I’m dying because I am following all the prescribed rules except one.

Here are things I’m doing well:

1. I clear my inbox.  I deal with each email the second I read it–by responding, deleting, or transferring to my to do list.

2. I have a single list. I have A’s, B’s, and C’s for my priorities, so I can tell what is most important to do on any given day.

3. I make sure I have long-term goals. And I put them in my list of A’s. I identify the items I must get done before the end of the day. But I also add at least one non-deadline-based item that helps me reach a bigger, life-changing goal.

4. I rewrite the list every day by hand. Because if something on the list is not worth taking the time to rewrite by hand, it’s not worth taking the time to do.

5. I make sure I get all the A’s done first. Only then do I move on to less important items. Just kidding. I don’t do this. But I should. Honestly, I can tell that it doesn’t really matter if I follow all the other rules when I’m not doing this one.

There’s a book by Michael Stainer titled, Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork. Start the Work That Matters.  I know I have a problem sticking to stuff that matters: as soon as I typed the title, I thought, “Why is the word that capitalized?” I checked back on Amazon twice to make sure. It doesn’t seem right to me.

Then I tell myself I need to look up the AP Stylebook to see what the rule is. I think the is never capitalized in a title and that is optional, but I think, in this case, it looks better as lower case.

Then I tell myself, look, I just really need to get this post done. If I look up the AP Stylebook, and find an answer, which is probably not going to be easy to find because honestly, I’m not the queen of Google searches. Even if I manage to do that, I will not feel like I have accomplished something important today. But if I finish this post, I will feel like I am meeting an important goal of writing a post each day.

Also, I tell myself that the best work I do is when I am not constantly distracted by randomly interesting searches. Like, the last time I remember doing this was, in fact, last night, when I got stuck looking up soporific. It means sleep inducing. But I thought maybe I was missing a nuance of the word because it was in a picture caption in a movie review. Who puts a word like that in a picture caption? So I thought it had another slang meaning or something. And then, when it turns out that it really does mean sleep inducing I didn’t feel accomplished. It was not on my to-do list. And I can’t even figure out how to slip it into my own writing. Unless you find my paragraph about soporific to be soporific.

Stainer's book has a chapter written by me. Which, I’m sure I wrote only because I put it on my A list 400 days in a row, sending it to him, finally, ten days late. Or something like that. And he has chapters by other luminaries who I am convinced do their A list before they even eat breakfast: Seth Godin, Chris Guillebeau, Leo Babauta. The important thing about reading a book like Stainer's is that if I read people telling me that I should not do bullshit work all day, then I am more likely to hold myself accountable to my A list.

This problem comes down to my struggle with self-discipline. I think everyone struggles. I think there’s a Maslow hierarchy of self-discipline. First you have to get out of bed in the morning. Then you have to write a to-do list every morning, and write a schedule to accommodate it. Then you have to have the self-discipline to start giving stuff up because you don’t have time for everything – the highest form of self-discipline is admitting that you will not be doing some things in the day.

I have done all that. So what I’m left with is stuff that is easy to do. But it’s usually B’s. And some stuff that’s hard to do. Those are the A’s.  Today I told myself no surfing. No staring at the wall. No reading my book. (I'm reading Bonk, by the way, which is scintillating, and thank you to Jens Fiederer who recommended the chapter about pig orgasms that last ten minutes.)

But then I saw a GChat link from Michael Roston about the Dutch parliament. I had to click. It turns out that there is a group trying to make sex with twelve-year-olds legal. So they formed a political party in order to get the laws changed. But the group dropped out of the election because they found they are spending so much time campaigning that they are losing focus of their main goal, which is to legalize pedophilia.

And I thought: Dutch pedophiles are more focused on their long-term goals than I am.

My problem is that I cannot write my own long-term goal in as clear a way as the pedophiles. I coach so many people who tell me they can’t move forward because they don’t know where they are going. And I tell them, make something up. I tell them to commit to a goal, any goal, and move toward it until you think of a better one. The act of moving toward something helps you crystallize where, exactly, you want to be moving.

