Topic: careers

Bullish: What Do You Really Owe Your Family? (Also: Solving Problems Without Sacrificing Yourself)

Bullish: What Do You Really Owe Your Family? (Also: Solving Problems Without Sacrificing Yourself)

I just had drinks with a friend who is a career coach in her sixties. She hasn’t read any Bullish columns, and when I told her that I often suggest that young women totally forget about work/life balance until at least age 30, she was visibly startled. I told her that it’s hard out there, and if you follow the crowd, there will not be any Social Security for you when you need it, and you don’t want to be in the same boat as the rest of the crowd. I’m not sure she believed me. More »

Stay-At-Home Moms Are Prostitutes & Happiness Isn’t Real

Stay-At-Home Moms Are Prostitutes & Happiness Isn't Real

Elizabeth Wurtzel filed a long, rambling confession over at New York this week, entitled Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One Night Stand of a Life. You’ll have to read it if you expect to follow along, but the gist is this: Elizabeth Wurtzel 1) had a crazy landlord this year, 2) women who don’t pay their own way are prostitutes and 3) there’s no such thing as happiness (?). More »

Party Favors: What Lies Beneath Your Skin

Party Favors: What Lies Beneath Your Skin

Your skin is really, really nasty. -The Hairpin

Classic coats for plus-size women. -The Frisky

Does changing jobs or remaining loyal benefit careerwomen? – DoubleX

Heidi Klum‘s Halloween plans. -Styleite

The top 10 free fashion-centric iPhone apps. -The High Low

An extremely disturbing Smurfette makeup how-to. -StyleList

Some warm Fall coats on a budget. -College Candy

Army considers a ban on French manicures, earrings. -The Frisky

Your guide to Fall suits, from entry level and up. -Refinery29

Take Halloween costumes to the bedroom? – YourTango

Kat Von D goes (stays?) goth. – PoshGlam

Fall-appropriate fragrances. Betty Confidential

…And beauty. -Birchbox

Bullish Life: How to Bitchslap Performance Anxiety

Bullish Life: How to Bitchslap Performance Anxiety

In the past decade, I have coached hundreds of people through standardized tests.

While a few genuinely have panic attacks and require the care of a mental health professional, most just suffer from the sort of fight-or-flight response that two million years of evolution have decided is an appropriate response to heights, snakes, and being asked questions regarding the rate at which a cylindrical tank will empty if it is simultaneously being filled and leaking and also the radius of the tank is the square root of a variable. More »

Bullish: How to Win When the Workplace Runs on Feelings

Bullish: How to Win When the Workplace Runs on Feelings

Recently, a colleague of mine — a 24 year old woman in the market for a new assistant — told me that her previous assistants had complained that she never said thank you. “I hate saying thank you to people just for doing their jobs! Why should I have to thank them?”

(Note that, on Mad Men (Season 4, “The Suitcase”), Peggy Olson similarly complained “You never say thank you,” leading Don Draper to thunder, “THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR!”) More »

Bullish: Maybe Work-Life Balance Means You Should Work MORE

Bullish: Maybe Work-Life Balance Means You Should Work MORE

A lot of career-related writing targeted towards women emphasizes work-life “balance.” So you should really take some time out and nurture yourself, right?

Actually, I’d keep that to a minimum right now. “Balance” is not for the young and sprightly — instead, think of work-life balance over the course of your entire life. Do you intend to retire some day? Would you like to have a baby and invest substantial time in caring for it? If there is some phase of your life during which you will be working 15 hours a week, then maybe you should work 60 now. More »

Confessions of a Former Bible Belt Porn Store Clerk

Confessions of a Former Bible Belt Porn Store Clerk

Let me tell you about my life about a year ago.

My roommate and I –we’ll just call him “Frank”- were both porn store clerks. We never worked the same shifts, so nightly we would get together at the bar, usually around midnight or 1 AM, and swap stories about “Da Life.” We didn’t like advertising that we were “porn peddlers”– we lived in the middle of the Bible Belt- so we merely referred to our profession, in polite company, as “Da Life.” More »

Did You Get the Memo? Blog Chronicles Matching Coworker Outfits

Did You Get the Memo? Blog Chronicles Matching Coworker Outfits

It’s happened more times than I can remember: you walk into the office in your cute new purple blouse only to see that five of your coworkers inexplicably also decided to wear purple that day. Just like women who work together sometimes end up with synced menstrual cycles, some of them also end up dressing alike without any planning or coordination. The Morris + King Company, a public relations firm in New York City, noticed lots of coworker dress-alike incidents. That inspired two of their employees, account supervisors Katie Smith-Adair and Jen , to start a blog called Did You Get the Memo? On the blog, they post pictures of coworkers with similar outfits, from plaid shirts to striped ties. We spoke to Jen and Katie about how their work project became a full-on obsession. More »

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