One of the biggest changes in the workforce in the new millennium is that we have to be information synthesizers instead of information producers.  All information is available online.  So we can’t add value by memorizing it.  We have to add value by reframing it. I call this synthesizing.

IBM conducted a survey of CEOs to find out what they thought were the most important leadership skills of the near future. And in the top five was boundary spanning, which is networking ideas and collaborating in order to synthesize information in new ways.

Side note:  I have a theory that this is why we suddenly are noticing how many people have Asperger’s, because it used to be that people with Asperger’s were extremely valuable for their memorizing capacity.  Today, when we don’t need to hire people to memorize things, people with Asperger’s are suddenly viewed as weird and unemployable instead of savants and extremely valuable.

This made me start thinking about how we create that unexpected clash of information that leads to new ideas.

Organizations have been spanning boundaries for decades as a way to expand their brand equity. For example, Shell Oil sponsors the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.  Shell has a prominent facility in Amsterdam.  Shell funded research into how van Gogh chose paint, and as part of that, Shell offered up their research facilities and their own researchers to do lab work on the project.

As the collaboration got deeper and deeper, the result was a ten‑year investigation of how van Gogh taught himself to paint through color, and how we can understand color in different ways today. One of the most memorable results is that van Gogh experimented with destabilizing red pigments, which means that today many of his paintings have become more blue than they originally were – like the walls in The Bedroom.

This changes our understanding of the bridge between the impressionists that van Gogh hung out with and the colorists, such as Matisse, that van Gogh provided a bridge to.

But how can we as individuals span boundaries in order to become better at information synthesis? Pair yourself with unlikely people.

1. Go somewhere you don’t fit.
Travelers to other cultures are the obvious example of people spanning boundaries. In the past I talked about how stupid travel is because people generally use it as a method of getting away from the problems in their life. However, you can use travel as a way to address the problems in your life if you use travel to do a specific job.  If you set out to solve a problem and then you need a different type of information to solve that problem, you can travel to create that solution.

This is very different from traveling to get away from your problems, because when you travel to get away from your problems, you don’t have a very specific solution that you’re on a mission to discover. A test of whether you’re using travel productively is whether or not you have a very clear way to implement the results of your travel once you get home.

2.  Work with people you don’t like.
When you get hired, your job is not to do your job description.  Your job is to help your boss. The boss that you’re most likely to give the most help to is someone who doesn’t share your skill set at all.

This means that if you’re good with people, you need to work with someone who is terrible with people.  If you’re good with numbers, you should work with someone who is terrible with numbers.

One of my most successful attempts at being an employee was when I worked for a CEO who was a frat boy. He was still wearing his fraternity sweatshirts ten years out of college.  The chief marketing officer was his fraternity brother, and so was the CFO.

When we sat in meetings, my sole purpose was to be the intellect in the company.  They never would have hung out with me outside of work because to them I was boring and overly concerned with the future.  But they needed me a lot because my way of thinking was so different from theirs.  Most of the great ideas we came up with were a combination of my ability to see the big picture and their ability to make my ideas fun and saleable. 

3. Make yourself nervous.
I made a rule for myself that I can never hire people that I coach, but it happens all the time that I coach someone and fall in love with the idea of working with them.  I coach such smart, interesting people, and they’re usually backed into a corner because they’re very good at something, but the thing they’re very good at is not working at that moment.  So even though I have a rule for never hiring people I coach, I end up hiring them all the time.

When I was dictating posts to Melissa we had a few problems.  I could talk faster than she could type.  She got frustrated when I made corrections and she always wanted to add her two cents.

Melissa is not a focus‑in‑the‑moment person.  Melissa’s brain is wandering all the time to new ideas.  So we can’t have two people wandering to tons of ideas if one person is supposed to be writing down the other person’s ideas.

So I was coaching this woman who is a court reporter, but the court reporter business is going to India and she doesn’t know what to do. Of course, I hired her to write while I dictate blog posts.

She can write so fast that we can actually get five posts done in one hour, but only if I’m focused. So what ends up happening is I get really nervous before our scheduled call, because there’s no reason for me to pause.  I should be dictating posts the whole time which means I have to prepare, and it means I have to commit to posts that I think I’m going to write, but maybe I don’t want to write.

Dictating posts to Carmen also encourages me to take more risks, because the posts go so quickly that if they end up being stupid, it doesn’t matter.

I would never have dreamed of hiring a court reporter, but when you pair yourself with someone you never dreamed of pairing yourself with, you do things that you never dreamed you were able to do.

The point here is that the risk takers will rule the next millennium. This is how we find a clash of new ideas and a surge of creativity, by taking intellectual and emotional risks. The other reason that risk takers will rule is that Generation Y is risk averse because they’re people pleasers and Generation Z is risk averse because they are consensus builders.

The last fifty years have been dominated by Baby Boomers and Gen X—two generations known for taking risks. As they retire, there will be a dearth of risk-takers, yet the need for risk takers will be increasing. So those who can put themselves if very uncomfortable situations, on purpose, will have the most to offer at work.

One of the things I had to do as an adult was learn to see what makes a good job. Some people intuitively know how to find a job that feels good. Most of us spend the first half of our lives trying to learn what feels right and the second half of our lives trying to get it. Maybe this post can speed up that process for some of you.

The bottom line of a good job is that it makes you feel like you have unlimited energy for your work because it’s so fulfilling. Psychologists would say the job matches your personality type. Mihaly Csikszentmihali would say it puts you in the state of flow. However you approach the idea of a good job, though, The Economist presents research to show that good work has these four components:

1. Provides clear goals.
The way I think of my childhood is that the first half was my parents ruining it, (in the house pictured above,) and the second half was my grandma trying to fix it. There were some fundamental problems with this situation. For example, it was impossible for my grandma to admit that her son had something wrong with him, so she had to blame the physical and sexual abuse on me and my mom. Not that my mom wasn’t responsible as well, but you can imagine the mental gymnastics this required of my grandma.