I wish I could tell you I'm doing that, but recently I've been writing about it more than doing it. Because I’m scared. It’s so scary to commit to a goal when you know it’s not the real goal. Success requires a leap of faith that goal setting is trial and error and the process of finding clarity — not the one-time process of immaculate conception of clarity.

When I was learning about to do lists, each step seemed too hard. And empty in box seemed impossible. Handwriting a to do list every morning felt absurd. But in each case, after I did it a while, it felt right and probably essential to me. So I guess I will just have to trust that if I force myself to choose a goal, my goals will get more and more clear, and the productivity piece will start falling into place.

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Now the site that specializes in matching married people looking to cheat, AshleyMadison.com, has released its list of the most adulterous professions based on the 1.9 million people who are registered on the site. (via BoingBoing)

Here's the list:

For Men:
1. Physicians
2. Police Officers
3. Lawyers
4. Real Estate Agents
5. Engineers

For Women:
1. Teachers
2. Stay-at-home Moms
3. Nurses
4. Administrative Assistants
5. Real Estate Agents

This list looks mostly right to me. It is a list of men who like power but do not have access to a lot of women. Physicians, for example, would lose their license hitting on a patient, so it's nurses or drug company reps. (Not that physicians aren't notorious for hitting on drug reps.) There are other types of men who love power and are notorious for cheating–politicians and traveling sales guys come to mind–but they have such widespread access to women that they don't need the web site.

But the number five slot looks wrong to me. Engineers make the top 5 I think, only because it’s a trendy, online resource. I actually think that with more data we'd find that engineers cheat less (reasoning: Engineers generally skew toward Asperger's on the autism scale, which is why Microsoft is known for great insurance coverage for Autism spectrum disorders. Besides, people with Asperger's have a hard time lying.)

As for the list of women, it is, with the exception of the number five slot, filled with jobs that are about nurturing and care taking. Which makes me think that a) the life of a nurturer is not as fulfilling for women as the world thinks, and b) masseuse would be on the list too if it weren't that they probably fall under the category of people who cheat but do not need the site to have access to people to cheat with.

We can also use this list to reaffirm stuff we already know but choose to ignore:

1. Stay away from career paths with an end game of getting power or being famous. Because those careers  are largely unfulfilling. The goal of having regular sex is fulfilling. But, according to David Blanchflower, economist at Dartmouth, power and fame do not give you more regular sex, they give you more choices, and we know from Barry Schwartz's book, The Paradox of Choice, that more choices does not make us happy. Even for sex partners.

2. Taking care of people all day is unfulfilling. Few people can cope with being the caretaker all the time. We already knew, from a study by Pew, that most mothers would like part-time work rather than being at home with kids all day or having work outside the home all day. Now we also know that women do not feel fulfilled being the caretaker all day at work.

3. Work is most fulfilling when it is meaningful and engaging. Caretaking is meaningful, but not always challenging enough to be engaging. The fight for power is usually challenging and engaging but seldom is it inherently meaningful. So when you choose a career, try to get both.

And, beware, because not being honest about fulfillment is dangerous: if you end up lying to yourself about your career, you could end up on AshleyMadison.com, lying to yourself about your marriage as well.

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The last video chat was so out of control that I actually got reprimanded from just about everyone in the company. Except Andrew Shell, who said it was funny and funny is all people care about.

So I have a choice of doing a private chat for Andrew, or I can switch up the format to be less obnoxious. And, as I am trying to be more likable, being less obnoxious will be good for me. So this week I'm doing the video chat alone. And for those of you who are disappointed that Ryan Paugh won't be there, take solace in this: The headset for doing the video alone is much better with my hair than the headset for doing a video with Ryan.

Sign up here to join the video chat on Friday.

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Then I didn’t write the interview for a week.

Then I complained about the questions: I don’t really believe in triumph. Because the most triumphant moments are the days when I have no idea how I'm going to fix anything, but I get out of bed anyway. On the other hand, the moments of huge achievement are not actually that hard to get to. By the time you're close, you are so motivated to get there that it doesn't feel like work at all.

