Here is a confession of lameness: I said I’d write the column and then I lost confidence. I thought I didn’t know enough about running a company to give other people advice.

Since then, I've spent two years running a start-up in the worst funding market in decades. After insane amounts of struggling, we have raised a total of $1.5 million, and for the first time, I do not feel panicked about keeping the company in business. We will have to raise more money, but I can see the path to that, and I think I can do it.

At the same time, I had a recent flurry of outside affirmation: Psychology Today featured me as a person who has outstanding resilience, and Self magazine is featuring me in their August “success” issue. So even though I squandered my opportunity to have a column in Wired, I am ready to give advice about how to run a start-up.

I’m going to answer the question people ask me most often: "What do I do when my company is out of money?"

Here is the answer:

1. Lay people off to save money
2. Forgo salaries to save money
3. Make a sale to generate money
4. Cut back your family’s spending to redirect money to the company
5. Kill your personal credit to redirect money to the company

All those options suck, of course. I should know. I did them all. And each time I wrote a blog post about how I was going nuts from funding, or making my family crazy from funding, commenters would tell me I look too crazy for anyone to fund.

But entrepreneurs wrote to me to tell me that they understand. Because most entrepreneurs have experienced something similar. They just don’t write about it. And investors are not stupid: They know this is what happens to entrepreneurs. That's why investors are investors and not entrepreneurs.

Lots of people told me to throw in the towel, but entrepreneurs never did. Because entrepreneurs knows that having a successful startup is really about not quitting. You never get the business model right on the first try. You never feel like you know what you’re doing, and you always have to adjust and adjust until you find what works. If you have passion and energy and faith, you keep going.

But it has to be an insane amount of passion and energy and faith, because there is no sane reason to have a venture backed start-up. A start-up does not get funding if it is a reasonable business model. A start-up gets funded because it's shooting for the moon, and investors fund companies to have a lottery ticket to the moon. So the odds are terrible that any entrepreneur will succeed. It is always a more sane financial decision to work at a corporate job for a paycheck.

If you can. If you can stomach it. Which reminds me about the advice my creative writing teacher gave us in graduate school: “If you can do anything else besides writing for a living, you should do it. Because writing professionally is a very hard life.” And really, making all career decisions is about knowing yourself.

So when you talk about how to manage cash flow, the crux of that question is a personal question: How  much can you bear suffering in order to do a start-up? Because you’re gonna run out of cash. Or worry that you are. You are not going to be able to sleep at night. You are going to start doing little, self-destructive things that add up to terribleness. Like, eat fries for sixteen meals in a row, or yell at your kids, or forget a date you made with your girlfriend.

You need to decide for yourself how much you want to do your company. It’s not rational. There is no right answer. There is infinite suffering. In exchange for that, you control your own hours, work with people you love, and solve problems in areas you are passionate about.

At some point a few months ago, everyone at my company was late on rent. I had an eviction notice, two people started sleeping on sofas, and one person had no car. But none of us thought we were shutting down the company. None of us thought that was a possibility. We knew we would keep going, we just were scared about how much worse it could get.

There's a craziness  required to get through cash-flow trouble in a start-up. There is craziness that keeps people doing a start-up long enough for them to exit the start-up. A start-up is a war of attrition. Cash flow is just one battle. And right now, I feel like I'm winning. Hooray.

But something I’ve noticed in the last year is that most of our happiness is actually dependent on our self-discipline. For example, we are happier if we exercise, but the barriers to getting to the gym are so high that it takes a lot more than missives from the Hedonic Psychology Lab to get us there. Also, Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University, has studied self-esteem for decades, and finds that when it comes to success, self-discipline is much more important than self-esteem.

So I have started tracking my own self-discipline rather than my happiness. And I think that the process is making me happier, because I am teaching myself how to bounce back quickly when my self-discipline falls apart. Here’s what I’ve learned:

Self-discipline is about small things paving the way for very big things.
My favorite piece of research from all the happiness research I’ve read is that self-discipline snowballs. That is, if you can work hard to have self-discipline in one, small area, you create self-discipline almost effortlessly in other areas.  The most famous study about this phenomena is from Baumeister, who found that students who walked with a book on their head to fix their posture ended up eating better, studying harder, and sleeping more. Without even noticing they were making those changes.

(One of the more recent things to come from the Hedonic Psychology Lab is an iPhone application by Matthew Killingsworth that lets you add your own happiness data to the lab’s research. Ironically, the data entry for this application requires a level of self-discipline that will surely qualify as the type that snowballs into other areas of your life and increases your level of happiness. So maybe we should all participate.)

