Unless you’re intentionally sticking with purely entry-level jobs or greatly restricting your career choices, you’re going to eventually find yourself in a position where you have to publicly present your ideas. It might just be to a room of peers, it might be to a large crowd, or it might even be to a large television audience, but in any of those events, you’re going to be practicing the art of public speaking.

I’ll be straight with you. The best way to become a good public speaker is to practice at it, but practicing at it involves a lot more than standing in front of a mirror and looking at yourself while you’re talking. There are a lot of little pieces that need to come together for effective public speaking.

Scott Berkun has been a public speaker for a long time. It was actually his talk on the myths of innovation that convinced me to find out more about him, and it was the strength of his public speaking style that convinced me to give Confessions of a Public Speaker a read.

It was well worth it. Confessions of a Public Speaker is probably the best book I’ve ever read on the art of public speaking. It balances the entertaining and anecdotal nature of such a book perfectly with hard-hitting and useful advice on getting up in front of a crowd and sharing your ideas.

I can’t see you naked
The trick to a good presentation is to realize that the audience mostly just wants for the presentation to be over so they can do other things – maybe get back to their work, maybe network with other people, maybe goof off. Because of that, they’re mostly not going to notice the small mistakes you make, so don’t worry about them. What about the big mistakes? Just try to roll onwards from them, preferably using them as a launching pad. For example, if you make a blunder, say, “You think that was bad? …” then share an anecdote that ties you to the audience and (hopefully) helps you to get back on track.

The attack of the butterflies
The best way to relieve nervousness before a talk is to practice it enough beforehand so that it feels natural and to eliminate little things that can make you nervous beforehand. Do things like getting a good night’s sleep the night before a talk, eating a healthy meal a couple hours beforehand, chatting with people in the audience before a talk (so that they seem friendly and not oppositional), and getting there in plenty of time so that you don’t have to rush and little hiccups become easier to deal with.

$30,000 an hour
What’s a justifiable amount for a public speaker to earn? Berkun breaks down a $30,000 speaking fee and really lays out how it’s not all that unreasonable for a 60 minute speech. It requires two days to create the presentation, the stress of speaking for that long, the time to travel there and handle the logistics of getting from your home to the venue and back home, and the career effort it took to reach a point where you can command a nice speaking fee. He makes a great case for why good public speakers ought to earn a lot.

How to work a tough room
The best defense against a tough room is on-site preparation. Get to the room as early as possible and get a feel for how you’ll sound in there. If there are other speakers, watch them and see how the crowd reacts to them. Are they an easy crowd or a tough crowd? If you’re the first speaker, encourage people to sit near the front, not spread out throughout the room (this way, you have a smaller area to focus on with your gaze and attention). The more you know the room and the crowd, the better off you are.

Do not eat the microphone
There are four key parts to assembling any good presentation. Take a strong position in the title of the presentation. Think carefully about your audience. Make your specific points as concise as possible. Know the counterarguments from an intelligent audience and address them. If you do these things, you’re going to have a presentation that grabs their attention and makes your case as well as possible. A good way to start is to simply list the five key points to making whatever case you want to make, honing those key points down, then making sure you’re able to handle the inevitable counterarguments.

The science of not boring people
The shorter your presentation and the faster the pace of it, the less likely you are to bore people and the more likely you are to make them leave with a positive impression of your message. Presentations that go on too long or dwell too long on specific points are often easily forgotten, which completely undoes the entire point of your presentation. Make it snappy.

Lessons from my 15 minutes of fame
My favorite point from this chapter is that memorization and teleprompters are evil for the vast, vast majority of speakers. If you have your speech memorized or are just reading it, you’re almost always not sounding genuine or human. Focus on knowing your points cold and delivering them naturally without reading a single thing. This sounds much more conversational and much more interesting to the person receiving the message.

