After the Facebook IPO, Sheryl Sandberg will become number two on the list of richest self-made women. She is the COO of Facebook.  For those of you not familiar with her career, there’s a nice summary in the New York Times. But the bottom line is that she is really smart (Harvard), a really hard worker (startups, Google, Facebook), a great speaker (here’s a commencement speech) ,and she’s married to a guy who is also making tons of money in startups.

There is nothing, really, that is bad to say about Sandberg. And she works very hard to encourage other women to go as far as she has gone.

The problem is, very few women want to be Sandberg, but there is very little discussion of this.

Sandberg has two young kids. She runs a company that is very public about having “lock-ins” to move fast enough to compete with Google, and they have open hours for kids to come to Facebook offices to say goodnight to their parents, who are working very long hours.

She encourages women to have ambition and “never take their foot off the gas pedal,” but very, very few women would choose to do this after they have kids. Pew Research shows that the majority of women would like to work part-time after they have kids. So it’s hard to tell that demographic that they should work 100-hour weeks at startups instead.

It’s revealing that the New York Times profile of Sandberg shows her surrounded by men who are only marginally involved in raising their kids.

Obama, for instance, is shown kissing her on the cheek. At that moment, presumably, Michelle Obama was with his kids. Because Michelle has been very clear that he is almost never with their kids, and she’s pissed, and she has confessed to screaming at him that she didn’t sign up to be a single mother. In fact, she quit her job so she could manage the family while her husband’s career took off.

Sandberg is also pictured with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. I was so struck by his lack of involvement with his kids that I wrote a whole post about it, here. He has a wife at home taking care of his kids.

Sandberg is pictured with Mayor Bloomberg, who is divorced and single, and left raising his daughters largely to his ex-wife.

Sandberg’s husband is not a stay-at-home husband. He has a big career of his own. Meg Whitman also had a husband with a big career, but when she became the very high-profile CEO of eBay, he stepped down to take care of their sons. Sandberg’s husband doesn’t appear to be doing that.

I have a friend who was a direct report to Sandberg. He had nothing but good things to say about her, but when I pressed for how she could possibly be getting this done with young kids, he said there are multiple nannies.

This makes sense. When I had a big job—nothing compared to Sandberg’s—I had two nannies. Because if you travel you have to have around-the-clock coverage.

Sandberg wants to be a role model for women who want big, exciting careers. But here’s the problem: women don't want to be Sandberg. It’s no coincidence that the number-one woman on the list of self-made millionaires is Oprah. She has no kids and no husband. She’s fascinating, nice, and smart. But few of us would really enjoy her life.

Sandberg and Oprah represent extreme choices in life. The things they give up are not things that most women would want to give up in exchange for the wild career success they could have.

Sandberg’s right when she says that the thing holding women back is women’s ambition. But I don’t see that changing any time soon. Even after the Facebook IPO. I’m afraid that what the Facebook IPO means for women is nothing. Sandberg is not a role model. She’s an aberration.

You can't have small kids and a startup if you want to see your kids. I wrote about this on TechCrunch and I got skewered for being bad for women and being a downer in general.

But this week Jeff Atwood wrote in Tech Crunch that he’s leaving his startup because it’s impossible to see his kids if he stays. And I don’t see anyone complaining about his declaration.

So probably Sheryl Sandberg is not doing much for women, but I'm pretty sure Jeff Atwood is, because it’s not as hard to say “The startup is too hard on my kids” when men are saying it, too.

Sunday nights at our house are dinner with me, the kids, the Farmer and the Ex. They are always fun dinners, and I always feel very lucky for that.

My six-year-old talked about his new baby cousin, Eva (who is pictured, in utero, above). "She has a terrible name," he said, "for Pig Latin. Its Vaeay. It doesn't work."

We all do the vowel arranging in our heads and agree, Eva is not a good Pig Latin name.

"Mom has a great name! It's Enelopepay."

The Farmer says, "It sounds like it could be the name of her next company."

The Ex says, "Yeah, emphasis on the pay."

The three adults laugh.

And then I get nervous. About what I'm going to do next. If you have had three companies, people assume you will have a fourth. So I assume that, too. Which makes me nervous.

When I was in the doctor's office with my son, he was playing his DS and I was looking for something to read to distract myself from the urge to rein in his video game time (I decided that parents who limit video games are delusional.) And I saw this pamphlet that looked like a food pyramid so I grabbed it to get some insight into how to use the food pyramid to make myself not want to eat and lose weight overnight.

What I thought was a food pyramid pamphlet was actually a mental health pamphlet. It was a pyramid that had taking care of life goals and meaning of life stuff on the bottom, and the middle part was daily routine mental health stuff like exercise and talking to friends—the stuff you already know you should do every day. And the top was the immediate stuff. Ways to calm yourself down in the moment. For the most part, the top part was positive self-talk.

I am good at the first two, but the immediate stuff I'm not good at. In fact, I eat when I am anxious. I found, actually, that drinking is more calming when I'm anxious, but eating is more socially acceptable. Xanax is always good, but only if I can sleep the rest of the day. And really, if I have a day where I can sleep then I'm probably not anxious. Not that I would ever know. Because I haven't had a day where I can sleep the whole day since I became a mother.

Anyway, I am trying to find good ways to calm myself down when I'm nervous. And I took the pamphlet home to make myself more conscious of what I do in the moment when anxiety arises. Mostly this means that I've started to tell myself, "Oh, look. I must be upset becacause I'm eating." But in this moment, at the dining room table, while the kids talked to the dads, I went into the kitchen to calm myself down. And I didn't eat. I practiced positive self-talk.