The key to self-discipline is finding an easy re-entry point.
I used to tell myself that if I would just get back on my daily workout schedule, the rest of my self-disciplined life would fall back into place. This is true. But it’s too hard. When everything has fallen apart for me in the self-discipline arena it usually looks like this: I am eating poorly, behind in answering emails, and I’m biting my nails. Then I start hiding from people because I feel too discombobulated to connect.

Fixing any one of those problems is big for me. So I go to something easier: push-ups in the morning, noon and night. I do it on the floor – any floor — and  it takes 30 seconds because I only do five so that I won’t dread doing them. The act of doing the push-ups is like wearing a book on my head. It restarts my self-discipline after just a few days.

You need to give up perfectionism in order to get anywhere.
Perfection is the enemy of self-discipline. If you are aiming for perfection, you are never going to get yourself to do what you need to do. No one is perfect, and if you tell yourself you need to be perfect, then everything is too hard to start. Here’s a self-discipline issue I have: I want to keep up with my reading pile and not let it get so high on the kitchen counter that it falls over.

This goal requires me to read things immediately, as they pass in front of me. I’m great at doing this online, but not offline. I realized, though, that the trick is to read fast and if I can’t, I throw it out. There is no harm in doing a bad job of going through a reading pile, and there is more harm in setting the goal—to keep the pile low – and not meeting it.

Self-discipline is mental, but only because it's about believing in yourself.
Take, for example, the person who stops going to the gym for a  month. A person who thinks of himself as someone who goes to the gym is more likely to start going again than someone who thinks of himself as a non-gym type. And this is true in a more broad sense: If you think of yourself as someone with high self-discipline then when you are not having self-discipline, you expect to start having it again, and you do. Also, self-discipline is like a muscle so you need to practice to get stronger with it, and part of practicing is talking with yourself about who you are: a person who has self-control.

The moment of regaining self-discipline feels triumphant.
I have not blogged in more than a week. For most people, it wouldn’t matter that much. But blogging is a job for me. So I really need to be doing it. Also, blogging keeps the rest of my life on track – I feel connected to a community, I think in a more critical way, and when I write a good blog post, I have self-confidence that I will do other things well, too.
So I am telling you that the moment today, when I finally sat down to write, and I could feel that I’d start blogging again, felt so good, and so secure, that I hope it will remind you to put aside an hour today to do the thing you have wanted to do for weeks, or months, to get yourself back on track. It won’t just change that hour, or that day, it will change your life.

Don’t get me wrong—women still do more than their male counterparts – for example, even women who have stay-at-home husbands are more involved in parenting than men who have stay-at-home wives. But Gen X men have been more involved in parenting than any generation before. And Gen X women have done a better job of mixing high-powered careers and family than anyone else.

There is another trend here as well: Gen X is much more family-focused than previous generations. Baby boomers talk about putting kids before work, but Gen X actually does it. For example, even with full-time jobs outside the home, Gen X spends more time playing with their kids than housewives did in the 1950s. (I can't remember where I read this. I think it's from Sylvia Hewlett.)

The result is a new sort of divorce, especially in the case where the woman earns more than the man. The woman cannot stop working. We already know the laws require the breadwinner before the divorce to continue to be the breadwinner. But when the difference between breadwinner and caretaker are not as clear cut, it’s not so clear where the kids should live.

What is clear is that kids need a home. We know from decades of research that one of the most traumatic parts of a divorce for kids is that they have no home. The parents each have a home and the kids shuttle between homes. This undermines the child’s sense of security in irreparable ways.

We also know how to solve the problem: The kids stay in the house and the parents shuttle between two houses. This preserves a sense of the family home. Parents are raising kids in their home and parents have a consistent set of house rules. It’s much harder on the parents, much better for the kids.

When my ex-husband and I started doing this, people thought we were nuts. But I knew, deep down, it was good for the kids. The kids feel almost like both parents live in the house. We have family dinners. And my ex has an apartment outside the house. The kids never stay there. My ex sleeps over (in his own bedroom) when I go out on an overnight date, and when I travel away on business. But the kids feel like I live with them.

I am always trying to figure out what is the best way to make this work. I am always wishing I could meet other people doing this because it feels right to do, even if there are not a lot of people in my world doing it. (I think Alexis Martin Neely does this on some level with her ex. Her videos documenting  their arrangement — on her blog sidebar — are fun.)

