I tell Now Magazine (I think it’s basically People magazine for the UK audience) to call back after I got the kids off to school. I ask my housemanager to come early because I can't handle the sleep deprivation and the early-morning interviews and school lunches all in one morning.

I block out the morning to write a thousand-word essay for the Guardian to justify tweeting about my miscarriage. Which the Guardian wants done in the next 20 hours.

Now magazine wants to know if they can send a photographer to take a photo of my kids.

No.

Or the Farmer?

No.

What about if their faces are blurred?

No. (But this at least makes the Farmer laugh.)

The Today show called Tuesday to see if I could be on the show on Thursday. I said yes. They call in between the Guardian and Now magazine to ask if I can fly there.

The first thing I think is that my kids were so sad that I was not taking them to school as usual that I promised to pick them up after school, and I don’t want to break the promise.

The only reasonable flight to NYC is at 3:08. I decide that the only thing to do is take my kids with me. I can’t bear to simply be gone when they come home from school. I did that so much last year. I don’t want to do that anymore.

So I tell the Today Show that I can make it only if they will fly my kids and the nanny with me. And pay for two hotel rooms.

The Today Show says yes. They start booking tickets. I finish interviews and the nanny starts packing. She calls the school to get the kids ready to leave early. She cancels violin lessons and cello lessons and a reading tutor.

I call the Farmer to offer him one last chance to go with us. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t take the offer seriously because it is so far from anything he’d ever do. He says he can’t believe I’m taking the kids on a trip again when the last business trip I took them on turned out so bad that the police came.

He has a point, but I tell him that I’m taking the nanny along this time.

Then the new CEO of Brazen Careerist calls. He’s concerned. I have given a one-hour interview with a tabloid that was not recorded and it’s being taken out of context all over the UK.

So we have a two-hour phone call about the Brazen Careerist brand. Should it be tied to me? Is miscarriage a workplace issue? What drives people to sign up at Brazen Careerist anyway?

Wait. Can you just go sign up at the site right now so the CEO can see that a post like this does not hurt the brand and I should just write what I want on my blog?

Okay. So the nanny is decked-out in black, with blown-out blond hair, and she almost looks a little New-York-y for her first-ever visit there, when the Today show calls to say they need to move me to Saturday.

Really?

This is what I thought: Is there enough time for me to get really drunk on junk wine in the fridge before I have to go pick up the kids?

I say no to Saturday.

Later, I get a death threat. This is not new. I have been getting death threats all month but today’s death threats are different. They are from the UK, and then from the Australian Christian Coalition. No kidding. Three calls in a row.

This all might be the end of me catering to mainstream media. But. Wait. I’m so happy to be in Inc magazine this month where Max Chafkin wrote a great list of top bloggers. And Max was so easy to deal with. He scheduled a call. We had a nice conversation. And he wrote an intelligent article.  He’s so good, and considerate that he’s almost like a blogger.

But for now, I’m exhausted. And I am thinking that dealing with mainstream media just isn’t worth it. I get my own story out, the way I want it, on my blog. I have a smart, engaged audience that is fun to talk to and, when there’s something really good, they tell their smart, thoughtful friends. I don’t think I need mainstream media. And I know I don’t need the ridiculous way they've been talking with me.

(Hi, Penelope Trunk? This is Steve from the early show –

What? What early show?

It's the morning show on CBS.

Oh.

Can you tell me how you justify your tweet?

What?

Just quickly. I’m going into our 4pm meeting and I need a summary of your position.)

So, mainstream media, here's my position. More than feeling compelled to justify myself to your audience, I feel compelled to protect my schedule and my family from your intrusive calls and seemingly random deadlines. I feel an urgent need to separate a sane online conversation about women at work from an insane media that is doing exactly what destroys women at work: Making it extremely difficult for me to have a manageable schedule for parenting.

Wait. You think of one, now. Quick. Just any one…

So I thought of a time:  it was in my grandparents’ huge yard with fruit trees and flower gardens and grass for running. And it was so peaceful.

What you remember as really nice tells you something about where you belong. Whatever you thought of, learn something from that.