Since I spent my teen years with my grandma, my education about how the world works came largely from her. She was born in 1923, and while other people seem to have experienced the Jazz Age and Woodstock, those passed over my family.

My grandma and my great-grandma bought me all my clothes. I’m not really sure why my mom didn’t buy me clothes. But I know she started giving me money to buy my own clothes at a young age, and I bought 20 sweaters in one day and she grounded me.

I remember thinking to myself that I was stupid for buying so many sweaters. This is what we do when we take action based on unclear goals: we try our hardest and then blame ourselves.

2. Provides a sense of control.
So, anyway, I wore dress-up clothes to school, because that’s what my grandmas bought me. I didn’t know they were dress-up clothes, but I happen to have saved my dress that I wore on the first day of third grade, and its incredible how inappropriately formal it is.

My grandma ended up telling me things that I don’t think she told anyone else. I think, as she got older, she wanted someone to know, and she thought it would be fine to tell me because I had already been corrupted in so many ways.

She told me that her mother gave her this advice on the day of her wedding about sex: “It will hurt a lot. Don’t say anything. Just lay there and it will be over fast.”

She also told me that when she had her appendix out, when she was about six years old, the doctor raped her. She said she was groggy from the ansestesia and she wasn’t sure what he was doing.

I remember, we were sitting in the car. She was driving. I remember being surprised that she knew the word rape.

That’s probably when I started feeling like I wanted to be a writer for a job. I wanted to make sure the information was recorded. I wanted to help maintain the public record: doctors were raping little girls in the operating room in the 30s. Of course we could have guessed this. But I wanted to write down that it’s true. I know it was important to her because she could only say it when she was looking at the road.

3. Provides unambiguous feedback.
My family won’t believe me. My family thinks I’m nuts. That I make stuff up. Of course, that’s the easiest way to deal with me.

Psychology Today has an excellent article about the hereditary nature of Aspergers. In girls, genetically speaking, the father’s mother has the most impact on the girl, because the mother passes on an X chromosome that combines her mother’s X with her father’s X. But the father passes on an X that came wholly from his mother.

So if the father’s mother has Asperger’s then the father’s daughter is much more likely to have Aspergers. This made so many things clear to me. My grandma and I were so similar. No social skills. Great memorizing skills. Both started multiple companies, both had a hard time with marriage, both read incessantly, both had difficulty with emotion and clothing.

Also, my grandma’s father’s mother: all we know about her is that she was very mean and very weird. So of course there’s a great possibility that this is actually just Aspergers. Also, of my grandma’s granddaughters, I’m the only one that came from her sons. The other granddaughters have great social skills because their father’s mom had great social skills.

The puzzle all fits together in my mind. It makes total sense. But the people in my family would say that I’m nuts. No one wants to hear from me that my grandma had Aspergers. It’s kind of like people write in the comments that I don’t have it. It’s hard to understand how successful people can have Aspergers, and my grandma and I share the trait of being excellent entrepreneurs against everyone’s advice.

My family thinks I’m the crazy unreliable person, which is such a stark contrast to what I am in my work. For example, right now I’m going to tell you here that to some extent, the local food movement is responsible for the shift to domesticity that has fueled the resurgency in stay-at-home moms.

It’s a surprising connection, but it makes sense (those links are great – click them!) and you probably believe me. You probably think: Hmm. Interesting.

But whatever you think, you tell me in the comments. I know where I stand with you. It’s very clear, which makes it much easier for us to get what we need from each other.

4. Stretches you without defeating you.
Cassie emails me all the time. About her mom (she won’t do Mother’s Day with Cassie’s girlfriend). About her boss (sales genius with a knack for content). About her girlfriend (she would hate to be on my blog because she would want to control what I said).

What Cassie emails to me most, though, is ideas. She has a million ideas about sales and marketing and social media but the ideas are not relevant to her job. Cassie’s job is actually very easy for her and her mind runs way deeper than her job.

Like, look at this. The coolest chart about marketing technology. Cassie can talk about this chart for hours. Each time she looks a little closer, she gets another idea.

But Cassie’s boss is big at their Fortune 500 company and has to stay focused. Cassie’s co-workers are not interested in her volcano of maybe-inter-connected business ideas. So Cassie tells them to me. And we sort them into startup ideas. I teach her how to evaluate them from a financial perspective. She dumps some ideas and gets more. And what she loves, more than anything, is having someone force her to think more intricately about business models so her questions get sharper and sharper.

I struggle to figure out why I work more than I need to. Clearly I don’t need to earn as much money as I’m earning in order to support my family . But I keep working. And the reason I do it is because the four traits of a good job are nearly impossible to get while taking care of kids, but the four traits are so comforting to have in my life.

We are all capable of seeing a good job and a bad job. We can recognize when our failure is from lack of goals, and not lack of effort. We can recognize when we’re not fulfilled at work and we can extend our job to include what we need. Once you know what you need from work you are much more likely to get it. And this is true of me and Cassie and my grandma.

Whenever I write about grad school, someone writes in the comments about how I’m just bitter that I didn’t get a degree.

But what I’m really bitter about is that no one wanted to have sex with me. Some famous poet was a visiting professor, hitting on every grad student but me. And Leslie Epstein was there, who is not only king of the Jews but the father of Theo Epstein, a big name in baseball. Leslie said I’m the best sex writer he’s ever read. So why wasn’t he asking me for sex?

Probably because I’m the master of bad sex. There is no anal penetration that I cannot ruin with a piece of poop at the end of the paragraph.

So no one hit on me in grad school except maybe Susanna Kaysen. I was starving and homeless and she was getting movie deals that included Winona Ryder riders. And if I had not been so Aspergery I would have done anything to get her to edit my memoir – she is a master of the line edit. I’ll always worry that my memoir could have been edited better. 