The things people say
The best way to improve on your presentation is feedback, but feedback isn’t as easy as you might think it is. Having someone just watch your presentation and critique it doesn’t really help. A much better tactic is to ask people how your presentation compares to other ones, as it’s much easier for people to compare and contrast two things (plus it feels less insulting when pointing out your flaws). Another great tactic is to simply videotape your own presentations, then watch the tape and see what’s wrong with the presentation.

The clutch is your friend
If you’re not connecting what you’re talking about to the lives of the people you’re presenting it to, they’re not going to be very interested. How is this relevant to their lives? Another key: you can’t just tell them it’s relevant. You’ve got to show them. Doing something is the most powerful way to learn, and you’ve got to get as close to having the audience do something as you can in the format of your presentation.

Confessions
The remainder of the book is almost like a blog. It addresses a bunch of very specific points about presenting, such as choosing the right pointer (this one) and how to properly put a wireless microphone on (clip it to your neck, then hide the cable inside your outer shirt). There’s just a bunch of good little tips here.

Is Confessions of a Public Speaker Worth Reading?
If you are on a career path that is going to involve making presentations in public at any point, Confessions of a Public Speaker is going to be well worth reading. It’s the best single volume on public speaking I’ve yet read.

The only complaint is that there’s not a whole lot on actually creating slides and building a presentation. Thankfully, a book I reviewed earlier, Presentation Zen, does that wonderfully. These two are great complements to each other.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Confessions of a Public Speaker on Amazon.com.

As I write this, FedEx has said that they’ve merely “disciplined” the driver, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he didn’t have a job come January.

So why am I mentioning this on here?

I want you to step back for a moment and put yourself in this guy’s shoes. Right now, it’s Christmas, so his working conditions are pretty miserable at the moment.

He has a ton of packages deliver and a lot of pressure from his boss to make the deliveries as fast as possible – and probably personal reasons to get done quickly, too.

He has a computer monitor, strolls up to a front door of a gated house that looks pretty nice – probably in a nicer neighborhood than he can afford to live in.

He’s likely not allowed to leave the package unoccupied on the front step, so the only option is to put it over this rather tall fence.

He could try climbing up to put it over the top, but that would take him a few minutes – putting him behind schedule and probably facing the wrath of his boss and perhaps his family – and perhaps he’s afraid of heights.

He’s frustrated, he’s tired, and he just doesn’t want to deal with it, so he makes a bad call.

That one bad call has probably cost him his job and has also made him the target of a viral video and a lot of sarcasm.

I’m not justifying the behavior of the guy in the video. He obviously could have handled the situation much better than he did.

Instead, I want you to take a second and imagine one of your worst days at work. Your boss is making tons of demands on you, you’re swamped with work, you’ve got a lot of personal worries, and it looks like you’re never going to leave.

In the stress of the moment, you make a bad call.

Most of us never have that moment broadcast all over the internet. In fact, most of us are never caught when we make that bad call.

Could you have handled that situation better?

I can certainly think of my own situations like this, where I’ve simply thrown away piles of paperwork rather than dealing with them and other boneheaded moves.

Those are the moments that I do not want myself to be judged on.

I would far rather be judged by my best moments, or at least be seen as someone who can handle a challenging situation. When people judge you in this way, it can only be a benefit for your career, not a job loss.

The challenge is that, for most of us, the camera isn’t running at work.

My suggestion? If you want to establish a career reputation that will win you raises and promotions, act as if the camera is always running.

Now, imagine that FedEx video if it showed the guy carefully climbing the fence, then gently lowering the box on the other side, then ringing the doorbell. It might have never went viral, but it just might have been sent to the people at FedEx and helped out his career a little bit. I know I’ve certainly reported good work on my behalf to companies in the past.

When you’re stressed out at work and thinking about cutting corners, imagine that there’s a camera running, watching what you do next. Do you want to make a video of you looking foolish? Or do you want to make a video you’d be happy to have sent to your boss? Can you overcome the stress of the moment and do things right?

Make the best choice and your career will thank you.

