Steampunk is the updated yet still-dated look of the Industrial Age. A recent Harvard Business Reivew has a timeline of business. I was surprised to remember that the Industrial Age was actually during the aftermath of the Civil War. The timeline also shows the Space Age, which, by the way, Restoration Hardware has interpreted in a genius way so as to be able to sell to interior design mavens with a fetish for mid-century modern.

Looking through the timeline, you start to notice that so often in history there is little awareness of the prevailing movement of the time. At the time of the Space Age, people were not aware that it was actually the Woodstock Age, when Baby Boomers began ramming their narcissistic view of self-actualization down American throats, as their Greatest Generation parents slipped in one last good deed, the Civil Rights Movement. (Here’s a great article about how Baby Boomers are selling out Generation Y. Read it before you defend baby boomers in the comments.)

Most recently in the timeline is the  Information Age. You know the story: the rise of computer, then the Internet, and now the rise of mobile everything. But I don’t think that’s the story, really. I think the story of our time is the personal responsibility. Here’s why:

1. You are responsible for your own health.
We used to put our health in the hands of our doctors because the doctor knew best. Today, there is too much information and too many decisions required in dealing with a medical problem for any single doctor to manage.

When my newborn son was diagnosed with hemifacial microsomia, there was a team of fifteen doctors assessing him. The person who ultimately handled the coordination of this data was me, his mom, with no medical training whatsoever.

But even for the healthy, a useful relationship with your doctor is quickly becoming an anachronism. Newsweek reports that the average amount of time a patient has to explain symptoms before being interrupted by a doctor is 23 seconds. Doctors are so overworked that they are seeing about 30% more patients than is recommended to ensure quality medical care. You are better off using the Internet to figure things out for yourself, which most of us do anyway, and then going to a doctor to double check.

2. You are responsible for your own retirement.
There is not going to be Social Security for you. I love the article about how the Baby Boomers have sold out the whole country so much that I’m going to link to it for the second time in this post. Right here. Because here’s a great quote about today’s politicians: “This isn’t conservatism. It’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby boom generation.”

There is also not going to be a company that gives you a gold watch and some sort of security blanket to go home with after 40 years of service. More likely is a pink slip after three-to-five years of service, over and over again, until you can’t work anymore. And there will be no children who will take you into their home when you get old. I know, there has not been this for a long time. There had been this practice, before Social Security and before pensions. But it’s unheard of now.

3. You are responsible for educating your children.
Public school began as a safe place for kids to go while their parents worked in factories. Today school has evolved into the best babysitting service in the world. But the truth is that your kids do not need to be in school to learn. Your kids were born knowing how to learn. Math? Yes, even math.

So we can no longer ship our kids off to school with impunity. It’s completely clear that individualized learning plans are best for kids, and there is no way that public education can afford that, yet it’s very easy for parents to provide it merely by providing food and shelter and love. Which means the education of your children is in your own hands. And, actually, it’s been there forever when you realize that the only part of education that matters is teaching grit and perseverance, and those are values that children learn from parents who model that behavior. Kids never learn that from memorizing facts to pass standardized tests.

4. You are responsible for your career.
I think the theme of this blog is personal responsibility for your career. Make sure you take care of your own career development. You have to keep your learning curve high. If people don’t like you, it’s probably your fault. If you have a bad boss, it’s probably your fault.

What I have found in my own career, and in the careers of people I coach, is that the more responsibility you take, the more you can affect change. If you blame outside forces for your problems, you have to wait for outside forces to fix things for you. Which means you have given up control over your own life.

The Age of Personal Responsibility is exciting. Because the more responsibility we take, the more control we have over our own happiness. And we are lucky to be living right now.

Fortune magazine has started reporting about family in corporate life.

We all know corporate jobs are messed up. Fortune magazine is a monument to how messed up corporate life really is. In November, Fortune wrote that the company that Sheryl Sandberg, a working mom, runs, has employees “on lockdown” and their kids come to the office to say goodnight before bed.

In December Fortune reported that to get his almost-top spot at GE, John Krenicki relocated his family 11 times while the kids were growing up. Working at GE requires the same type of sacrifice from a family that the US expects from military officers.

In January, Fortune profiled Wei Hopeman, from Citigroup (pictured above). She has one of the coolest jobs in the world — investing Citi’s money in startups in Asia. Here’s how she describes her life: “I have an apartment in San Francisco, but I usually stay in hotels in Palo Alto because I’m generally in the office 12 hours a day; no matter where I am, I’m almost never home.”

The workplace is in a war with family life right now. It’s not a question of balance or accommodation. If you want a big, serious job, you have to give up your family.

I never really noticed this stuff when I did not have kids. But once I made the goal to have a fun, exciting career that also accommodated kids, I started paying attention to everything related to my goal.

That key shift toward attention and focus pops up everywhere. Our instinct is to try to ignore what’s going wrong so it doesn’t bring us down all the time. But really, the key to improving what we don’t like in our lives is to pay attention to it. By paying attention we can’t help but make it better.

Here are a few examples I’ve noticed:

1. Careers
People who hire me for career coaching are invariably high performers. Even the people who got themselves stuck, or the people who have no idea what to do next, all have a common past: strong performances wherever they have been.

I realize that this is because people who are strong performers at work get lots of advice for how to manage their career.

2. Love life
At a point in my life when I had tons of disposable income but no boyfriend, I hired a feng shui consultant. My apartment had almost nothing in it, but I was curious. What would a feng shui expert advise? What differences could feng shui make?

She made tons of suggestions. Like, put something purple in my money corner.  But I noticed that the suggestions I paid the most attention to were the bedroom suggestions, because that’s the part of my life I wanted to change. I threw out old pillows. I changed the lighting. I added some pink. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg for what I did.