But, to my point, what I learned while I was not getting hit on in grad school is to never write drunk.

I don’t want any of you to think that I am endorsing grad school. Here is another specimen from my collection of links about how grad school is a waste of your time.

I learned not to write drunk because everyone thought they’d write better drunk but they only wrote more like themselves.  So, if you’re a good writer sober, you’d be a good writer drunk, but you can just write sober. Why add the extra calories? Because when your book is published you are better off looking hot. Of course. Everyone is better off looking hot, especially if they want to fuck their boss.

I’ve been trying to decide if I am going to use the word fuck. My husband, Matthew – who now has a name on this blog- thinks it’s trashy. I want you to think that I’m interesting in bed in a sort of trashy way and that I say fuck all the time. But I don’t. I’m probably really boring in bed. I’m much better on paper.

Oh God – my editor is going to throw this whole post out for not being useful. He’s going to say, “Try writing something when you’re not drunk.” Even in the best case he’s going to say, “I have to think about it. I’m not sure if it works.”

Which always makes me write back “Fuck fuck fuck.” That is a common salutation to my editor. I’ll say “I need a post today! I haven’t posted in four days!” I know the world does not stop to notice when I don’t post in four days. But I feel like a failure. What am I doing if I’m not posting?

Well. I’m drinking.

In case you are wondering, Cassie told me to read this book Drinking: A Love Story, which shows how easy it is to become an alcoholic, so I stopped drinking for three weeks as a check-up. So I don’t think I count as an alcoholic. I’m just like one of those tiresome grad students who writes drunk except in grad school the editor is the classroom full of people who want to take you down, in front of the teacher, so the teacher will fuck them instead of you.

There is a rule for my blog: the more crazy the post is, the more useful it has to be. My editor follows this rule. I gave him this rule. By the way, he is not a rule follower. It’s ironic because he has this big job making sure his company follows FDA rules, he secretly sends me poems that are too hard for me to read but it’s clearly because there are no rules being followed. How do you judge a poem with no broken rhymes?

It’s okay, I think, to drink. Because I’m sad. I’m sad that my life has become driving my kids everywhere. I’m in the car more than 48 hours a week. It’s absurd. Don’t do it. It’ll ruin your life. So I’m sad. I came home tonight. At 11pm. From driving. And I have to drive again at 9:30 am. My experience of planting corn is pulling up behind the seed truck, and taking a picture, on my way home. And remember the 20,000 bulbs I planted last fall? I’ve seen them for about sixteen minutes. Because I’m never home. I’m driving.

You can’t have a nice house in the country and a good job in the city. You know that. I’ve told you a hundred times. But it’s just like how the preacher’s daughter is always knocked up: the career coach always has a life-destroying commute.

But here’s what I’ve learned, again and again: picking a career is picking a life. Look at the person’s life, not the job, and decide if you want it. If so, choose their career.

But watch out. I homeschool my kids and I have a husband who is home all day to help, and I live on a working farm and I have a great career. Who wouldn’t want this, right? But some nights, I come home and drink. People don’t tell you that. When you ask them how they got the career, they don’t mention how they drank a bottle of Chardonnay on nights when they drove too much.

Remember that people will brag about what they’ve achieved, but they don’t brag about the price they paid to get it. So find someone who will tell you the worst parts of their life. Because it’s easy to see what’s great about someone’s life. But if you’re picking a career by picking a life, the only people who are useful to you are those who will tell you the bad stuff too.

My editor has been fired a lot before he got his job now. I don’t know if he’ll cut this paragraph. The thing is, he’s really good at work now. I like my editor a lot.  But if you asked my editor about what his life is like as an FDA rule enforcer, he would never tell you that he was fired from the military for misconduct. Or about the stealing. Or about how it feels like his marriage is ending.

You know why I love my job? Because I just want to write that truth. It feels good to tell you what I see. I know I don’t have the best social skills, but I see things clearly because I don’t worry that people will hate me.

But I worry that my editor will veto this post. When you look at my life, if you think you want it, remember that you will be choosing to live and die by your editor. If he cuts this post then me deciding to write while I was drinking was a total waste of time. If he approves this post, then I’m a creative genius. That’s how thin a line it is between career success and career failure for me. So when you’re choosing what you do, make sure you like the process. It’s a choice you can control.

Jason Collins is a professional basketball player who just announced that he’s gay. It’s rare enough for a professional athlete to be openly gay that President Obama called him up to offer support, and former President Clinton tweeted his support, adding that he’s known Jason Collins since he was friends with Chelsea Clinton at Stanford.

Collins is a 12-year NBA veteran who has played for the Boston Celtics and Washington Wizards and chose to come out in the new edition of Sports Illustrated . He says, “I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay. I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation.”

It’s a great conversation to have, because we all do better in our careers if we are honest about who we are.

The research about the benefits of coming out at work is solid. Gay people get higher pay and have more stable careers if they come out at work. Because so much of career success is connecting with people, and secretive people are not likable. This is one of the reasons that I was so upset when I was coaching Cassie Boorn and she didn’t tell me she was gay: because the best career advice I could give anyone who is gay is to find a place for themselves in the workworld where they can be themselves.

You would not believe how many people I coach who are gay but don’t tell me until the last ten minutes of the call. It would be fine if being gay is irrelevant to their career, but it almost always comes up, in passing, because we have to talk about your personal life to build a career plan that supports your personal life.

So if you are systematically hiding that you’re gay, then it is highly probable that the core of your career problem is that you’re hiding. Because people who hide something that big from the world are usually hiding lots of other things as well. And the more you hide, the harder it is to find a job that’s right for you.