I had rehearsed it before, which is how to prepare for the moment of huge self-doubt. Here are the five points I've come up with:

1. Stay confident that I am making good choices based on good data.
When I started having kids I dropped out of the software industry and the startup world.

The moment was similar to me deciding that homeschooling is a non-negotiable. Everyone told me not to drop out and that I was crazy.

But I had read a lot about attachment theory—that kids need one, single primary caregiver for the first two years. I realized that it's common knowledge among child development experts that kids need a single caregiver for the first two years, but no one wants to be the bearer of this bad news. Because daycare means there are two primary caregivers, at least, which jeopardizes a baby's ability to attach. So sending a kid to daycare was out of the question for me.

And that's how I feel now, about homeschooling. Even though it's wreaking havoc on my career.

2. Remember the times I felt like a failure when it was not true at all.
This research made me intensely committed to finding work I could do from home to support the family. Which lead to temporary financial ruin. And I felt like a failure.

All my friends in the software industry disappeared because we had nothing to talk about. The writers I met earned so little money that I worried hanging out with them was bad for my career.

After a few years, I launched this blog. It got big enough that people who make a lot of money started paying attention to me again. And I didn’t feel like a failure anymore.

If I could go back to that time, I'd tell myself to stop worrying about failure.  The worry just makes the change harder, and no one is a failure in the middle of a big change. You can't fail if you're moving toward something. You fail only if you stop.

3. During big transitions, be clear on priorities.
I have a startup right now. I started pitching some top-tier VCs I'd like to work with and  they said the business idea would not grow big enough. So I showed how I can win at the whole online food business because the barrier to entry for selling meat and cheese online is huge and I have a way to get around that.

Everyone loved my marketing plan. Except that the business was too small to be funded. There would not be a big enough exit and I can’t get great business partners if I don’t have huge exit potential.

That's a problem because I want to work only with hotshots. I don’t want to work with moms who want jobs on the side. Please God do not strike me down for saying this, but as a mom who is trying to have a really exciting career, I don’t want to work with other moms. I want to work with twenty-something men who have no kids and have endless time to address their endless curiosity.

So I worked with an angel investor to craft a business plan that moves quickly from online food to online everything. I talk about the future of shopping . It used to be that shopping was exciting because you could find different stuff in different cities. Discovery and exploration are part of shopping. But online, everything is a commodity. People want discovery and they want to feel that what they are buying is special.

I say all this to show how my online food business will transform the consumer experience. You need to say that kind of stuff to get A-list partners and A-list funding.

4. Getting what you want means deciding what you'll give up.
So last month I got a great developer to agree to move forward with me. Last week there was no barrier to me launching my goat cheese business as step one to transforming the American consumer experience.

Except that I don’t think I can handle talking like this every day for five years. Which is what a startup is: talking like a manic dreamer with crazy ambitions that no one thinks you can really pull off, but some people will take a wild bet on. That’s what it would be.

It’s so fun. But not with kids. It’s so great to have an amazing business partner, but not if they have to chase you down in between playdates. They start to hate you.

So I have this business I’m not doing. And I'm banking on the advice I tell other people, that admitting what won't work to do right now is a step toward figure out what will work to do right now.

5. Keep moving forward and believe you'll go somewhere good.
I am at an in-between stage, and I’ve been here before, so I am going to have faith that I’ll come out okay. I am going to have faith that I am not going to wither away and lose my ability to earn a lot of money. I am going to have faith that when I am done with my current identity crisis there will be top-performers all around me.

I coach so many people in their 20s who are lost, and they are worried that their feeling lost will never end. And I tell them to just keep trying jobs until one sticks. Have patience and believe that you'll figure things out. This is true for me, too. Right now. The more times you live through that feeling of being lost, the more faith you have that you'll keep moving forward and come out fine.

You know what makes me happy right now? My sister-in-law had a baby after losing her first one. I'm really happy for her. And my small, odd family has fun dinners together. And focusing on the stuff that definitely feels good gives me faith to trust that eventually I can put the pay in Enelopepay.

One of the keys to my ability to work 40 hours a week and homeschool two kids is that I have great time management. Which is to say, I say no to just about everything. But learning when to say no is still a work in progress. Here's what I know about saying no to phone calls:

1. It's more efficient to read the book than talk to the author.
I get about ten emails a day asking me if I want to talk to someone about their book so I’ll recommend it on the blog. My answer is always no.

I said yes once because it was Gloria Steinem. And it turned out to be a really disappointing phone call. If she is disappointing pitching to me, then everyone else will be, too.

Now I ask people to send me the book. If I like the idea of it, I’ll read it. I just read a book by Alexandra Robbins about why high school is destroying the kids who go there. She didn’t come to that conclusion, I did. But see, that’s why it’s good that I read the book myself instead of talking to her.

2. Interviews are a faster form of entertainment than going to a movie.
But I do try to say yes to all interviews. I like the Russian Roulette aspect of interviews in that I never know what I’ll get. I liked getting grilled on CNN about my miscarriage. They didn’t tell me that was the topic, but it’s okay. It was interesting to answer the questions.

And I didn’t like talking to Steve Roy about his career, but whenever I listen to the recording of the call, I laugh out loud, so in hindsight, even that was a good interview to say yes to.

So this guy, Michael Zenn, sent me this email:

Subject hed: Your Input

…I am currently in the process of producing a new edition of my book and reaching out to interview some of the leading female thought leaders in the nation, which I believe you are one.  