I am not sure that I believe that the feng shui got me my husband. But I do think my mental shift to paying attention to things that create a life of romance gave me the ability to find a guy.

Feng shui, like career consulting, reflects a commitment to focusing on what matters most during that time of your life.

3. Finances
My friend is investigating whether she should cancel a credit card to get a better one or if it’s not worth it because it’ll ding her credit score.

The first thing I thought to myself when she said that was, “Oh god, I have to check my credit score.”

This is why: People who know their credit score do better at managing their money. Not because you will somehow be a high earner if you know your score. It’s because people who pay attention to their money are better at handling their money.

I know this first-hand because I’m actually terrible at managing my money. I get away with it because I’m great at earning money.

When I met the Farmer, one of the first conversations we had was about money.

He told me he made $15,000 a year.

I couldn’t believe it. “I make that from one speech,” I told him.

“But you have no money,” he told me.

It was true. I have lived with no savings for the last fifteen years. In my defense, nearly half of the US lives paycheck to paycheck, and you’d be surprised how high the incomes go in the paycheck-to-paycheck world. Although surely I’m at the high end of it.

I realized, from watching the Farmer in action, that people who have a grip on their money don’t necessarily earn a lot, but they focus on what they have. People who don’t have a grip on their money choose to focus away from their spending.

I know this because I am acutely focused on earning. I am always hatching plans for new revenue streams.

So my point is that you can learn about yourself by seeing what you focus on day to day. That’s what you’re going to do well in. And the stuff you hate thinking about? That’s the part that will never improve.

I once interviewed Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School. She does research on social skills in the workplace. Midway through the interview, I started to panic and I asked her how I could tell if I have terrible social skills.

She told me that it’s nearly impossible to judge one’s own social skills. But there’s one good way: Measure the amount you care about your social skills. If you care, and think about ways to make them better on a daily basis, you probably have decent social skills.

This is true for most things in life: It doesn’t matter so much exactly what action you choose in working toward improvement, it just matters that you’re trying, with genuine intention. The common problem is not wrong action so much as it is no focus.

Now it’s spring, and the farm is incredible. There are baby animals everywhere.

The farmer is letting the piglets slip out of their pen. The piglets run all over the farm like they’re free-range chickens, and because the mom is stuck in the pen, the piglets always come back.

My son just used money he earned selling his pigs to buy two Alpacas. We are fascinated by the alpacas, the alpacas are fascinated by the piglets.

The boys spend tons of time outside, doing things that, had we lived in a city, I would have felt are way too dangerous, like cutting wood with an ax and walking through a whole herd of cattle to explore the creek. The boys spend a lot of time in the yard pulling stuff out of the garbage and turning it into forts.

Just when I was about to tell the boys to stop making a mess of the yard and stop taking stuff out of the garbage, a cat had her kittens in the fort. And the boys were so proud that they added a playroom to their fort so the kittens could learn to walk. Now they spend their days waiting for the mom to go get food so they hold the kittens.

It’s also a great time on the farm because we can let the goats out of their pens without worrying that they’ll eat all the crops. The goats are like dogs right now, following my son all around, and waiting for him like a good friend waits, while he goes in and out of buildings doing his chores.

I tell you all this to tell you how nice it is to be on the farm. I love the peacefulness of it and I love how high my learning curve is. I love how I can make a big difference with whatever I do. And when the Farmer needs help with a job, I feel important and useful doing it.

Life on the farm has all the components of a great job. Control over my hours, control over my workload, goals that are challenging but I can meet them, and a high learning curve. But the farm is not my job. I have tried, believe me. I’ve come up with 50 different business models to make the farm my job. But I can see that it’s not going to work.

The farm is not my job. It’s something I love right now. It’s something I’m really excited to learn about. But I can do that without getting paid. I do it for pleasure and because it’s fun to be passionate about something.

I have other work that I get paid for. My homeschooling blog, for example, is growing very fast, and already making me a good bit of money, and it’s an example of a way to keep my learning curve high doing something that earns me money.

Which is to say that there’s a wide range of things we are passionate about, and there’s a wide range of things we can make money doing. The trick is not to find the thing that allows us to earn the most money or the thing that we are most passionate about. The trick is to find the thing that combines passion and money and stick with it so you get great.

Just because I love the farm doesn’t mean my work has to involve the farm. And this is true for you, too, when you are picking your line of work. Often we feel there are are so many things we are passionate about that no career makes sense. Just pick one thing to do. And if that doesn’t work, then pick another. Making a choice and trying it is an important career skill. And choosing something practical, that people get paid well for, is an important life skill.

You are not a failure if you don’t do what you love for a living. You are a practical person who knows that no one can do the stuff they are passionate about if they are worrying about food and rent. Support yourself somehow first, and then explore your passions from there.

I love watching people lie. I know that I probably have the same feelings the liars do, the feeling of being stuck. I like to think about what I do when I have that feeling, how people cope with it, and how much pain we can handle before we become our worst selves.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about these lies and the feelings that provoke them:

1. The lie about expectations. 
Have you heard of Ashley Madison? It’s the site that caters to married people who want to cheat on their spouse. We could debate about the ethics of that business model (or this one), but I think Ashley Madison might have made up for their questionable ethics by using their data to provide one of the biggest insights to marriage problems that I’ve read in a while:

Guess which is the second most popular day of the year for women to sign up for Ashley Madison?

I’m leaving a blank spot for you to guess.

The second most popular day of the year for women to sign up for Ashley Madison is the day after Mother’s Day. That report was a major surprise to me.