So I wrote that. And then I felt bad.  So I tried to give an example. People like examples. And  I like Psychology Today. And I didn’t want to disappoint them.

So I wrote that the moment when I was a freelance writer and a new mom and had post-partum depression but I knew I had to keep working so I had to get out of bed and write. Maybe there were fifty moments like that. Or five hundred. But those are the moments of triumph.  The thing is, I think it was probably messed up that I kept working and did not check myself into a hospital. And then I started thinking that all my moments of triumph came at the heels of me having done something totally terrible.

Like, let me tell you right now that before I could play volleyball professionally, I was literally starving. So I stole bagels at the bagel shop. I have had about ten editors take that out of my writing. Out of my Business 2.0 column, out of my book, and my editor will tell me now that this is not good to put in a post. Stealing is bad, right? But my point is that it’s very hard to do some extraordinary triumph without taking some extraordinary risk or making an odd judgment that other people would not make. That’s why the triumph is extraordinary.

Another thing about the bullshit of big triumphs: Our big moments — where we can change the world — come because so many other people have helped us, and luck has come to us. But our small moments, when no one is watching and no one cares and the only thing that makes us try again is an unreasonable belief that we can get what we want for ourselves — those are the triumphs that we do all by ourselves.

When I have been on the cusp of huge success, there have always been people to help me. For example, my agent stayed with me when I was out of money but about to get a six-figure book deal.

But there was no one helping me get out of bed the day I knew I had to start writing my book proposal even though the odds of getting  a big book deal from it were terrible.  The daily task of believing things will improve when then things look bad. We do that on our own, and each time I do it I am thankful, in a deep, spiritual way. I'm not sure what keeps me going when everything looks terrible, but I know that each time I do it, it's a triumph. And it happens a lot.

Another thing. Everyone, please shut up about your biggest failures. I hate when people write about their failures because they always write about how they pulled themselves up, or what they learned. And really, then, it's not a failure, is it? It's a learning opportunity, or a chance to shine. Failure is something you did not overcome. You did not learn from. And most people are too embarrassed to write about it. High achievers don't have failures because they can learn from everything.

There is no finish line, there is no gold prize. There is only living with yourself, day after day. So each day needs to be a small triumph so you can pat yourself on the back before you go to sleep. I try to do that. Today's triumph is doing this interview with Psychology Today. Sure, I couldn’t quite do it, and I had to be quirky and weird, and it probably cost me getting into the article. But at least I wrote something.

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Which is notable because hatred is a process. Neurologists have proven that love and hate are closely related, and I have found it's hard to hate a person unless I am also close to that person, and the same is true for a topic. In that vein, life is the process of expanding our love and our knowledge, and I suppose, our hate.

So here are some things that I have recently reached the point of thinking so much about that I feel qualified to hate them:

1. Sarcasm
The use of sarcasm is always inappropriate. Sarcasm reveals insecurity and cynicism – both things that make a person unlikable. Sarcasm is always negative in meaning, and the tone is always disparaging. On top of that, people who use sarcasm think they are being funny, but this is a poor man’s humor; because comedy is about timing. You say it, then there’s a beat, and then people laugh. With sarcasm, you say it, there’s a beat when someone realizes you’ve said something you don’t mean, and a beat to process what you did mean. The timing is off.

So comedians rarely use sarcasm because it’s not funny. And top performers don’t use sarcasm because it’s mean.

2. Getting bids
If something is so important to you that you are spending enough time on it to collect bids, then you shouldn’t get bids. Because if it’s so important to you, give it to the person who will do the best job. And if you think you can swindle someone into “giving you a deal,” well, why do you think they’re so good if they don’t even get market price for their work?

If your project is important, find someone who has done it before, with someone who was great. And hire that person. You could get another bid, but the work would be different, right? And you should hire someone who does good work. And if everyone does the same work, then pricing can’t be that varied – it’s a commodity, priced the same across the board – so you don’t need bids.

3. Maternity leave
It’s not that I don’t like the topic. I don’t like that people think this is an area fraught with controversy. This is not a gray-area area. This is a right answer/wrong answer area.