The story of Jason Collins is not just a story about being gay. It’s a story about how, to some degree, each and every one of us is scared to be ourself at work. Each of us has something we are scared to own about ourselves because we are scared people won’t like us. We’re scared the top people in our field won’t respect or like us. We each hide something that we think is particularly bad. And we all think, “Other people might not need to hide this, but for me, it’s different.”

But really, if there’s anyone who could say they have a special situation, it’s Collins. He’s in a field where he has to touch other men all the time. He’s in a profession that’s notoriously homophobic. And he is a national figure but he’s not used to dealing with the press in a personal way, so talking about all this publicly is out of his comfort zone.

I have been working in the tech industry for most of my career. As a serial entrepreneur I’ve had to figure out, each time, how much of myself to reveal to my co-founders, to my investors, to my employees. At one point, during my last startup, I was crying in the lobby of Chase Bank because we ran out of money and none of my employees would get paid and it was the week before Christmas.

Earlier in my career, I never would have written about that, because it’s very hard to get funding when you are crying and weak and desperate for money. No one wants to fund that kind of entrepreneur. But I wrote about it anyway, on my blog, and literally hundreds of entrepreneurs told me they had been there before, and they offered great ideas for getting through such a tough time. And my investors came through as well. Because what investors need, more than anything, is a founder who is dedicated and driven and genuine and honest.

That’s what the NBA needs from Collins: dedicated, driven, genuine, and honest.

And that’s what people need from you.

Some of you are still thinking you’re not going to really be who you are. You want to keep the parts of you that are fun and enchanting and easy, while making the other, worse parts of you go away. But the truth is that no one is enchanting if they are not whole. I realized, late in my career, that one of the biggest reasons that I looked scary to some people was that I was hiding some fundamental things about me: like that I was taken away from my parents for abuse. I wanted it to not matter. I wanted to be past that.

But everything matters. Everything is our lives is who we are. Jason Collins being gay will matter so little in two years. We’ll be past the hoopla. And so will he. It’ll just be a part of who he is.

Here’s how I know: I was coaching a guy. And we were talking about how he and his wife were going to move to the East coast, and he needed a career transition strategy. At the end of the call, he told me, “Hey, I have something to tell you.”

I said, “At the end of the call? You have something new to tell me now?”

He said, “Yeah. Well, I read how you said that so many people wait until the end of the call to tell you they’re gay.”

“Oh no. You’re gay? You’re going to tell me you’re gay?”

“No. I’m not gay. I’m a transexual.”

Silence. I was shocked.

Then I said, “Are you done? Like, is it that you were born a woman and now you’re a man?”

“Yeah. I went through all the operations and everything. No one would guess I’m a transexual. I just wanted to tell you.”

And we both laughed. Because it’s a funny riff on the constant problem of people being closeted and not telling me. But that’s all it is – funny. Because he’s fine with who he is, and he’s integrated his whole self into his life, and so it’s not possible for it to be a problem for his career.

I wish that peace for Jason Collins and I wish it for all of us. Let’s start today, being a little more honest about who we are. And bonus: We’ll make more money doing that. Really.

For those of you who don’t remember, a film crew came for three days to make a demo reel for a reality show based on my family.

Here is the problem: we are too normal. I’m not kidding. That’s what the TV people ultimately concluded. But I take being too normal for reality TV as new-millennium Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

The other thing the TV people said was that listening to my coaching sessions was magical. Really. They said that. So I’m writing it for you again: magical. They filmed at our house for three days, which means they heard my side of a dozen calls, and in each case, they couldn’t believe how fast I could figure out the person’s problems and solve them. (And then, of course, I started doing that for the producer of the demo reel. That was a big hit.)

So there is probably not going to be a reality show based on my family. But the good news is that I’m going to focus on doing my own video podcast/reality show where I coach people. I am not totally sure how I’m going to execute that, so if you have ideas, please let me know.

And if you want to know how to specialize, this is the process. You think you’ll be great at one thing, but people tell you you’re great at something else, so do what people tell you you’re great at. Don’t fight it.

So somehow I’m going to be great at reality TV coaching. In the meantime, here is a peek into my too-normal-for-TV family.

I have been trying to think of time differently, so I don’t panic because I don’t have time to do that. I have a job that requires about 60 hours of work a week. And I homeschool my kids. So the only way to get by is to stop thinking of time in terms of work time and personal time. I don’t have enough time to fulfill the needs of those two categories.

I have to find new categories so that I feel like I have enough time.

Tuesdays my son and I drive four hours to Chicago for piano lessons, cello lessons, and orchestra rehearsal. I used to think of it as a terrible day where I drive eight hours and get no work done. But then I realized I could do work while I drive.

So I recategorized drive time as work time, and then I felt better about getting work done on Chicago days.

Then I noticed that I could also work during orchestra rehearsal. It’s true that parents are supposed to be paying attention. But it’s not like individual lessons where I have to write every little missed note on our list of things to practice. Orchestra is a place where a mom can fade into the audience. And pull out a laptop.

So I wrote a blog post during orchestra and I told myself I can pretty much recategorize Tuesday as a work day with two music lessons stuck in the middle.

At the end of the session, my son brought his cello over to me and he whispered, “Mom, I can’t believe it. That was the longest bathroom break I ever took. Fifteen minutes.”

I said, “You didn’t take a fifteen minute break. We all would have noticed.”

He said, “Everyone did. The orchestra teacher left the classroom and got me.”

So, fine, orchestra is not a place where I can check out and do work. But still, I am trying to figure out how to look at time differently. And here is a list of ways I’ve thought of and none have gotten me in as much trouble as my Tuesday idea.

Work life/Home life
This is the typical divide. It is useless because it’s not helping anyone feel better about themselves. And also, if we really wanted to divide time this way we’d all put away our iPhones. The other thing about dividing life between home time and work time is that there is then clearly not enough time. So we go nuts. And we always revert to overlapping the two.

