Yesterday I was trolling for posts, and I remembered this one, about hiring a babysitter. I never link to it because I can't read it. I get physically ill. It was a short, stinging moment during an absolutely terrible time in my life. But a part of me likes that sting. I'm the kind of girl that picks scabs off just to feel like I'm alive.

So you can imagine that a blog post about how to sell is not rocking my world. It's true that I've been thinking a lot about creating more stability in my life. But it's also true that in the recent post about what I learned from sales guys, I should have told you that when I met one of those sales guys on a plane, I went to a hotel and had sex with him. I had never had a one-night stand and I thought I should know what it's like. And it was terrible. I like picking scabs, but it's very controlled. It's hard to control a one-night stand, and it was, actually, very scary and not fun at all.

I want this blog to be somewhere in between a one-night stand with a sales guy and a five-point list of sales tips. In fact, I want my life to be that way as well.

A few days ago I flew to LA to get my haircut. I know that sounds crazy, but remember that I live in the middle of Wisconsin. Also, my best friend, Sharon, is in LA, and she owns a hair salon, and she's been cutting my hair for 15 years. Before I was her free-haircut-friend, a cut and color with her was about $300. So I feel like the plane ticket, together with the free haircut, is somehow still a bargain.

I go there on a day the salon is closed, and we do my hair and then spend the day hanging out in Santa Monica talking.

At lunch, outside, with cars driving by, I tell Sharon I need a break. I need a vacation. I have been working absolutely insane hours for the last five years. I traveled so much that when I get on a plane now, I have panic attacks.

She said, "What would you do on vacation?"

Me: "I'd probably wake up, take the kids to school, go to the gym, write a blog post, and then work on whatever company I was percolating. And then pick the kids up at school."

So I don't really want a vacation. I want breathing room. But not a vacation. To be honest, I still work at night. I am not sure why. I think because I'm interested in what people are doing. In what I'm doing. I don't want to miss anything because everything is still fun.

I think working at night is like picking scabs. It feels lively to solve some problems before I go to bed. Or create some. (Same way with pulling a scab, right?)

After lunch, Sharon and I drove to Culver City, to get my eyebrows done. I usually go to NYC for eyebrows. But I don't want to travel anymore, so I don't want to have a hair person in LA and an eyebrow person in NY. So, as a step toward simplifying my life, I did my eyebrows in LA.

I liked the place immediately because there was a whole display of gray nail polish and I know gray is the it-color for fall, and I know no one is wearing it yet in Madison, so I had high hopes for my eyebrows.

But they are uneven. Sharon tried to tell me they were okay, but good friends, really, don't do that. So in the end, she didn't. And I'm going back to NY next time.

I know you'll say, "Just find someone else in LA." It's not bad advice. In fact, this is what Sharon said.

But I'm upset about the eyebrows, about how it turned out. It's hard to make changes, even if the changes could make my life more calm. It's so easy to convince ourselves that the change is too difficult to make. For eyebrows, for a blog, for a career.

I used to think I’m not that good at sales. For example, I’m an open book—I have very little ability to bluff or play my hand close to my—actually, what is that expression? I don’t even know the expression.

But then, when I told one of my mentors that I’m not good at sales, he said, “Of course you’re good at sales. You’ve gotten three companies funded.” He’s right. I wanted to take back all the times I said I’m not good at sales. The thing is, I have a specific talent in this department: selling ideas.

I have gotten companies funded when they were still just philosophies about how a market will move, what the trends are, and what ideas will work. I have yet to raise a later round of funding, where the company is selling actual products or services with me raising money to sell them faster.

I’m also great at the consultative sale. I’m great at meeting someone who wants to think in new ways, and tossing some ideas back and forth and then going to lunch, or yoga, or commenting on each others’ blogs. I connect easily on ideas, and can close a sale there because the idea exchange is so rewarding.

There’s another kind of salesperson, though. The kind that can hit numbers, close tough deals with demanding customers, and compete effectively against the most cutthroat of their peers.