Then the Gosselins separated. And while it’s sad they are not staying together, I can’t help looking forward to seeing how they run their lives. They are a great example of a couple who both earn a living and they do equal amounts of parenting (as equal as any) and now they will try to continue that divorced. The kids will have the house and each parent will live part-time away from the house.

I wonder what it will be like.

People are so hard on Kate Gosselin, but I think she is an anthem to Gen X women. She has taken charge of her career, and she has a job that accommodates her doing what she's good at, and her making time to take care of kids. She's an homage to the fertility mess Gen X has found itself in. She an homage to the fact that Gen X — not Gen Y — is the first generation to manage their children's online identities, and she's handling the issues with flair. And Kate is the quintessential Gen X mom getting post-baby plastic surgery.

I love that she has a husband who is fun and cute and not a demon but yet, the marriage still isn’t working out, because that's what life is like. It's not good and bad. It's messy, and Kate's figuring things out. Gen X is great with messy.

Email number one: The obnoxious reference check

[Name redacted] is applying for a position at our company and listed you as a reference. I was hoping that you could complete the brief questionnaire attached to this email to provide your feedback. Thank you in advance for your help, and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

This email is from InvestorGuide.com. Let me tell you something: That questionnaire was not brief. It was about ten essay questions and then insanely inapplicable multiple choice questions.

This company is ridiculous for sending an onerous questionnaire to references. For one thing, it puts me in a bad spot because I loved working with the guy who gave my name as a reference, so I want to give him a good report, so I have no choice but to fill out the BS questions and try to have a good attitude.

The other reason the company should not send a form like this is they look incompetent. Not just for destroying the relationships potential new hires have with their references, but also for not being able to make hiring decisions without asking a third-party if the candidate is professional. Seriously. Open your eyes in the interview, guys.

Email number two: The annoying request from mainstream media

I write for BusinessWeek Magazine and I am putting together a special report for Businessweek.com called “Managing Gen Y”. We are inviting a few experts such as yourself to contribute articles. I thought you might have some great thoughts on some aspect of managing gen y and I wanted to see whether you would be interested in contributing a column? We would need the piece in about 3 weeks. What do you think?

I know, you’re thinking, what’s the problem here? Who doesn’t want to write for BusinessWeek. And, in fact, I did. (Here’s the link.) But here’s the problem: BusinessWeek doesn’t pay me. That’s problem number one. I wrote basically the same thing for Time magazine (here’s the link), and they paid me. Which makes sense. Because I’m a professional writer. I mean, I have a book on the topic. I have a history of working in journalism. That counts, right?

Okay. So they tell me they are not paying me, but I will get a lot of traffic. Then they tell me how many zillions of page views Businessweek.com gets a month. But I wrote for Yahoo for a long time. So I know the page view game. These big sites get tons of traffic but the traffic is spread out over tons of pages. Zillions or something. So, the truth is that my most current post gets more traffic than 90% of the pages on Yahoo or Business Week.

So don’t tell me I’m writing for you for free in exchange for traffic. Just because I’m a blogger doesn’t mean I’m stupid. In fact, it means I have a lot of metrics at my disposal. (Another crazy thing: You never find out page views for your own article when you write for a huge site in mainstream media.) The week my Business Week article came out, here is a list of blogs that sent me more than twice as much traffic as Business Week without me having to write anything for them:

Lifehacker.com

Getrichslowly.org

Barstoolsports.com (not safe for work)

I’m not going to go on and on about Business Week because first of all they gave me the best review of my blog ever: A Business Week writer called my writing “poetic.” I love that. And when I complained about all this stuff, they were nice. I mean, they listened to me. That counts for something. And I really need Business Week to write favorably about my company when it’s time for my big publicity moment. So. Um. I love Business Week so much.

Email number three: Salary gap whiners

[This is for every single person in the whole world who bitches to me that there is a gender gap in the salary department. All of you. Your emails are so annoying that I’m not going to print one. ]

The reason the emails are annoying is that I’ve spent the last five years interviewing the people who do the salary discrepancy research, and digging into the details, and I report on it constantly, and the people who tell me there is a salary gap do not read this stuff.

First: Women who are in their 20s earn more than men in major cities. So this means that any data you show me about salary gap is focusing on older women. They had less opportunities, they are gonna retire, and the world has already revolved around the baby boomers. I’m done talking about salary gap like baby boomers are the only demographic that matters.

