, so why do so many bosses insist on it?
From the WSJ's Cubicle Culture
Multitasking, a term cribbed from computers, is an information age creed that, while almost universally sworn by, is more rooted in blind faith than fact. It's the wellspring of office gaffes, as well as the stock answer to how we do more with less when in fact we're usually doing less with more. What now passes for multitasking was once called not paying attention.
---
Employers continue to seek out jugglers despite decades of research showing that humans aren't great multitaskers. (And in the case of distracted driving, we're downright dangerous.)
"Multitasking doesn't look to be one of the great strengths of human cognition," says James C. Johnston, a research psychologist at NASA's Ames Research Center. "It's almost inevitable that each individual task will be slower and of lower quality."
--
While multitaskers seem to be accomplishing a lot, they are in most cases literally just going through the motions. It is easy for our brain to schedule many different tasks, one after the other. And we'll gamely set out doing those tasks, some of which require little extra brain input and some of which require a lot. As a result, says Hal Pashler, director of the Attention and Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, "your mouth can be moving while your brain is elsewhere."
If you can't live without your Blackberry, you may be suffering from an addiction that is every bit as damaging and hard to break as one to hard drugs – and one that employers might one day be held liable for.
Trapped in electronic slavery
If you have a Blackberry, how long can you go without checking email?
If you're always looking down at your handheld and ignoring everything else around you including the people, chances are you've got a jones going.
Retired and want to hit the road and see America but you haven't saved enough money?
The Over-50 Crowd Takes to the Road in Paid Big-Rig Gigs.
That's right. Couples are finding second careers driving 18-Wheelers.
At a truck stop diner along Interstate 5 near Tigard, Ore., Daniel and Becky Ford were fueling up on pancakes and black coffee for the 2,200-mile run to Dallas they were about to make in a Freightliner tractor-trailer stuffed with auto parts.
It was the 10th week on the open road for Mr. Ford, 57 years old, and his 51-year-old wife, who chucked their old life in rural Pennsylvania in May for a cramped truck cab that keeps them moving 22 hours a day.
Their new career is taking them to places they always dreamed of visiting but couldn't afford. "When the money is tight and you have other worries, you can't be too adventurous," says Mrs. Ford, a former hairstylist. "Becky and I serve as our own boss," says Mr. Ford, a former carpenter. "We can stop wherever we want."
---
This fall, the American Trucking Association plans a billboard and television ad blitz to lure older drivers.
"We just thought if Ma and Pa can drive the Winnebago, maybe they can drive the 18-wheeler," says Tim Lynch, a senior vice president at the trade group.
Since 2000, the number of service and truck drivers 55 or older has surged 19%, to about 616,000, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percentage jump is quadruple that of truck drivers overall.
Exhausted are you?
You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?"
"The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest," I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before I reached the end of the sentence. "What is it, then?"
"The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness."
It's David Whyte on meeting Brother David. A remarkable essay
You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly to rot on the vine.
Why do we work so hard? Is it maybe time to quit your job ...and follow your path?
We are at once infuriated by and enamored with the idea that some people can just up and quit their jobs or take a leave of absence or take out a loan to go back to school, how they can give up certain "mandatory" lifestyle accoutrements in order to dive back into some seemingly random creative/emotional/spiritual endeavor that has nothing to do with paying taxes or the buying of products or the boosting of the GNP. It just seems so ... un-American. But it is so, so needed.
Case in point No. 1: I have this sister. She is deep in medical school right now, studying to be a naturopathic doctor at Bastyr University just outside Seattle, the toughest school of its kind in the nation, and the most difficult to get into, especially if you've had no formal medical training beforehand, as my sister hadn't.
She got in. She bucked all expectation and thwarted the temptation to quit and take a well-paying corporate job and she endured the incredibly brutal first year and rose to the top of her class. Oh and by the way, she did it all when she was over 40. With almost no money. While going through an ugly, debt-ridden divorce.
It seems as if most people have to be broken before the time is right and they find the courage to follow their path. I was.
The profession with the greatest prestige is ....Firefighting.
Doctors second; nurses, third.
Business executives. stockbrokers and real estate agents vie for the bottom.
Results from the Harris Poll.
We admire firefighters for their bravery and their duty to risk their lives to save everyone imperiled; doctors and nurses for their care when we are the most vulnerable. We know they are not looking to make money from us, but see us as the pitiable human creatures we are - and help us anyway.