I am fascinated by this type of person. I don’t meet them a lot, which makes me nervous. Because I want to be more like them, and there’s a great piece by Clive Thompson in the New York Times about the Framingham Heart Study that shows that you become more like the people you hang out with. And it started to worry me that I don’t like hanging out with competitive types.

I know, you’re thinking, WHAT? But I’m never about getting the most money or getting up the ladder the fastest. I’m always about getting what I want to do when I want to do it—having the work that makes me happiest feeding the life that makes me happiest. Frankly, that is so much work for me that I don’t have any energy left to notice who is winning.

But it worries me. It worries me that in general, when I’m in hand-to-hand combat—on the volleyball court, in divorce court, in Ryan Healy’s office—I tend to give in so that the whole process ends sooner and I can get back to whatever is going on in my head. I always want to get back to thinking about ideas. And that desire makes me not the strongest competitor.

When I was flying two or three times a week, I sat beside a lot of sales guys.  And it is mostly guys. First Class is always full of men when you travel between smaller cities, and the odds of sitting next to someone in sales on any late-in-the-day, weeknight flight, is very high from any city.

I talked with sales guys a lot and mostly I learned that I don’t think like they do.

So it should come as no surprise that my company just had to hire one of these sales guys: Justin Rheinhardt. That’s his name. I loved hiring him because I knew my days of having to be a cutthroat closer were over. Justin is that. But also I loved hiring him because I learned so much from him in just two weeks.

For example, Justin was in recruiting, which makes sense because we are selling services that help recruiters. So I asked him why he wants to do sales instead of recruiting.

And he told me that if you’re a sales guy, you can’t be a recruiter, because good recruiters really care about placing the candidate where they fit. Good recruiters build relationships to help people over a long period of time—helping that person build their career on a path that works for them.

Justin just wants to sell, so he was closing instead of counseling. For Justin, the rush of the close is what drives him. Which I totally believe, because I don’t really have that. I have the rush of a good idea.

I talked to Richard Goldman, COO of Birkman International, a company that helps businesses make intelligent hires by using the Birkman Method for personality assessments. Goldman says, “If you’re a great team player, you probably don’t belong in sales. Salespeople are in it for themselves. They eat what they kill.”

I asked Goldman if he thought I could develop these skills, and he says that our underlying needs are set by age five or six, and our usual behaviors are set by age 22.

So it’s pretty clear to me that I’m not a salesperson, and I’m not an eat-what-I-kill sales person, plus I’m not going to become one either. I’m more of a convince-someone-else-to-go-out-and-do-the-killing person.

Also, Justin has a rule that you make your calls list at the end of the day, so that you can start calling right away in the morning. That calling part seems really hard to me. You have to be really driven to kill to be able to sit down and make calls every day.

But I know that if you want to be an idea person, you should sit down and write an idea first thing in the morning. And now, come to think of it, maybe you can tell who you are by what you require yourself to do first, every day.

Like most goals in life, my definition of blogging success has shifted as the circumstances of my life have shifted.

1. Post regularly without messing anything up.
My first goal was simply to understand how to get my writing onto the Internet. All the buzzwords overwhelmed me: feeds, trackbacks, SEO. I understood none of it, and it took weeks to get up the nerve to blog before I actually started. My first goal was to post regularly and avoid basic publishing mistakes like posting a draft before it was ready. (Reality check: There are much easier ways to start a blog than the method I chose.)

2. Create traffic.
I started measuring my success by traffic. But after a few months, I was totally overwhelmed and had to rethink what I was doing. Suddenly I couldn’t answer all the comments, I couldn’t even answer all my email at the beginning—it started coming in faster than I ever imagined. (Reality check: Traffic metrics are addictive.)