Second: Feminism in the workplace is over (link one, link two). So everyone should just shut up about dividing the workplace into men and women. Men are helping women all the time. Women love working with men. And look! Workplace spouses are the only intense flirting outlet that Cosmo readers voted was within relationship bounds.

Even if there were a salary gap, which there isn’t, women do not help themselves by bitching about it. If you work for a company that pays women less than men, just leave! Who controls you? You do.

Third: The gap is a result of women making decisions that men don’t make. I have written about this so many times because the research pops up constantly. Here’s another piece. From Cornell University (via Self magazine) A woman whose spouse works 60 hours a week is 52 percent more likely to quit her job than a man whose wife does the same.

Women choose different paths than men. Which means that women who have the same education and same skills set earn less than men because most women want different things than most men do. And this is okay. Really.

The first one was when I was twenty-seven. I was playing professional beach volleyball. I was playing volleyball eight hours a day and I spent two hours a day at the gym. I noticed that I was getting tired more easily, but I thought it meant I needed to train harder.

Then one weekend, a doctor friend on a visit saw me drop a plate one day, and a vase the next. I told her my hands just gave out because they were so tired.

She said I was anemic. Then she said, “Maybe you’re pregnant.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I have a regular period.”

It turns out, though, that you can have a regular period and still be pregnant.

And I was. Fourteen weeks.

My friend said, “Schedule the abortion now. You’re already late for it.”

I didn’t do anything. I was in shock. My boyfriend was in shock. Neither of us had ever had a pregnancy. I couldn’t believe the whole process actually worked, to be honest.

I told my mom I was pregnant. She said, “Get an abortion.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t really thinking I had any choices. I didn’t have a job that could support a child. And I wasn’t sure if I was planning to marry my boyfriend, although we were living together. I knew that I had big ideas for my life and I hadn’t figured things out yet.

My mom got militant. “You’ll destroy your career possibilities.”

She riffed on this theme for a week, calling me every night. Her passion is understandable. My mom took a job when I was young because she hated being home with kids. She endured interview questions like, “Does your husband want you away from home working?” She was one of the first women to become an executive at her Fortune 500 company. She blazed trails so I could have career goals that required an abortion to preserve.

Here’s what else happened: Other women called. It turned out that many, many women I knew had had an abortion. This is not something women talk about. I mean, I had no idea how ubiquitous the procedure was, at least in my big-city, liberal, Jewish world.

Each of those women told me that I should get an abortion so that I could keep my options open. “You’re a smart girl. You can do anything with your life right now. Don’t ruin it.”

My boyfriend was laying low. He was no slouch when it came to pro-choice politics and he knew it was, ultimately, my decision.

But the minute I said I would get an abortion, he was driving me to Planned Parenthood.

You had to go once to set up the appointment, and then go back.

When I went back, I had a panic attack. I was on the table, in a hospital gown, screaming.

The nurse asked me if I was a religious Christian.

The boyfriend asked me if I was aware that my abortion would be basically illegal in seven more days.

I couldn’t stop screaming. I was too scared. I felt absolutely sick that I was going to kill a baby. And, now that I know more about being a mother, I understand that hormones had already kicked in to make me want to keep the baby. We left. No abortion.

My boyfriend started panicking by suddenly staying really late at work and going out with friends a lot. I stopped playing volleyball because I got tired so quickly.

People kept calling me: They said, “Think about how you’ll support the child. Think about what you’ll do if your boyfriend leaves you. You’re all alone in LA with no family. How will you take care of yourself?”

People gave me advice: Get a job. Once you have established yourself in a career, you’ll feel much better about having kids. Figure out where you fit in the world. Get a job, then get married, and then have kids.

I scheduled another abortion. But it was past the time when Planned Parenthood will do an abortion. Now it was a very expensive one at a clinic that seemed to cater to women coming from Christian countries in South America. I knew that if I did not go through with it this time, no one would do the abortion. I was too far along.

So I did it.

I went to sleep with a baby and woke up without one. Groggy. Unsure about everything. Everything in the whole world.

People think abortion is such an easy choice–they say, “Don’t use abortion as birth control.” Any woman who has had one will tell you how that is such crazy talk. Because an abortion is terrible. You never stop thinking about the baby you killed. You never stop thinking about the guy you were with when you killed the baby you made with him. You never stop wondering.

So the second time I got pregnant, I thought of killing myself. My career was soaring. I was 30 and I felt like I had everything going for me – great job, great boyfriend, and finally, for the first time ever, I had enough money to support myself. I hated that I put myself in the position of either losing all that or killing a baby.

I didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant. I knew what they’d say.

So I completely checked out emotionally. I scheduled the abortion like I was on autopilot. I told my boyfriend at the last minute and told him not to come with me.

He said forget it. He’s coming with me.

I remember staring at the wall. Telling myself to stop thinking of anything.

The doctor asked me, “Do you understand what’s going to happen?”

I said yes. That’s all I remember.

I got two abortions to preserve my career. To keep my options open. To keep my aspirations within reach.

I bought into the idea that kids undermine your ability to build an amazing career.

And here I am, with the amazing career.

But also, here I am with two kids. So I know a bit about having kids and a career. And I want to tell you something: You don’t need to get an abortion to have a big career. Women who want big careers want them because something deep inside you drives you to change the world, lead a revolution, break new barriers.

It doesn’t matter whether you have kids now or later, because they will always make your career more difficult. There is no time in your life when you are so stable in your work that kids won’t create an earthquake underneath that confidence.

I think about the men I was with when I had the abortions. They were not bad men. One is my ex-husband. So much of life is a gamble, and I think I might have had as good a chance of staying together with the first guy as I did with my ex-husband. And I am not sure that my life would have turned out worse if I had had kids early. I am not sure it would have turned out better. I’m not even sure it would have been that different.

You never know, not really. There is little certainty. But there are some certain truths: It’s very hard to have an abortion. And, there is not a perfect time to have kids.

And I wonder, are there other women out there who had abortions in the name of their career and their potential? What do those women think now?

There is absolutely irrefutable data to support the idea that good-looking people do better in life than everyone else. Gordon Patzer, in his book, Looks, draws from a wide body of research to describe the advantaged life of a good-looking person from the time they are a baby (good-looking babies get better parenting) to the time they are in sales (the whole sales team performs better if there are more good-looking people on the team.)

As a result, I have jumped on the plastic surgery bandwagon. Super-smarty Chelsea Clinton got plastic surgery before she entered the work world. We should all do that. And while I haven't taken my own advice, I do find myself pinching and pulling at my nose to see what it would look like after a $10,000 investment.

But wait. Before you take out a loan to straighten your nose, maybe you should just start thinking like a tall person. Being good-looking means having the right mix of a lot of things, and for you, being tall might be the final keystone to hold it all in place. (Wondering if you're already tall? Fast Company has the answer: over 6'3" for men and over 5'9" for women, which, by the way, makes me half-an-inch into the land of the tall.)

Tall people make $789 more per inch per year, and are 90% more likely to ascend to the CEO chairs of Fortune 500 Companies, according to Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book. She scoured the sociology, psychology and workplace research to determine why tall people succeed (she herself is 6'3"). And Cohen discovered that the behaviors tall people display can be mimicked by anyone in order to get the career benefits of being tall.

Here's what Cohen says to do, based on the research she's gathered:

Be unforgettable. Due to evolutionary programming, when a tall guy walks into a meeting, everyone registers that he's there, and remembers what he says. This is a huge boon for someone who's also an ambitious, talented worker. So be noticeable. Figure out a way that when you walk in the room, everyone registers it. You can do that through interesting (but professional) clothing, cracking jokes when you walk in, etc.

Act like the boss. Tall children, from a very young age, are deemed the "leader" of their friends. Other little kids literally look up to them and often treat them as they would a slightly older child, and as a result, they're more likely to function as the leader for the rest of their life. Even as interns, other office workers give them the physical space and attention usually reserved for a leader. So act like a leader.

Find a way to look down on coworkers. Literally. An eye cast down is a really powerful behavior — it's the body's way of signaling a power imbalance in your favor, and you can create that power imbalance with some attention to your positioning. Thus, stand whenever you can when coworkers are sitting, and avoid walk-and-talks and casual standing around the office where coworkers are looking down at you.

Guard your personal space. Close friends hold conversations 18" apart; friends 2-3' apart, and bosses and employees four feet apart. Coworkers naturally give tall people four-or-more feet, which means that from the beginning, they're treated with boss-like reverence. You can mimic this body language — simply send out the physical vibe of professionalism, not chumminess, even in casual conversation. You'll see that people step back, and give you more space.

Don't be shy. Tall people often build an oversize personality to fit their oversize bodies. In the workplace tall people are more likely to yell or make demands or pull off a tongue-in-cheek toast to the boss. Socially, they take chances, and those chances are rewarded.

