One Question for Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times and international bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happier. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness.  Happier at Home:  Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Lifewas published in September, 2012.

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

Gretchen:   My most significant risk professionally was to switch from law to writing. I was clerking for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when I finally acknowledged to myself that I really wanted to be a writer. I decided to start all over from zero. It was difficult, but I realized that I would rather fail as a writer than succeed as a lawyer. At the time, I was working on a big research project about power, money, fame, and sex, in my free time, so I decided that it was time to treat that project as my job, not my hobby, and see if I could get an agent and sell the proposal for a book. I did—and that project became my first book, POWER MONEY FAME SEX: A USER’S GUIDE. And I’ve been a full-time writer ever since.

Miss Manners Minds Your Business

My review originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. When Judith Martin published her first guide to manners in 1979, the country was still settling down after a decade-plus of countercultural upheaval. Women had become members of the workforce in large numbers, and men were being permitted a more relaxed affect (no ties, longer hair) in most offices. Television series like "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" were successful because they amusingly used workplace snafus to illustrate our shared post-1960s struggle to parse behavioral "rules" amid the new flux, and because they depicted the truth that, with more of us earning salaries full-time, the workplace had become a new kind of quasi-family.

Miss Manners, the amusingly arch and starchy avatar that Ms. Martin initially invented while at the Washington Post, was mock-conservative but also genuinely conservative, lightly ironic but ultimately quite serious about basic good manners. For a would-be establishment desperate for some plausible modern heir to Emily Post, she was an ideal spokesperson. Or is it spokeswoman? In her latest book, "Miss Manners Minds Your Business," our authority is torn on how best to deal with gendered titles. Somewhere during the past two decades, she writes, the rules "went into the shredder, engulfed by almost universal agreement that there should be no difference between professional manners and personal manners."

In "Miss Manners Minds Your Business," it often seems that Ms. Martin, Wellesley class of 1959, wants to wish away the era of "The Office" in favor of an improved, gender-blind "Mad Men" paradigm. Channeling her inner Joan Holloway, she admonishes us to create distinct behavioral spheres and norms for work and home. She declares that at the root of our 21st-century uncertainties about proper workplace behavior are the "two big lies of the modern workplace—that the old hierarchies are gone, so that all employees are equal, and that these new 'teams' are as bound together by friendship as by the accident of employment." She dismisses as faddish nonsense the idea "that people accomplish more when they become pals. It is in direct contradiction to what every schoolteacher knows about separating friends during class."

My reaction to this, as to so many of her assertions, was: Yeah, maybe, I guess, but. While most of one's co-workers aren't going to become close pals, in ultra-mobile contemporary America, work is indeed where many of one's important friendships will be made.

Still, Ms. Martin is right that a lot of stress these days derives from the porous membrane between the professional and the private. She aptly describes the complications that ensue when each of us, digitally connected, is expected to be available 24/7 for family while at work and for work while at home. "The demarcation between public and private was clearer when there was an office door," Ms. Martin writes. "Not every minute spent at work might have been spent on work, but the assumption was there. Cubicle 'farms,' 'open offices,' and lunch rooms—not to mention long hours—at work, and telecommuting, sales jobs, and social media bloggers off-site, have made it less clear what is on, and what off, the clock."

Absolutely. Ms. Martin is at her strongest when sorting through issues faced by parents or childless employees, and she lands firmly on the side of justice when she says that "many patterns of life in this country no longer fit the realities." Companies need to step up and address the needs of working families, she writes; "society has a crucial interest in the welfare of children, and therefore in making good care available, and therefore in designing respected and economically feasible jobs for parents, adult children, and professional assistants alike." Yes!

But I regret to report, with all due respect, that Miss Manners mostly fails to grapple with the thorniest problems of the modern office. When the average person will spend no more than four years in each job, how does one best enter a new workplace again and again and yet again? When it's projected that almost 40% of the workforce will be freelance by 2020, what are the peculiar etiquette issues faced by the self-employed?