This is why I started coming up with new ways to think about time: to make enough space that I wasn’t feeling overwhelmed by my lack of time all the time.

Doing time/Not doing time
You can get tons of work done without actually doing it. You can hire people and delegate. One of my favorite things about coming home to a clean house is that I didn’t have to do it. There is something magical about time when I am getting things done and not having to do them.

So I try to have a bunch of things each week that I have passed off to someone else. They have to be big enough projects that when they are done, I feel that relieved sense of accomplishment you get from doing something significant in your work.

Phil Libin, founder of Evernote, writes that  you don’t want to be the smartest person in your company. This is because if you surround yourself with bright people they get more done without you. I  know that virtual assistants are all the rage right now. I caution you to hire a very smart one. The joy in getting things done when you’re not doing them only comes when it’s done well.

Fun time/ Play time
I hate fun. Fun drains me. But I like ideas. Actually, ideas are fun. Fun to me is reading and writing all day, and every so often, someone pops in to listen to me talk about what I’m thinking, and then I go back to reading and writing. That is a great day for me.

I have a son who thinks fun is play and excitement. It’s a problem for me. I am not the joyous type. But my husband loves fun. When we were dating, he would try to be goofy and it would make me cry. It’s stressful if you don’t understand role playing, which is what I think goofiness is. So he is very happy that I have a playful son. And I am very happy to not play.

We divide our family time between fun and other stuff. I do most everything else. It’s easier for me to do dishes and clean bedrooms than it is for me to play kickball and jump off the rope swing. So I look for times when the family is doing their fun which is play, and it’s a nice time for me to do my fun, which is more like work. Of course.

Nice time/ Critical time
One of the biggest weaknesses I have is making time for a marriage. It’s not natural for me to stop my work to take care of emotions. So I started trying to measure the amount of time I spend with my husband. I told myself if it wasn’t an hour a night, the marriage wouldn’t last. If it wasn’t an hour in the morning, we would have a bad life. I told myself all kinds of time-constrained truisms.

But what I’m thinking now is I can divide the day into positive comments and negative comments. Psychology Today reports that marriages do well if you have at least 5 positive comments for every one negative comment. I can do that. And when it’s difficult, I tell myself I’ll be rewarded for my kindness with the ability to help him perfect one thing.

Engaged time/Unengaged time
People actually don’t mind working long hours when they are engaged. Burnout is not a result of how much work you’re doing but what type of work you’re doing. So instead of organizing time into work time and personal time, you could organize it into time when you like what you’re doing and time  when you don’t like what you’re doing. This is actually my big gripe with Tim Ferriss. He says he only works a 4 -hour week, but he really means he only does four hours a week of work that is not engaging to him.

People are doing this with learning as well: binge learning. This is when people take courses that are compressed, and they watch all the courses at once, sort of like watching a whole season of Arrested Development at once.

Days/Weeks
A lot of times you have a day where you do no work or a day when you do all work. And then you might feel that the other part of your life is in trouble. But instead, you can think in terms of weeks and months. You can have a week where you mostly work, and a week where you mostly don’t work. That’s balance, but in a larger picture. The idea of balance seems impossible hour by hour, but there are other ways to think about having a balanced life.

And you know how you can tell if your way of thinking about time is working? It feels good.

Of course I have to open this post with something about how stupid college is. Colleges are finally responding to the problem they charge tons of money and then graduates are unemployable and in debt. Colleges are responding by becoming job preparation centers. And Frank Bruni, opinion editor for the New York Times, says this is a waste of time and resources. Here’s what’s better:

1. Skipping college.
The real issue we have with admitting that college is not a path to the work world is then we have to ask ourselves why we send our kids to high school. There is plenty of data to show that teens are able to manage their lives without the constraints of school. The book Escaping the Endless Adolescence is chock full of data, and a recent article by my favorite journalist, Jennifer Senior, shows that high school is not just unnecessary, but actually damaging to teens who need much more freedom to grow than high school affords.

2. Focus on internships instead of school.
Kids should be working in internships in high school. Because the best path to a good job is a bunch of great internships. But great internships don’t go to people who need money. They are mostly for young people. Yes, this is probably illegal and classist and bad for a fluid society. But we will not debate that here. Instead we will debate why kids need to go to college if the internships are what make them employable? Kids should do internships in high school and by their college years, they are capable of real jobs where they are doing work that people value, with cash.

You cannot take this route if you’re saddled with huge student loans. You can’t take this route if you’re inundated by homework in required subjects you don’t care about. You can’t take this route if you have no work experience when you graduate college. It’s too late. (Don’t tell me you need to go to school to learn, okay? People just do not believe this anymore.)

I was reading the Fortune list of 40 under 40 and I was struck by the career history of Kevin Feige (number 11 on the list). He’s president of Marvel Studios at age 39. He wrote that he interned with the Superman movie director as a film student and that was the last job application he filled out. That’s because if you get an internship with someone great, and your performance is great, your network will cover your employment needs for a very long time.

3. Start a company instead of writing a resume.
I’m struck by Marissa Mayer (number 3 on Fortune’s list) whose announced acquisition strategy is buying small, cheap companies. Which is, in effect, buying the team. Silicon Valley calls these acqui-hires. She is looking at young people who start companies that are not necessarily successful in terms of product or sales but successfully market the founders as visionaries, self-starters, and hard workers. You can’t show those traits in school, so if you have those traits, you slow yourself down by going to school where you cannot exhibit your best,  marketable traits.

4. Refuse to present yourself in a linear way.
Do any workaround that lets you forgo the linear obsession that LinkedIn has with career presentation. Because linear presentations favor people who have long, rule-following careers – which don’t necessarily make you look good anyway.  I could write a post ten thousand paragraphs long of all the new things people with nonlinear work histories are doing to get jobs.

People use twitter as a resume, according to the Wall Street Journal, which requires only that you publish ideas, not any sort of academic experience.