My husband’s father just gave him a huge speech about how he doesn’t dress appropriately for work and how he will never get promoted or “become a manager” dressing the way he does. My husband is a computer programmer who works with a bunch of engineers. He wears dress slacks and polos or button-up shirts everyday to work, while most of his co-workers wear jeans and t-shirts. This confused me, but my husband exaplined to me that what his father is saying that since he doesn’t wear designer clothes and because he doesn’t wear a tie everyday that he will never be promoted. We buy his clothes at JC Penney, but the cheaper brands. I can’t tell the difference between them and the nicer dept. store brands, other than the price. Do you agree with my father-in-laws assessment? What about if my husband wants to advance his career, but has no interest in managing people? I realize he would make more money if he eventually became a manager, but he enjoys his computer programming work, and probably wouldn’t enjoy managing people, and I would never want him to work a job he didn’t enjoy if he didn’t have to.

I think what’s happening here is that your father-in-law is substituting his own goals for his son’s goals and he’s trying to guide his son towards those goals.

Your husband seems to have his own set of career goals. He’d like to advance his career as a programmer, but he has no interest in being in management. Your husband also has familiarity with the culture of the career path that he’s chosen.

I think it’s absolutely vital that people have a set of career goals. They need to have a sense of where they want to go and what they need to do to get there. For those reading this, ask yourself those questions. Where do you want to be with your career in five years? In ten years? In twenty? What do you need to be doing to get there?

Yes, attire can be a part of those goals. The usual advice is to dress in the attire of the position you want to eventually attain. If you want to be in management, dress like management. If you want to be just part of the senior staff, dress like part of the senior staff. I consider that to be pretty good advice.

It sounds like your husband is dressing for the position he wants to attain eventually, which is a senior programmer. He should note what people in his desired position wear and emulate it.

Your father-in-law has his own goals and he probably envisions certain outcomes for his son, for various reasons. For those goals and outcomes, the advice your father-in-law is giving his son is probably good advice. He likely envisions his son eventually moving into management and wants to prepare him to do so.

The challenge here, as it often is, is communication. For this type of disagreement to occur, both people aren’t articulating what their goals are and the paths they see toward those goals.

Your husband can fulfill his part by simply making it clear that his goals do not involve moving into management. He needs to make it clear that he’s dressing for the role he aspires to, and that something he values deeply is a job that he enjoys doing and he’s willing to accept non-executive pay for that position.

If your husband can’t clearly articulate his career goals and his plans for achieving them, he should spend some time thinking about his plan for the future. Can he clearly state where he wants to be in five or ten years? What exactly is he going to do to make sure that happens? The more thought he’s given to this and the more detail he can give, the better.

Your father-in-law should be able to accept that. If he’s not, then your next move is to simply disregard his advice with regards to a career path. If he’s still giving advice that seems to be guiding your husband toward a management role, your husband needs to just nod his head and then follow his own path.

I actually sympathize with your husband. I have little interest or desire to be involved with personnel management, and knowing that about myself has driven many of my choices, both in the past and even today. I don’t want to manage people and it sounds like your husband doesn’t either.

However, it’s important to remember that (likely) your father-in-law cares deeply and desires a successful life without want for his son. Keep that in mind as you address this situation and handle everything with care and without anger or aggression.

After that, the conversation switched to Cyber Monday, and he told me of the long checklist of websites that he checks on that day. He talked about how the guys in his office spent a lot of the day emailing those deals to each other.

When I heard about that, I grew quiet. It seemed to me that a lot of people were burning their day hunting down a deal or two. The people he had described were in an office, meaning they were at work, and they were emailing lots of deals to each other, meaning they were spending a lot of time online finding those deals and emailing them to each other.

I’m the last person to say that it’s bad and horrible to spend some of your time doing that. If you work in an office environment with an uneven work flow, you’re going to find yourself with pockets of time without anything immediate to do, and it’s up to you to decide how to use that time. A lot of people end up web surfing during that time.