I will be adding a brand new material to the book and am looking for female influencers, bloggers, websites, resources and ideas that I could potentially feature in the new book that would benefit women readers.  

Please let me know when you might have a few minutes for us to chat.

I replied with a yes. I figured I’d give him 15 minutes, and anyway, people never call me about food, so it might be fun to answer questions about that.

3. Smalltalk goes faster with short responses.
Here’s what happened. He opened up with some platitudes. Like, who he is and that his book is sold in Whole Foods and it’s the only book the CEO of Whole Foods has ever endorsed.

I think a few things. I think, I hope he gets to the questions fast.  Then I think, he must be the illicit lover of the Whole Foods CEO to be leveraging the checkout counter in the way that he is. He is telling me how his first printing will sell out in one month. And I am thinking, something is fishy here.

Then he says he reads my blog, and he wonders if I have always been so direct and unfiltered.

I say, "Yes."

He asks, “Do you know why?”

I say, “Yes. I have Asperger's Syndrome.”

He has never heard of it.

“It’s like autism,” I say. “But with a high IQ. I’m smart about some things, but not social skills. So I have no patience for you making small talk with me.”

He laughs.  He says “Oh, it’s like you can’t tell a lie.”

“Yeah.”

“I wish I had more people in my life like that,” he says.

“No you don’t,” I say. “You’d get sick of it.”

Pause.

4. Tirades take too long (and they're hard to stop once you get going) 

He asks, “What is your goal? What do you want to tell the world?”

“I don’t want to stand in front of everyone and tell them what to do. Because I don’t know. Life is hard. I’m trying to figure out how to deal with the difficulties of life, and I like that people do that with me, on my blog.”

He says, “Yeah, it’s much better to just be honest about what you’re doing.”

Pause.

Then he asks me if I have written at all about the food I eat.

I think to myself that he is either illiterate or a liar. I say, “Yeah, I live on a farm. With animals that we eat. I write a lot about that. With pictures.”

I can’t remember what happens next. I think I decide to tell him that all of the goat cheese that’s labeled by Whole Foods is made by killing the boy goats as soon as they are born. I hear nothing on his end. So I add that they are crushed underfoot, in the snow.

I tell him people need to pay a lot more money for pork if they want to have pork from mothers who are not chained like prisoners while they are having their babies. It costs a lot more money to raise pork if the farmer lets the mom roll on top of some of the piglets, but it’s what she would naturally do.

5. A fast way to feel good is to attack a caller you're sick of. (Childish but effective.)
I don’t know what he says next. He is saying something about how I have strong opinions or something. He is not used to this.

I tell him people don’t have enough money to pay 50% more for groceries at Whole Foods. I tell him that group child care for kids under two is very bad for the kids and people should spend their money solving that problem. It’s a lot more important than not having food additives.

He says his book tells people to do small steps.

“Like what?”

“Like eggs.”

I say, “Do you buy your eggs at Whole Foods?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they suck compared to my free range farm eggs.”

“The eggs at Whole Foods are free range.”

“What does that mean? Free range for one day a year? Who regulates the words free range? Free range on sawdust? You can look at my eggs and the eggs you eat and you can see a huge difference in how yellow the yolk is.”

“People need to know what they are eating.”

“You don’t even know what you’re eating. This is a black hole for spending and it’s not appropriate for poor people. You can buy pork at Whole Foods where the moms are chained at birth and the pork could be organic.”

5. Get off the phone as fast as possible. 
Then I tell him it’s time to go to skateboarding. I tell him that my son gets more out of the money I spend on skateboarding lessons than the money I spend on organic juice with 50% less sugar which he thinks taste terrible, by the way.

The guy says, “Can I send my book to you?”

I can’t believe it. I want to tell him that he should have just sent that email to me, instead of wasting my time talking to me about his book. I would have said yes to just an email but now I hate him. I hate that he told me he wants to interview me for his book but he doesn’t. He’s a lifestyle guy, really. He’s telling people how to have a good life. And he’s lying to me.

So I say, “Why do you need to pitch your book to me? You have a monopoly in Whole Foods checkout lines. Your book is selling out it’s first printing. Why don’t you do something more interesting than marketing a book?”

He says, “I want to change the world. Obesity is a huge problem in this country.”

“You’re going to solve obesity by telling people to buy free-range eggs?”

“Yes. Education is the key to curbing obesity.”

“You think fat people are too stupid to know that if you pay double for your food you get better food? I think they know that. Try being a single mom with two jobs and four kids and then tell her she has weight problems because she doesn’t buy free range eggs.”

He asks, “Well what do you think is the panacea?”

And I say, “Panacea? You are looking for a panacea? There aren’t those in this world.”

In therapy lately I am learning to identify my feelings. Maybe you’re thinking this is elementary, but did you know that envy is about wanting something you don’t have, but jealousy is the fear of losing something you already have?

I am thinking about those two things. I am almost never envious, but I am often jealous. Most of my emotions, in fact, are rooted in fear.

I am thinking a lot lately about where my joy comes from, and one thing I love is writing well. When I have a blog post that people love I am happy for weeks. And the excitement of doing good creative work gives me energy to do more.

So I have been thinking about how to get better at writing, and I’ve been trying to notice stuff that I wish I had written. The process teaches me a lot about identifying my own emotions.