But just think: Women want to be appreciated for being a mom. In a world where women have more power and more opportunities than ever before, what they want, still, is to be appreciated for where they are devoting their time and energy. Whatever a woman is doing—working long hours outside the home, staying at home with one kid and a nanny, or anything in between—the woman perceives that she is putting a large amount of her intellectual and emotional energy into parenting and she wants recognition for that. The outside world does not value parenting openly, it only values earning money. So it’s up to a spouse to recognize a parent for parenting.

When I coach people and they tell me they want to focus on work issues instead of relationship issues, I remind them that if you get a divorce, your career options shrink fast because you have to support two families.  Your earning power goes down and your power to control your own life goes down.

So Mother’s Day is really a career issue. If you want to keep your career options open, tell your spouse you appreciate her.

But the biggest lie in all of this is that women tell themselves Mother’s Day doesn’t matter. The reason men ignore Mother’s Day is because the women don’t say, “Mother’s Day is important and here’s what I want you to do.”  That’s fine. It’s fine to tell your spouse what you want.

This is true in most of life—tell everyone what you want from them. You’re much more likely to get it. And much less likely to have to lie about the decisions you make later.

2. The lie about inadequacy. 
It turns out that Scott Thompson, the new CEO of Yahoo, lied on his resume. That’s right. His degree is in accounting, but he added computer science, which is, of course, much more relevant to the high-flying jobs he’s held. Which goes to show that no one is immune to having feelings of inadequacy.

This is important to remember when you’re managing up. Making sure the people above you in your organization love you is probably the most important part of your career, because if you do great work but you annoy everyone, people won’t care that you do great work.

The key feature of managing up is finding your boss’s weakness. Many of you work for supremely confident types. But Thompson shows us that no one, really, is supremely confident. And while everyone wants help, not everyone asks for the help they need.

Thompson’s been lying on his resume for a long time. Which is, of course, how it goes with lying. You start the lie, when you think it’s a small, innocuous lie, but then you have to keep lying, and you never really know how big the lie will get. There’s a great children’s book about this topic, where the lie turns into a monster and follows the boy around.

3. The lie about fear.
I think a lot of people resist hearing what is true because they don’t want to have to face that they’re wrong. For example, people love to mock the idea of managing your personal brand. They say how stupid it is, and how transparently self-obsessed it is. But the truth is that people want to be able to find out about you easily, and the people who malign the idea of personal brand simply don’t want to take the time to help people find out about them. It requires learning to be good at something new and people don’t want to hear that they have to do that.

Homeschooling is another example of a truth people don’t want to hear. It’s so incredibly clear that the education reform movement favors individualized learning. And people pass over that information as if it’s impractical. But you can do whatever you want with your own kids. You can give your kids the opportunity to learn on their own, which is exactly what experts advocate that you do. It’s just that many people don’t want this to be true because it undermines how they planned on educating their kids. They don’t want to be wrong about what’s best.

The thing is, it’s okay for personal branding to be a must-have career skill and still you don’t have it. It’s okay for homeschooling to be definitely a better education for your kids and still you’re not doing it. It’s ok to be wrong. Admit you’re wrong and then consider a new choice.

Which brings me to plastic surgery. I was wrong about this. I looked at the research about good looks and drew the conclusion that since good looks give you an advantage in everything, everyone should get plastic surgery. But when I asked Gordon Patzer, the king of attractiveness research, about my theory, he said that in fact, plastic surgery does not make people better looking in other peoples’ eyes. You still are what you are to other people. Which means that plastic surgery is useless.

And, forget those self-esteem arguments as well. The Wall St. Journal reports that women who get plastic surgery are likely to have poorer body image than women who don’t get plastic surgery. And the plastic surgery does not help. Their poor body image persists.

Not that this information doesn’t stop me from obsessing about looks. And the photo up top is one of the 10,000 photos I’ve sent to Melissa to have her fix my outfit.  But now I know that getting a chin implant is like getting a salary increase, really: You are happy for awhile, and then you go back to whatever happiness level you are usually at. Salary doesn’t increase your baseline happiness and neither does plastic surgery.

So I was wrong. And I’m telling you this to let you know that it’s okay. Because the first step to finding the truth is to realize that it is okay to be wrong.

Photo by Roz Joseph c. 1970

It used to be that the reason people hated me was because I offended them. Poor social skills. I’m sure you can imagine, but if you can’t, here’s the post about how I spoke at a women in business blogging event and I offended everyone by telling them that their blogs sucked and how to fix them.

Maybe I should set up a coaching business where I tell people how to fix their blogs, but really, most people don’t want to know. It’s like going to couples therapy. It’s a lot of work. And there’s always the hope that great sex can make up for everything else. People strive to write the blog equivalent of great sex.

1. Understand your personal style for bad behavior.
Anyway, the way I offend people today is different. Because I’m much more conscious of my lousy social skills, and I’m always trying hard to compensate for them. So my new way to offend people is to have terrible followthrough.

In case you are wondering how bad it is to have terrible followthrough, it’s one of the five most damaging deficits you can have in the workplace.

Anyway, here’s a list of what I do with my life:

• Earn $150,000 a year from career coaching, speaking and ads on my blog.
• Homeschool two boys ages six and nine.
• Drive eight hours to Chicago round-trip once or twice a week for my son’s cello lessons.
• Go to the gym almost every day.
• Manage a vegetable garden that allows us to eat completely off the farm from June to September.

Do you want to know how I do it? I miss stuff. Not the stuff you are thinking. I mean, I miss that, too. Like, I rarely see my friends, I don’t go to movies or out to dinner. I don’t go shopping.

2. Don’t say you’re sorry. That gets old. Take action instead.
But I also miss stuff  like Chris Guillebeau had a book coming out, and he asked me to endorse it. I know Chris, and I like his work, and he’s a fun guy. So I wanted to help. I carried his manuscript around with me for months. During those months, Chris sent me two followup emails asking if I was still doing it. They were really nice emails. I sent back emails saying “Yes, of course, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, okay next week.”