Young people are selling stock in themselves - paying out dividends for decades at a time.

Agents represent workers who pick and choose projects that match them rather than signing on for indefinite amounts of time. The Harvard Business Review calls this supertemping. Business Week calls it going Hollywood.

But here’s the big takeaway. A fundamental shift is taking place, where the path to getting a job is massively circumventing college credentials. And, at the same time, the American public is fed up with the insane debt that college are expecting new grads to take on in order to graduate. (Good essay: How College Ruined My Life.)

If you are not going to school in order to “fit” into the adult world, then why are you going to school? The love of learning, presumably. But school reform pundits are 100% sure that kids will choose to learn if you put no constraints on them. They will just learn what they want. Best example: The MIT program that gave iPads to illiterate kids in Ethiopia (pictured above), and they taught themselves to use it, program it, and read it in English. No teacher.  No curriculum.

The biggest barrier to accepting the radical new nature of the job hunt is the reverberations throughout the rest of life. If you don’t need school for work, and you don’t need school for learning, then all you need school for is so parents can go to work and not worry about taking care of their kids.

It takes bravery to go against the grain. It’s difficult to say that the great learning and the great jobs come from leaning out, doing things in a nonlinear, non standard way, and playing only by the rules that fit your own style for personal learning and growth.

One of the first things I wondered about the Farmer when I met him is why he was even reading my blog.

He told me, “I’m an entrepreneur.”

I was hooked. I had no idea what he was talking about. But I could see that I was going to learn a lot from him, and nothing gets me going like a steep learning curve.

That was five years ago. Today, I read all the farming magazines that come to the house, I sit in on meetings with the seed salesman and the accountant who specializes in farms. The Farmer has a rule that I can listen but I have to wait until the end for questions, because people in the farm community are too nice to tell me when I’m asking too many. “But you are,” he tells me. “Just trust me that you are.”

The more knowledge I have about farming the more I scream about how he treats the animals. Family farms are generally horrendous for animals. Not because the farmers have no ethics but because ethics are contextual, and like every other profession, farmers just do what other farmers do. For example, corn is like crack to pigs. It’s not healthy for them but you can move pigs around by feeding them corn like you feed kids candy.

So I am not nearly as offended with the idea that pigs are fed candy as I am with the idea that pigs are confined. They have the IQ of a three-year-0ld kid. They should not be confined to a tiny space. And definitely farrowing crates are out-of-control inhumane.

I could go on and on but I also understand the economics of farming. If you don’t know 99% of pork in the US comes from a farrowing crate operation then you have no idea that you should be paying ten times the amount for the pork you eat. And maybe you wouldn’t. So the economics of farming is a mess, and someone needs to take some big risks.

This is where Matthew comes in. I’m going to call him Matthew now. Because he’s amazing and this is a post about how amazing he is and I don’t want him to be a character on my blog anymore.

Matthew is a one-man pork revolution with a Jewish wife who won’t let pork in the house. He is working on figuring out how to make it economical to produce pigs without farrowing crates. No crates means the mom might crush pigs, or the pigs might freeze. It means that Matthew has to reinvent raising pigs.

Matthew has been raising pigs since he was a young boy. And he went to graduate school for pig genetics. Even so, raising pigs more humanely is a huge risk for him. He can go online and read about how other people do it but each farm has different weather, different crops, different layouts. It’s impossible to simply copy another farmer’s solution. Also Matthew already gets the highest price in Wisconsin for his pork, but it’s not nearly enough to cover the drama of trying to raise pigs outside of farrowing crates.

He puts the mom pig on a pasture, like a free-range cow, and the mom builds a nest and has her pigs and takes care of them.  Some days last summer he couldn’t find one of the moms. But the moms are completely capable of managing their piglets and raising them without farmer confinement.

This is a picture of a mom’s nest in the summer pasture. Everyone is warm and happy.

In the summer, that system works well, but Matthew needs to be able to continue supplying restaurants year-round. So he needs to have baby pigs in the spring and fall as well, which is when the pasture is too cold or too wet, so he has to have an alternative system.

He put the pigs into a fenced-off area where they could be in little huts. It worked well. The mom pigs stayed inside a quarter acre surrounded by an electric wire, and the baby pigs ran all over the place, but they always go back to their mom. Have you seen a picture of a farm where chickens run all over the place? We have chickens and piglets. People can’t believe it when they visit. A piglet approaches, like a puppy, to play.

Farmers see chaos and mayhem. I see revolutionary inventiveness. I kept telling Matthew that if people knew how much happier his pigs were than a regular pig, they would pay a premium. I tell him this is the future of pigs.

Things were going great until this spring. It was very very wet and very very cold.

The moms were supposed to make nests in the huts. But there was not really a place for the moms to stay dry. This is a picture of the nest inside the hut: cold and muddy.

There are a million variables in farming. If the ground thaws and then freezes the moisture is more in the dirt than if it doesn’t freeze. Or something like that. Matthew knows everything about the weather. (Here is something he told me that I swear has been true every time: “Rain before 7, done by 11. Rain after 8, rain til late.”)

So this spring, the pig experiment didn’t work. The piglets were born on the cold, wet ground, and in one week, sixteen piglets died.

Matthew lined them up and took a picture.

Like a Monday morning quarterback, he could see all the mistakes he made. He ended up buying bedding for the pigs that cost enough to make the pigs unprofitable for the whole season. He’s been caring for 100 pig litters a year for forty years. He never expected to make such a big mistake. He questioned everything: his IQ, his morals, his financial competence, he work ethic.

When things go bad for any business, it’s so easy to feel like a failure. But to have animals dying makes it all seem even worse. He told me he wanted to sell his farm.

I understand that feeling. It’s the feeling of wanting to give up when things go bad in your business. There are lots of ways to get past that moment. Each entrepreneur finds one that works for them.