Beautiful people head start in brainpower tests
BEAUTY may be more than skin deep after all. New research suggests that good-looking people do better in exams and thus probably in later life, than the plain or downright ugly.
In the study, better-looking students achieved superior results in both oral and written exams -- the latter marked anonymously -- suggesting that success is not just down to teachers favouring attractive students but to superior natural ability.
There's no permalink but if you go to Inbubblewrap, you may still find it under "Special Notes".
Seems as if at the last department picnic, management decided for liability reasons, they could serve alcohol if people were limited to only one drink.
The guy who ordered the cups was fired.
You don't have to understand a word, it's just hilarious.
I couldn't stop laughing. The infectious quality of uncontrollable laughter.
I just wonder if the poor guy still has a job.
From the Boston Globe
Blogging is good for your career. A well-executed blog sets you apart as an expert in your field.
--
''For your career, a blog is essential," says Phil van Allen, a faculty member of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
''It's the new public relations and it's the new home page. Instead of a static home page, you have your blog," he said. It's a way to let people know what you are thinking about the field that interests you.
The eight reasons why are right here. Blogs 'essential' to a good career
Thanks to Troy Worman, I clicked on Come Gather Round and found this terrific question
For what has my life been preparing me?
People who find a deep sense of purpose in their lives are almost always able to look back at their previous experience and see that nothing was wasted. Experiences such as the work that had gone before (even if unpleasant), a tragedy, seemingly random events and turning points, even childhood delights and traumas, were all preparation to fulfill the purpose.
So, if you are puzzling about the purpose that will guide you, the key to the puzzle may lie in the question,
Three "existentially challenged Pepperdine University grads" traveled the country in a 1985 neon-green Fleetwood RV and interviewed 86 successful leaders in a variety of professions.
Every one essentially gave them the same career advice.
Block out the noise and
really pave your own road
guided by what lights you up.
What's so surprising as they talked to twenty something college students, is that no one else, neither parents nor teachers, ever told them the gospel truth to follow your heart and lines of desire.
Countless emails arrive daily. "I sometimes [wonder] what would have become of my life had I never found your book that day in Target," reads one note from a recent grad who ditched her indifferent plans for law school and moved overseas. "Thank you . . . for writing about an experience in our lives most young people are too frightened to acknowledge."
Read Inspiration Junkies at Fast Company.
Seems like there's a big market in simple truths
If you're a nurse, you never have to worry about losing a job or finding a job. You can go to a brand new city where you know no one and if you're a registered nurse, you can get a job in week. Everyone wants you. And for good reason. Nurses make all the difference when it comes to caring for patients.
Yet there are not enough of them.
My mother is a nurse. She stopped working when she was about 78. She still gets calls EVERY WEEK from some recruiter who tries to lure her back at 84!
The American Hospital Association says we will need 1 million replacement nurses by 2012, just six years away; yet, nursing schools turned away 32,000 interested students because there was not enough faculty to teach them. Nurses ache for aid.
U.S. hospitals could avoid as many as 6,700 patient deaths, 70,400 complications and 4 million days of hospital care if they hired more registered nurses and increased the hours of nursing care per patient, according to a new study in the January issue of Health Affairs.
The problem is too few nurses makes hospitals work the remaining nurses too long with too many patients until they finally burn out resulting in too few nurses.
WANTED
Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen.
Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily.
Orphans preferred.
I remember reading William Least Moon's Blue Highways and laughing at this ad by the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company.
They called it the Pony Express and there was never a shortage of riders.
"Expert riders Willing to risk death" - how better to attract young men in their early twenties.
HT. Doc Searls
What happens when a boomer takes a buy out and discovers his passion and creates a legacy. It comes with your fifties.
For the first time, I was experiencing a reward that wasn't supposed to be hung on a wall or placed into my bank account. And it felt good.
----
Not long ago, when someone would ask what I did for a living, I'd say, "I teach, but I once worked in the corporate world." It was as if I was saying, "I used to be somebody, but I'm not anymore." Now, when asked that same question, I simply say, "I am a teacher." That's it. No caveats, no qualifiers, no need to say more.
I Was Out of a Job - And an Identity
From the Wall St. Journal's "Fiscally Fit" column by Terri Cullen. How companies are fighting rising health care costs.