Where I belong is in nature. And in quiet. When I lived in New York City, I spent most of my time in Central Park and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Most people who live in New York City say they spend a lot of time in Central Park. I almost lived there. I thought I would die if I didn’t go there each day. (Wait. Here's a test to see if you belong in New York City. I definitely don't.)

When I drove up to the farm, the first time, I knew I belonged there. I think I fell in love with the farmer that second. And I saw my whole life as the process of coming to grips with the fact that I am not as fast and cool and cutting edge as I wish I were. I do not belong in a city.

So you’d think, now that I’m marrying the farmer, I’d finally get my farm. But I don’t. Farm land is not like any other possession in the world. Laws of marriage and property and value do not apply. We went to a lawyer to get a prenuptial agreement, and it turns out that it’s not marital property. Instead, it’s everyone’s security, and everyone’s life long dream, and everyone’s connection to the earth.

So maybe I will not get to live on this farm. It’s ironic, because when the farmer first started seeing me, he wouldn’t really do it unless I agreed that I could come live on the farm. And I said yes, I could, way before I really thought I could, because I wanted to be with him so badly.

Now I love the farm. But maybe, the farmer will have to buy different land. It’s not clear. Surely, I will love whatever land we live on, because it will always be a farm. But I really love this farm. It’s where I fell in love with the farmer, and the country, and where my kids looked happier than they have been in years.

I’ve never posted a photo of the farm because I am scared to want it. I’m scared to want to live there because I can’t really control if I live there. It’s between the farmer and his parents. But today, I’m posting a picture. Because part of coping with adult life is allowing yourself to want something even if you are not sure you’ll get it.

So many of the questions I get from people are questions they answer themselves, in the very email where they ask the question. They ask if it’s okay to want what they want because they’re so scared to want it: A book, a blog, a job change, lots of money, less money. It’s scary to want things in life. But if you don’t know what you want, you can’t even know which way to move.

The trick is to admit what we want, even if we are scared we won’t get it. We can only be who we are. And if we are disappointed, later on, well. I guess that’s just part of being a grown up and knowing what we want.

So. This is what I want. To live here, on this farm.

That’s appalling. Being a non-profit is no excuse for treating people poorly. And it’s not just benefits—It’s pay, too. Paying way below a living wage is elitist—as if working in a nonprofit is a rich kids’ playground that your parents fund.

Luckily, the non-profit world is changing. The difference between not-for-profit and for profit is becoming more and more artificial.

When a business is deciding whether to be for-profit or not-for-profit, they are thinking about what is the most efficient way to meet their goals. For example, the Gates Foundation was established to get the money out of the hands of one family and give it to people who can change the world with the money. They do not want to make a profit, so they put all the money they make back into the Foundation.

Merck, on the other hand, is changing the world by curing diseases, but they need to create a profit in order to keep their stock price up and pass money on to shareholders.

Both companies are solving huge health problems. Both companies have equal capacity to get you, an employee, very close or relatively far from the act of saving a life. The only difference between the organizations is the financial structure.

So, here is a new way to think about careers in the non-profit sector:

1. It’s small minded to think you can only do good in a non-profit.
It's really dangerous to think there are vastly different motivators in the non-profit world. You'll notice that in the for-profit world, in the new workplace, money is not a key motivator. You should not work where someone does not value you (and pay a living wage) and you should not work where you do not find meaning in your work.

I think we should all be careful of dividing the world into meaningful non-profits and soulless corporations. Caring for each other has more to do about the people who we report to and manage than the goals of the organization. If your boss comes to work every day genuinely looking to help you grow, and you do the same for the people you manage, then that's a great workplace. If your boss is a jerk, and you are a jerk, then it's a terrible place to be. It doesn't really whether your company is making tons of money or saving lives in Tibet. What we do ourselves—individually, with the people next to us each day—is what establishes meaning in our lives.

2. Some non-profits are doing less than some for-profits.
Just because a company is a non-profit doesn’t mean it’s not a wasteland. Example: United Way. We already know that grassroots organizations are most efficient at channeling aid to people who need it. Yet United Way persists with their umbrella model of taking money from the community, through a monopoly-type system with corporations, and then deciding themselves what smaller organizations will get money.

United Way actually does no good directly. They are middlemen, skimming off the top. And in the age of Internet, we can all decide where to give, and give directly. We don’t need United Way.