"Miss Manners Minds Your Business" is composed of correspondence from her etiquette-anxious readers, to whom the author offers counsel and, along the way, broader cultural reflection. Ms. Martin and her son Nicholas have culled about 200-odd letters, many of which concern the circumstances of open-plan office environments: smelly food, smelly colleagues, noisy neighbors. A particular Miss Manners bugaboo—required attendance at office parties—comes up again and again. But nearly all the questions could have been asked and answered anytime during the past several decades. (Indeed, they were—different questions mention pagers, "dot-coms" and the cellphones that people have started using a lot. One letter is repeated verbatim from the 2005 edition of "Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior," originally published in 1979.)

"Miss Manners Minds Your Business" feels musty, and not always in the lovably, charmingly ironic way that defined the Miss Manners sensibility 35 years ago. She does address a few nettlesome email problems (no response to an electronic job application, receiving unintended correspondence, reply-all responses, a young employee instant-messaging a boss), but mostly she just rues the new conditions. She doesn't delve into the best way to handle the tsunami of everyday electronic dysfunction that exasperates all of us—people who don't bother to carefully read the emails they get, or supervisors who answer emails at midnight yet fail to tell staff that they needn't answer immediately. What are the rules for texting during meetings? She doesn't say. How does one manage in a global company? Nary a question.

One thing Ms. Martin does say is that she isn't fond of emotional outbursts at work. "What helps in emotional situations is formality and ceremony," she says peremptorily, "not, as popularly believed, talking things out, which can easily lead to disaster." "When attempting to enter the business world," she writes, we need "to learn to be someone else. It is called having a professional identity."

Beyond the hyperbole, I fundamentally disagree with her wear-a-mask-to-work approach. Of course an employee should dress and speak appropriately for the environment in which she works and, even in our TMI age, sometimes play things close to the vest. But behavioral economists who study the workplace have identified something called "emotion labor," which in a nutshell is the effort required to maintain a difference between how you feel at your most natural and how you must act when circumstances require it. If too much effort is applied to "being someone else," it can be exhausting and demoralizing.

Employees and their bosses are clueless about how to draw boundaries in a boundary-less world. Antidiscrimination and harassment laws have legitimately constrained management but also left them and their employees uncertain how to demonstrate empathy or compassion, especially during financially challenging times. "Change was desperately needed, and, contrary to rumor, etiquette is not against change," Ms. Martin writes. "It only stipulates that it be well thought out, orderly change that preserves what is good from the past while rectifying what is bad." In our changing world, we crave sensible guidance. Miss Manners does her characteristic job providing a common-sense approach that may have worked in the past, but almost nothing suggests that she understands the bedeviling nature of etiquette at work in the quite different now.

Best High School Band?

The Winner of Studio 360's Battle of the High School Bands.

Studio 360's Battle of the High School Bands contest, ended up with 350 submissions spanning six decades of adolescence — from psychedelic pop to soulful hip-hop. (For a handful of the very best, check out their two volumes of mixtapes.) Rock star judges, Andrew W.K. and Thao Nguyen, had the challenging task of picking a winner, and then collaborating on a cover version of that song. Their pick was “The River,” by three young Nashville women who go by Bea, Rita & Maeve.

Listen to "The River" by Bea, Rita & Maeve and Andrew W.K. and Thao Nguyen's cover here.

“There was a very timeless quality this song had, without being nostalgic,” Andrew tells Kurt Andersen. Thao praises the “subtlety and refinement in the musicianship.” In fact, the pros admit to being daunted by the rookies. “It ruined my entire perception of myself in high school,” Andrew confesses. Where the original hews to a folk style, Andrew and Thao’s cover uses rock drums and layers of instruments for a heavier, arena-ready version.

Both versions are extraordinary

Listen As T. S. Eliot Reads "The Wasteland"

I found  this recording by T.S. Eliot of his heavily allusive 1922 masterpiece “The Waste Land” at Open Culture. Originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a quote from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, the poem is filled with references to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and James Frazier’s The Golden Bough. Ezra Pound's heavy reworking is responsible for the poem you hear above, read by Eliot himself. The first image in the video shows Pound’s marginal annotations.

