Notes for My How to Do Life Workshop

The Secrets to My Success

My Commandments: The best advice I give myself and others.

When You're on a Roll

Don't Empty Your Mind. Fill It.

My Time-Saving Secrets: An installment in my series on practical secrets

My Routines: Key to a productive and comfortable life

Succeeding in Your First Professional Job

In this installment of The Quests series, my Psychology Today article today begins with a first-person report from "Jeremy," a composite of my clients' experiences. It embeds four important practices, and after "Jeremy's" report, I call them out.

Succeeding While Lazy It’s possible . . . if you carefully curate your choices.

Sometimes, choosing just a simple, pleasant approach to a task is enough for you to be successful. My Psychology Today article today offers examples.

The Art of Accomplishment: What it really takes

Not everyone cares to become highly accomplished. My Psychology Today article today is  for those willing to make the commitment. It reflects what has most often worked among my highly successful clients and what I've learned from reading a number of biographies of the highly accomplished.

Succeeding on the Job: Tips from Careers for Dummies

I offer tips for succeeding on the job in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Fighting Your Weaknesses

Conventional wisdom says, “Build on your strengths.” And I agree, but some common weaknesses usually must at least be mitigated or you may not get a chance to use your strengths.

Of course, most weaknesses don’t succumb to quick tips but my current thinking on behavior change is that quick tips end up yielding more net good than do protracted prescriptions. 

Quick tips  are particularly likely to yield more net good per-minute of reader time. There are plenty of long articles and books on each of the following but perhaps the quick tips I offer in my PsychologyToday.com article today add something to the corpus.

The Big Three: A key to rewarding life is to surround yourself with people who are intelligent, driven, and ethical.

A key to rewarding life is to surround yourself with people who are intelligent, driven, and ethical. In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I explain why and how to make it happen.

An Ultra-Simple Way to Choose and Succeed in Your Career

The longer I've been a career counselor the more I've become convinced that the professionally recommended process is unnecessarily long. 

I propose something far briefer in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Should You Aspire to Conventional Success?

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I tell a short-short-story about a conventionally successful person. Its purpose is to encourage readers to look at their lives.

The X-Prize Founder's Rules for Success...Compared with My Own

Billionaire entrepreneur Peter Diamandis is famous for having established the X Prize, It offers millions of dollars for the first team to meet various major challenges, for example, the self-teaching software that, within 18 months, yields the biggest improvement in standardized achievement tests among students in developing nations.

So I was intrigued when I saw Peter's Laws. Alas, the intrigue quickly turned to derision.

I disagree with at least half of them but space precludes my critiquing that many, In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I cite seven I particularly think are wrong and why. And because I prefer to criticize only when I can propose an alternative, I offer a few Marty's Not-Quite Laws and welcome your critique of them

The New Rules of Success

Some keys to success are time-honored but there are new ones. I describe those in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Unconventional Advice on Career Success

As I think back on my 4800 clients, conventional advice about success doesn't work often enough: work hard, don't procrastinate, blah-blah-blah. So when writing the last part of my 12-part series on your career: Success in Your Career, I decided to try a different approach: Knowing what I do now, if I were starting over, what would I actually do to help ensure success. HERE is the link.

Your Dark Side's Upside

America rewards optimism, cheeriness, and moderation. The new book, The Upside of the Dark Side by Todd Kashdan, argues that you’re more likely to be successful and feel good about yourself if you, as appropriate, invoke less societally encouraged behaviors.

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers ideas from the book plus my reaction to each.

All the Career Advice Your Need in One Blog Post?

There is so much career advice out there, it’s overwhelming. In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I attempt the perhaps ridiculous goal of, in the space of one moderate-length article, telling you what you really need to know to: pick a career, land a job, succeed on the job, be a good leader, become successfully self-employed, and feel good about the way you’re living your life.