Salesforce.com, on the other hand, is raking in profits. And they give employees time off to serve the community directly. The employees choose what to do. There is no overhead because Salesforce.com is eating the costs themselves. It is totally efficient. There is no fundraising, there is no sucking the enthusiasm out of locals by telling them they need a middleman to connect with grassroots movements.

3. Choose your job by how direct you want to be.
Choose your job by what your skill set is and what your financial needs are. How direct do you want to be? You can be very direct and have little impact, and you can be very indirect and have massive impact. You can work with people you hate and save the world, or you can work with people you love, and donate money at night, on the Internet.

Being in a job you love allows you to generate income, and good will, and to cultivate a sense of gratitude to the world. Which means you’ll give back no matter what.

4. Consider that earning money is a direct path to doing good.
The Robin Hood Foundation is famous for inventing a more direct route to doing good. It’s a room full of people who are bidding to build things like a new shelter for the homeless ($470,000, raised in a few hours) . And 100% of their money goes directly to that project. It’s  the hedge fund industry’s way of giving back. And it’s just like their day job: brash, fast, high-flying, full of peer pressure, and extremely fun. It’s hard to say these guys are not doing good. They are making way more money than most foundations make in ten years. And they are putting it to work to do good immediately.

Or here’s another model. Earn money and buy board seats at companies that don’t respect the benefits of diversity, and then you can force diversity on them as a shareholder. That’s pretty direct. And if you didn’t have money on your side for this one, it would take you ten years of lobbying congress or flying on jets with CEOs. (Is there a difference?)

When you talk about your career, talk about doing good, for sure. But recognize that we are each capable of doing good from wherever we are. And each of us is capable of being fulfilled in a wide range of jobs. Grow your career with an open mind: you’ll find more opportunities to make a difference in the world.

Hat tip: The Non-Profit Discussion on Brazen Careerist, (where I might have been annoying to everyone, but still, I learned a lot from the conversation.)

Countless studies show people would rather have pleasant and personable co-workers than a co-worker who is always right. I try to keep this in mind each day, and consequently, I spend a lot of time planning my interactions.

But sometimes my plans fail. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’m going to walk you through my most recent parent-teacher conference. Which was a disaster.  And while it was a meeting in a second-grade classroom, it could have been a meeting with anyone, anywhere.

1. I can’t tell the difference between social niceties and reality.
I think I'm late.  I am bad with transitions — I space out from the stress of change so I drive around the school a few times without noticing before I go in. I am bad with time, because I don’t totally understand how to predict what the next number will be. So sometimes I forget where I am in the hour.

But then I get to the school and I think I am early to the conference, and I go to the bathroom, because the school halls are bustling and I want calm.

I get to the room and the teacher is sitting at her desk. Doing nothing. I think this means she is waiting. So I ask if I’m late. She says no, but I am pretty sure she means yes. I know some people say the answer they think would be good manners instead of the right answer. I stare at her body language for a clue.

2. I get sidetracked by insisting on telling people what they don’t know.
I forget to listen to her talking because I’m stuck on if I’m late or not, but I perk up when she says that my son’s cursive writing is too slow and he needs to print like the rest of the class.

Because I need her to know that spending any time on kids’ handwriting is stupid.  I tell her there are no jobs that require people to have decent handwriting, and definitely no jobs—besides wedding calligrapher—that require cursive.

She thinks I'm saying kids don't need to learn to construct paragraphs, or book reports.

I try to clarify that I mean good penmanship is useless.

She says she's sorry that I am upset.

This is when I realize that I picked a fight, and parents do not pick fights with teachers unless the parents are jerks or idiots or both. And I don't even know what I'm arguing for any more. So I try to get out of the argument. I tell her that I will explain to my son that cursive writing is for at home until the rest of the class is doing it.

3. I interrupt constantly and don’t realize it.
She tells me my son is great at math. I tell her that it’s typical of boys with Asperger Syndrome to be great at math, so that’s not what I’m worried about.

I tell her I’m worried about his spelling. She tells me about his spelling and I tell her that he can spell the words he’s missing but he can’t listen and spell and write all at the same time.