Find the words at: http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html

Reading Now -- The Unfinished Revolution

In The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family, New York University sociology professor, Kathleen Gerson, draws upon extensive ethnographic research to explore the new attitudes towards work and family. Gerson conducted in-depth interviews with 120 men and women between the ages of 18 and 32 from a wide variety of family backgrounds.  Yet despite their diversity, common themes emerged. “In contrast to the popular claim that this generation feels neglected by working mothers, unsettled by parental breakups, and wary of equality, they express strong support for working mothers and much greater concern with the quality of the relationship between parents than whether they stayed together or separated.”

"Coming of age in an era of more fluid marriages, less stable work careers, and profound shifts in mothers' ties to the workplace shaped the experiences of a new generation.  Compared to their parents or grandparents, they are more likely to have lived in a home containing either one parent or a co-habitating but unmarried couple and to have seen married parents break up or single parents remarry.  They are more likely to have watched a stay-at-home mother join the workplace or an employed mother pull back from work when the balancing act got too difficult.  And they are more likely to have seen their financial stability rise or fall as a household's composition changed or parents encountered unexpected shifts in their job situations."

"In the end, whether or not a mother held a paid job matters far less than whether or not mothers and fathers were satisfied with their lives and with the life they were able to provide for their children."

What You Need To Know Before You Quit Your Day Job.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Going it alone is liberating – and tough.

At the height of the go-go late 1990s, when entrepreneurial optimism leached from the dot.com bubble into the rest of the work culture, I decided to go freelance as a writer and consultant.

In the past I’d worked in commissioned sales — both print advertising and television programs – so the notion of having compensation tied to performance didn’t particularly scare me. I’d also helped build media businesses, which allowed me to imagine that being a freelancer wouldn’t be all that different.

But at the time, I foolishly focused in on my past successes instead of what really mattered — the practical nitty-gritty.

Today, given the deluge of people going freelance as a result of the Great Recession — a recent Intuit study estimates that by 2020 the number of U.S. freelancers will be as high as 60 million or 40% of our workforce— it’s worth examining what this army of the newly minted self-employed will be likely to experience.

Having been in the freelance space for over a decade, here’s what I’ve learned:

It’ll Change Your Identity

Most of us spend great swaths of time at work. It’s no wonder we define ourselves by what we do there: The higher up a particular ladder we progress, the more money we make, and the more valuable and important we feel we’ve become. It’s a key way U.S. culture measures worth and success. (See Sandberg, Sheryl: Lean In)

When I stopped having a title, I changed overnight from being a person whose work and worth was easily calibrated by others, into something that felt amorphous and slippery. I was surprised by how emotionally vulnerable it made me feel.

It took me a year or more to begin to feel comfortable describing myself as a freelance journalist. Peer judgment, real or internally projected, can sideswipe someone in the midst of a career change. Before making the freelance leap, try to anticipate the full range of ways others’ evaluation of your new status will make you feel. That shouldn’t stop you, but you should be prepared.

It’s Expensive

Depending on what you choose to do, there will be savings – reduced wardrobe expense, potentially reduced transportation costs – but there are also significant costs to going it alone.

Setting up and operating a home office and business – legal fees (will your corporate self be an S, C or LLC?), bookkeeping and productivity software, computer hardware, website design and hosting, marketing, tax preparation (just to name a few) – costs real money. Don’t overlook the importance of funding retirement accounts or health insurance.

As for that paycheck, you should know when you go freelance, that you probably won’t earn as much money as you would have had you stayed in your company job.

Also know, that your future income will be hugely variable. Monthly retainers and long-term commitments are increasingly vestiges of a bygone era. It’s a given that clients will, in the best-case scenario, pay you 90 days after you submit your invoice. So craft a financial plan with built-in contingencies. 