Here’s the thing, though: people who figure out how to use that time more effectively at work are going to build up their career.

Think about it this way. Alan spends Cyber Monday at work surfing the web looking for deals. He finds a $20 bargain on something he was going to buy for his kids for Christmas and a couple $5 or $10 bargains for things for himself. A few work tasks back up, but nothing big. His office is a bit messy and some paperwork needs filed, but it can wait.

Bill spends Cyber Monday at work getting his filing done and handling emails from the long weekend. He gets the things in his inbox done. At the end of the day, he does have a few extra minutes to look for bargains, but he mostly just looks through the emails for the bargains coworkers have sent out. He does some Cyber Monday searching in the evening at home, too.

On Tuesday, a huge project comes down the pipe, one that, if done correctly and with quality, will catch the eye of the boss. Who’s going to be more prepared to just knock that project out of the park, Alan or Bill?

If you want to have job stability and earn raises and promotions, look at your actions from the perspective of your employer. Is the thing you’re doing right now creating a positive value for your employer? If it’s not, why should they continue to employ you?

Here’s the key thing to always remember: employers are always going to want to hang on to people who provide a positive value for their business. Most of the people who are “downsized” are either filling a position that isn’t providing that positive value or aren’t producing enough work in that position to be a positive value for the company.

If you want job stability and raises and promotions, you need to focus on making sure that the company is getting more value out of you than they’re paying you. If you’re not doing that, you might as well start spending your time building a side business or looking for a different job.

If you’re reading this late on Cyber Monday at work, as many of you will be, you have a fundamental choice to make.

You can spend the rest of the day surfing the web, hunting down deals on things you don’t really need, and providing little or no value at work.

On the other hand, you can spend the rest of the day taking care of some unfinished things, providing some real value to your employer.

One route might be more enjoyable, but the other one helps you build a more valuable and more secure long-term future.

I just found out that I’m being “downsized” at the end of the year. While I have a small emergency fund, I do have a mortgage and a bit of credit card debt. I also have three kids at home. My wife will continue to work, but she has only a part-time job with minimal benefits. I am receiving a pretty good severance package, though.

Rather than panicking, I’m trying to be calm and rational about figuring out what’s next. This made me think of you and The Simple Dollar. If you were in my shoes, what would you do?

Here are the steps I would take in your situation.

Start living cheaper immediately. This means cutting back on or eliminating non-essentials in your life. Cancel your Netflix account. Pare back on your premium movie channels. Start eating at home more. Start brown-bagging your lunch. Just use good old fashioned frugality to your advantage, because you’re at a point where every penny matters more than ever.

Move to minimum payments on all debts. If I’m making any payments larger than the minimum on any of my debts, I’d pare them down to the minimum right now. This might involve adjusting automatic mortgage payments or other such things. I just couldn’t afford those excess payments if I were in this type of situation.

Build up my emergency fund. Every excess dime I earned between now and leaving my job would go into here. Then, during my actual period of unemployment, I would use this account as a supplement to what my spouse was bringing in, if needed. This arrangement would allow me to survive a fairly long period of unemployment without getting into real trouble.

Investigate my COBRA options. If there was a health insurance need, and it sounds like there is, I would look into the COBRA options at work. COBRA is a federal law that allows you to use the health insurance provided by your former employer for a period if you pay for the insurance. If my family needed my insurance, I would strongly consider using COBRA to extend my insurance.

Polish up my resume. I would focus on actual accomplishments over the last five to ten years rather than just a long job history. I’d be better off listing things I’ve achieved and skills that are very clearly marketable than just listing all of the jobs I’d done over the years. Employers don’t care about the irrelevant job I was doing in 1993, so I’d save that line for a description of something I achieved at my most recent job.

Send an individual email to each person I know well in my field. I’d suggest that I might be looking for greener pastures and ask if they know of any relevant positions that might be available. Social connections are the most valuable tool you have for getting your foot in the door at a new job.

