You don't need to be a basketball fan to know that LeBron James has been deciding if he should stay with his current team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, or move to another, more winning team. ESPN set aside an hour-long special episode for James to announce that he's going to the Miami Heat.
James is extremely talented [...]

Now that I am committed to living on a farm which is sort of the anti-New York City, visiting New York City no longer brings up flashbacks to a really, really difficult lifestyle. Instead, New York fills my head with ideas.
The first one is a billboard I saw as soon as I got off the [...]

Thanks to dating sites, we have a great way to gather data about the human condition without having to write grant proposals to the National Science Foundation. I first became aware of this bastion of data when OK Cupid announced that older women benefit from showing cleavage in their photos, but younger women don't. I immediately [...]

Comment on: How to find the most fulfilling careers

Psychology Today did an interview with me. It was about my most triumphant moments in my life, and how I overcame obstacles to get there. I knew immediately that the interview was going to be a disaster, so I told them I wanted to do the interview written, rather than on the phone.
Then I didn’t [...]

Comment on: The biggest triumph is getting out of bed

My current favorite blogger is Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports. (Not safe for work.) His topic, as far as I can tell, is smut and snobbery. I think that even though my blog is pointed at the intersection of life and work, I wish it were at the intersection of smut and snobbery. Because I am [...]

Comment on: How to be more creative at work

The culmination of my four-year obsession with happiness research is that I think people need to choose between an interesting life or happy life. (Note: This does not mean you are interesting or not interesting. I am talking about what values guide your decision making.) I think the things that make life happy have to do [...]

Comment on: Test: Is your life happy or interesting?

I've been walking around with the July/August 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review constantly, for close to three years. Sometimes, if I’m getting on a plane, I’ll put it with the other heavy stuff into my luggage, and then get it out later. When my last car broke down in the middle of an [...]

Comment on: Being an expert takes time, not talent

I think I’m over the happiness thing. I think I am thinking that the pursuit of happiness is, well, vacuous. I don’t think people are happy or unhappy. Because I think knowing if we are happy would require knowing the meaning of life, or the ultimate goal, or the key to the world, or something [...]

Comment on: Do you overemphasize happiness?

It’s the time of year when I list my top posts of 2009. When I first started doing this top-posts-of-the-year thing, I felt obligated to actually give you the real version of what was most popular. Now I don’t feel so obligated.
If you’re wondering, some of the posts that brought in more than 400 comments [...]

The workplace is set up to reward extroverts. For example, ENTJs make up only 3% of the population but they comprise a wide majority of the world's CEOs. The bias against introverts in American society is well documented, including research that shows that a spot on the cheerleading team foreshadows career success much more reliably [...]

Some days I look through old posts, reminding myself of posts that I've written that I like and that I should link to. Often, this process serves to let me procrastinate writing while pretending to be engaged in writing. If I were a body builder, this would be me looking in the mirror instead of [...]

My ex-husband worked in the nonprofit sector for a while. And you know what? He rarely got health insurance. At one point, we were completely stressed out about not being insured, and he asked his boss what everyone else was doing, and she said, “Can’t you get insurance from your spouse? That’s what we do.”
That’s [...]

The farmer broke up with me five times the first five months we were together, last year. So I learned that he had huge commitment issues.
I tried to do the advisable thing to do when you’re with someone who has commitment issues. I tried to fall in love with someone else. But I didn’t. I [...]