1. Focus on the big idea. 
My  favorite is to focus on the big picture rather than the problem at hand.

I told him he’s a revolutionary. He must keep going. I told him he might have to kill hundreds of pigs and lose thousands of dollars, but someone needs to do that in order to lead the pork industry to a more humane way of economically raising pigs. Someone has to be a leader, and leaders lead by failing and trying again. I told him the happiest people have the hardest jobs.

My speeches do not inspire him. Revolutionaries seldom do that sort of thing in order to get attention as a leader. They do it because it is right, and they want to do what’s right. Revolutionaries are driven by something more important than ego.

So he told me to stop talking to him about it.

2. Take action.
Matthew personality type is ISTP. So he needs to focus on taking action as a way to get past a bad mistake.

He revised his system so that the next week of freezing rain didn’t kill any pigs. They were all dry and cozy.

And he is thinking about the next season of pigs, and the next set of problems. Like, I planted 20,000 bulbs last fall and the free-range piglets have dug up about 2000.

Matthew’s question is how to treat pigs more humanely and still have a profitable business. Every time he solves one problem, he gets another one. People  talk a lot about what makes a successful entrepreneur, and the answer is that they don’t quit. Each time a huge problem arises, an entrepreneur has a choice to work on solving it, or stop trying.

3. Surround yourself with people making mistakes and surviving.
The reason entrepreneurs hang out with each other is because it’s inspiring to watch people work on problem after problem.

And of course, that is true for life, as well.

Our lives are defined by the problems we take on. Every day I look out our window and I feel so lucky to have the piglets running around. They are a wonder to watch, and they create more and more problems, and Matthew is a wonder to watch solving them.

This post is about productivity. I have to tell you that because this is a career blog and career blogs need topics that fall into the career space. You can’t have a blog that doesn’t have a topic. Even Mark Cuban, who seems to not have a topic because he writes about basketball and colleges and eating at the iHop still has a clear topic: How to make a ton of money.

1. Life is easier if you embrace hardship instead of trying to avoid it.
My blog topic is not how to make a ton of money. It used to be. When I was in my twenties, and early 30s, my focus was money.  But somewhere I realized that I wanted an interesting life more than money. I think it was when I was at Ingram Micro, a Fortune 50 company, and I was blown away at how boring and risk averse everyone was. The Fortune 50 is a study is seeking safety in product lines, in workplace practices, and in a stable life.

I am not the safety-seeking type. So I stopped trying to make a lot of money and started trying to do interesting things, and that’s when my career really took off. Investors love interestingness.

2. Focus on being interesting and then hurdles are predictable.
I found that if I focused on making my life interesting, money came. But if I focused on money, I got stuck. So I have spent the last ten years understanding the difference between going after money, going after happiness and going after interestingness. I have found that I am most productive when I follow my instinct for what will be interesting because people are more focused and more engaged when they do what interests them.

A lot of you will say you want to do what you love, but your vision of doing what you love is really limited. Like, you think you want to be a yoga teacher, but the yoga business is mostly about marketing yet  you have this idea in your head that teaching yoga is interesting. But teaching yoga for someone else is being a worker bee and it’s working for free. Teaching yoga in your own studio is mostly a marketing job. (Even Mark Cuban says this, actually: follow your action not your passion.)

So let me be clear that choosing interesting work is difficult. It’s the hard path. It is not interesting to do something easy because if it’s easy, you already know the path and the outcome. How could that truly be interesting? You are lying to yourself.

3. If you admit you’re a cliche, you can use tried and true methods to help yourself. 
When I launched Brazen Careerist, it was a blog network. I had already found my fifty favorite Gen Y bloggers and I had my editor, who is still my editor, edit those bloggers.

For the most part, he hated editing the bloggers.This was before he got medication so he was also surly and biting, and one of his biggest complaints was about posts that began by explaining why the person has not written in so long.

Because of this I am very careful not to open a post with that topic. Instead, I am slipping it in here, in the middle.

I have written about my life for my whole life. It just happens that it’s my job now, but I’d do it anyway. This is probably not good—for one thing, it pegs me as very likely to kill myself. For another thing, when I am uncertain about my life I shut down. In my seminar about how to write about your life, I realized, while I was teaching it, that writing about your life means facing your life. I am having a hard time facing my life now.

4. Be clear on what you hate about yourself. You have to see it to move past it.
It’s a pattern. Here are the times I had a hard time writing about my life:

When I had a baby. (I started republishing old posts and I got fired for breaking my contract.)

When I launched a company. (I wanted to write about entrepreneurship but I got scared that people only wanted to read about climbing a corporate ladder.)

When I moved to the farm. (I wanted to write about the farm but I thought people only liked me because I was from LA/NY and other big cities where I’ve landed.)

Now. When I’m scaling back my career to homeschool my kids. I can’t even write that without feeling a little sick. I don’t want to face that. So I don’t want to write anything because I don’t want to see it.

I coach so many people who want to have kids and are feeling sick about the idea of scaling back their career. They feel sick about the idea of being grouped with stay-at-home moms instead of high-achieving men. I get it. I feel that way too. The first thing I noticed, in fact, when I started homsechooling, was that I miss being surrounded by men. Because that’s what happens when you have a big career and you are a woman. Most women drop out, and it’s the men that are left. You get used to being surrounded by men.

5. You are not special. You are like other people. So find people who are like you. 
But luckily, people send me tons of links about scaling back careers, and I am getting confident in my choices. Here are some of my favorite links:

The Harvard Business Review says that it’s not the women who need to lean in, it’s the men. The author, James Allworth, points out that all the studies about what makes a fulfilling life show that it’s relationships and not work. So to tell people to forgo relationships in order to work more is absurd. Sheryl Sandberg’s book assumes that women are not in high-powered positions because women make the wrong choices. But people who choose to have a smaller career and pay attention to family relationships are making better choices, and men need to lean in to their relationships.