Hit the social networking sites, especially LinkedIn and Twitter. I’d use LinkedIn to build up professional connections, starting with the people above that I emailed. I’d use Twitter to dive into professionally-oriented conversations with people in my field. LinkedIn does a great job of shoring up the connections one already has, while Twitter does a great job of starting to build new connections.

Start building a side gig. Even with all of these things, you’re going to have some time to burn. Use it productively. Make an effort to start a side business in an area you’re passionate about, whatever that might be. I know one person who moonlights as a high school sports referee. Another person I know makes art that he sells on Etsy. The key is to start something that will bring you some income now, but more importantly has the possibility to grow into something later.

In other words, this is a time to be busy. Get started now.

One of the best discussions I’ve ever had with a reader was with Emily. Emily worked in an office environment where the supervisor position was going to become available soon. She felt as though she had the skills to take on that position and the track record in the workplace to win the competition for it, but something else worried her.

She felt that she had a great relationship with a lot of her coworkers. They were her friends and confidants, and she was worried that becoming their supervisor would damage those relationships.

I felt as though that were a valid concern. Quite often, the job requirements of being a supervisor can really interfere with relationships you might build with people in the workplace. You might like your boss or you might dislike that person, but there’s still an inequality between the two of you in the workplace hierarchy.

I encouraged her to talk about it with her friends and make up her own mind. She decided not to seek the supervisor position after some time reflecting on it, which was probably the right move for her.

Recently, I discovered a book that would have been just about perfect for Emily. From Bud to Boss by Kevin Eikenberry and Guy Harris covers this exact scenario. How do you transition from being “one of the gang” to being a successful leader? It’s not an easy path for anyone to take.

Succeeding in Your Transition to Leadership
The most profound idea that Eikenberry and Harris set out in the book comes early on, when they focus on the difference between control and influence from a manager’s perspective. If you focus on controlling people, the amount you can actually control is pretty limited. People don’t like to be controlled and the more controlling you are, the more they’re going to squirm away. Instead, you should focus on reducing your control and instead focusing on your influence. Instead of telling people what to do, instead talk about what needs to get done as a whole and break it down in front of everyone so everyone knows the role they have to play. Give them some slack and let them know that you really believe they can do what they need to do. Many people thrive under those conditions and it doesn’t have to rely on “putting the hammer down.”

Change
The best way to handle this kind of transition is to talk about it. Ask questions. Ask people in the office what they’re feeling, what they’d like to see done differently, whether they’re happy with their job right now, and so on. Talk about your own challenges in this new role so that they understand that you’re both facing new challenges in this changing time. Candor really pays off during times of change.

Communication
As you establish communication lines during the transitional period, keep them open after the transition has happened. Talk to people often – and not in a Bill Lumbergh top-down-do-what-I-say approach. Ask them what their challenges are. Let them know what you can do – and what you’re doing – to make it possible for them to succeed.

Coaching
This section focuses on the difficult task of giving feedback to people based on their performance. The key, as always, is to look for both positives and areas to work on for everybody. The best supervisor I ever had told everyone in the office, all at once, that he was going to tell each of us about the things we’d done well and give each of us one area to work on to improve our job performance in the coming year. That’s exactly what he did and that made all of us feel as though we weren’t being singled out for bad performance while also hearing about the thing we needed to improve on.

Collaboration
A key part of success in any workplace is hinged on the success of collaboration. Are people able to work together well? My experience – and this is right in line with this section – is that success often is hinged upon each piece of the collaboration understanding clearly what is expected of them and what the other collaborators expect. Again, it all comes back to clear communication.

Commitment to Success
In the end, it all comes back to you. What’s your commitment here? Are you committed to building a career here? Are you wanting to build a track record of success? It’s really up to you. A key thing, as always, is to be clear with yourself – and with others around you – with what your goals are. Hidden games rarely work. Hiding in your office doesn’t work, either. Instead, be clear with what you’re doing and what you expect from others.