I start to tell her about sensory integration disorder, but I see that I am lecturing, so I stop. And then she is hesitant to talk again. That’s when I realize that I’ve been cutting her off.

I feel terrible and tell myself I have to be a better listener. And then I start focusing on how terribly I’m doing and I forget to be a good listener. I am upset that I am offending her. I think about the  psychiatrist who says people often mistake someone with Asperger Syndrome as a narcissist. I think this is a moment when the teacher is thinking that I am totally self-absorbed and not caring at all about her.

4. My mind is too scattered to focus on being nice.
Just when I start thinking of how to care about her, she says, “in conclusion” and then I panic. I will not have time to show her I appreciate her.

I remember a photo of the Obama’s going to their parent-teacher conference and Michelle is carrying a vase of flowers. I should have brought a vase of flowers.

I try to focus.

I look at the teacher to focus on what she is saying and she is saying my son is delightful to have in class. I hear this as something she says to every parent. Then she gives me an example, which is that he is very easily redirected when he is not doing what other people are doing.

I tell her that his problem is not that he can’t be redirected. People with Asperger Syndrome are dying to please everyone around them. People with Asperger Syndrome don’t want to stand out or be the center of attention. They just want to get along with people and have things run smoothly.

So of course if she tells him what to do to fit in, he’ll do it. The problem is that he will not have someone around him for the rest of his life telling him that. I tell her it would be a positive thing if he could tell things were going badly and then he knew the right way to get help in order to make himself do what is expected.

I look at the teacher. She is clearly exhausted from dealing with me. It occurs to me that teacher conferences are only fifteen minutes. Of course we cannot cover anything significant in this time. This is a friendly, get-to-know-each-other moment. It’s a small-talk-and-smiling moment. And I should have known to ask someone to come with me, to cue me, so I would do what is expected.

Men think: Flowers die, they don’t do anything when they are alive, they are expensive, and they are a cliché. Men know that women in general like flowers, but men also believe that women they know personally do not like flowers. The women they know are the exception to the rule.

I think it’s safe to say that mostly women are reading this post. Women are reading to figure out how to get the men in their lives to send flowers.

Here’s what it’s going to take: Bottom line impact. Yes, the guys want to get laid, but dinner seems better: it's like money well spent to them – you still get the sex, but you also get good food. What do you get with flowers? This is how men think, for the most part.

So, here’s what you get:

1. Flowers make the giver happy. The act of giving flowers elicits a real smile (as opposed to a fake, oh-that-was-nice smile) more often than other gifts of similar cost, according to research from Jeannette Haviliand-Jones, psychologist at Rutgers University.  And men are conditioned to react very positively to a real smile.

2. People think you are smarter if you’re a guy who gives flowers. That’s right. Send the flowers to your significant others’ workplace. Science says that people will perceive you as having higher emotional intelligence than your peers. Next step: Start milking your significant other's network of contacts since they are already impressed with you.

3. Your will be a better manager. Men give flowers at work, too. Not every bouquet means I love you. Some bouquets mean, “Get the project done on time or we’re screwed.” Give flowers during crunch time because flowers and plants at the workplace increase productivity. This seems like a good time to link to the post about when I got flowers from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. They definitely made me more productive.

Nancy Etcoff, evolutionary psychologist at Harvard, (who spouted radical views of female beauty at the Ted conference) concurs that flower make people happier. She found that if you see a vase of flowers in the morning, you have more spunk all day and less stress and anxiety at work. So don't just send flowers to your girlfriend and your co-workers. Send flowers to yourself.

Hat tip: About Flowers

I tried to do the advisable thing to do when you’re with someone who has commitment issues. I tried to fall in love with someone else. But I didn’t. I only missed the farmer more.

So I told myself that it’s okay to be with someone who has commitment issues, as long as I am having fun.

But my kids grew to love the farm, and the farmer, almost as quickly as I did. This makes sense. My oldest son was with me on my first visit to the farm,  and if you have ever been on a working farm you know that to kids, it’s like Disney World.

So my kids were constantly asking to go to the farm, and constantly trying to figure out, what is the farmer? A friend? An uncle? And why did I kiss him if he’s not in my family?

