If you’re smart, you’ll learn something new from every job. And given that you’ll switch, not just jobs, but careers several times over your life, your unique advantage comes from the wisdom you pick up along the way. If you worked in customer service, you’ll know how to handle clients when you go into business…

You have a big talk coming up. So you say to yourself, I’m going to sit down right now and write it. You type one sentence: “Good afternoon.” You delete it. You wonder if you’re a fraud. You wonder why you’re doing this. You wonder what to have for dinner. Then: Oh would you look…

A recent episode of This American Life (#598: “My Undesirable Talent”) told the stories of people who had become really good at things they regretted. One of them was a guy named Zora, born to Ugandan parents and raised in Fresno, who went off to college and pretended to be an African exchange student. He did a whole Coming to…

You and I have fallen under the sway of a misled idea: that in order to advance our careers, we must persuade people to recognize our worth and then convince them to pay it. When negotiating salary or figuring out what to charge for a service, the first question we often ask ourselves is: What am I…

There’s tremendous pressure to “find your passion” lately. Too much pressure, if you ask me. It’s also misleading: If I tell you to “find your passion,” we must presume that it’s been lost, like a set of keys or that coupon for a free burrito at Chipotle. Not only is it lost, it’s now a…

Carson Tate was working in sales when she realized there was a direct correlation between how organized she was and how much revenue she brought in. When her colleagues adopted her system and started earning more, she knew she was onto something. Carson saw that as her cue: She left her full-time job and launched her…

Shasta Nelson is a relationship expert and the author of Friendships Don’t Just Happen. She is also the CEO of a female friendship-matching site called GirlFriendCircles.com, which she created after recognizing that many of her life coaching clients were having a hard time finding meaningful relationships with other women. I recently had Shasta on my show, Solopreneur on the Whatever…