Also during that time, the Farmer had a chance to read the manuscript.

“Did you read the book by Chris Gillebeau?” he asked.

I said, “Do you think that’s how you pronounce his name? I don’t think it is.”

He said, “So you didn’t read the book, right?”

“Did you like it?”

“Yeah. It’s good. You should read it. “

I didn’t read it. But then Chris sent me a copy when it was done, with endorsements that included, of course:  A list of all the people who had their shit together. And I read the book, and here’s my endorsement: The $100 Startup is a book that shows you there is nothing keeping you from launching your own company. (It’s a great book to give to all the people who talk about how they are entrepreneurs but never do anything.)

3. Do unexpected favors to make people forget about unexpected rudeness.
Another thing: I missed a conference. I was supposed to give this talk in Madison. Melissa says the reason I didn’t go was because I wasn’t getting paid. This might be true.  I know that this whole blog is a diatribe on how money doesn’t make you happy. But money makes me motivated.

So this was a really small thing about giving writers advice on being writers and I wasn’t getting paid, and I missed it. Not that I didn’t have a good reason. We realized that our siding was falling off in pieces and it is asbestos (I always wondered why our siding didn’t look like any siding I had ever seen) and then when the guy came he told us that we had asbestos all over the pipes in the basement and the cats were clawing at it and the air was totally infested.

I think that’s the real reason the farmer is always coughing, and it’s not really allergies. I told him that and it just made him freak out more because I’ll tell you what farmers hate to do: spend any money on the house. There are barns to maintain and fences to build. Those fences are expensive.

So the Farmer was having a fit over having to spend money on the house and I was having a fit that the kids had been in the basement playing for two years and they were going to die before me and there is no more terrible thing in the world than watching a kid die and there were hazmat guys climbing all over our house and I forgot to go to the writer’s thing.

It’s particularly bad because the writer’s thing was in Madison and I worry that people in Madison don’t like me. I worry that they won’t do playdates with my kids because of this blog and I also worry that they just think I’m a nutcase. I’m not going to link to nutcase. You can think of a lot of appropriate links, I’m sure. But maybe there’s someone reading who lives in Madison who came to my blog because they heard I’m really fun and interesting. I don’t want to give them any bad ideas.

Wait. Here’s a link for fun and interesting.

So I called this hazmat guy in Madison to come ASAP, because I’m from NYC and everything for me is ASAP even though I expressly moved to rural America to stop being the ASAP type.

I called him and he came right away. Advanced Health & Safety. That’s the company.   The guy’s name is Bob Stigsell.  I’m putting his name here so it’s free advertising for him. This is a way to get people in Madison to like me.

So look, if there is anyone who was planning on going to my talk about how to make money being a writer—or whatever the talk topic was, I can’t totally remember—but if you were supposed to see me, and you’re disappointed, you can just email me and I’ll set up a time to talk with you. Actually, I’ll set up a time to talk with anyone about how I’m making money being a writer. I’m great at doing that. But if you were’t signed up for the conference you have to pay me my regular consulting fee. (And, what do you think? Would that count as making money being a writer or is that something else?)

4. If your bad behavior is toward yourself, be judicious with second chances.
Finally in my list of things I messed up because I am doing too much is my essay about why eating meat is ethical. That’s right. The New York Times had a contest for who could write the best essay on that topic. Melissa sent me the info and said I should enter.

I thought: She’s right. And I wrote my essay on the spot and I sent it to her.

She wrote back, “I love it. You’ll totally win.”

I thought, “Yeah. She’s right. I’ll totally win.” I thought how I should start entering contests again. I used to do that when I thought I was going to be the female version of Philip Roth but now I just write blog posts and I think I’m a winner if I get more than 100 comments.

Okay. So I didn’t send in my essay. I decided I would hold onto the essay for a few days while I figure out how to replace the part about killing kittens. (We do that. Kill kittens. I wasn’t sure if it really had a place in the winning essay about how eating animals is ethical.)

But then I forgot to send in the essay. I noticed one day while I was supposedly catching up on stuff. But really you can’t catch up on stuff that is past. So I was just sulking, really, and then Jeanenne came into the room and said, “Do you want this sweater washed or dry cleaned?”

And I said, “Whatever. It’s clean just put it away. Don’t talk to me.”

I am so disappointed that I sent my essay in late. I was thinking maybe they would let me be late. I was only a day late. But the contest is in the ethics column. And The Ethicist can’t really let me cheat on the contest.

So I am fixing this, too. I am publishing the essay myself. Here. You can read my winning essay for The New York Times contest on why it’s ethical to eat meat.

And I’m wearing my sweater anyway. I’m pretending it’s not dirty. And it seems that people are pretending right along with me.

In the airport a fight attendant said to my six-year-old son, “Where are you going today?”

He said, “California.”

She said, “You’re a lucky boy!”

He said, “Actually, I’m really tired of going to airports with my mom.”

This is because I’ve been taking him on all my business trips. And he is learning something important about business travel: It’s really, really hard to do a lot of it, and you need a strategy. To be sure, there are people who travel almost every day of the year. I think they’re nuts. They don’t have a life. I’m talking about people who travel two or three times a month, which I’ve done, on and off, for a long time. Those trips take a toll, and you need a plan to keep yourself sane.

1. No sightseeing.
Forget museums and other tourist hotspots. If you travel once a year, sightseeing is exciting. If you travel enough to wonder if your home is really your home, then you need to keep a semblance of routine so you feel like you do have some sort of life outside of work. The trick, when you’re traveling a lot for business, is to stay sane in the midst of constant new surroundings, not to pile new stuff on top of new.