Don’t tell people you’re pregnant if you’re not showing. Hide the bump as long as possible. This is your right. And you have this explicit right because everyone knows that even though it’s illegal, women are penalized when people hear they are pregnant. No one trusts they’re coming back after the baby, so the project flow goes dry or gets boring.

Also, you do not need to know if you are coming back to work full time after the baby. Tell your employer you are. Change your mind later if you want. This is reasonable: no one could guess how they want to raise their kids until the kids are there.

Take paid maternity leave no matter what. It’s your right. And the fastest way to post-partum depression is to take no time off to recuperate. (I know from my own experience.) So even if you quit when maternity leave is over, take paid leave. The US makes women earn maternity leave. You’ve earned it already. You don’t need to work more after.

4. Pseudonyms
Here’s what I read in Car and Driver magazine: The most popular name for upscale strippers to use is Lexus. Do you know what this tells you? Pseudonyms are for strippers.

If you’re being your real self, doing things that bring you self-respect, why have a pseudonym? And if you don’t want to claim what you are doing as your own work, ask yourself why you are doing it.

Here is a post about how using a pseudonym made my life a mess. And here’s a post about pseudonyms undermine your career, which is ironic since people are usually thinking they need a pseudonym to save their career.

5. Lack of hate
My son came home from preschool and told me that using hate is against the rules. I told him that discerning people hate things, and I encouraged him to think of something he hates. (Bowser, a bad guy in Super Mario, for those who are curious.)

Recognizing that we each love and we each hate is part of the process of knowing ourselves. Talking about it is part of the process of letting other people know us as well.

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• Why you should not try to make money from your blog
• Why you should not start a second blog
• Why you should take care to link to other blogs, a lot

But mostly, I'll answer your questions, which you can ask in real-time.

I'm doing this video stuff with Ryan Paugh. (I am linking to his personal blog to show you that I take my own advice.) Ryan keeps coming to these events a little bit drunk. But that doesn't stop us from getting rave reviews. Here's one he forwarded to me from his mom: "Great job, Ry."

So sign up here. And you will have a great blog. Or you will at least know why you don't.

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1. Get a spot where you can concentrate.
So I tried working from home, but then I started feeling like I am the most alone person in the world. So I thought I’d change it up a little; I’d work from home, but the farmer’s home.

I call him to tell him I’m coming to his house early.

“How early?” he asks.

“Now.”

“Don’t you have to work today?”

“I’m not going to the office any more. I don’t want to talk to people.”

There is a beat of silence, and I think the farmer is going to say something. Or maybe the silence is long enough that he is thinking I am going to talk. He has asked me to not talk over him, but I have a hard time telling if it is his turn to talk or mine. I start to panic because the rhythm of conversation is getting irregular, so I say, “Okay. Bye.” And I hang up before he can say anything else. I note to myself that this is the fourth conversation in a row that I did not talk over him.

I stop at the gas station by his house. I have enough gas to get to his house, but not enough gas to get lost and get to his house, which shouldn’t happen, but if it did, it would be bad because I still do not have a winter coat. I am not sure why I don’t have a winter coat. I think it is because it’s so cold that I can’t stand being outside for more than five or ten seconds. So if I’m only going to be outside for a few seconds then I don’t need a coat. The farmer keeps telling me how dangerous it is to travel without a winter coat. I show him I’m paying attention to the dangers of the cold by being sure to not run out of gas on a remote country road.

2. Have close proximity to a coffee source.
I get to his house. I put my stuff down in the kitchen and I make coffee.

The farmer comes in. He kisses me hello. Then he wipes up where I spilled water by the coffee maker. At one point, we had an argument about his wiping up around me all the time.

“I never wipe the table at dinner where you spill,” I said.

“What?” he said. “Are you kidding? I never spill.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t. You spill almost every time you do anything in the kitchen. That is not normal.”

“I spill more than other people?”

“Yes. Adults don’t spill.”

Once he told me this, I noticed that I actually spill something every meal. Sometimes two or three times. I never noticed that other people don’t do it until the farmer told me. So now, him wiping up the water on the counter feels intimate: he knows me so well.