This is not a good path for kids if the relationship isn’t going toward marriage. So I waited until a day when the farmer and I were holding hands, walking between rows of corn higher than our heads. And I told him that I can’t keep bringing the kids to the farm because we’re not getting married and I’m scared the kids will get hurt.

The farmer didn’t say anything for five minutes. And then he said, “Okay. Let’s get married.”

It’s taken me months to tell people. It’s taken me months because I sort of don’t believe it.

I didn’t want to write that I’m worried. You will tell me, in the comments section, “Don’t get married if you are worried!” But I’m not sure I’d ever NOT worry.

How can I not worry about marrying a farmer? I will be moving, with my kids, to his farm. The farm is in the absolute middle of nowhere, outside the town of Darlington, WI. And now, I guess this will be my debut in Darlington, because I’m pretty sure there will be no blog outranking me for that search term.

But if I didn’t marry the farmer, I would be worried, forever, that I should have married him.

So it’s not a hard decision to marry him. I have been married before, and I don’t think I’m going to change much, so I know what I need, and I know what I have to offer, and we are a good fit.

And, I have Asperger Syndrome, which could be summarized as raging intellect and acute sensitivity to outside input. So the farm is a perfect spot for my mind to explore while outside-my-mind is calm.

But I worry about the farm for my kids. One of my kids also has Asperger Syndrome, and he is completely addicted to the farm and the animals, and the farmer’s calm, slow, sunny demeanor.  My other son does not have Asperger’s and probably does not need of the serenity of life on the farm.

Not that serenity is bad. And the family life that grows from farming is intimate and grounded and full of routine. All good things for kids.

But I grew up in a world where everything was open to me. Check out my high school: New Trier. It’s always ranked in the top twenty-five high schools in the country. I remember the principal telling us that the top 500 kids in our graduating class would go to colleges where most would be the valedictorians of their class.

At the time I didn’t understand how this could be. But now I understand that in order to compete at the top of the academic field, you need to be the number-one student in your small town.

Maybe not number one academically. But number one in soccer if you want to play soccer in college. And number-one in cello if you want to play in an orchestra in college.

Wait. No. It’s worse than that. Because in Darlington, there is no orchestra in high school. So where will my son play his cello in high school if he wants to play in college? And how will my boys learn to play soccer at a high enough level to play in college if all the kids on the coasts are getting private coaching? Where is the private coaching in Darlington?

It’s scary how limiting the choices are when you live in a place like Darlington. But competition is scary to me as well.

The reason I couldn’t keep playing professional beach volleyball is that I didn’t care enough about winning. To get to the very top of anything, you have to think you’re going to die if you don’t win.

That’s not me.

I belong on a farm, where life is slow, and rhythmic, and people are not breathing down my throat about getting the best of everything.

The farmer and I discuss this a lot. He went to graduate school for biology and hated it and went back to the farm. He thinks he could have done anything, so why won’t my kids be able to choose anything?

I am not sure. I am not sure if it’s my proximity to overachievers that gave me opportunities, or it’s my innate optimism and intelligence.

Then he tells me that what I really would have wanted from my childhood is to feel love and security, and why don’t we just focus on giving the kids that?

He’s right. But it’s hard for me to act on that. So I think this marriage and move are leaps of faith for me, hoping that love and security will trump opportunity and achievement. I hope I’m making a good decision for my sons.

The Story of the Farmer – From the First Day We  Met:

June 2008 New Way to Measure Blog ROI

June 2008 How I started taming my workaholic tendencies

Oct. 2008  Self-sabotage is never limited to just one part of your life

Nov. 2008  Think of networking as a lifestyle, not an event

July 2009  The sign of a great career is having great opportunities, and saying no

Sept. 2009 How to deal with an insane commute

Oct. 2009  How to deal with doubt: Take a leap

But many of you are making lots of social media mistakes. I know because so many people tell me that social media is a waste of their time. They’re wasting their time, and continuing to make mistakes, because there’s a set of common lies that people believe about social media. Here are those lies:

Lie #1: LinkedIn is for networking.

LinkedIn is great. I’m on LinkedIn. I have 650 connections. At first I wondered, why do I need this list of connections published on LinkedIn? What was the purpose of it? But now I get it. With LinkedIn, people can tell that I am a very connected person.