I try to stay on one time zone the whole trip, eat the same foods each day, wake up the same time each morning, and go to the gym. I book hotels according to how good the gym is. I used to book private Pilates lessons if I was missing my Pilates lesson at home. Now I book cello lessons for my son if we are gone for one or more lessons.

2. Buy two of everything. 
Duplicate sets of clothes means that you can stay packed all the time. Packing and unpacking constantly is really annoying if you travel for business. It’s just sort of a way to extend the trip even longer because the transition times are longer. And forgetting stuff on the trip makes the trip hell. If you have duplicates you avoid all these problems. Bonus: the second set of this stuff is usually tax deductible because you wouldn’t have bought it if you weren’t traveling for work.

Another thing you can do with the duplicate stuff is leave it in a place you go to a lot. I go to NYC a lot, so my son keeps a skateboard, helmet and pads at my friend’s apartment. That way he can maintain his skating routine without having to schlep the equipment back and forth.

3. Meet a friend.
I’m going to tell you about the time I spoke at the Natural Products Expo.

First, you should always look at the list of people who will be at the show and figure out who you want to meet. You should contact those people beforehand to ensure that you get to meet them. I did not do this. But my friend, Heather Stouffer, did, and she texted me.

I said to my son, “Let’s go visit my friend!”

Heather is the CEO of Mom Made Foods. She is the person who gave me tons of coaching on how to launch a food business, when I was going to sell goat cheese. In fact, she was so generous with her time and information that I decided I’d rather die than deal with the shipping issues surrounding perishable food.

My son did taste tests while we talked.

It’s draining to meet all new people all the time, and I’m always careful to limit interactions with people I don’t know. But seeing a friend is different. Tom Rath’s research at Gallup shows that if we have a friend at the office, it’s almost impossible to hate our work. I have found that when traveling, if I have a friend in that city to meet up with, it’s almost impossible to hate that day of travel.

4. Be a tyrant about your hotel choice.
When you travel, the fewer surprises the better. So you should pick a hotel chain and stick with it. When I had really well funded companies, I stayed at a Westin hotel wherever I went. The beds were so fluffy and cozy. Staying at a high-end hotel can make you feel a little better about missing out on your whole life back home. Which is why companies are often willing to spring for the higher hotel rate.

When I travel for speaking engagements, I have less control over the hotel, but I always end up in a good one because it’s where the conference is. When I stayed in Las Vegas, I was at the Cosmopolitan. With my son, of course. A nice hotel in Vegas means naked women all over the walls, condoms all over our room, and casinos at breakfast.

Which reminds me that fun stuff you don’t usually do, you should save for home. Stuff is fun when it’s a break from your routine. Stuff is not fun if it’s adding to the already unpredictable and tenuous life of a constant traveler. That includes shopping, movies, and even gambling. You don’t need to gamble at a casino. You can do it at sites like this.

So don’t pick a hotel because it’s fun. Pick a hotel because it allows you to create more stability during your travel life.

5. Avoid the Red Eye at all costs.
It’s so enticing to book a Red Eye. When you look at the landing time it looks like you almost won a free day. And on top of that, companies will almost always upgrade you to first class if you take the Red Eye.

But there’s a reason for that: The Red Eye is impossible to sleep on without drugging yourself, and you are basically losing a night of sleep in order to gain a day of work. So it’s a great bargain for your worklife at a terrible cost for your personal life. Every time I get home from  the Red Eye I’m a grouch, and I have to sleep in the middle of the day, and I vow to never do it again.

But of course, I do book the Red Eye again. And here’s what happened last time I booked the Red Eye, and we were standing in line to board a plane at 11:50 pm:

The novel Fifty Shades of Grey is selling faster than a Harry Potter book right now. The book is about sexual domination in a contemporary setting, including the career woman who has everything, including a hot, successful boyfriend.

The big news is that we have enough data to show that the majority of women buying Fifty Shades of Gray are in their 20s and 30s living in urban areas, according to the publisher’s data, and the Atlantic. To be clear, these women are incredibly powerful. In urban areas, more women than men graduate college, women out earn men in their 20s, and we are almost to the point where women in their 30s are outnumbering men as breadwinners. Which means that it is the women who have tons of power who are also having tons of rape fantasies.

None of this should surprise you, because there is a tradition of sexual domination literature being popular with women. For example, The Story of O is a college reading list mainstay for women reading way off the syllabus. And rape fantasies have such a long history of being shockingly ubiquitous among women that we have a euphemism invented by the queasy: fantasies of sexual submission.

So we know that the majority of women who read this blog have a college degree, live in a urban setting, and are in their 20s and 30s, presumably out earning men, if not the men in their immediate surroundings, then at least the men in their theoretical surroundings. Which means that the majority of women who read this blog have lots of power in their lives and also have lots of rape fantasies.

Katie Roiphe has a phenomenal article in Newsweek about why this type of  woman fantasizes about sexual domination. She writes that women must be desperate to read rape fantasies because they are reading Shades of Grey: “Millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level. If you are willing to slog through sentences like ‘In spite of my poignant sadness, I laugh,’ you must really, really want to get to the submissive sex scene.”

So I am admitting now that I have rape fantasies, too. I have known since I was in college that this is not weird because I was a girl who read everything, and I read so much about rape fantasies that by the time I was teaching creative writing at Boston University I had to make announcements at the beginning of my course that students could not write about masturbation or rape fantasies because it was so common in an intro creative writing class and also so difficult to write well.