Focus on image rather than competence. Tall people aren't actually better workers, but in surveys, their bosses think they are. Which means that though competence matters, the perception of competence matters much more. So stop spending so much time on your work, and start spending more time on this list of ways to look tall.

NYC has the most extreme benefits to it, but it also requires the most extreme concessions in order to get those benefits. This makes sense. It’s how most of life is. So in order to understand how good a fit you’d be in NYC, you don’t need to look at the benefits – we all want the benefits of NYC. What you need to look at is what you give up.

Here are three questions to ask yourself. You need to answer yes to at least two in order to be a good fit in NYC.

1. Are you an optimizer?

Optimizers are people who are always looking for the best of everything. You know if you are this kind of person because you are never complacent. You are always trying to find if there is something better. It could be a someone who cuts bangs better, a better pickup basketball game, you keep trading up boyfriends, optimizers are always looking for something better, and they usually get greatness in their lives in many aspects. Non-optimizers can be satisfied with what they have. Each of us falls somewhere on this spectrum. New Yorkers skew heavily to strong optimizers.

This is because you can find pretty much the best of everything in NYC. (Yes, maybe there are some things, like the best ski slope, that you cannot find there, but if that’s what you want most, you probably shouldn’t be in NYC.)

I know you have heard that NYC is expensive. But you will never really know how insanely expensive it is until you live there.It’s like having children. Everyone will tell you having kids is really, really hard. Harder than anything they’ve ever done. And everyone will also say that after all those warnings, they still were not prepared for how hard it was when the baby came. This is what money is like in NYC – you absolutely cannot imagine how expensive it is there until you are there, living day to day.

So New Yorkers constantly have to ask themselves: What am I paying so much for? What am I suffering so much for? Life in NYC is very hard (here's funny commentary on that), and if you go to any city in the US, there is a bond that ex-New Yorkers have because they know they each understand how hard life was.

I say this to tell you that the only way to justify the cost and hardship of NYC is because you’re an optimizer. You appreciate having access to the best of things. Not everything – you probably have a few things that are really important to you. And you’re willing to trade off a lot of comforts to get it.

2. Do you want to be at the top of your field (or marry someone like that)?

In many cases, people have to work in NYC in order to rise to the top in their field. (Or, they want to marry someone like this – NYC is a very competitive place to find a husband but only because women recognize that the pickings are superior: Optimization knows no bounds.)

Wanting to be at the top of your field is not for everyone. Business Week reports that eighty percent of generation Y thinks they are in the top ten percent of all workers. So a bunch of you are overestimating your capabilities, right? But the truth is that NYC is very, very competitive, because it's a magnet for ambitious, strong performers, and if you are not in the top, you will probably not do very well there. So if you do not go to NYC thinking you will work your way to the top of your field, you probably don’t need to be going there for your work.

And, of course, you do not necessarily have to live in NYC to work in NYC, but in order to get a substantially lower cost of living, you would have to move pretty far from the city. This is why New York has the longest commute times of anywhere in the country. This is a fine line to walk, though, because long commutes do a lot of damage to one’s ability to be happy. So you are probably better off paying to high price to live closer to work if you want to get to the top of your field.

3. Do you value an interesting life over happy life?

New Yorkers are not known for being happy. In fact, they are known for being unhappy, and they don’t care.

On balance, New Yorkers understand that most people who are happy are complacent – they like the status quo. And people who like what they have do not do innovative things to change the world. They like the world just fine how it is. This is probably why 95% of New Yorkers voted democrat in the last presidential election. Republicans are typically happier with their lives than democrats. And most New Yorkers are optimizers, and optimizers are almost never happy.

New Yorkers think an interesting life is more important than a happy life. What you really pay for with the exorbitant cost of living and the hard lifestyle is to be surrounded by strong performers, huge ambitions, and constant need for change and innovation. To live in New York City, you have to trade happiness for this. To most New Yorkers, it’s a no-brainer. They would take that trade any day. To most people outside of New York City the trade-off is crazy.

Hat tip: Time Out New York

Here’s what I am going to start saying to those people: Only losers say they don’t have time to read blogs. Because everyone has the same 24 hours in the day. So it’s not that you somehow are more busy than everyone else – no one is actually too busy for anything – the issue is that reading blogs is not high enough on your priority list to read them.

So the real response, when I say, “I’m a blogger,” should be “I stay away from blogs so I can shield myself from alternative opinions to mainstream media.” And you wouldn’t want to be that person, right? In fact, you’re probably not that person, because look, you’re reading this blog.