Most of you already know I’m well connected—I’m a print journalist, blogger, and startup founder, which are all very network-intensive jobs. But if you’re someone who doesn’t know how to tell whether someone is connected, LinkedIn is a great scorecard.

Potential employers like LinkedIn because they can glance at your LinkedIn profile and get a sense of how connected you are and how much money you make. (Yes, large networks correlate to large salaries.) That's the utility of the scorecard.

But what you cannot do on LinkedIn is build a network. Networks are built on relationships, which grow from conversation. LinkedIn is not for conversations. So you need to go somewhere else to build your network, and then, when it’s big, display it on LinkedIn so you’ll look great.

Lie #2: Twitter is for conversation.

So if you need conversation to grow relationships into a network, then you look for the social media tools that are for conversation. Right? Twitter seems easy. It’s only 140 characters, so it’s appealing to someone who is weary of spending every waking minute using social media.

The problem with using Twitter for conversation is that we need more than 140 characters to make a genuine connection with someone. So you’re not going to have a whole conversation there; Twitter is great for finding people who have similar ideas, and for keeping track of them in a superficial way.

But you still need to go elsewhere—offline or online—to solidify the relationship to the point where you would actually care about each other in the way a solid network connection does, but Twitter is a good start.

Lie #3: Blogs are personal journals.

Your blog is a record of what you’re thinking, and that record will represent you online, as a high-ranking search result when someone googles your name. So if you care about building a network, you’ll stop using your blog as a diary.

Your blog is intellectual exercise for you—to keep yourself thinking in a disciplined way about things that interest you. And it’s an intellectual exercise for other people—to follow your thought process and decide if they’d like to engage you in conversation. The blogosphere is a cocktail party for the intelligentsia without J Brand jeans or Jimmy Choo shoes. It’s just ideas, bouncing back and forth, and you’re deciding who to talk to.

I know I’m always telling people to stop worrying about what their blog is going to be and to just start blogging. I say this assuming that you understand that a blog is a networking tool. It’s one of the most important ways you can create career stability, by being who you are and connecting with people who like you for who you are. Your blog is a career-management dream-come-true.

Lie #4: Social media is no place for business.

The most common thing idiots say to me about my company is that we are never going to make money. But, we already do. Because companies definitely understand the need to leverage social media to meet their bottom-line goals. And my company helps them do that.

Companies understand they need to participate in conversation, and they are looking a professional places to do it. If you want to be known to companies, you will use social media to allow them to get to know you. (Wait. This just in. Government agencies get it as well! Check out the TSA's stellar use of social media.  A mommy blogger wrote a post accusing airport security of taking her son from her during a security check. TSA disputed her claim by posting video of woman and her son on the TSA blog. The mommy blogger published an apology.)

Which brings me to the seven-second rule. Someone who just met you for the first time, in person, will give you about three seconds to impress them. So you are very careful to show your best first impression in this situation. You already know this.

The same is true online. You probably get ten seconds instead of seven seconds, but the person will google your name, looking for something relevant in the top results, and click. If they are not impressed in the first ten seconds, they won’t keep reading about you.

If they go to Facebook, you have no idea what they’ll find out about you because so many people write on your wall about unprofessional things. If they end up at LinkedIn and you have a relatively shallow level of experience, you will not look good next to the typical LinkedIn user who is 40 years old, earning more than $100K, and has 15 years of experience.

So where do you want people to meet you for the first time online? Somewhere they can hear you talking about ideas. For bloggers, this is often a blog URL. Others could try Brazen Careerist, where your profile is comprised of your thoughts and ideas—you, being you.

Newsflash: No one could write in the Middle Ages, when the good writers wrote in Latin and everyone else spoke colloquial languages like French and English, which priests told them were too lame for real writing.

It’s the same situation today in that the best way to have a population of good writers is for people to write constantly, in the language that is theirs, so that they are great at expressing themselves.

People do good writing every day, in social media—when they write a note on someone’s Facebook wall, when they post a caption to a photo on flickr, or when they post a comment in a group on Brazen Careerist.