More Firms Pressure Workers to Adopt Healthier Lifestyles.
Last month, Stephanie Sobel joined thousands of her colleagues at drug giant AstraZeneca PLC in taking a free online health-risk assessment test.
Ms. Sobel says that she'd long planned to use the tool but never got around to it. This year, however, she had an additional incentive: In September, AstraZeneca began penalizing workers who fail to fill out the online assessment tool by boosting their health-insurance premiums by $50 a month until they complete the questionnaire.
The assessment tool asked questions about the 32-year-old sales and safety manager's lifestyle, querying her on everything from nutrition to her past medical history. After plugging in all her information, Ms. Sobel received an evaluation of her health and detailed recommendations on ways to adjust her lifestyle to improve her well-being. The result: Her health isn't too shabby but she could stand to take a daily dose of vitamins.
"I like how it divided up into two sections what my health issues are, but also highlighted what my strengths are," she says, "It made me feel good and encouraged me to keep at it."
Frustrated with efforts to contain health-care costs, companies are stepping up the pressure on workers to use diagnostic tools and take better care of themselves – or be penalized when they don't.
"We didn't want to go down the path of cost shifting for all our employees so we decided to head in the other direction, encouraging workers to use the tools available to help them contain health-care costs by making healthier choices," says Penny Stoker, vice president, human resources at AstraZeneca in Wilmington, Del. The incentive appears to be working: roughly 10,000 of the company's work force of 12,000 have signed up to use the tool.
Here's a very interesting essay by Paul Graham on what business can learn from open source. via Daily Dose of Optimism.
Workplaces
Another thing blogs and open source software have in common is that they're often made by people working at home. That may not seem surprising. But it should be. It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.
--
The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it's not just the way offices look that's bleak. The way people act is just as bad.
Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching beige cubicles they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether it's "work safe." The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. And you know what? The company at this stage is probably the most productive it's ever going to be.
Maybe it's not a coincidence. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net loss.
Facing age discrimination in searching for a job, the 55-Plus Crowd takes to eBAy Auctions.
Many people age 55 and older are turning to the online marketplace.
For some retirees, eBay has become a kind of financial lifeline, supplementing pension plans or savings that may not be sufficient.
Others have uncovered a latent entrepreneurial streak in themselves or simply see eBay as a creative outlet; they enjoy the sales process and the interaction an eBay business gives them with people around the world.
One of the great advantages of blogging is that you meet so many interesting bloggers face to face that you've been reading. I've been lucky enough to meet Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By, Yvonne DeVita at Lipsticking, and the Diva of Marketing, Toby Bloomberg.
Others I've met at Blogging Gatherings, at the first Blogger Con, back when I was just a reader and the idea of actually writing a blog seemed terrifying. I've learned a lot and met a few people at the Thursday meetings at Harvard's Berkman Center even though I'm only a sporadic attendee. People like Bill Ives, Dave Weinberger, Lisa Williams who also posts at a very interesting and local H20 town and Amanda Watlington.
The most recent blogger bash was an after-hours American Marketing Association where I met John Cass of Backbone Media whose recent survey of corporate blogging has just been published and which I plan to discuss over at Estate Legacy Vaults blog. You can download it here and join the conversation at its very own blog.
One of my new blogging friends, Dina Lynch, is the Mediation Mensch. That's mediation, not meditation. Mediation uses a neutral third party to resolve disputes between two parties, well short of the all out warfare that lawsuits too often engender.
I have a soft spot for mediators since my Dad was one and an arbitrator too, at one point, President of the American Academy of Arbitrators. I'm happy to see how far the field of mediation has come in public acceptance as a legitimate and preferred alternative method of resolving disputes. It means that we are learning to rise above our differences to stand on a higher common ground.
If you're interested in mediation, jump over to Mediation Mensch. Dina is even making the generous offer to coach two new practitioners for free. Hard to beat that.
Many of my other blogging friends, and they are legion, I will meet at Blogher on July 30 out in Santa Clara. Registration is almost full, but you still have time until registration closes on July 25th or until they fill the last 40 seats whichever comes first.
Lots of interesting posts over at Curt Rosengren's Occupational Adventure.
There's the thirty career lessons from successful people including this one from Dionne Blackwell
Great questions to ask yourself like How is this moving me forward?