There’s something really liberating about being able to own the rape fantasy. First of all, it reflects a lot of self knowledge. It reflects that you know that your fantasies are just fantasies and it’s okay to have them. It reflects that you do not feel the need to have all PC thoughts all the time in order to be an intelligent, educated person. And it reflects the knowledge that you do not lose your power by harboring fantasies of powerlessness—your power is much more stable, and hard-won than that.

If you can do all that, then other things become easy.

For example, it’s easy, then, to also harbor the fantasy of telling everyone at the cocktail party to fuck off when they ask you what you do and you are doing nothing because you know you’re going to get pregnant in four months and you don’t want to get a job and then leave it in a year. Because let me assure you that this is what most women want to do: work part-time after they have a baby. So of course they don’t want to hunt for a full-time job right before they have a baby.

It also becomes okay to say that you are only dating men who earn a lot of money. Because I simply don’t believe that women harbor the fantasy of being responsible for putting food on the table for their family. Women do it because it’s practical. They fall in love with the intoxicating nature of earning money, or they fall in love with a guy who is terrible at earning money. But the number of women who want a full-time, high-powered job is very slim.

Honestly, it’s easier for me to admit that I have rape fantasies than it is for me to admit that I wanted to marry a guy who makes a ton of money. If nothing else, I have control over both, and I’m only getting what I want for one of them. I have a huge collection of rape fantasy books leftover from when I was too scared to tell the guy I’m with what my fantasies are. And I have a mate who is unfazed by the fantasies: he’s heard it before.

But I did not get the guy who earns more than I do. I tried, but mostly what happened is that I hated those guys and when they asked me out on a third date, I wrote blog posts instead.

Admitting to rape fantasies is so liberating because now I can admit to all the other un-PC things I’m feeling. I want to stay home with my kids because of guilt and I don’t care. I think it’s guilt built into my DNA and I’m not going to fight it.

And I want someone to take care of me and I don’t care if you know. Sure, I like that I can take care of myself. But most educated, city-raised women can take care of themselves and their kids. It’s not that difficult. Finding a guy who will take care of me is much harder.

I’m probably not going to read Fifty Shades of Gray, because, as an ex-creative writing instructor, I need to tell you that Elizabeth McNeil and Marquis de Sade are much stronger writers of the literary rape scene.  But I am done having closeted fantasies. I don’t want to be told by the feminists what’s okay for me to want. I am done hiding what I really want because what is really liberating is for women to be able to want whatever we want.

Last month I gave a speech at the Natural Products Expo in California, and I took my son with me. Everyone’s an entrepreneur in my family, and my son’s first thought was that this would be a good way to expand his egg business. He knows the eggs he gets from our chicken coop garner a high price from natural food types.

“This isn’t where you sell regular food,” I tell him. “This is more like a convention for processed natural food. People can charge more money for processing eggs than selling just the eggs.”

“Maybe someone can process my eggs,” he suggested.

So I encouraged him to look around for someone to partner with who could process his eggs.

Mostly, though, he just found a lot of free samples.

But it was great practice for him. Because the biggest barrier to having your own company is finding a great partner. This is true for my son, and it’s true for you. Really. You probably think getting your business off the ground is more complicated, but it’s not.

Let’s say you don’t have an idea. You just need to find an idea person. (Look for an ENTP.) Let’s say you have a million ideas, but you never act on any of them. Partner with someone who is phenomenal at getting things done, day in and day out. (Find an INTJ) Maybe you already wrote the code, but you can’t figure out how to market the software. You need someone who understands what people want and how to sell it to them. (Look for an ENFJ.)

See how it works?

That said, I am not a big fan of the idea that everyone should run their own business. It’s simply not true. Running your own business is very risky and makes each day full of disorder and uncertainty. Also, running your own business usually puts your family on the line.

That said, the majority of people say they want to start their own businesses. What they think they want is to work for themselves. The benefits, of course, are clear. You don’t get fired, you work whatever hours you want and starting your own business is the only path to becoming a gazillionaire.

So here’s a plan for overcoming the biggest hurdle to being an entrepreneur.

1. Know your shortcomings.
An extremely wide range of personality types are able to be successful entrepreneurs. Research from Saras Sarasvathy at Darden School of Business found that the single, common thread among successful entrepreneurs is their ability to compensate for their weaknesses by finding the right people to fill in the gaps.

So, you need to really know yourself. It’s the only way to understand your gaps. The process of knowing yourself is difficult. Take the Myers Briggs. You’ll probably be disappointed  but the good news is that there is no weakness that cannot be overcome with a good partner.

2. Grow your network.
I shouldn’t even need to tell you this, but people hate networking, so I have to say this. You should know, by the way, that introverts hate networking for sure, but everyone hates networking too.

Look, imagine you are the hot ex-cheerleader with an Ivy League degree and a six-figure salary. You still have to meet new people, right? And it sucks because all the men hit on you, so all the women hate you, and it’s difficult to find someone who could actually help you because you are performing at a level that’s much higher than most people.

See? Even the person who you’d think would adore networking actually thinks it’s a pain.

But you have to do it in order to have a roster of people to call on to help you fill in for your weaknesses. The key people in your network, according to the LinkedIn strategy department (which is from ancient times, when people looked at LinkedIn and asked what the purpose of the site was) you need 30 people who significantly different than you are—as in, not in your close circle, not in your industry, not your Myers Briggs type.

Finding those people is hard work, which is why entrepreneurs spend a lot of time networking. There are lists of startups  that help founders find co-founders for their startups, but you still have to network. There’s no way around that.

3. Typecast yourself.
It’s not enough to know the person who can be a great partner for you. You have to be able to attract that person. Of course, you should go after a superstar, or something who is rising to that position. And the best way to attract these people is to differentiate yourself. You want to attract someone who has a special quality that you need, so you have to show the special quality you bring.