Is From Bud to Boss Worth Reading?
Much of the content of From Bud to Boss is just a primer on how to be a good boss with some material included to make people feel more comfortable with the transition from coworker to supervisor.

That doesn’t make it a bad book. In fact, it makes it a very good book for people in Emily’s position. If you’re thinking of trying to take on a supervisory role but are afraid of how it will impact your workplace relationships, this is an incredibly valuable read.

Check out additional reviews and notes of From Bud to Boss on Amazon.com.

The job was easy. All I had to do was go to that room during designated hours, sit at a particular desk, and answer user questions, along with a few other minor tasks such as reloading printer paper and changing print cartridges. The vast majority of the questions were very basic.

This left me with quite a bit of time where I wasn’t really doing anything but filling space.

Those hours – and there were many of them – are actually one of the biggest regrets I have of my college years.

I spent a lot of that time just sitting there web surfing. Occasionally, I’d dig into a homework assignment. Once in a while, I’d read a paperback. More than a few times, I stared at the wall and the clock.

I was underemployed, in other words. While there was a need for someone to be sitting in that seat, most of the time there wasn’t enough actual work for me to be doing.

I’m not alone in this. One of my closest friends used to work the graveyard shift as a convenience store clerk. She said that customers would come in at a rate of about three an hour during the night and she spent most of her time staring out the window or moving bags of potato chips around aimlessly. She usually had a nighttime checklist of things to accomplish, but those tasks were usually out of the way in the first two or three hours of her shift.

In each of our cases, we wasted our underemployment. Instead of taking advantage of open time where we’re actually being paid to just sit there and use that time for some sort of self-improvement, we just wasted that time.

I would give almost anything to have all of those wasted hours back. Those hours held the key to a lot of different potential avenues in my life.

Here are four incredibly useful distinct things you can be doing if you find yourself in an underemployed situation.

Look for useful things to do
There are always things that can be cleaned or organized better. There are always procedures that can be improved a little bit. There are always things that can be documented.

Sure, one might argue that these things aren’t really your job. And you’d be right. That’s not the point of doing them, though.

The reason to do them is twofold. First, you’re being paid to do something, not just sit there. You are earning money for your time there, so you might as well do something with it. Second, doing things like this earns you positive attention at work from your supervisor, which can help a lot if you’re in an emergency situation or if you’re hoping for a raise or a promotion down the road.

Improve your skills for this job
What skills are on display at this job? Communication skills with customers? Efficiency at making food or pouring drinks? Techniques for the technical field you’re involved with? Can these things be practiced or improved upon?

There are always ways to work on the skills you use in the workplace. Working on those skills when times are slow is a sure way to make sure the job goes much more smoothly when times are busy. Plus, an effective employee is one that stays around and is often in line for promotions and raises.

Prepare for your next career step
If this job is a jumping-off point, use your idle time to prepare for whatever it is that comes next.

There are a multitude of things you can do in this regard. Put in some extra studying time for a class. Work on that novel you’ve always wanted to write. Investigate a topic area you’ve always been curious about. Polish up your resume. Find leads on new jobs.

Improve yourself
If all of those fail, you can always spend the time there improving yourself. I know one person who used to take a barbell to work with him and do various exercises with it during downtime to build up his arms and shoulders. You can always take and read a challenging book – one that forces you to think deeply about the world in some way. Perhaps you can spend some time writing a handwritten letter to someone you care deeply about. The key here is to leave work a better person in some fashion than when you arrived.

Underemployment doesn’t have to mean idleness. In fact, it usually means opportunity.

The person I was talking to sighed and said, “You know, if you had told me I’d be here in ten years, being a stay-at-home mom waiting for my kid at the bus stop with these two little ones, I would have laughed at you.”