1. A New Yorker article.
There is not much in the New Yorker I wish I had written. Most of it I think is too long and could use a stronger editor. (Like this article about Ikea.) But there is a piece in the Nov. 28 issue that is just one page, and so funny that I carry it with me and make people read it just so I can watch them laugh.

It is We are the One Percent, by John Kenney. Will you click to read it? Go read it now.

I'll wait.

I am not funny. I mean, I am funny but in an unintentional way. When I try to make a joke it is usually a pun. I love puns but I have realized, late in life, that people do not think puns are funny.

When people read my writing and say that I am funny, I feel lonely, because I know better than to try to be funny on purpose. So honestly, I don’t feel that funny. It’s a lot like when people say that I write stuff just to get a lot of traffic. If I knew how to churn out a 300-comment post on demand, don’t you think I’d do it every day?

In fact, it’s like funny. I have no idea when it’s coming. Feeling: Lonely, because I’m always surprised.

2. An email from Melissa.
I wrote to Melissa that I messed up my PayPal account and I hit my limit on money I can transfer to my checking account and I wanted the money right then, while I was in Florida, with the kids. We were at the Waldorf in Boca, which I would have never chosen, but there was a wedding.

And actually, in the list of things I wish I had written should be the pricing plan for this resort. It reminds me of buying a printer. They seem so reasonably priced until you get killed on the ink. And that’s what happens here—when you have to pay five dollars for an apple juice, and $25 to get the hotel to remove the $5 juice from the fridge in the room so the kids don’t drink it.

Anyway, I asked Melissa if I could pay her through PayPal and use her credit card at the hotel. This is the sort of fucked up behavior that Melissa and I have done in the past, so it seemed like a reasonable request.

Melissa wrote back, “No. I’m not doing stuff like that anymore.”

And I thought, “She is really smart. Of course we should not do stuff like that anymore.” It is bad boundaries and I am working on having better boundaries with everyone, even Melissa.

I am hoping she will send me an email asking for something bad so I can write a response that blows her away with my ability to establish good boundaries. Feeling: Determination to change and excitement about what my life could be like with good boundaries.

3. The ad copy up there.
The girl. In the hot outfit, with all the guys around her. Do you see her? It’s an ad for work clothes, of course. But it’s an ad that gives women the freedom to use their sexuality to get everything they can get. I love that. Women are doing better than men are at work in their 20s. Women earn more and women are less likely to get hit in layoffs.

OK Cupid – one of my favorite blogs for the combination of amazing data and amazing analysis, and really, that should be on my list of stuff I’d like to write too, except that the guy who writes it – Chris Rudder – has his personality all over it which makes me just want to enjoy it and not be it. Like Joel Stein’s column in Time magazine. It’s too too too him for me to want it to be me. But I love reading it.

Anyway, OK Cupid concludes that women are in highest demand when they are in their late 20s. Which makes sense to me—they are high earning, stable, and still very hot.  So women should leverage their sexuality to get promotions, make sales, get high-earning husbands—great legs help with all that stuff.

I want to write advice like the advice in this ad. Be great. Reach high. Inspire people around you by being inspired yourself. And when you don’t feel that way, at least look that way and eventually that good look will get you back on track.

Feeling: Hopeful. The ad reminds me of all the positive psychology research – that you can create hope in yourself by giving it to other people.

If I focus on what I wish I'd written, I realize that what I'm scared of  has nothing to do with other writers. What I'm scared of is not growing. It's freeing to recognize that, really. Because I can't control what other people write. But I can control how much I push myself to grow. And I'm convinced that jealousy and envy — whichever is your sin of choice  - have very little power over us when we are growing fast enough to surprise ourselves with what we can accomplish.

When I sent her this photo, she said: “What is this?”

I only wanted her opinion about the color of the shirt, so I thought it was okay that it was blurry. But the more I look at the picture, the more I think that it’s how I feel about myself right now.

I am not quite sure who I am, right now. And given the current career climate, this is actually how most people see themselves, too—blurry from constant movement, settled on the basics, but unclear on the specifics.

And then I read an article in Fast Company this month titled Generation Flux. The article is about how careers are constantly moving and our identity is therefore moving as well.

So I am focused on how to make myself more clear about what I look like. At least right now. And here are things I think we each need to do to pin down our moving-target, career-jumping selves.

1. Get a plan for post-35.
This is a great post by Matt Heusser, from Google, that outlines why you only have fifteen years to put a plan together.  By the time you’re 35 you have to get out of any career space that is for young people and settle into an older person job.

Want to know what young people jobs are? Making sales (as opposed to managing), writing code (as opposed to managing), working across three time zones. These are jobs that middle-aged people do not get. Mostly because no one would respect a person who has worked for 15 years and still has to take a job like this. These are not good jobs for having a life. These are jobs for working long, hard hours with the intention of laying the groundwork for a better career.

Sara Horowitz, writing in the Atlantic, suggests that the new jobs will be independent, short-term and maybe even coffee-shop based. Others, like Cathy Benko at Deloitte, suggest there will be a series of lateral moves that will somehow become respectable. Anya Kamenetz, writing in Fast Company, says this will look like continuous, back-to-back career change, so that job hopping begins to look tame and totally normal.

At any rate, you can’t get through the second part of your career doing the work you did in the first part. So there is not time to rest in a safe spot for your career.

The other reason you only get 15 years is that your salary tops out in your late 30s. (Actually, age 35 for women and 40 for men.) Statistically speaking, you are extremely unlikely to earn more than you are earning at that age.