The people who are complaining that no one can write anymore are the same ones who are stressed about information overload. This is not a coincidence. Information is changing, the flow of ideas is changing, and written communication is changing with it. Information overload is the feeling of not being able to deal with this change. Young people do not feel information overload, which is another sign that they are excellent writers for the new millennium: They can process and communicate new ideas at the new pace.

I remember the first time in my life I heard about people who can’t write anymore. It was my grandma telling me to read A Little Princess, instead of Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret.

The people who tell you who can write and who can’t are the people who don’t want language to change. They don’t want ideas to change. They don’t want people to talk in ways that are new to them.

And now, for all you doubters, I present the research to end all research. It comes from Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. She has conducted the Stanford Study of Writing, which includes about 15,000 writing samples from students from 2001 – 2006.  The always-interesting Clive Thompson reported her findings in Wired magazine:

First, only 38 percent of the writing young people do takes place in the classroom. Prior to the Internet, almost all writing people did was for the classroom. The increased amount of writing that young people do outside the classroom these days is so significant that Lumsford calls it a paradigm shift.

Second, the type of writing that students do—via IM, Twitter, Facebook, and so forth—is actually great for building communication skills.  Thompson writes that, “Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.”

Third, the students have an acute sense of what good writing is because they are almost always writing for an audience. Lumsford found that students are writing mostly to debate, organize, or persuade. This is much more demanding writing than most of the writing students do for school. And, in fact, students in the Stanford study were not as enthusiastic about writing for school because they felt that the only purpose was to get a grade.

Finally, for those of you who think students don’t know how to write in full sentences, you are the people who probably don’t understand how to use text as a persuasive medium.

Lumsford finds that students are adept at making their point heard across a wide audience. And a study about Twitter, reported in Fast Company, shows that the text most likely to go viral—that is, the most persuasive text—does not have abbreviations or emoticons, the evidence most cited of a crisis in modern writing skills. Which means that students probably know intuitively to use texting slang only when texting.

Which makes me think that the people who are most worried that kids today don’t know how to write are the people who are most unable to write for an audience.

In the history of western thought, the first thing to happen when there was a paradigm shift was that the writing shifted, (Chaucer's stories of common people and Martin Luther's translations of the Bible come to mind). And the first people to complain were those who had a stake in keeping things the same. So ask yourself, do you want to be part of the next period in history, or do you want to be a person representing the futile force in history that tries to hold us back?

The problem is that we are not taught to ask good questions. We’re trained to answer questions. But only answering questions doesn’t make an interesting life. After all, if you have all the answers, and you’re spewing them all the time, then you are not learning anything new.

Asking questions is how we get smarter. One of the earliest signs of a child with Asperger syndrome is that they fall behind in their learning because they do not understand how to ask a question. It doesn’t occur to them that someone would have information.

And maybe all my blog posts are actually about my obsession with a good question. For example, my recent rant about how blogs need topics is really about how a good blog is based on a good question. (My question is: how can we make the the intersection of work and life better?)

Today I’m going to focus on the kinds of questions that back us into a corner.

1) The question that asks: What is the meaning of life?

I think a lot about how people ask questions because I get them all the time. Often, the questions are so vague and poorly framed that I can’t believe the person actually sent an email. Here’s an example of one:

Hi Penelope,

I am from Bangalore India and an avid reader of your blog. I have recently quit my job at [big, international tech company] after working with them for many years. I would like to start something of my own but do not know how to go about it.

Can you guide me please?

Thanks for taking time out to read my mail. I will look forward to your response.

I sent a reprimanding email back to this person. In hindsight, I should have directed him to the post titled How to Write an Email that Generates a Good Response. Instead, I told him that there is no answer to this question. The question is so vague that it is not actually a question but a plea for respite from the inherent difficulties of adult life.

2. The question that reveals that you don’t care.

The questions that are most interesting are ones that create a conversation. My friend, Marci Alboher is great at these questions, because I love the conversations we have, even though she never likes my answers.

One of the most frequent mistakes people make in a job interview is when you switch to complete BS when the interviewer asks, at the end, “Do you have any questions for me?” Face it: the best way to ask questions in an interview is to ask them the whole time, not just at the end, so you can create the conversation that the interviewer needs so she can learn that yes, you are the right person with the right ideas for this position. If you wait until the end of the interview, it’s obvious that you don’t care—you have already had your conversation, based only on you answering the questions and having nothing to contribute on your own.