I agreed with that. Ten years ago, I was still in college, single, and without a career path. Five years ago, I was fully embedded with a career path that was totally different than the one I’m on.

I then asked her a question that had been floating in my mind a lot lately. “Where do you think you’ll be in five years?”

She stood there for a second. “You know, I’ve really enjoyed making a lot of my children’s clothes. I would love to figure out a way to make that into a business.”

Ten years ago, she was a single college student. Seven years ago, she was a married career woman. Today, she’s a stay-at-home mom. In five years, might she be starting a clothes business?

The truth of it all is simple. Our lives don’t always follow an orderly path. For an awful lot of people, you’ll be doing something with your life in five years that you completely don’t anticipate today.

Another interesting element of this is that I can see, both in my own path and in the path of the person I was talking to, that we were constantly training ourselves, either directly or indirectly, for what came next.

As a student, I trained myself for what would become my first career path. While working in that career path (and before), I spent a lot of my spare time writing.

As a student, she trained for her career path. As a professional, she started planning for a family. As a stay-at-home mom, she’s spending some of her spare time prepping for a potential clothing business.

Right now, what am I preparing myself for?

It’s an interesting question. If I had to guess, I would think I’m preparing myself to be a fantasy writer, but honestly, my fingers and actions seem to be in a lot of different pies. I’m working on presentation skills and making presentations. I’m involved with creating e-books. I’m always working on The Simple Dollar.

Just as importantly, I’m building and maintaining savings. When a change in my life direction comes along, I have the cash on hand to do with the flow of whatever it is that comes along. Why? Because, quite frankly, I know something is going to eventually happen and change my direction in life.

What are you doing in your life right now that might prepare you for the next stage?

Do you have a healthy emergency fund? Do you have cash in hand for an unexpected move because of a career shift, seed money for a business, or living money because of a job loss?

Do you have little or no debt? If your debt isn’t under control, you’re tied to your current job pretty tightly. It’s hard to take a risk if your bills are eating up the vast majority of your income.

Are you building new skills? Time management? Information management? Communication skills? Photography? I can name thousands of potential skills you might be building in your spare time. The key thing is that you’re building something that’s exciting to you.

Are you building new relationships? Do you hide from your professional peers, your neighbors, and the people in your community? Or do you head out and meet these people and embrace them?

All of these things (and much more) are key parts of building whatever it is that comes next for you. It could be anything and it’s worth your while to be ready for it.

My family and I traveled to the Seattle area to see the sights, visit family, and take our children to Mount Rainier and the ocean.

We attended my sister-in-law’s wedding and reception and a few other events surrounding it.

After that, we hosted several family members who visited us.

After that, I attended a convention while my wife and children visited family members.

During that period, I intentionally tried to avoid checking The Simple Dollar. I set up a service that sent me messages if the site was having major issues. I checked my email once or twice. My largest effort was an idea notebook I kept with me where I wrote down ideas for articles if they happened to come to me.

As I sit here writing this, I’ve just sat down to write material for The Simple Dollar for the first time in a long while.

Most importantly, I feel really excited about doing it. I have a ton of ideas built up (some of them being good ones that will turn into posts). My only writing in the past few weeks has been on my fantasy novel, so it will feel great to write about the subject of personal finance and growth again.

In short, I feel reinvigorated for my work.

So often (and I was certainly guilty of this in the past), we get so caught up in our work that we fail to take vacations. We never turn off our cell phone. We do work in the evenings. We never get time off.

After a while, that grind can turn even the most exciting job into drudgery. It can sap away your spirit and your creative energy and your willingness to really push yourself at work. It becomes routine – and often, a routine you dread.

A vacation doesn’t mean a trip and it doesn’t mean a pile of activities that wear you out and it doesn’t mean just sitting around doing nothing, either.

A vacation means doing whatever it is that you do to recharge your energy and your enthusiasm for your life’s work. For me, that’s spending time with my family, reading, playing games, and, yes, writing, but writing in an area completely different than my usual work.