It’s Hard Work

Before I went freelance, I’d thought the vicissitudes of sales jobs had thickened my skin for the ups and downs of freelance work, but it’s one thing to sell the product of a team effort and something else entirely when the product is … you.

Then, rejection becomes infinitely harder to shake off. Day in and day out, a freelancer has to get up knowing that they need to network and self-promote even when the process is grueling and humbling.

And the hard work doesn’t stop after a sale or a commission. Don’t expect to hear back from the prospective buyer for days and weeks. Developing a graceful way to continually seek reassurance that the work was acceptable and didn’t get lost in the company spam filter (a favorite way for freelancers to let-clients-off-the-hook-for-their-rudeness) can be a chronic, dispiriting challenge.

Finally, remember you’ll be wearing a lot of hats. And that’s definitely hard work. When the internet goes down or the printer jams, you are the IT department; when payments are in arrears, you are Accounts Receivable as well.

Some Things Need Collaboration

Developing new leads, hatching the best distribution or marketing plan, uncovering fresh sources for manufacturing, refining or expanding an idea — many things are improved with collaboration.

A loose network of friends and colleagues can help identify resources and brainstorm. Co-working spaces can also offer a collaborative environment. Virtual communities, like Freelancer.com or LinkedIn can provide leads and resources, but, let’s be honest, it’s lonely out there.

It Can Make You Happy

Having worked freelance for the past 15 years, I find I can no longer remember what it felt like to work a 9 to 5 job.  The irregular cash flow and diminished income is more than made up by the freedom to choose my work.  I love being wholly responsible for the success or failure of my output, which researchers have identified as a key determinant of workplace happiness.  A 2004 research study of 1,000 people by the Work Foundation suggests I’m not alone: More than 80% of those surveyed who were self-employed said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs.”

When in doubt, I take solace from risk engineering professor Nassim Taleb’s assertion in Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder that by buffeting about in the roiling waters of regular professional uncertainty, the freelancer becomes strong.

In a world where job security is a quaint 20th century artifact, perhaps evolving an independent, freelance career for oneself is a cleverly Darwinian means of survival.

Does Language Influence Spending, Eating and Smoking Habits?

The language we speak influences behavior in surprising ways.  Derek Thompson from The Atlantic shares new research from economist Keith Chen. In the 1930s, linguists proposed that the way we read, write, and talk helped to determine the way we see the world. Speakers of languages that had the same word for orange and yellow had a harder time actually distinguishing the colors. Speakers of the Kook Thaayorre language, which has no words for left and right, must orient themselves by north, south, east, and west at all time, which enhances their awareness of geographical and astronomical markers.

Last year, economist Keith Chen released a working paper (now published) suggesting speakers of languages without strong future tenses tended to be more responsible about planning for the future. Quick example. In English, we say "I will go to the play tomorrow." That's strong future tense. In Mandarin or Finnish, which have weaker future tenses, it might be more appropriate to say, "I go to the play tomorrow."

Chen wondered whether languages with weak future tenses would be more thoughtful about the future because they consider it, grammatically, equivalent to the present. He mapped stronger and weak future-tense languages across Europe and correlated the data with future-oriented behaviors like saving, smoking, and using condoms.

Remarkably, he discovered that speakers with weak future tenses (e.g. German, Finnish and Estonian) were 30 percent more likely to save money, 24 percent more likely to avoid smoking, 29 percent more likely to exercise regularly, and 13 percent less likely to be obese, than speakers of languages with strong future tenses, like English.

If your B.S. antennae are standing straight up (as mine were), you might be more interested in (To read more...)

This five minute video presents the facts in a simplistic, but comprehensive way.

Why We Make Bad Decisions

In 2005, Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of Stumbling on Happiness, delivered this TED talk on why we make bad decisions.   Economic instability, employer churn, and the permanent state of uncertainty clouding the workplace, make the issues Gilbert explores even more relevant today.  As Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow put it another way, "nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it."

The Formula For Creating Happiness At Work

How can we be happier at work?   

Fast Company excerpted the following from my book, It's Always Personal.