It’s harder than you think. You have to typecast yourself.

Ten years ago business schools started publishing research that the same rules of Hollywood apply to the workplace, and you will be more successful in work if you tell people what you do not do. You cannot be a star performer at everything, so if you don’t specialize then you can’t be a star performer at anything. You have to specialize to be a star at work.

Here’s a great example of Scarlett Johansson doing just that. TMZ reports that a sex shop near the US-Mexican border used her image on their business card without her permission.

You might expect a response from an A-Lister to someone stealing their image is to have no comment. Because it happens all the time and who cares?

But watch what Johansson does: “I actually have not played that many sexy characters!  . . .the characters I play aren’t really traditionally sexy, I don’t think. I think it’s probably a reaction to the fact that I’m curvy and confident about it, maybe.” She can’t be a “sexy vixen” because it’s a cliché and also because she will be unemployable as she ages. But non-traditionally sexy, that’s a good one. That gives her some leeway. And “curvy and confident” makes her almost sound like a plus-sized model rather than a gorgeous Hollywood icon.

You need to be like that too, of course. Every time someone asks you “What do you do?” you need to reinforce your genre and your differentiator.

If you take these three steps, and take them seriously, you’ll be well on your way to having your own business. But during this process you are likely to discover that you don’t really want to run your own business. Are you an ISTJ? You could start a business. Anyone can start a business. But it’s likely that you’ll be happier being at an office that has a system and has rules and pays you to keep things in order.

The good news is that these three steps make everyone’s worklife better. Because if you don’t want to run your own business, you still need to stay employable. In fact, you need more than ever to stay employable if you don’t want to make your own company. And the best way to stay employable is very similar to the best way to be an entrepreneur. So there’s no getting around the work of doing these three things: know yourself, know other people, and define who you are so other people understand your value.

Sheryl Sandberg, the woman who runs Facebook,  has said that the most important career choice you’ll make is who you marry.

I have to agree with this statement. Here’s why:

If you marry someone with a big career and you want to have a big career you have to find that rare mate who can treat you as an equal, even when your career needs to come first. These are very tough marriages to hold together because there is a constant, never-ending re-balancing of priorities and power between spouses.

If you marry a breadwinner who expects their career to come first, then things will probably only work if you can support that. Even if you have a career of your own.  This is the easiest marriage to hold together (if any marriage can be called easy) as long as the man is the breadwinner.

If you marry someone who is terrible at earning money, or someone who is good at earning money but doesn’t want to, then you will have to take responsibility for earning the money.

In each of these cases, your career decisions are largely determined by who you choose as your mate.

If the idea of being in a long-term, committed relationship makes you sick, you should stop reading now, and click over to Beatrice de Guigne’s stunning parody of wedding photography, featuring Barbie and Ken. If you still hold out hope for marriage, here are my five favorite ways to get a spouse:

1. Network.
Getting a spouse is the first big test of your networking abilities. If you’re really well networked, like George Percy, then you can look around at who you know and who your friends know and pick someone.

If you go the networking route, the same rules of networking for a getting a job apply to networking to get a spouse. Which means that the most valuable people in your network are people who you are not that close to because those people will likely know a bunch of people who you don’t already know.

This seems like a good time to tell the story of how my brother met his wife. He came to visit me at college, and it was a weekend when there was a dance. And it turned out that my date was gay, and because I was so stupid about dating I was a) the only person in the school who didn’t know and b) too shy to cancel the date.

I asked my brother to come, to save me, but he needed a date. So I asked a woman in my suite who I had recently gotten to know.

The dance sucked, I couldn’t find my brother, and when I came home, he was making out with the woman in my entrance way. I remember standing there, stunned, and then saying: “What are you guys doing?”

2. Try online dating sites.
That was before dating sites. Today dating sites make things easier, for the lucky 23% of people who can get dating sites to pan out.

Most dating sites specialize. ScientificMatch matches you based on your DNA. Salon is for intellectuals. OK Cupid is more Jewish than JDate. JDate is rife with intellectual snobs and eastern-seaboard snobs who figure they can sort for their demographic by sorting for Jews.

Feeling frustrated and ripped off? Luvia specializes in people who want a better payment fee structure for online dating. Really. The founder of Luvia, Ravi, says: “There’s no monthly fee or any premium services fee. And registration is totally free. Luvia.com is very economical because  we charge based on usage.”

3. Use a headhunter.
When I was thirty and not married and starting to panic, I hired a headhunter.

Here’s why: I was thirty, I had just launched my second startup after exiting the first one, and I was a former professional beach volleyball player. I knew I was a good catch, but I had no time or patience for dating.

The headhunter charged me $10,000 and for that, she taught me how you pick a husband. She told me you only get what you are worth. She told me that I’m an eight so I can get an eight.

Then she told me I could give her three criteria and she’d meet them.

First, I picked good looking, rich, and Jewish. She set me up with the only Jewish Calvin Klein model. I mean, maybe there were two, but it’s hard to believe there are two Jewish men as shallow as this guy was. Really. I think their moms wouldn’t allow it.

So I swapped rich for smart. And I got a screenwriter. Unemployed, of course. After all, I was in LA.

I knew I needed criteria to wipe out the screenwriters. That’s important in LA, because everyone’s a screenwriter. Even the homeless. Actually, especially the homeless.

I spent a lot of time developing a perfect list of three things, and I came up with Jewish, good looking and great at what he does. I thought this last one would be sneaky because you probably are smart and rich if you are great at what you do.

These guys were right up my alley—the type I was used to hanging out with. At work. So I had a hard time keeping dating talk to dating topics and almost all those dates turned into business meetings.