3. Grow conversations.
I started getting a handle on my email and the comments and the general influx of blog-related information from all the readers. And in the process, I realized that what I really cared about was the conversation. I wanted to meet new people and learn new things about topics I’m interested in. So I wanted the conversation to be good. I started measuring my success by the number of comments, and then, in turn, by how much I was learning from the comments. (Note: Here's a lovely post from Problogger about encouraging comments.)

4. Make money.
I realized that I loved blogging more than any other writing I had ever done. I knew I wanted this to be my job, so I needed to be able to support my family doing it. I started measuring my success by how much income I could generate. I hit my target of $100,000 a year pretty easily (thanks to Yahoo) so I realized that I could aim higher. (Reality check: Money is not a good blog goal for most people.)

5. Build a company.
So I decided to sell equity in my blog and spin off a company. I gauged my success on how quickly I could get the company launched and funded. And, once I did that, I gauged my success on how well I could leverage my blog to drive traffic to my company, Brazen Careerist. You might be sick of hearing about my company here, but, you might also be happy to know that I’ve accomplished that goal, too. (Reality check: I nearly died from the stress of doing this.)

6. Regain my sanity.
So, here I am, asking myself, what is my goal with the blog now? Right now, what I want for myself is to be calm and peaceful. I have had a really wild ride in the last five years. I have gone from being nearly broke in NYC, moving to Wisconsin, starting a company,  getting a divorce, traveling every week, while I’m trying to raise kids. Life has been chaotic and erratic and I’m sick of that. I want a break. I want to feel grounded, stable and I want routine.

Part of that, of course, is why I’m with a farmer. It’s the farmer stereotype: grounded, stable, waking up every day to do chores. But I need to find that stuff from inside myself, as well.

On days when I post, I feel grounded and stable and connected. On days I don’t post, I don’t feel that. Which is why I should be posting every day. I see people who have very busy lives who are able to post every day.

So this will be a test for me. For now, my definition of successful blogging is using my blog to give myself a sense of stability and connectedness.

Each blogger starts for some reason. A good test for whether a goal is really meaningful to you is, do you keep at it? Do you keep striving to meet the goal? Sometimes I wonder, do I really want stability and a sense of being grounded, or do I just talk about it? The only way to find out is this: committing to it here, in a very public way, and seeing if it sticks.

The answer is not always intuitive. For example, you'd think that if Bill Gates wants to give you career advice, you should take it, right? I mean, the guy’s had a pretty decent career. The problem is that if he doesn’t care about your career, he’s going to give you generic advice.

Here are five other counter-intuitive principles I have used to figure out who to listen to when it comes to my own career:

Listen to people who hate you. People ask me all the time how I put up with the level of criticism this blog draws. The interesting thing about taking advice from people who don't like me is that sometimes, they'll say things that other people wouldn't say because it would hurt me. I rely on my gut in terms of whose criticism comes from caring and understanding and whose criticism comes from an obsessive need to take me down, but after I figure that out, I still pay attention to my critics.

Stop thinking your issues are especially difficult. The most important piece of self-knowledge is that our problems are not unique. If you had problems no one else has, then no one will understand you enough to help you. But the truth is that it’s pretty easy to see what someone else should be doing  if you have distance from a problem.  So don’t be a snob about who to take advice from. You don’t need a “career expert." You don’t have the world’s most sophisticated problems. If you are articulate about framing your problem, most of your friends can give articulate, useful guidance for solving the problem.

Less experience often means better advice. When it comes to finding a mentor, the most effective mentors are 3-5 years ahead of you in the workplace. Those are the people who have the best memory of what it was like to be where you are. In today's workplace this is especially true. The rules are changing so quickly, that many times someone who has a lot more experience than you do will also be out of touch with what the workplace is like today. I find that this is a big problem when people rely on their parents for advice.