"Professional happiness is elusive--but you can have it (or even manufacture it), if you know where to look.In her book, The Happiness Myth, Jennifer Michael Hecht identifies three basic kinds of happiness: good day, good life, and peak, and I’ve found that thinking about work within her construct has helped me tease apart some of the “happiness formula” variables that influence well-being.

Good-day happiness at work might mean: I got to the office early, I was able to take care of backlogged paperwork that had been nagging me, I had a productive meeting, and I was able to leave in time to make it to my daughter’s school concert. Good-day happiness is about an awareness of the fortunate conditions of one’s life--where stopping to smell the roses can have measurable positive impact.

Good-life happiness as it relates to work would be more along the lines of being engaged in tasks that you find meaningful and challenging, and in which you are aware that you’re helping provide a decent material quality of life for your family. This kind of happiness is more connected to hard work--the sense that one is doing the best one can in any endeavor and, ideally, endeavors in which the work itself is its own reward. Good-life happiness does not relate to things like our gender or our age, over which we have no influence, but rather to conditions over which we do have some control, such as where we work or the kind of work we choose to do. But good-life happiness does not mean that we are “happy all the time,” to quote the (only somewhat ironic) title of Laurie Colwin’s great novel. Far from it. The positive psychology field puts this in perspective, acknowledging through empirical and replicable research that in spite of the advantages of thinking positively, there are times when “negative” thinking is appropriate, and that difficulty, pain, and sadness are inevitable. We need obstacles and challenges in our lives for achievements to have meaning, the cold and cloudy days that make us revel in the warm and sunny ones, the necessary and numbing scut work that lets us really enjoy the resulting moments of success. Outrage on behalf of the disadvantaged can lead people to make their corners of the world better places. Ferocity--a little anger, even--can fuel healthy competition.

And, finally, the third kind of happiness--peak happiness--is the more transcendent sort, by definition rare in everyday life, including (and maybe especially) on the job. I’ve also found that this sort of happiness becomes more elusive the older we get--the more cares and responsibilities we have, the less willing we may be to engage in the kinds of experiences where peak moments tend to happen. It takes effort to wake up in the middle of the night with our kids to watch the Pleiades’ meteor showers if our prospective sense of how exhausted we’ll be at work the next day outweighs our anticipation of awe. But, Hecht intimates, it is the peak experiences in our lives that endure, that offer us hope and glimmers of meaning, and that connect us to our families, communities, and a sense of the eternal. And this kind of happiness is closely connected to the “V” in the happiness formula--these are the things we choose to do.

While in our personal and private lives peak happiness may be, for instance, the kind of euphoria we experience at a great rock concert or after exceptional sex, at work it is more often connected with the creation of something original: designing a new kind of ergonomic desk chair, discovering a new way to isolate and destroy viruses, delivering a giant project early and under budget, or creating the next Simpsons. In short, moments of peak happiness at work often involve some aspect of the creative process.

The Creative Connection
“There have been in my career a handful of times when I had what I call true happiness--where who I was at that time felt in harmony with what my company did and was about,” says Tom Harbeck, who is today senior vice president for strategy and marketing at OTX, a consumer research firm. And Tom connects his professional happiness during those times with a few key factors: working for a company where there was “a team of people who ‘got it,’” where everyone felt plugged into some larger vision and shared the goal of making the mission come to life. Tom is talking about the collective experience of flow, the happiness derived from face-to-face, day-to-day social connection with other seriously engaged people on the same wavelength.

