Calling off the Chase

How many of our career decisions are dictated by the shiny objects?  You know the ones we’re talking about:  the title, the status, and most of all, the fat paycheck. Okay, they’re not really shiny and they’re not even objects, but you get the point.  We’re constantly on the chase, even when we know it [...]

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Happy Birthday, Undecided

What goes around,  you know, comes around.  That’s what came to mind yesterday when someone sent me a link to this post on College Candy wherein Charlsie, a new college grad, charts the difference between choosing a major and, sigh, choosing a life.  Let’s look: Looking back, college didn’t require a lot of serious decision [...]

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La Vie Est Belle: A Guest Post by Maggie Beidelman

First she made a decision. Then she wondered what on earth she was thinking when she made it. Now Maggie is living the life — and learning to love the unpredictability of it all. In today’s guest post, a newly minted college grad — who teaches English to French teenagers, fights off the advances of [...]

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Purpose and Soulcraft: You know it when you feel it.

Organizing for America Sometimes it’s not what you do that matters, but why you do it. Case in point, the video above. (Don’t click on it quite yet.) Someone who has been there, done that sent it to me — this being an anniversary and all — making me wonder yet again whether finding that [...]

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One Foot Out the Door

The other day, one of our Twitter followers sent me a link, with a “What do you think?”-type note. (Using 140 characters or less, natch.) A click landed me on Harvard Business’ blog, and a post entitled “Why Are Women So Unhappy At Work?” The piece (written by a man–just for the record) quotes the [...]

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Architects of the Change

I often call my journalism students “the architects of the change.” What I mean is that, as the whole industry transforms itself, it will most likely be up to those who are just entering the field to be in on the action of what the future of news will be. (If you think this is [...]

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And now, for the good news …

The San Jose Mercury delivered a triple shot of optimism to go with the morning latte on Saturday morning. The Page One feature, the seventh installment of a 12-part “Life in a Year” series, was all about that first paycheck. The subtext? Making choices work. The story had me at Studs Terkel. But more about [...]

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Soulsuck or Soulcraft: Another brick in the cubicle partition?

I quote Ron Livingston, in his iconic role as office cog-cum-construction-worker Peter Gibbons: “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way! Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight [...]

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Should I stay or should I go?

When it comes to your current job, you’ll probably stay — at least until the recession is over. But what you really want to do is go. New numbers out of a Workplace Insights survey from Adecco, an international staffing company, show that when it comes to work, most of us are dreaming mightily of [...]

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Recession’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose…

Not to be all Pollyanna, but is it possible that the current economic reality might offer an escape from the whole passion-v-paycheck debate Barbara addressed in yesterday’s post? Or that maybe, just maybe, when it looks like your choices are diminished, in a strange way, they start to multiply? I came across this piece yesterday, [...]

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