2. Get good at setting boundaries.
In the old workplace you could take one job, on an established path, and move forward in a predictable way. The average job today lasts four years. (And other research shows that people who are staying a lot longer than four years are probably getting themselves into trouble.)

If you are changing jobs every four years, you are going to have to manage lots of close relationships with co-workers and bosses. This requires being very good at setting boundaries, which, in turn, requires good self-knowledge.

I have a bookshelf full of boundary-building books right now, and I’m blown away by how relevant they are to careers. (Examples: I Hate You Don't Leave Me and Stop Walking on Eggshells).

Most of our career problems have, on some level, a boundary component. For example, many people in their 20s know what they’d like to do but they cannot separate the dreams of their parents from their own, and so they make bad choices for themselves that they spend a decade undoing.

In other cases, career choices are clear and good, but a spouse has dreams that are incompatible with this choice. For example, the spouse wants a income, or more attentive child care, or a relocation that is not possible. In this case there would need to be a family talk about boundaries and how one person’s dreams cannot depend on impossible career feats by the other person.

The better we are at managing boundaries in our personal relationships, the better we’ll be at managing our career decisions. And as careers become more dynamic, this equation becomes more true.

3.   Get tons of coaching.
I have always been a huge fan of coaching. It’s not only that I have hired people for help with what to wear. In fact, I think one of my biggest strengths is to get coaching from a wide range of people.

As a result of realizing this personal strength, last year I started doing a lot more coaching for other people, and I started reading more about coaching as well. For example, all high performers get a lot of coaching. And the need for coaching does not wane as you get better and better at your job.

So many people told me that the coaching session I did with them changed their life that I decided I wanted to get that. I wanted a coaching session that changed my life. So I asked Christine Carter to do a coaching session with me. She wrote the book Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents. She coaches families on how to create systems that promote family  happiness. She helps them restructure schedules and priorities, which are exactly the things I’ve been having trouble with since I moved to the farm and started homeschooling.

We dealt with fundamental decisions like when I will do my work each day and how the family can be more predictable. And you know what? She changed my life. Because she took questions that are difficult and complicated for me and she was able to find good answers quickly. Which, by the way, is exactly what I am able to do when I coach people about career decisions.

A coach works on the same problem with hundreds of people, so the coach is great at seeing how to solve that one problem for you. For anything. I’ve written about coaching for mental imaging, coaching for more optimism, coaching for gait. Each of those coaches have blown me away by teaching me something totally new about myself and helping me solve problems related to that area.

So I can’t stress enough how much I recommend that you get coaching this year. You cannot rely on your company to teach you what you need to know to manage your career. Because first of all, no one knows that answer except you. But also, a company cannot make that kind of investment in employees when the average tenure is four years.

And one more thing about coaching: It's very hard to know what question to ask. Which may make you think that this is a reason to not get coaching. But in fact, learning to ask good questions is something you can get coached for as well.

If I look back on my blog, I can see that each year there were one or two ideas that just blew me away and ended up dominating my thinking. For example, 2011 my year to be obsessed with school –  homeschooling and higher ed, 2010 was my year for disillusionment with happiness research, 2009 was when I started writing honestly about how unglamorousstartup life really is.

1. Nature vs. nurture
An important book came out at the end of 2011 that got very little play in the media: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, by Bryan Caplan The title of the book is just awful. Which is probably why it has been roundly ignored. The title should have been Why Nothing You Do As a Parent Matters. That title would have gotten a lot of media coverage, but who would have purchased the book?

No one. Because as parents we are invested in the idea that what we do matters. But it turns out that what parents do doesn’t matter very much. This book is a compendium of evidence from a wide range of university studies that show that once basic needs of a child are met, parents do not really affect how their kids turn out.

Here’s an example of the reach of this evidence: The age that boys first have sex is determined genetically. You cannot influence it by talking to the kid, or preaching to the kid, or whatever. The evidence is astounding. But also disheartening. Because then what does it matter what are parents doing?

One thing is that they can affect how much kids appreciate them as adults. This is influenced by the parents completely. So as this research gains public attention, the shift we will see in spending will be toward things that parents and kids experience together. We don’t need to spend money on shaping the child when the child is already in the shape he or she will be. We can focus on spending money to help the child connect with the parent in a meaningful way that will last their whole lives. That’s all we can influence, as much as we wish it to be otherwise.

2. Lean startup thinking
At this point, the idea of the lean startup is not that new. That's the method for launching a startup where you continually ask questions and refine as opposed to setting up a goal and driving unequivocally in that direction. It's a process for dealing with the reality that we don't know what will work and what won't work. Eric Ries came up with the idea, wrote a book about it, and now he's at Harvard evangelizing it to the next generation of entrepreneurs. The idea took hold of the Silicon Valley crowd first, of course, but at this point, the idea of the lean startup has infiltrated entrepreneur circles in middle America as well.

The lean startup is such a strong, salient idea for our era because it is the natural response to the situation where we have the ability to gather information quickly and move quickly. But why do we only apply this idea to companies? Why not also apply it to our lives? We don't need to figure out a goal when we are in our 20s and then move toward that goal. We can constantly gather information, ask questions, and readjust our goals. Our lives should run as lean as our startups do, which is to say, aiming to get rid of the baggage from goals we once thought might work but now clearly will not.

Next, we should stop investing in our lives as if they are set in stone. The less stuff we have, the lower our monthly costs are, the more flexible we can be to respond to new information about what really works for each of us, in our own lives.