Another link that makes me happy is that the best educated moms are the ones most likely to opt out. When I saw the headline it made immediate sense to me. Those are the moms most likely to feel that they have a choice—because their husband earns enough money and they themselves are capable of generating income from home. The research also makes sense because the best educated moms are the ones most likely to be able to process the data that explains why it’s not a given that everyone should try to have the biggest possible career. It’s new data and it’s difficult to process after twenty years of feminist diatribes about the glass ceiling. But the smartest women are the first to go against the grain—which is what opting out is, since the media does not encourage it.

Here’s what I’ve learned from not writing about my life because I was scared you wouldn’t like it: I’ve learned that you don’t care what I do in my life as long as I’m interesting. If I am doing something that’s scary, and I tell you, then you can identify with me when you do something scary. What this community is, really, is people who want to do something scary. Because life is very, very boring if we don’t scare ourselves.

The wage gap, of course, is the gap between men and women. We don’t talk about the wage gap between, say, black men and white men because the causes are so visible. Like, most black boys do not grow up with a father, and in some cities 50% of black men have been in prison.

But we talk about the wage gap between men and women like it is some Escher puzzle that we can solve through infinite stories in the media.

But in fact, the wage gap between men and women is as big a red herring as the gap between black and white men. Women don’t care about workplace stuff and men don’t care about home stuff.

I know that’s a stereotype, a cliche. But it’s a cliche for a reason. I’m right.

The issue is that if you take a man and woman who have equal qualifications at work and you add kids to the mix, the woman’s salary goes down as the man’s goes up. We know that this is by choice. Each gender typically makes choices that move their salary one way or the other.

Here’s how to understand those choices:

Unmarried men almost always say they want to share household duties equally. However this is so completely not how it turns out that evolutionary psychologist David Buss says the equality thing is merely a mating call. Men can’t be in a relationship today unless they say they want to assume household duties.

I actually think men do want to do half. But they want to do half of what they think needs doing. So, for example, changing the sheets on the kids’ beds does not matter to a guy. The sheets don’t have poop on them, so they’re clean. If the sheets have poop on them, the guy has no trouble changing them. He does it immediately.

My brother’s friend, who is a banker married to a stay-at-home wife and surely does nothing around the house but surely thinks he does, suggests that couples use a chess clock to keep track of household contributions. He says you announce that you are doing a household chore, and you ask your spouse if it is something they care about. If the answer is yes, you hit the clock while you’re doing the chore.

This experiment would make things look equal. And you can take this beyond household chores. For example, when a mom drops a kid off at a new friend’s house, the mom stops and talks to the parent and sniffs out the house. The dad says hello and leaves.

Yes, that’s a stereotype, but there is a ream of hard data to show that on balance, this is true.

Which brings me to March Madness. In high school I played NCAA brackets because I wanted to hang out with the boys who did that. It was a way to get them to pay attention to me. When I worked on the trading floor, the betting pools are so entrenched in the culture that there are arbitrage signs for when trading stops to deal with the betting pools. During the NCAA playoffs, if you ask for a bid in the S&P pit, miming a basketball shot means that the trading volume is reallly low because the traders are cleaning up their brackets.

The New York Times reports that women work more hours at the office than men do. There’s a problem with that statistic too, though. Men think they are working at work just like they think they are doing chores at home. Most of work is social. So women are putting their heads down and knocking out their to-do lists while men are running betting pools.

The problem with the data about who works harder at the office is who defines what work is—the same problem is at home, defining housework. At the office, the most important work is socializing. It’s the stuff that comes from emotional intelligence and makes you an office politics star. The real work at work is knowing what people need and helping them get it so they give you what you need.

The gap between men and women working at work starts in school. Girls work so much harder at getting good grades than boys do that it’s easier to get into college if you’re a boy. And girls work so much harder at doing what they are told to do in college that more girls graduate than boys. The problem is that the work world doesn’t revolve around your grades. The work world relies on the same skills boys have been developing the whole time they have been getting sent to the principal’s office.

So what do we do with this information?

1. Stop treating men and women the same. There’s a great letter in the Princeton alumni magazine to women in Princeton: get married in college, which is where the pickings are better. I like the letter because it’s a warning to the next generation: don’t be mislead by older people telling you that men and women can do the same work: at home, in the office, or in school. In each stage of life, men and women care about different things. [Note: Princeton removed the link from their site. But there is conversation all over the Internet about it anyway. Here's a discussion at NPR.]

2. Understand the different stages of life. For women, when they turn 30, it’s time to have kids if they want them. Men can start a new career when they’re 30. Women can’t. You can’t start two new careers at once, and having a kid is starting a new career for women. Not men.

3. Accept that this is a problem inherent in school. School teaches that linear progression is important. And that high achievement through ranking and competition is important. Using your intelligence to gain influence and or money is important. None of these things happen when you scale back your career to have kids. None of these things happen when your husband thinks the bathroom is clean and you don’t. School teaches girls that the things women value and the choices women make are largely not valuable. At least not as valuable as ranking and influence and money and achievement.

The real gap here is between the values we teach kids in school and the values we reward in the work world. We really do value what we choose to spend time doing. Women make choices that are not a linear progression from what we learn in school. Which means that at age 30, there is a crisis: women have been high performers their whole lives and they realize, often, that they don’t care enough about that contest to keep winning at it.

The real workplace revolution is not happening at work. Women today reject our chronically unbending and incredibly demanding corporate culture. Most women don’t want to get past the glass ceiling.

Which means that the real revolution begins in school, where we have to start teaching kids that there is a wide range of paths in adult life, and many of them have nothing to do with book knowledge and high IQ. Until we start doing this, women will always feel regret and disappointment when they stop being high achievers in order to make decisions more consistent with their values.