3. Have good food, fast Internet, and a sofa for avoiding both.
He tells me that he is in the middle of moving pigs, and he’ll come back to the house for lunch.

I want to ask him if he's working on getting an Internet connection because if I'm going to work from home from his home, I need Internet. But he always feels like I’m pushing, and then he pushes back. So I decide to ask him while he’s eating lunch. He is easier to talk to if he’s walking or eating and it’s too cold to walk outside.

I lie on the farmer’s sofa and think. The fields are white and rolling, with bits of old corn stalks poking out. The cattle are far off, almost at the horizon: brown dots moving slowly to yellow dots of hay. I stare out the window long enough that the farmer drives by on the tractor. Stops at the barn. Pets the donkey. Comes in for lunch.

Since this is an impromptu visit, there is no food to eat except beef. That’s all he keeps in his house. Well, beef and Frosted Flakes and Dora the Explorer cookies, from the last time that I came here with my kids.

He cooks hamburgers for us.

He tells me he did not notch the pigs' ears in the last litter because he was so distracted dealing with me. He tells me he has never had a litter of pigs unnotched. Ever. Unnotched is not his word. It’s mine. I forget the word he uses.

4. Have a notebook for ideas that you save for when you’re with people.
Then he sits down to lunch and I try to not bring up difficult stuff to talk about because I can see that he is already unhinged that the pigs are unnotched.

But after three bites I cannot hold back: “I have a list of things we need to do so I can move into your house.”

He looks at me. Puts his fork down. Takes a deep breath. “Let’s see it.”

“I have to read it to you.”

He looks. It’s in shorthand. Not regular shorthand but the shorthand I invented to take notes at school because the way I got through school was by memorizing every lecture word for word and then regurgitating it to teachers on essay tests.

I find that my shorthand is also good for writing private notes to myself. Now I can have my list out, at the table, but the farmer cannot read it so I can tell him only the amount of things I think he can handle without going nuts over how hard it is for me to move to his house.

I tell him, “Well. The Internet. That’s an easy one.”

He picks up his fork. Takes a bite. “Okay. What else?”

“The heating has to work.”

“Okay. We have to talk about that. About what it means to you to be working.”

“Okay. Let’s talk about that now.”

“First, tell me what else is on the list.”

“Not that much.”

“What do you mean not that much? I see you have crazy writing down the whole page. That looks long.”

He’s right.

I tell him it’s a secret.

He shakes his head and laughs.

I tell myself I have to develop a shorthand sign for manure, because I need him to not put it so close to the house. I think it’s causing a problem with flies. Which I already have a shorthand sign for because I had a history professor who always used the phrase “flies in the face of . . . .”

5. Find balance: Calm/exciting, chatter/quiet, people/no people.
After lunch we sit on the sofa and talk about grazing. He is thinking of grazing pigs with cattle this summer. People don’t usually do it. He is not sure how he wants to manage it. He likes to have interesting projects on the farm. He is curious and likes the quirky edge of farm life. But he is always trying to figure out how to balance his curiosity with his need for stability.

He says, “Okay. I have to go back out now.”

I say, “Five more minutes.”

He says, “You’re having a hard time transitioning to work, aren’t you?”

He says, “Do you want me to lie on top of you?”

I nod yes.

So I lie on the sofa and he puts the cushions on top of me and then lies on top of the cushions, and the pressure from the cushions is like a big squeeze without the social input of feeling a person as well.

The farmer discovered this trick by reading Temple Grandin's technique for working with cattle. It works with me, too.

Then he leaves and starts sorting pigs, and I sit down at the table and start writing.

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We have been saying this in Brazen Careerist board meetings for about five months. The conversation goes something like this:

Board member: How is the blog redesign going?

Me: Um. I'm thinking.

Board member: That's what you said two months ago.

Me: Yeah. That's true. I'll get some bids.

Board member: It's important the we differentiate the Brazen Careerist brand of the company from the brand of you.

Me: Yeah. I get it.

Then we have a pause in the meeting while everyone is silently frustrated with my inability to make changes.