But the problem of saying “I don’t have time to read that” applies to anything – it could be blogs but it could be those really long articles in the Atlantic that scream: “I know no one is reading this article! I only wrote it to get a book deal!”The reality is that you have time to read everything.

Here's what to do if you feel like you can't get a grip on your reading pile:

Stop talking about information overload. That term is for weaklings. Guess what? Generation Y never talks about information overload. That’s because they know how to process information better than anyone else. That’s actually what they were doing when their parents told them to turn off the TV and the music and log off of IM and do their homework.

Information overload is actually the feeling that you cannot sort through the resources in the world in order to figure out what’s important. If you feel like you are overwhelmed it means that your career is at risk, because the best employees in today’s workplace are information synthesizers. And information synthesizers don’t feel overwhelmed by information – they either use it or they don’t, but they don’t whine that there’s too much.

(Here’s a way to test yourself for how fast you can process information online. Look at these two blogs for three seconds each: On Simplicity and Marginal Revolution. Can you tell which is the bigger? If you can’t figure it out that quickly, you won’t be able to sort information quickly. Solve the problem by practicing: You don’t need to read more stuff to decrease your sense of information overload. You need to read a wider range of sources.)

Stop talking about good and bad media. Just because you don’t read it doesn’t make it bad. There is not any type of media that is so stupid that you can categorically dismiss it. I have found that I learned things from romance novels, People magazine, and even books that, in hindsight, were time wasters. So instead of saying, “I don’t have time for xx,” talk about time like you have a grip on it. Say, “I don’t have that type of media at the top of my list because of xx.” It’s a great exercise to make yourself talk this way, because good time management is actually about understanding your priorities, and you cannot explain your reading choices without also explaining your priorities.

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better. Look, if you wanted save all your time, and sit around and do nothing all day, then you would be gunning for a 4-hour work week. But most people actually enjoy being busily engaged in interesting things (which is why I think Tim Ferriss is a scam) so we are not so much saving time as figuring out the best use of our time.

So focus on meeting your goals rather than saving time. Information is not something you have time for or don’t have time for. Information is either helping you meet your goals or not.

And anyway, maybe your real time management problem is that you are a perfectionist, you spend too much time doing research, or you work too hard on Mondays (yep, that’s right, you should plan to do the most on Wednesday and Thursday).

I have a lot of doctors in my family and lots of friends who are doctors, so I’m reasonably familiar with the careers of doctors, and I’m astounded that we’re not talking about paying less for health care.

Why do doctors need to make so much money? The non-financial rewards for being a doctor are larger than almost any other profession. Except teaching.

There’s a reason we pay an almost non-living wage to teachers: It’s rewarding and meaningful and you do not need tons of schooling to do it.

So okay, there’s a shortage of teachers, but not by a lot. Because the trend today is to do meaningful work and work with civic duty. Teach for America is one of the most popular choices for college grads. So the salaries can’t be that out of whack for the job.

Also, the Institute for the Study of Labor says, “When teachers were offered cash rewards for good performance (measured by factors like grades and parental feedback) student scores on national exams significantly declined.” So I don’t think paying more to people with meaningful work actually gets a more meaningful performance from them.

Which means that it makes sense that we pay people for what the market demands. And we could fill medical schools twice over with all the candidates who didn’t get in. Don’t tell me they’re not smart enough. They passed organic chemistry. That’s fine for me.

So we should pay doctors a lot less. Those doctors who are motivated by helping people and doing good things for the world will stay. And those who want a lot more money can go to finance.

Oh. Wait. They can’t do that. Because the days of finance guys making tons of money for doing something that is really long hours and not helping anyone are over. So we should certainly also be done with guaranteeing people loads of money WHILE they do good things.

So doctors who were in it for the money will need to go to professions like VP of Intellectual Property at a Fortune 500 company where they can sue small entrepreneurs and ruin their lives in the name of corporate profits. A job like that is pretty certain to be a good living and the price you pay is that you don’t get to save the world.

It is all adult life. It is a trade-off. You get to do good things or you get paid a lot. It’s why moms don’t get paid. It’s why garbage men earn more than teachers. Why should doctors be any different?

The doctors who complain about this will talk about insurance (premiums will be lower if no one can pay: Duh). And they’ll complain about school loans (outrageously high, yes).

The cost of medical school is the obvious objection to paying doctors less. Actually, the cost is a joke. Research scientists are happier, on balance, than almost any other type of career. Teaching at med school is a great job. You solve interesting problems, and teach people to save lives, and you have great hours.