3. Fake is an art form.
Instead of fighting against fake, maybe we should celebrate it. After all, we have a long history of loving fakery. You know what the people did with the discovery of oil paint? Now that they could make lines and colors so precise as to look real, they started painting pictures of beautiful women for men to hold onto when they couldn't have a real one. (Girl With the Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier, is a great story of this practice.) Andy Warhol devoted his life to making art about our love of the fake.

So here we are, in 2012, and did you check out the photo of the Apple store at the top of this post? Here's another photo of the store.

Guess what? It's a fake Apple store in the middle of nowhere in China. All the employees think they are working for Apple. And the customers think they are buying from Apple. And though some mistakes are obvious, a former Apple store employee stumbled upon the store and she documents all the little details the store owners got wrong in a very fun blog post.

I want to tell you this is thievery and dishonest and an international crime. But you know what? I love it. Fake is fun, and China is just amazing at it.

4. The rise of career centers.
At some point, there's going to be a huge shift in university politics, and the head of the career center is going to be the god of academia. That's because the value of a school is no longer in the knowledge it spews—anyone can take the classes online. Anyone can access the teacher's papers online, and anyone can email the professor with a good question.

The value in the school is the jobs kids get after they graduate. For some schools, just the name of the school will open doors. For most schools, though, this is not true. And for those schools, the career center has an opportunity to add huge value to the diploma.

At some point, university administrators will stop courting physics professors and start courting a high-profile head of the career center. Because right now the career centers are throwing the students under the bus.

You know what will make this shift go much faster? When US News and World Report gets a reality check about what people reallly want to know about higher education, and they start publishing lists of schools ranked by how well they place kids in the job market after graduation. There's nothing like a new list criteria to force the hand of university presidents. (And in the meantime, we should complain loudly that US News and World Report uses largely irrelevant criteria for school rankings, like class size. It's 2012. If you don't like the size of your class, go online and have a class of one, and then meet your professor during office hours.)

5. The compounding effect. The guy who publishes Success magazine, Darren Hardy, wrote a book called The Compound Effect. I liked the book as soon as I heard the title. I thought to myself, "Of course! Making good career decisions every month is like putting money in a 401K every month!" The thing is that most of us are not putting money in a 401K every month. (And it probably doesn't matter, because saving for retirement is an antiquated approach to life.) But most of us can get the compound effect by making solid decisions each month, again and again and again.

The opening of Hardy's book is: "Ever heard the story of the tortoise and the hare? Ladies and gentlemen, I'm the tortoise. Give me enough time, and I will beat virtually anybody, anytime, in any competition? Why? Not because I'm the best or the smartest or the fastest. I'll win because of the positive habits I've developed, and because of the consistency I use in applying those habits."

I like that. I like the idea of making lots of good small decisions about my career knowing that the compound effect will create big rewards over time. Which reminds me of the idea that captured my attention in 2008: having a strong career is so much more rewarding than having a 401K.

Somehow, last year, I got too big-picture. It’s not surprising since I’m an ENTJ. I understand my deficit, which is one reason I picked the Farmer, an ISTP-–extremely short-term thinking.

At the end of the day, the Farmer walks in the house and talks about his day’s accomplishments, and the weather. I used to tell him that the weather is such a stupid topic that it actually makes me uncomfortable to have him bring it up. But now I realize that the weather is a segue to talking about what is happening right now. And that’s something I need to get better at.

1. Pay attention to the short term.
So my first resolution is to be more excited with what's going on in my life in the near-term.

On January 1st the Farmer separated from his parents’ farm, and he has pigs are at our farm now. (I am saying our farm now. It shows us being a team more. It’s hard to write, but I guess this is a sub-resolution within the resolution: Think like a team.) He used to make the pigs have babies in crates, at his parent's farm. The birthing process was confinement—the moms couldn’t move so they couldn’t roll onto the babies. Now he is letting the pigs breed while they wallow in grassy mud, and he's letting the moms have babies wherever they choose in a barn full of soft hay bedding. The pig will roll on some of the babies probably, but probably that’s why pigs have big litters.

Anyway, the Farmer is excited and scared and curious and he comes into the house each day and says something fun about the new pig setup. I should have something fun to say each day about my work, too. I want to be excited that I’m trying new things.

2. Pay attention to moment-to-moment happiness.
Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, and my happiness research idol, is shifting his focus to the workplace. This is not surprising. As our education system grows more and more inadequate, companies are taking more responsibility for educating their employees. So there’s a lot of money in corporate America earmarked for education, and if you have a new idea, you’d best start selling it to those purse holders.

Anyway, Gilbert gives a great interview in the Harvard Business Review this month about what makes people happy. And, first of all, it’s really clear for the last two decades of research that events do not make us more happy or more sad. We overestimate how much a single event will change us – a huge raise, a lost limb – all of it has little long-term impact on our happiness because we bounce back on both ends of the spectrum to our happiness set point – that is, the one we’re born with. (If you’re interested in facing the reality of the fact that happiness is basically predetermined at birth, a good book on the happiness set point, check out The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky.)

So work is simply not going to change how happy you are. That’s not how work works. On the other hand, you do have to be at work for eight hours a day – well, most of us do, in one way or another, even Tim Ferriss – so we should get a good feeling from being there.

And here’s where we can affect our happiness: minute-to-minute. One of the lucky grad students in Daniel Gilbert’s research lab at Harvard is Matthew Killingsworth, who distributed an app (through this blog, actually) to track peoples’ happiness on a moment-to-moment basis. As we learn more about people reporting their own happiness we know that our ability to predict happiness stinks, and the way we remember our happiness levels is inaccurate, but we are pretty decent at knowing how we feel if someone asks us. (I know, this flies in the face of every marriage counseling session in the world, but still, I believe Gilbert knows what he’s talking about.)