The truth is that I have always known that I'm going to separate myself from the name Brazen Careerist. I mean, I don't want to be the Brazen Careerist when I'm 70 years old. And anyway, the brand is better for a social network.

So, it's time to take it off my blog. But I'm slow. I'm so slow that I am doing incremental changes as a warm up. And, also, as a way to make the board think that I am not constipated.

So the first change is that I added a section on my blog sidebar titled: My life disguised as career advice. And the list in that section contains topics that make sense for my blog, if it is separate from Brazen Careerist.

I think I will keep rejiggering my sidebar categories. I'm sick of the categories I have had. What's up with time management being a separate category from productivity anyway? What was I thinking?

The other change is that I have agreed to do weekly, live video chats. I want to tell you they will happen at the same time every week, but my life is not so streamlined. Fortunately, Ed, our CEO, who is all over me to start doing these video chats, has come up with the idea that the banner ad on my blog, which surely none of you even notices because it never changes, will now announce the weekly topic and the weekly time.

Frankly, I'm more excited about changing my categories, but I'm also excited about making Ed happy. I have found in my career that the only time I have a good job is when the person who manages me is happy with me. So that's the topic of this week's video chat, Managing Up: How to make your boss love you.

You can sign up here.

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Then I thought maybe I needed expertise: striving to be an expert would be my obsession. Which it might be. But I don’t think it replaces happiness. It sort of sits next to it. Like, obsessing about being an expert comes naturally to me, but I’m not sure why.

So I’m still looking for what can replace happiness as my what-am-I-doing-here thing. And I’m thinking that maybe it’s mindfulness. It kills me to even write the word, because for the last decade, while I was busy turning Ashtanga yoga into a competitive sport, my teachers kept talking about mindfulness. I kept thinking to myself, I wish they’d shut up and just rank us so I know if I’m best.

But I’m convinced that mindfulness is what gives us the self-discipline to do all the stuff the happiness researchers say will make us happy. And it makes sense, because my yoga teacher always told me mindful would make me happy, if I’d just try it.

So I get about ten zillion books in the mail because publishers ignore the fact that most book reviews on this blog simply say why I didn’t like the book. But. Whatever. So I get this book in the mail – The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World – and for some reason I find myself reading it during violin practice. This is very bad because we are in a Suzuki program, which means I’m the teacher.

I said to myself, this is crazy, I’m reading a book about slowing down my life as a way to multitask while I am teaching my child to love music. I forced myself to put the book down.

But I liked the book. And I asked the author, Christine Louise Hohlbaum, to write a guest post on my blog. Which is something I never do. Because I end up hating all guest posts and spending way too much time editing them.

The first thing I did when I saw her guest post is I said no. I said this cannot be a guest post. But I think it was okay because that’s her first piece of advice:

1. Learn to say no with panache.
So instead of spending way too much time going back and forth editing, I am just going to plumage through the guest post for stuff I like. I like no. She says, “One of the biggest time sucks in our lives is saying ‘yes’ to something we should have declined. Taking on that extra project at work, organizing the blood drive (again), or accepting yet another party invitation can eat up your time you could have spent doing something you truly love. We have been conditioned to believe ‘no’ is an evil word, when, in fact, it is a complete sentence.” This is how I know she won’t mind that I dumped her guest post but took her best material.

2. Watch your words.
This is the advice that initially hooked me: Hohlbaum says, “Busy is the new fine.” It’s true. Someone asks, “How are you?” and you say, “Busy.” Can you see how messed up that is? It’s a script, right? The person doesn’t really care how you are. The person wants to just hear that you’re fine and move on to the meat and potatoes of the conversation. So if you say busy, you are either saying you do not understand the social convention of opening niceties (very bad to say) or you are saying that busy is the new fine (also very bad to say). Busy is not fine. Busy is too much going on to be your best self. So stop talking about it and fix it.

3. Honor Set-Up Time.
You know the feeling. You return from a week’s vacation to a mountain of work that piled up in your absence. It takes you three days just to slog through it all, and you wonder why you even bothered to leave in the first place. We have the expectation that we should be able to jump right back into what we were doing at a rapid pace. Not so. Every project requires set-up time. Honor the time it takes to get started. It is not about procrastination. It is about wading into the task at hand. It is no wonder you get your best ideas in the shower. You are relaxed and stress-free. Set-up time allows you to tap into your deepest thinking. Make room for it in your life—it will contribute more to your success than pushing through with no stops.