Surprising tips - If you want to save big, you have to dream big Who can stick to a long term savings plan unless your dreams fuel your will to save.
But most interesting is Curt's series of posts exploring what success means to him. You want to read them all and as a spur to thinking about your own definition. Curt lists career passion, financial abundance, time abundance, love, health, being present and meaning.
I would add of course Living and Leaving a Legacy.
Remarkably good life advice from Steve Jobs.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life.
.......
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.
Every life transition, especially if it's hard, is a chance to recreate your life, to reorient towards your own North Star, your truest self.
Philosopher and theologian, Harold Thurman Whitman wrote, "Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
Find what you love. That's what makes you come alive. Part of the Business of Life™.
If you've only heard "Do what you love and the money will follow" Curt Rosengren at Worthwhile gives us the fuller, more accurate quote.
Do what you love, work really, really hard, be patient, be persistent, be open, work really, really hard so more and the money will follow
That sounds right. But how do you know when you're in the second "work really, really hard", closer to the end than the beginning?Dervala is a happy new employee. They gave her beautiful new notebooks with this inscription
This is my notebook. A collection of my thoughts, ideas, some other people’s thoughts, some good stuff, some useless stuff. All written down, mostly scribbled, some stuff that I can no longer read, in an attempt to preserve a brilliant moment in time. (Or, at the time, I thought it was a brilliant moment.) I got this notebook from Stone Yamashita Partners. They always feed me. They’re the kind of office that allows dogs. They believe in the power of good thinking to invoke change. And so do I.
Here's another reason.
On my first day, two months ago, my SY[P] co-workers gave me a neat stack of San Francisco guidebooks and a household address book that they’d filled with notes on opthalmologists, florists, car repair shops, hikes, plumbers, restaurants, dentists, and babysitters. This streak of inventive empathy, made elegantly tangible, runs through the culture from the stationery cupboard to the client presentations. It’s what makes them excellent, and it makes me glad they found me.
More in Detail matters.
They got me at the notebooks. I'm even more impressed after reading what Stone Yamashita does.
Have no doubt, meaning and purpose is BIG. The extraordinary success of a Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren which to date has sold over 20 million copies.
Bill Jensen has a new book out called "What is Your Life's Work". I've been reading excerpts he he's made available on line, and already there are whole paragraphs I want to quote. Normally, I would post this on Legacy Matters, but since this is also about work, here it goes.
From the introduction:
Put simply, this book is about what we learn about ourselves when we teach our loved ones, especially our kids, what matters and about the powerful need we have to leave something behind -what we want to be remembered for.
Bill has spent his career listening to people, collecting stories and studying how we work.
To jump start insightful conversations, he used to ask "What really matters here?" That is until the economy took a nosedive, no one wanted to rock the boat, everyone wanted to keep their job. So he changed the question,
"What is the single most important insight about work that you want to pass on to your kids? Or to anyone you truly care about?"
BAM! The floodgates opened. A happy accident: Changing my question to something much closer to home, "Why do we do what we wouldn't want our kids to do? Which of our mistakes should they not repeat?" unleashed completely new conversations.
Jensen than asked them to put their thoughts on paper: "Write a letter to that loved one. Or keep a journal -a work diary." ..." Something magical happened. They got back more than they gave."....A work diary for others ends up being a tool for self-discovery."
Some astonishing facts:
• 75% of us are disengaged from our jobs
• 75% of all employees are now searching for new employment opportunities
• 83% of us wish we had more of what really matters in life."
You can pre-order the book at Amazon
HT to Curt Rosengren at Occupational Adventure who alerted me to the free downloads.
For some reason, the media seems to be focused on a few people who were fired for blogging. There's quite another side as Tim Bray points out in Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career
1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.
2. You have to get noticed to get hired.
3. It really impresses people when you say “Oh, I’ve written about that, just google for XXX and I’m on the top page” or “Oh, just google my name.”
4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.
6. Knowing more also means you’re more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.
7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.
8. If you’re an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.
9. If you’re in marketing, you’ll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.
10 It’s a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.
Hat tip Boing Boing
Here's an anecdote from Dervala that makes my case about Happiest Workers.
Leo had majored in Romance Language Literature at the University of New Mexico but when his young family came to California years ago he decided to apply himself to an honest trade.