This is where we get good information about work. People are happy, minute-to-minute at work if they are setting reasonable goals and meeting them.

3. Pay attention to paragraph breaks.
I want to try new things in my work and I want to set goals for myself. At my core, I think I’m a writer. And I need to always be improving. Some of that will come from forcing myself to make more money from this blog. I have to organize my ideas in different ways if I want to make more money from them, and so now seems like a good a time to tell you that I’ll have a new book coming out this spring. (More on that later.)

I’ve also been forcing myself to try different ways of writing blog posts on my homeschooling blog. (Here’s one that I like that is different than anything I would write here.)

I am obsessed with expertise. And people get better and better at something – anything – by being focused on what they are working on and pushing themselves in new directions to reach hard goals.

I think to myself: what am I doing with my writing to make myself get better? It scares me that I’m not getting better. Mostly, I just need to write more to get better – it’s what anyone needs to do to get better. But I want a goal, also, so this year I’m going to focus more on the paragraph break. I think that’s where the big potential is to elevate my writing.

Like there. Right? You stopped a beat to think, oh, here’s a break. Something big will happen. The break is an opportunity for an intimate moment with the reader. It’s the part of writing I like best, and I could do much more with it.

Do people give New Year’s presents? Here is mine to you. Or to me. It makes me happy just to have this poem here on my blog:

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

By Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle

That while you watched turned into pieces of snow

Riding a gradient invisible

From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.

And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

It's been four days since I documented my own domestic violence, in almost real-time, between me and the Farmer. The most common response I've heard is some variation of: "Zero tolerance for domestic abuse!"

And you know what? I have zero tolerance for things I am not prone to tolerate as well. That’s easy, isn’t it?

It’s much harder to see the issue from the person’s perspective who has the issue.

I've spent days reading the 500 comments on my blog and the comments about my situation on other blogs, and I'm absolutely shocked by the collective hatred and disdain for women who are in violent relationships.

Here’s what someone said on my blog: "Victims of domestic abuse suck at pressing charges."

Yes. It’s true. Women don’t like to press charges. Because they love the guy. You, maybe, are unable to fall in love with a guy who is violent. Good for you. But do you have to hate women who aren’t like you?

For some reason, people feel it is honorable to rip a woman to shreds if she is living with domestic violence. Here’s an example from the comments section on James Altucher’s blog:

"[Penelope Trunk is] out of her mind to think that her children are not being abused. She, in fact, is as guilty of that abuse as the farmer that beats her."

The high-and-mightiness that emanates from the public discussion of domestic violence is breathtaking. Everyone is an expert. Everyone knows what’s right.

Here’s an example from the comments section on Jezebel, a supposedly feminist community that is full of anger towards women who live in violent households.

"No one gets another chance to hit me. I don't care that I have the training to fight back.

"One incident, and YOU LEAVE. Violent people don't get better without a lot of work, and it's not *your* problem. Once someone raises a hand to you, you owe that person *nothing.* It's likely that the violent behavior will escalate. Sometimes it is deliberate. Either way, YOU LEAVE."

This person sees everything very clearly. If there’s abuse, you leave. Even if it’s small. Because all small abuse gets huge.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that if the guy hits you twice, the kids are better off living in a single-parent home and hearing their dad called an abuser. What people do say is that the odds are it won’t stop. The odds are it will get worse. The odds are, the kids will be worse off, in the end, having lived with the dad.

But the truth is that we do not believe that men who leave two, visible marks on their wife should lose their kids.

You know how I know we don’t believe this? Because if Child Protective Services sees two bruises on a kid at two different times, the kid is not removed from the home. Think about it: Is that kid better off with parents who might be able to stop, or in the Foster Care System for the rest of their life?

So we are making bets, right? Is it better to leave, because it is likely to get worse? Or is it better to stay because the benefits from things improving, although unlikely, are huge?

I’m in the startup community. It’s the world of high risk. You bet big on yourself, you kill your family’s credit, you put your house on the line, and maybe, just maybe, your company will make it.

So why wouldn’t I bet big on myself now? I am not the whole problem in my family, but I am half. And over the last year I have described multiple situations where I was half the problem.

I can improve my own half and see what happens. Have you been to couple’s therapy? There’s a saying that a marriage is a gear system. If one gear changes, all the gears change.

Blog commenters will argue against this idea by telling me not to change because It's not my fault.

But really, how do they know? We know that I grew up in a home where there was lots of violence. So it's likely that I will be in that kind of house when I'm an adult. And surely it's possible that I am contributing to the mix since I am statistically likely to create a violent household. Here's another thing: You don't know what I did leading up to the bruise in the photo.

I'll tell you what my mom used to do leading up to my dad hitting her:

One night they were wallpapering. They had been wallpapering the living room after work for a week. My mom got mad at my dad and threw red paint all over the wallpaper. Ruined all their work. He didn't respond. He was stunned. Then she knocked over the table with the wallpaper and the glue. It ruined the newly varnished floors. He held her arms so she couldn't do anything else. He held tighter and tighter. She kicked him to get loose. She left no mark. He hit her in the face.

If she blogged about it, and showed the hand print on her face, she might get 500 commenters telling her it's not her fault.

Should she leave with me and my brother because our dad is violent and we should not live with him? Or should she work on her own behavior to see if she can single-handedly stop the violence?