4. Save the best for last.
“Procrastination is a huge time-killer. You spend most of your time worrying about what you haven’t started, pushing it into the recess of your mind. Instead, start saving the best for last. Tackle the hardest project earlier in the day. Reward yourself with your favorite project at the end.”

I love this advice in a book about slow, because it’s not just a way to get your stuff done. It’s a way to slow time down. If you are procrastinating, time goes so much faster than if you have your most important stuff done.

I am trying to figure out what mindful is. And I’m pretty sure it’s doing this stuff. It’s making little rules for yourself throughout the day that force you to check in to make sure you are living a conscious life, purposefully guided. These might not make me happy—that might be impossible—but they might make my head spin slower.

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This is my favorite blog post ever by Dave: The Thong is Dead. (Maybe not safe for work.) He does so many great things in that post. He has genuine social commentary about who decides what is fashionable underwear. He shows us a glimpse into his personal life because he has an underwear discussion with his wife. And he provides a great photo of a girls’s ass, in boyshorts. All this in 500 words.

For me to get all of that into one post would take about 1000 words. Seth Godin writes posts like that—dependably dense: really short but packed with value—but never as scintillatingly smutty as Dave. Where Seth makes a living as a high-paid speaker by republishing a compendium of blog posts every two years, Dave can make a living as the intelligentsia by repackaging other peoples’ soft porn.

Do you know the Approval Matrix in New York magazine? No? You have to look at it. New York magazine has perfected a way to showcase the thrill that is behind the brilliance of low-brow culture. Recent example:

Highbrow and despicable: Franco Zefferellis says the soprano in his opera is too fat.

Highbrow and brilliant: When the production goes to Rome, she quits.

Brilliant and highbrow: The book titled Benefits of Looking Up, which is a series of photographs of balloons that got stuck in trees.

Brilliant and lowbrow: An online video of some guys jumping off Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.

I am obsessed with the meshing of lowbrow and highbrow. I’m convinced that if you understand high brow well, then you are also a great judge of low brow, and you can get even more pleasure out of that.

This reminds me of when I used to hang out with a woman who was a Ralph Lauren model. Neither of us had very much money because I was playing professional beach volleyball which meant I was living off sponsors (I spent my days in a bagel shop that sponsored me with free  food), and she used to be a Ralph Lauren model, but she cut off her hair because she thought she might be gay and she was living off residuals (checks that comes in when ads run months or years later).

So we’d hang out in my bagel shop, usually with way too much food on our plates because I was bulimic and she was a hoarder, and the food was free. My friend’s clothes were always a little raggedy because she decided it was cheaper to get ten-cent shirts from the thrift shop than to pay to clean clothes at the laundromat. And I always had a little too much sand in my hair, and it fell onto the table, and since the only new clothes I had were from sponsors, I always looked like I was at the beach even when I was at the bagel shop.

We always sat in a corner because it was too much trouble to try to pass for regular. But still guys would come up to us and they would look at her and feel like they just discovered America. They were Christopher Columbus and she was the untouched new nation (and I was a native they might have to kill.) The guys loved thinking they discovered a street person who looks like a model. They thought they had an eye for lowbrow.

They were morons, of course, because every guy in the whole world was attracted to my friend, and every guy thought he was the only one. “Here’s my card. I could do so much for you,” guys would tell her. As if she wasn’t already under contract with a modeling agency, violating it with short hair.

My point here: there is a little-acknowledged thrill in uncovering low brow while seeing the high brow in it.  It’s why I love Barstool Sports. It’s also why I know that every job is creative. There are ideas that people dismiss as not right. Not intellectual enough. Not how we think. But there are gems. The creativity, in any job, is finding the gems among the discards. It’s thrilling to do. Even if you’re wrong sometimes. And the rewards are huge. After all, Barstool Sports is making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

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