Q&A
Q: What makes your career advice different?
A: I explain why old advice - like pay your dues, climb the ladder, and don’t have gaps in your resume - is outdated and irrelevant in today’s workplace. I have a reputation for giving advice that is counterintuitive but effective, like take long lunches, ignore people who steal your ideas, and stop vying for a promotion. Both the New York Times and Business Week cited my writing as especially in tune with today’s new workplace.
Also, I am known for test-driving my advice before spewing it. In my personal life, I routinely (often awkwardly) demonstrate buzzwords before they buzz, like the quarterlife crisis, portfolio career, and shared-care parenting. My own career choices have been featured by Time magazine and the London Guardian as examples of the new issues people face at work today.
Q: What is your work history?
A: I spent ten years as a marketing executive in the software industry and then I founded two companies of my own. I have endured an IPO, a merger and a bankruptcy. Prior to that I was a professional beach volleyball player.
I have had a number of ludicrous jobs that taught me a lot about myself and the world. For example, I was a chicken farmer in rural France and killed our food for dinner; I answered fan mail for Esther Williams, and determined who scored saucy photos from the 1940s and who got the more up-to-date head shots; I worked at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange using the open outcry system for European currency arbitrage, and I got fired for not keeping up with the trades the day the Berlin Wall fell.
Q: What was it like playing volleyball?
A: I spent a lot of my time in a bathing suit. I spent eight hours a day on the beach and two hours a day at the gym. I was in a Bud Light commercial, and I had sponsor names written across my chest.
I realized after being on the tour was that what really interested me was the process of getting sponsors. So after my learning curve started to flatten in beach volleyball, I moved into marketing. I picked the software industry because I knew people in software made a lot of money and I was sick of struggling to pay rent.
Q: How did you become a writer?
A: I started writing business advice when Fortune magazine published an open call for a woman to write about her own life as an executive. I auditioned with a piece about my brother’s stupid Internet ideas, and a piece about my boss’s sex appeal, and I won the job.
I never thought I would be a full-time writer. But I was standing next to the World Trade Center when the first tower fell. I got so close to death that I got to that stage where you make peace with it. When I lived, I couldn’t go back to my office, which was four blocks away.
So I sat in my apartment, churning out my weekly column and thinking I was an unemployed software executive. But then I realized that I was a full-time writer. And I stopped looking for software marketing jobs.
Today, I am a columnist at Yahoo Finance and the Boston Globe, and my syndicated column runs in more than 200 publications worldwide.
Q: Why did you start blogging?
A: In April 2006 I did a lot of research for a column I wrote for the Boston Globe about blogging. The column concluded that if you want a successful career, you should be blogging. But the column was about to run, and I realized I didn’t have a blog myself, and that would look really bad.
So I started one. I told myself I’d just do a couple of posts a week, but it only took two weeks before I was posting every day. It was totally addictive right from the beginning.
Today, about 100,000 people read my blog each month.
Q: Where are you based?
A: I have spent roughly ten years each in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and New York City. Seven months ago, I wrote a series of columns about how to leverage scientific data about what makes us happy in order to choose a job and a place to live. I took my own advice and moved from New York City to Madison, Wisconsin even though I had never been there before. The first word my baby learned in Wisconsin was cow.