Career, Workplace, and Economic Predictions and Trends for 2012 and Beyond

My latest TheAtlantic.com article (republished on yahoo.com) offers my career, workplace, and economic predictions and trends for 2012 and beyond. HERE is the link.

The Two Keys to Achieving Your Goals and Keeping Your New Year's Resolutions

You can set goals and make New Year's resolutions but you'll probably fail unless you remember one thing: stay conscious.

Let's say you want to lose 20 pounds in six months. That meets all the usual criteria for a good goal: realistic, specific, and important. But you will fail unless you stay conscious of the importance of your achieving your goal, from the moment you start thinking about eating through the moment you finish or get distracted by something else. Without that vigilance, it's just too easy to succumb to "Ooh, that food will taste good." It may also help to break your goal into a small step:one pound in the next four days, for example.

Another example: You want to land a job within three months and, to that end, you want to put in 30 good hours a week. During those 30 hours, you must stay conscious that you must put in the time, reminding yourself of all the benefits you'd get from landing a job. Again, it can help to break it down into smaller goals, for example, I'll make five calls today.

If staying conscious isn't enough, tell one or more people your goal and deadline and, if necessary, ask if you could check in daily. For example, ask if you could email them the letter grade A through F you'd give yourself for your day's work.

Three tips from my new book: How to Do Life: what they didn't teach you in school

Here, I present three tips from my just-published book, How to Do Life: what they didn't teach you in school. It's available on Amazon for $15.00. HERE is the link. I'd welcome your writing an honest review of it on Amazon.

Career Advice: What I said to a panel of student interviewers

A group of broadcast journalism students did a series of six six-minute interviews with me. Most of the questions were on how to be a career success in these tough times. Here are those interviews.

Note: The first minute is pre-interview fooling around. And the following minute or so has a few audio squeaks--they are student engineers. But the other 33 minutes are okay.

My new book, "How to Do Life" is now available

I've just published my new book, How to Do Life: what they didn't teach in school.

Perhaps it's author bias but I believe it is an invaluable assemblage of ahead-of-the-pack ideas on career, relationships, money, health, education, and life's big questions, all in 142 crisply written, even mildly entertaining pages.

Many but not all of its ideas have been presented on this blog and on my website. The book presents them in a coherent package.

I've priced it at just $7.99 because I'm far more interested in being helpful than in making money.

I believe How to Do Life would be of great benefit to people of any age but particularly appropriate for someone just starting out.

HERE is the link to the Amazon page where you can buy it. Do note that the cover may be the one above or the one pictured on the Amazon site. (I can't control which.)

Both a printed-book and Kindle version are available.

I welcome your writing an honest review of it on Amazon.

You Can Vote For or Against Staycations in The Atlantic

I've long felt that vacations longer than two hours aren't worth it. If your worklife is so unpleasant that you need longer breaks, maybe you'd be wiser to try to get your job description changed, get better at your job, or if you can, find better a better job or self-employment.

And if you or your honey feel you need a longer break, you'll probably get more restoration and even novelty with far less hassle and cost with a staycation: using your home as the base of your vacation operations: You can go to that restaurant you know is great, see those friends you keep saying you want to see, and make that Grand Marnier souffle you've been dying to try.

And unless you're one of those spiritual souls for whom stepping into the Parthenon makes you feel so one with history that it's worth the $$$ and hassles getting to and fro, you may feel you've derived more pleasure per buck and minute by watching high-quality travel videos without cost or hassle on YouTube. For example, HERE is a free five-minute tour of Malaysia. The company that produced that video has created dozens of other free video tours of vacation destinations. To see more, HERE is the link.

I've made the case for staycations on this blog but not elsewhere...until now. It's my Question of the Week in The Atlantic: If and when is it wiser to have a staycation than a vacation? If you'd like to weigh in, just click HERE.

We're All Miseducated

We are educated by the wrong people: teachers, professors, journalists, filmmakers, fiction authors.

Teachers score lowest among all professionals on the SAT, and qualitatively, spend time with K-12 teachers and, unless you're a dullard yourself, you'll find most of them, well, dull: usually caring but unlikely to educate beyond a minimum, let alone inspire or elevate their students.

Professors are people who opted out of the real world so they can study arcana for a lifetime--not the best people to abet students' real-world functioning. And because there is a near litmus test for hiring professors in the humanities and social sciences, college and graduate school education is truncated: right-of-center ideas will usually be absent from the curriculum except as whipping boys. Some but not all wisdom resides left-of-center.

Journalists disproportionately self-select into the profession because they want to change the world--in the leftist direction their professors monolithically extolled. And most journalists have little real-world experience to temper their being True Believers in leftist theory: that the privileged white male capitalists are destroying society, especially women and people of color. In previous generations, that was tempered by journalism school professors urging students to strive to be fair and balanced. Now, many journalism professors urge "advocacy journalism," even in supposedly straight-news pieces.

Films nearly always have a leftist bias. For example, filmmakers generally portray corporations as evil --even though, for example, if not for corporations, you'd have no medication, no refrigeration, no TV, no computer, no car, no public transportation, etc. And corporations' efficiency enables even most low-income Americans to afford all of the above. Not to mention that big corporations offer some of the more secure, well-paying, well-benefited jobs, with ongoing free training, all in a safe, pleasant environment. But you'll rarely see that message in a major film. The hero is much more often a have-not.

I've been taking a number of literature courses through The Great Courses, for example, THIS, (taught of course, by leftist professors) and I've learned that the authors of most of our revered literature are misfits, so offbeat (depressed, alcoholic, or simply downright weird,) they nearly always honor the weird person over the straight arrow. And, like journalists, most fiction writers, holed up in their atelier most of their life, have little real-world experience to provide a reality check for their dreamt-up ideas.

I'm not in a bad position to assess the extent to which the above arguments are true. I've trained student teachers and observed many so-called master teachers. I've been on the faculty of the University of California and the California State University and been a consultant to 15 colleges, so I know lots of professors from the inside. I've been a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Kiplinger, U.S., News, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. So I know journalists. I'm always looking for the metamessages in books, movies, and the news media's reporting. And as a career counselor who has worked with 3,900 clients over the past quarter century, and someone who, even at parties, loves to talk with people about their worklife, I have a pretty good sense of what our society's mind molders are like compared with other intelligent people.

As a result of all of this, I have concluded that we would be better educated if we were taught mainly, although not exclusively, by society's doers: businesspeople, those who work in nonprofits, tradespeople, as well as in the government. The older I get, the more I believe in a variant of the old saw: those who can, do; those who can't, teach, write, or make movies.