“People think that because I know all these languages, and poems, and books, I should have been something more than a mechanic. But if I worked in my academic field, I’d be fighting to make twenty or thirty thousand a year. And guess what? Last year I took home over two hundred grand from this little shop.”
As I backed my car off the hoist he was belting out a Puccini aria.
My muffler man does good work, and is easily the happiest person I’ve met so far in California.
For some time now, I've been toying with the idea that young people should consider learning a trade before going to college. As more and more "knowledge work" is being outsourced, knowledge workers are finding that their college degrees don't insure them jobs. At the same time, work that requires a physical nexus - like plumbing, electrician, hairdressing - can never be outsourced. Trade work is often the basis of a very solid small business, so I was not surprised to learn how many are the Millionaire Next Door
Now we have the results of a poll in the U.K that show they may well be the happiest workers.
TOP FIVE HAPPIEST PROFESSIONS*
Hairdressers (40%)
Clergy (24%)
Chefs/cooks (23%)
Beauticians (22%)
Plumbers (20%)
*% who rated their level of happiness as 10 out of 10 in brackets.
FIVE MOST UNHAPPY PROFESSIONS*
Social Workers (2%)
Architects (2%)
Civil Servants (3%)
Estate Agents (4%)
Secretaries (5%)
*% who rated their level of happiness as 10 out of 10 in brackets.
Michael Osbaldeston of City & Guilds said there were plenty of reasons why hairdressers should be happy.
"It is the relationship they have with their client which makes the job what it is," he said. "They are appreciated. They make people feel good and look good. Many of them have the opportunity to be their own bosses and that also seems to be something that is quite important in people's happiness."
Your chances of getting away with murder are 3 out of 4 according to a real homicide detective in Chicago who deals with 50 or so murders a year. Fascinating look at a profession we only know from cop shows on TV.
I do love my job. I believe in silly old-fashioned ideas like justice, integrity, and law & order. No one, no matter what they have done, deserves to be murdered. ... I ended up in this profession quite by accident and I can't think of anything else I would rather be doing. ... Being a homicide detective has had one personal drawback. I have an overwhelming sense of my own mortality. It is mildly depressing. .... On a side note; never trust a detective who dresses like one of those TV characters.
Tired of the idiots at work? Here's a safe place to vent. I work with fools allows you to share anonymously work-related stories. It could become a Page Six for the Dilbert crowd.
I work for a major financial institution once known for using bleeding-edge strategic technology to make dramatic profits in the market. About 3 years ago management decided that technology was not strategic, technology was a commodity, yada, yada, yada. Anyone who felt differently was pushed out the door. Management arranged to outsource the entire global technology organization to another major corporation known more for their commercials professing their ability to provide technology services on demand, than for their ability to actually deliver said services, for a savings in excess of $2.5 billion. Of course our CEO received a $10 million bonus for this fantastic feat of magic. Three years later, after both companies experience exorbitant and unplanned technology-related costs for substandard technical services, the same management announces that technology is strategic (duh!) and should be developed and retained in-house. Furthermore, management has budgeted $5 billion to insource the jobs (not the people) over the next 3 years. Our CEO is receiving another $10 million bonus this year for bringing the technology jobs back in house; the architects of the original disastrous outsourcing, are now orchestrating the new operational model involving insourcing.Who's the CEO and what company could this be?
Are you under a lot of pressure at work? At a job you don't even like? Consider this: Stressful deadlines boost heart attack risk six-fold.
"The pressure of meeting a work deadline can produce a sixfold increase in the risk of suffering a heart attack over the course of the following day. And competition at work could double the ongoing risk, according to a new study.
Previous research has shown that intense anger, sexual activity and emotional stress can all lead to heart attacks. But this is the first time having an intense work deadline has been singled out as a trigger for heart attack over such a short timescale.
The study questioned nearly 1400 heart attack survivors from the Stockholm area, aged 45 to 70, about the period leading up to their first heart attack. They were compared with a control group of about 1700 people who had not had a heart attack.
Maybe it's time to consider something Worthwhile - work with joy and meaning. Maybe it's time to embark on a new Occupational Adventure. If fear of the unknown is holding you back, ask yourself if you are creating Hard times that will never happen. Better a leap into the unknown than a heart attack.