I think the most grown-up, good parenting thing for her to do would be to understand her own behavior and stop it so that me and my brother could grow up in a home with both our parents. She didn't do that, of course. She had little insight into her own behavior and she and my dad ended up taking most of their anger out on me.

My mom had good choices she could have made because, in fact, part of the domestic violence was her fault.

"It's not your fault" completely limits a woman's choices, because you are saying that she is powerless to control the situation. And if you tell every woman "it's not your fault" then they can't improve. How do women get better at not creating a violent household? Probably by changing their behavior. This doesn't mean "always tiptoe around your spouse and become a mouse". But it can mean a wide range of positive changes.

We are all growing personally. It's not your fault is almost always a path to no growth. It's what Oprah founded her show on, right? Personal responsibility. Why don't we go there, first, before we go to "it's not your fault". The truth is that if we take responsibility for the problems in our lives, we can solve the problem. If we blame other people, we are always running. People who blame other people can't get along with siblings, can't get along at work, lose friends quickly. People who facilitate that behavior say, "It's not your fault."

Most of the success of my blog comes from my reliance on the idea of personal responsibility. There are no bad bosses–it's only you. If you can't get a job it's not because of the job market, it's because you are unemployable. And you can fix that.  Your heavy workload is not because someone gave it to you — you gave it to yourself. People like what I say because I show them how they can fix anything when they take responsibility for fixing it. That's what I truly believe.

And that's why I'm staying with the Farmer.

It was also the year I discovered pictures for my blog, and I even redesigned the whole blog so the photos are more prominent. So it makes sense to me to end with a picture of me looking for something — who knows what? — when I was a child. Because some things are just part of us. They don't change, even when the year changes.

I don't know if these are the best posts of the year. But they are some of the posts that received the most comments. My favorite post of the whole year is the one that's first on this list. Hopefully I've picked a few of your favorites too, and a few that you missed, so there's a fun one for you to read right now.

Happy new year, and thank you for reading my blog and commenting. You make me feel lucky. And here's the list:

On Sunday my son sold his pig (271 comments)

Voices of the defenders of grad school. And me, crushing them.  (249 comments)

Blueprint for a woman's life  (440 comments, 3,000 likes on Facebook)

5 Reasons to stop trying to be happy (146 comments)

Salaries top out at age 40 (102 comments, 471 likes on facebook)

What gen-yers don't know about themselves (250 comments)

Generation Z will revolutionize education (175 comments)

I took the kids and went to a hotel so I could have time to think. I think I need to move into a hotel for a month.

The Farmer told me that he will not beat me up any more if I do not make him stay up late talking to me.

If you asked him why he is still being violent  to me, he would tell you that I’m impossible to live with. That I never stop talking. That I never leave him alone. How he can’t get any peace and quiet in his own house. That’s what he’d tell you.

And he’d tell you that I should be medicated.

I’m trying to make sure this is a career blog, because, if nothing else, if I don’t have a career then it’s pretty hard to have the discussion of why I am not leaving.

I am having trouble writing, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m not great at faking things. I am trying to do business as usual because we all know that I should have left the last time there was violence.

Look. I can’t even write “the last time he beat me up.” I tried to, but then I thought: "No. It’s my fault. I deserve it. He’s right. I’m impossible to live with.”

Our couples therapist told us we will never make any progress. The reason that we will never make any progress is because neither of us can be vulnerable in a relationship.

This might be true.

The Farmer responded by saying he thinks we are making good progress. That was when he had made it to two months without hurting me. He said that was progress.

I feel like I am never going to get past this if I don’t write about it.

Some days I wish I had a real job at Brazen Careerist where I had to go into an office every day. I think it might be good for me. Structure is good for me.

I thought it would be such a big deal when I stopped working there. But it’s not. No one really cares. The company moves on. I show up to board meetings and there are people working there who I’ve never even met.

When I was growing up I always heard women say that you should have a career so you can take care of yourself without a husband. What if there’s a divorce? You need to be able to support yourself! Don’t let yourself get stuck.

But now we know more about work. It’s fun to have a career. It’s fun to get the accolades that work provides.

And we know more about domestic violence. You don’t need a career to leave. You need something else.

I am not sure what. I think I might need a hotel. But really I need to know what is keeping me there. I’m pretty sure that blaming myself is keeping me there. I think, “Why would I leave him when it’s all my fault?”

This is what I felt like when I was a kid. I was taken out of my parents house when I was fourteen. But I kept wanting to go back. I kept thinking that I’d be better and they’d like me better.

My parents were banned from family therapy because of poor behavior. The final blow to their time in family therapy was when they said the family is much better with me in the mental ward.

So I did therapy alone, and after a while I got that feeling again: That maybe now I would be the type of person my parents liked and we could all get along.

I lasted one day at my parents house before there was violence.

I tell you this to tell you where my comfort zone is. Right there.

And I tell you this to tell you that I blame myself for getting myself into this. I think I have poor relationship skills. I think I am probably only interested in sharing my feelings if I’m writing them.

I think my closest relationships in my life are with my kids and with you, the person reading my blog.

The hardest thing about leaving is that no one cares. My parents were so relieved when the police finally took me out of the house. The police said, “We’re going to have to take her now,” and my mom said, “Thank you so much! Please do that.” She wasn’t mean when she said it. She was genuinely relieved.

That’s how the Farmer will be, too. He broke up with me 50 times while we were dating. He loves the feeling of getting rid of me.

That’s why I can’t leave. I want someone to miss me.