3. The question that generates an answer you can’t cope with.

I like to think that I’ve learned to be great at asking questions. I spend days dreaming up the perfect question for my mentor who I haven’t spoken to in a month. I want to make sure I ask a question that is interesting, and engaging to him and useful to me.

And I hear so many bad questions that I think I have become immune to asking them.

But it turns out that I’m not. Because I knew I was going to have a hard time getting myself to write a blog post today. Last year, I’d often go five days with no post. But that was when I was CEO of Brazen Careerist, and traveling every week, and also worrying that the company had no money.

Today I have a relatively calm life. The company is going great, and there is a new CEO, and my job is to write this blog, be a thought leader about the workplace, and talk to the press.  So I need to be posting more regularly.

I know that having a trick works for me, from days when I can’t get myself to go to the gym. Like, I tell myself I will go to the gym and just sit in the locker room and listen to my ipod and then go home. Invariably, if I convince myself to do that, I don’t actually stay in the locker room. I end up doing some sort of exercise.

So I thought of a trick for blogging. I told myself that I’d make a game of it. I asked my Brazen Careerist chat group (sign-up required) for a topic. I told them I’d write about the first three topics people suggested.

But here’s what happened: I didn’t like the topics. Well, some of them I liked a lot. Like, Karen Gaustad and Mara Lunaria both asked why we link to Facebook profiles from Brazen Careerist. It’s a good question, because I talk all the time about how Facebook is a network for personal –and often unprofessional — aspects of your life, and Brazen Careerist is for building your professional network. So I actually don’t know why we link to Facebook. I keep asking Ryan and Ryan and they say something which I will summarize like this: Wait. Hold it. I can’t even summarize what they say, because I can’t remember exactly, but I think it’s something like “You’re too old to understand” but I don’t want to write that.

Okay. So I asked a good question that generated good questions in return. But I don’t like that question. I try to spend my life not hiding from hard questions. You’d think it’d be the abortion stuff that flummoxes me. But I’m pretty clear on how I feel about that. Why to link to Facebook, though? That’s a tough one.

4) The question that has unintended consequences.

Melissa Mansfield asked me to write about how companies that are highly ethical and also highly profitable. She will think I didn’t write about this topic. But I did. Because we can’t control companies. We can only control ourselves. So I’m always more focused on how I can change the world personally than how I can try to require institutions to change the world.

The thing is, though, that ethical workplace behavior is based on asking good questions. They lead to honest conversations and meaningful connections and the world of good behavior is build on relationships like these.

Not that every good question leads to a great relationship. The world is not perfect, of course. Because sometimes you ask a question that reveals only that the person you’re asking is useless.

My son said, "For what?" Then he pointed to an advertisement for Target — a boxing glove that punches images of the flu. He said, "Did Obama win for killing that stuff?"

I saw a teaching moment. I tried to think of something good. I said, "He won for being nice to people and reminding us all to be nice every day."

The Nobel Prize Committee said something interesting about Obama's award:  "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."

And this, I think, is what good leaders do. They help us a see a future that we like, that we're a part of, and that we can help create. In the case of Obama, his combination of strong values and intellect and charisma are mesmorizing to watch. And to me, his lack of BS in politics is almost as revolutionary as his skin color in politics. I love the whole package, and he makes me proud to be a US citizen.

I feel a similar way, on a smaller scale, with the new CEO of Brazen Careerist, Ed Barrientos. I spent almost a year convincing him to love the company and then to be CEO of the company. There were other people who had offered to take the job. But I wanted this guy because he inspires each of us at the company to be our best selves. That's what leaders should do.

Sure, it's early for Obama to win the prize, but it's an acknowledgement that people are already stepping up and acting differently because Obama has set the stage for people to be their best selves.

Very few of us feel that we can pick our country, but we can each pick our company. Companies with leaders who put people, the planet and profits on equal footing are companies that are most likely to give you that same feeling of pride that we feel today. When you choose your job, you choose your leaders. Today's Nobel Peace Prize award is a reminder to us that good leadership inspires everyone to be good. Find that in your career.

Hat tip: Melissa Mansfield