One of Tom’s times of peak joy was when he worked at the Chiat-Day advertising agency in the 1980s. “The culture was so intensely alive,” he says, “that you couldn’t separate the [agency’s] slogans from the employees who wore them on their T-shirts. ‘Good enough is not enough,’ ‘I’d rather be the pirates than the navy,’ ‘How big can we get before we get bad?’ It was a culture that thrived on scrutiny, debate, evaluation, and criticism--all aimed at the work, not at each other.”Tom was fortunate to find work that tapped into his inner passions. “I was a poetry major,” he says, “who had no training in advertising or marketing, in the midst of an organization creating an advertising revolution.” Chiat-Day’s 1984 Apple ad redefined buzz and event advertising after only one run. Nike’s “real athletes” billboards took a 180-degree turn from celebrity sports spokespeople. And the firm’s NYNEX Yellow Pages ad, “If it’s out there, it’s in here,” charmed the entire country. Despite Tom’s inexperience, his bosses listened to what he had to say and considered it (not him) against the goal of improving the agency’s work, making it closer to great. It turned out that his English-major poetry training--finding and feeling the meaning given an economy of words used freshly--was highly relevant to creating ads. Advertising was intended to make you think and feel something, not unlike poetry. “So despite no prior experience,” Tom says, “who I was and what I knew and what I was good at, at that precise moment in my life, was valued. I was happy. When it happens, it is tremendous--you cannot believe they actually pay you to show up at your desk; you are giddy.”

One Question For Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman are the authors of the new book, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing (Twelve/Hachette). Their previous book, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children (also published by Twelve) was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than six months and an Amazon Top Nonfiction 100 book for over a year. NurtureShock was on over 35 "Year's Best" lists and is currently being translated in 16 languages. They have written cover stories for Newsweek and New York, as well as features for the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, the Daily Beast, and others.

Reporting on the science of human development, Bronson and Merryman have won nine national awards for their writing including: the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Journalism; the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Award for Science Journalism; an “Audie” from the Audio Publishers Association; and two Clarion Awards.

Prior to their collaboration, Bronson authored five books, including What Should I Do with My Life?, a #1 New York Times bestseller with more than ten months on the list. Merryman's journalism has also appeared in Time, The Washington Post, and many other venues.

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

Po:  By the summer of 1999, I had been covering Silicon Valley for four years and had reached a certain prominence. My second book about it was on the bestseller lists, my face was front and center on the cover of Wired magazine, I had a big feature in the Times magazine, and I was getting weekly paid speaking gigs. Despite all that, I had a nagging fear that if I wrote anything more about Silicon Valley, I’d become permanently attached to it. Joan Didion didn’t keep writing about hippies after

she’d penned Slouching Towards Bethlehem for the Saturday Evening Post in 1967. I didn’t see the bubble coming, but I persuaded myself that the cultural impact of the dot com boom had peaked, and Silicon Valley would no longer be a cultural story, it was becoming only a business story. So, despite 101 offers of assignment, I turned them all down, and decided to do .... nothing.

That was the hardest part of it. I didn’t have my next idea yet. I didn’t have another life raft to jump into. I did not harbor some other dream. I honestly had no hunch what was next. And it wasn’t like I could afford to sit around; my wife and I had just tapped our entire savings to buy a house. But I had to create room for the next idea to germinate. For about a year, I wondered what to do with my life before I recognized everyone was wondering what to do with their life, and that was my next idea – I would do a book about that question.

Ashley:  On the day-to-day, I think I'm risk averse. I'm pretty much a boring homebody: on most days, if I'm not working, I'm home reading a book, watching a crime drama on TV, or trying to learn to crochet. But career-wise, I've done a bunch of incredibly risky things. (e.g., I've hung out with Belfast paramilitaries.) I guess the craziest risk was when I decided I was going to leave a budding Hollywood career, drive across country, and go work for the Clinton-Gore 1992 presidential campaign in Little Rock, Arkansas. And just 24 hours later, my car was packed, and I was driving East.

The thing is – at the time, other people thought it was a risk. For me, it just made sense. I didn't think of it as a risk or a potentially life-changing choice. Instead, it just seemed like an adventure, doing something that I'd believed in. And I think that's why I take those big risks. I'm not thinking of a long-term downside. I just think, "This makes sense. This is something I need to do for a while," and then I go for it. If I tried to think about risks and their long-term ramifications, then I, too, might have said, "This is crazy," and then I wouldn't have done it.

But it's always the biggest risks I've taken that end up being the most worthwhile.