Just when the headhunter was getting frustrated with me, my ex-boyfriend told me he was in LA and asked if I wanted to get together for sex. I said, Okay, if we get married. He said okay. He bought me a ring from the LA County museum, on the way to my apartment.

We had sex. It seemed right because he was good-looking, Jewish, and great at what he did. (He was a video artist. One day I will spew my wide-ranging knowledge of video art on this blog.)

4. Go to therapy.
Hiring the headhunter was like going to therapy. You know, those fairy tales about having three wishes aren’t really about the wishes. They’re about learning what’s important to you. (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble is a fun, contemporary take on this story.) The fairy tales are about the power of self-knowledge, and how hard it is to come by.

Which is really what dating is all about. You have to give stuff up to get married. Picking a spouse is a lot like picking a location—it’s not about what you get, it’s about what you give up. You have to be really clear on what you are not willing to give up—because you’ll probably be giving up everything else. You have to assume you are. And it’s hard.

Most of adult life is about admitting what you will not be able to have or be able to do. Marriage is no exception. If you can’t accept that, going to therapy can help—you get stuck otherwise. Which wouldn’t be so bad if you don’t want kids. But stalled dating under the tick-tock of a biological clock is no good for anyone.

5. Compromise your career.
It’s true that who you marry is your most important career decision. But it’s also your most important financial decision, your most important parenting decision, and on and on. No one ever says that they knew what they were getting when they picked their spouse. Twenty years down the line, everyone is surprised.

So the choice is impossible to perfect because the information you have about your options is so poor. People change, and people don’t know who they are so they can’t disclose who they are. And life before kids does not resemble life with kids, so how do you even know how the person will react when the kids come?

It’s hubris to say this does not apply to you.

But of all the things that spouses affect, and with all the things you have to compromise in order to hold a marriage together, a career seems like a small price to pay.

People who are married are happier than people who are not. And I think it’s mostly that people are happier when they put the requirements of being in a committed relationship ahead of the other aspects of their life. And a career would be the first thing I’d tell you to give up. You can get a lot more from loving and being loved.

You do not need to have a life full of passion. What is that life, anyway?

You probably don’t even know what passion is. But if you really thought about what you were aiming for when you talk about passion and careers, eventually you’d get to the idea of engagement.

This is not a controversial thought: that you would want to be engaged in your work. Engagement is one of the most important aspects of your worklife. Almost every study about what makes people happy at work comes down to engagement.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the book Flow, transformed the idea of work passion to be the idea of engagement. The work we do leading up to engagement is just practice time until we are so proficient at what we’re doing that we enter the state of flow, which is such a high level of engagement that we don’t even notice time passing.

Getting to the state of flow requires years and years of practice at a single thing so that work is so much a part of us that we can get to the high level of flow. (As I write this post, I think to myself that I should be there with writing, and I can get there sometimes, but then every time I think, “Am I there?” and I stumble. So part of flow is not thinking.)

Sonja Lyubomirsky talks about workplace engagement as a result of having control over one’s time and being able to make people feel good. Janitors, she finds, are happiest at work because they can control their workday and they can see immediately how they are helping people. Lawyers, by contrast, are the most universally unhappy, because they have little control over their hours and they are generally dealing with people who hate that they have to hire a lawyer, whatever the lawyer is doing.

Lyubomirsky’s research is freeing because she finds that happiness comes from the most simple lives, rather than the lives with big, complicated, impressive careers. (You can read her book, The How of Happiness to find out why I realized that it’s hopeless for me to be happy—I relish the complications of life too much. But there’s still hope for me in the engagement arena.)

When you say you want to do something you’re passionate about, you really mean, when you think about it, that you want to do something that is right for you. Something that is fulfilling and feels like the thing you should be doing with your life.

Ironically, you can prepare kids for this adult-life hurdle by letting them play unlimited video games. Because video games are engaging, challenging, and social. This is why I took my kids out of school. So they could learn how to find their own paths to engagement.

However schools train kids to subdue their own drive in order to pass required tests. Then we toss those kids into the adult world and tell them to do what they are passionate about. So you need to bridge the gap between what you learn in school to pass tests and what you need to learn about yourself to have a good adult life. This comes down to Myers Briggs.

So here’s the link to a fast, free Myers Briggs test for the millionth time. And that site will get 5000 visitors from my blog post. I am frustrated that I do not have a Myers Briggs test on my own site that I can link people to. If anyone is qualified and able to build me a test for my site, please email me. I’m sick of sending these people traffic. And anyway, they haven’t even ever sent me a thank you email, and that, after all, is one of the ways that I feel good about my work.

So go take the test. You will be one of sixteen personality types. Only two or three types of personalities are made for saving starving babies in Sudan, and rescuing crime victims from chains in dark basements. Most people would be psychologically destroyed doing that kind of work. Most of us need stability and order and predictability in our lives. Some of us need to control other people. Some of us need to be alone all the time. All of these types of people should not be doing that traditionally meaningful, passion-filled work of saving lives.

You will find, after discovering your personality type, that you are well suited for a particular type of work. It might not be what your dad wanted, or what your wife wants, or what fits your idea of who you wish you were. But if you do the work that meets the core needs of your personality type, you will feel passion. Because you will be engaged in your work. If you refuse to pay heed to your core personality, you will always feel that you’re searching for something elusive in your career.

Are you an ISTP? You need to use your hands to make things. Are you an ENTJ? You need to lead people. Are you an INTJ? You’ll go nuts if you don’t get something done every day. Are you an INFP? You’ll go nuts if you have to get something done every day.

Figure out what you need in your life to be fulfilled. Find that work. Then, as long as you have control over your hours and you can see how you help people, you will feel good about your work. And you know what happens when people feel good in their work? They stop asking themselves bullshit questions about what they are passionate about.