Those med school professors are totally overpaid. So make med school cheaper by paying the professors less. Then we can pay doctors less. You’ll lose the surplus of applicants each year, but who needs that big a surplus? This is a good step to starting a universal health care system.

Sure, health care probably won’t be as good as what we have now. For the insured, that is. But fifty million people will be able to go to a doctor who couldn’t under the current system.

And yes, I know, there will be a two-tier healthcare system where many of the top-notch specialists will only work for cash. But, newsflash: This already is happening in NYC. As the mom of two special needs kids, I saw all the best doctors in NYC, for a wide range of issues, and most did not take insurance. So we already have that system. Cutting pay to doctors across the board won’t create it. The only thing it will create is a way for poor people to get health care.

Okay. So if the gender gaps are not around these feminist favorites, then are there any gender gaps we should be concentrating on? Yes. Here are three:

1. The startup gap. Women need to be compensated at a higher rate than men if they are to give up their personal lives in order to work. Law firms accomplish this by keeping women on partner track even when they’re part-time. Corporations do this by offering flex time and other business-bending options for high-performing women who want to take care of kids.

VCs talk endlessly about why there are so few women running venture backed companies, but it’s incredulous talk. The reason is that VCs don’t pay women more. Here’s the bottom line: If you take a man and a woman doing the same office job and the same parenting job, the man will think he’s doing a good job at parenting, but not the woman.

This makes genetic sense. The men had to think the kids were fine when they left the cave to hunt. Or else they wouldn’t leave and no one would have eaten. The women had to think the kids always needed more attention. Otherwise, the women would say, “This is good enough” and then the kids would starve or get eaten by lions.

How this translates to the VC world is that you need to spend TONS of time away from kids doing a startup. For women to do that, they need to be compensated more than men. Other industries have done it in order to benefit from women's brains. The VC world should follow suit.

2. The orgasm gap. People who have orgasms do better at work: they earn more, they hang out with higher powered people, they are better at public speaking, and they walk with a more confident gait, which, of course, inspires confidence.

So we need to pay attention to the orgasm gap, which Hannah Seligson reports in the Daily Beast: "Women are shattering political glass ceilings, surpassing men in the workforce, and even winning Indy-car races. But there's one area where the gender gap has proved particularly stubborn: The orgasm gap."

Paula England, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, says, "The orgasm gap is an inequity that's as serious as the pay gap, and it's producing a rampant culture of sexual asymmetry."

Where does this orgasm gap come from? Probably the amount of effort expended in bed—and who's expending it. England's study found that women give oral sex to their male partners in all contexts—from casual hookups to serious relationships—at significantly higher rates than men do. (Hat tip: Sepideh)

And if you’re wondering how this pans out across generations, things seem to get worse in the younger crowd—Caitlin Flanagan reports in the Atlantic that girls are giving blow jobs just to get the boys to shut up.

3. The fun gap. As soon as men and women start aging, the men are happier. Maybe they have had more training on how to have fun. But life is too difficult for any of us to wait to have fun. So we should all start learning to have some levity early on, and this is the damage of the fun gap.

You can see the gap at the bar. Alcohol makes us have a more broad imagination and do a wider range of things. So why is it more acceptable for professional men than professional women to go out with friends and get drunk? Why is it okay for men to get drunk in order to have an easier time hooking up, but it’s not okay for women? This is such a serious problem that New York magazine calls the gap the the last frontier of feminism.

It’s clear that women are spending more time following the rules than men, and people who have more fun actually do better in life: their fun snowballs, and the more we enjoy the more we get of what we enjoy.

It starts in kindergarten, where the girls sit in their chairs and pay attention in class, and they socialize in the lunchroom. The boys, on the other hand, have spent the first five years of their lives turning everything into a gun or sword and cannot be contained in a classroom atmosphere.

Yes, these are generalizations, but as the mom of two young boys, I have never heard any parent disagree with these generalizations, (and it's official that boys are six months behind girls developmentally by kindergarten). I did not buy guns for my sons. I didn’t have to. They can use anything. And I remember as a fourth grader thinking, (from the back of the classroom, where all the strong performing girls sit because they don’t need help from the teacher) “Wow, the boys sure are doing poorly in school.”

The problem is that the boys are having all the fun. Women are doing better than men in school but school is not what makes kids successful at work. What actually prepares you for life is athletics, aiming high, breaking rules, playing video games. Girls should do those things more. Then, as they grow up, they should spend their time figuring out how to get more orgasms.