Be wary of people whose lives look perfect. Happiness researchers have known for a long time that if you ask people directly if they are happy in their career, most of the time they’ll lie. This makes sense becuase if someone has invested tons of time in getting to where they are, it’s a really tough thing to say they’re unhappy; then they’d have to take action to change. So you’re often better off just watching people. Many people hide their lives – they want you to think things are going perfectly, and they’re always making great decisions, so they don’t tell you the parts that are a mess. But sometimes, you come across people who are willing to show you the messy parts, and you can learn the most from these people. This is why I like reading about celebrities. They can’t hide as much as non-celebrities, so I can learn more about what works and what doesn’t.

Stick with people who give you bad advice. If you're getting advice from someone who has never steered you wrong, then you're not asking this person enough questions. After a  while, someone who has given you a lot of advice will falter. Because no one is perfect, and no one can do as well at running your life as you can. So if you find someone who is giving good advice, push harder, until you get to their limit. Everyone gives bad advice sometimes, even me.

In some respects, bad advice might be better than good advice. Because what you really want is advice that makes you think in new ways about possibilities for yourself.  So when it comes to taking advice, you still have to have your inner compass. You can’t blame anyone else for where you end up. But, in a way, that’s good news. Because if you are responsible for where you are, if you don’t like it, you can get yourself to a new spot. This means that you should gather lots of advice, but be aware that sometimes, you need to ignore it. After all, what is the fun of life if we can’t make our own mistakes?

If you are excited about business travel, thinking it’s a free ticket to see the world, you should stop reading now. But if you are having trouble maintaining your personal life in the face of tons of travel, these tips from a cynical traveler will make life easier for you.

1. Stick with your priorities. When people travel to another city, why do they throw out their to do list for sightseeing in random museums? If you have on your top three things you want in life: go to the gym, stay in touch with friends, read a book a week, then sightseeing is not on the list. You don’t need to do it when you travel. You need to stick to your priorities. If sightseeing is on your priority list, then get a new job, because you have no control over where you sightsee if you have a job with a lot of travel.

2. Eat really well. First of all, you’re not paying for your own food, so you should eat really good, healthy food, which is always more expensive than junk food. Second, if you have a rule for yourself that you always eat well when you travel, then you will actually be healthier from traveling. Most people eat crap when they travel because they are tired and they feel like the calories don’t count because they are across state lines. That attitude will make you burn out faster. I can’t find a link but I’m sure there’s a study to support the hypothesis that you deal with the stress of travel more effectively without McDonald’s.

3. Think of balance in terms of weeks, not days. I know I want to spend time with the Farmer, spend time with the kids, be around for dinner invitations, and tooth-fairy moments. I used to worry about this every day. If I didn’t have breakfast with the kids, then I had to have dinner. Now I think in terms of weeks. If I was gone all week, I take off a day from work to have extra time for my personal life. If you are good at your job, and you travel a lot, no one counts how many days you take off.

4. Get elite status. Somewhere. Anywhere. When everyone is staying overnight at O’Hare, the people who are platinum are getting rebooked first. When you are waiting on the tarmac for an hour at LaGuardia because air traffic control cannot remember how many planes are in the air (which, really, is like, every day) if you get upgraded to first class, you’re drinking free wine and eating firm grapes while you are a prisoner of the airport. To get elite status, it means that every time your company wants to save $50 to put you on another airline, you have to say no. If my company will save more than $300, I’ll travel on an airline that I am not platinum on. Make sure your company knows you’re doing them a favor.

5. Do not agree to stupid meetings for geographical reasons. Just because someone you never want to hang out with lives in Saskatchewan and you’re gonna be there doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you should hang out with him. You have a life. And you surely have stuff you can do that evening besides hang out with a loser. Or maybe he’s only a half-loser. The thing is, you don’t have time for half-losers at home. They are the same everywhere: Still just a distraction from the real work of living the life you want.

The bottom line is that you need to  respect your life. Your life cannot be on hold while you travel. The travel, if it’s really frequent, sort of is your life. So the values you have—be spiritual, be frugal, be healthy—have to prevail during your travel. This is not vacation travel. This is not a vacation from your life. Business travel IS your life.

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