Stress is taking a larger toll on our lives than we knew. The The American Institute on Stress calling stress the number 1 health problem in the US estimates that 75-90% of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related problems .
The New York Times has a page 1 story on Workplace stress which costs some $300 billion year in health care costs and missed work. The changing workplace - non traditional (part time and self-employed) employment and increased hours are major factors as is what one expert called the "the work ethic of fear" and downsizing and surprisingly workforce expansion.
Workers who feel a sense of control experience less stress. But those who experience stress at work and stress at home get more than a double whammy. Psychiatrist Jeffrey P. Kahn, president of WorkPsych Associates, a consulting firm in New York, says. "Stress at home plus stress at work doesn't equal two units" of stress, he said. "It equals five."
On a very simple level, stress compromises the body's immune system
"The physiological changes associated with stress are part of a complex system that once saved the lives of human ancestors, warning them of danger, said Dr. Bruce S. McEwen, director of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at Rockefeller University.
But human physiology, Dr. McEwen said, was not intended to handle the chronic stress that is an inescapable accompaniment of modern life. The wear and tear of long hours, ringing phones, uncertain working conditions and family demands lead to what he calls "allostatic load," a stress switch stuck in the half-on position. The result: fatigue, frustration, anger and burnout.
Links are being found between stress and disease at the molecular level
At Ohio State University, for example, Dr. Ronald Glaser, a viral immunologist, and his wife, Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a psychologist, are reaching across disciplines to understand how stress causes illness...
"What we know about stress is that it's probably even worse than we thought," Dr. Kiecolt-Glaser said.
Their most recent work focuses on cytokines, molecules produced by white blood cells, and in particular interleukin 6, which plays a beneficial role in cell communication. Like cortisol and adrenaline, interleukin 6 can damage the body in large and persistent doses, slowing the return to normal after stressful events. It has been linked to conditions that include arthritis, cardiovascular disease, delayed healing and cancer, Dr. Glaser said.
The immune systems of the highly stressed subjects, Dr. Glaser said, "had the levels of Il-6 that we saw in the controls that were 90 years old," which suggests that their experiences "seemed to be aging the immune system" drastically.
From the Occupational Adventure, you'll find all sorts of tips in you're engaged in combining passion and career or want to be, Combining Money and Meaning
Cliff Hakim, author of We Are All Self-Employed shares five tips for combining money and meaning in your career (more details on each in the article).
1. Work from the inside out -- figure out your commitment...The only sustainable work comes from your heart.
2. Ask yourself how much is enough?
3. Give yourself permission and an opening to explore.
4. Persevere/flex, persevere/flex, persevere/flex.
5. Work darn hard.
But what I liked best
were the lessons from a successful career change
Lesson #1:
Have an unstoppable belief system and the commitment to make it work.
From personal experience, I've found that this comes from tapping into who you are at the core. My belief and commitment in what I'm doing now with my Passion Catalyst work are degrees of magnitude greater than in my old marketing career.
Lesson #2: Many heads are better than one. Network and build a strategic alliance of mentors, coaches, teachers and motivating friends
Lesson #3:
Luck is a residue of design. You find your own luck through the opportunities you seek and act upon.
Action begets action, pure and simple. Often the result is a complete surprise (for example, you meet someone that opens up a door you never even realized was there), but it would never happen without taking steps.
Lesson #4:
Set big, crazy or even unrealistic goals to stretch yourself.
I have to admit I can find this one challenging. Every time I turn my attention to creating the huuuuuuge goals, I find myself tempering it to make it more achievable. The really big goals can seem so out of reach. But they're really just another real possibility on the spectrum of potential futures. So why not aim for them?
Lesson #5:
When you do what you love and make a difference in people’s lives, you will never have to go to work ever again.
We're starting to experience a shortage in the labor force when major US companies, like GE and Goldman Sachs, join together in a task force and discuss strategies of creating on-ramps for women seeking to get back into the labor force. "There is this whole body of high-potential women out there ... that are unrealized assets," says Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, a New York nonprofit group that is sponsoring the task force.
This development and the burgeoning industry springing up around mothers returning to work is the subject of today's Work & Family column in the Wall St Journal entitled Mom for Hire
A blog for job hunters and career changers The Occupational Adventure
Curt Rosengren is a "passion catalyst" helping people find the pull of passion that will lead them to more satisfying jobs.