During the last week or two before this vacation, I felt like I was pulling double time getting all of the articles ready in advance for the trip. By the end, it all felt like drudgery and I felt drained.

Right now (other than a bit of tiredness from not getting adequate sleep the last few nights), I feel as enthusiastic and ready to go with my work as I ever have.

Don’t ever think of vacation as meaning that you’re avoiding your job. Instead, think of it as putting yourself mentally into the position you need to be in to dominate at your work.

This goes for supervisors, too. If you have a key employee and you need that employee to be hitting on all cylinders and putting out great work, give that person vacation time and do everything possible to not bother that person when they do their own thing. What you’ll get in exchange is an invigorated and loyal employee who will churn out a lot of great work.

In short, we all need time away from our work, no matter how much we love it. That time away makes us better.

(Obviously, because of this sojourn, comment approval and emails are way behind. I’ll get to them as efficiently as I can, but it may be a while.)

Given that, I thought it might be worthwhile to walk through the steps that I use to develop a presentation. No, this isn’t going to be some kind of PowerPoint tutorial. Instead, my focus is simply on gathering your thoughts and turning them into something cohesive and presentable.

Step 1: Brainstorming
The first step is to simply get all of the disjointed ideas you have about the presentation out of your head.

Use index cards For each discrete idea you have, put it on its own card. I give each card a number identifier, which I write in the lower right corner and circle. So, I might write something like “Audience is THE key” and write 1 in the lower right corner and circle it. If I have an idea of how to group earlier ideas together, I note numbers of those ideas on the new card so I can match them up later on. If an idea is complex at all, break it down and spread the pieces across multiple cards.

List everything without worrying about repeats Just write them down as they come to you. Don’t worry about repeating the same idea or even stating the same idea again in different words. If it’s in your head, dump it out and move on to the next idea. I often go through a package of index cards when doing this, and sometimes even two or three packages.

The key here is to just get it all out of your head and onto a format where you can shuffle things around to your heart’s desire.

Step 2: Grouping
Once you are sure that your mind is devoid of ideas (which I usually am after three or four brainstorming sessions), it’s time to start doing some very basic organizing of the ideas.

Use groups that make sense to you Start grouping the cards together into groups that make sense to you. I usually use stacks of cards attached together with paper clips, with the “biggest” idea in the stack on top so I know what that stack represents. Often, that kind of “biggest” idea is one where I wrote a single word or two and followed it with a bunch of numbers representing other index cards, so those index cards will go into that stack.

Allow small groups to entirely be part of larger groups if needed Sometimes, I find that a small group goes within a large group. That’s completely fine! I’ll just put the small group (paperclipped together still) within the larger group and keep moving.

Step 3: Reducing
Once you have everything grouped, you need to start reducing the size of the groups.

Delete redundant or repeated ideas You’ll find a lot of these. Go through each of your groupings and toss every duplicate that you can. If two ideas are similar, toss one of them. If an idea turns out to be redundant, meaning the point doesn’t matter much at all in a crowd with the other points, toss it. If a card has two ideas on it that are represented on two other cards, toss the card with two ideas on it. What you want are cards with unique ideas on them that are in sensible groups together.

Reduce each idea to the minimum number of words Once that’s done, I start revising the cards. I try to state the core idea on the card in the least number of words possible while still making it comprehensible. Ideally, I can reduce it to one or two words. What about the details? The details are what you’re going to be talking about when presenting. The slides are just an outline and each slide is just a visual accessory.

At this point, the cards are basically your slides. Each card is a slide. Each grouping is a logical part of your talk. Likely, the groupings have some sort of coherent order or, at the very least, tie together in a way that you can explain in a few words on a single slide.

Step 4: Visualizing
Now comes the time to think visually.

Think of a single visual representation of the idea you’re stating What sort of image will really convey the idea you’re talking about to the crowd you’re speaking to? Try to imagine one image that would really knock your idea out of the park.

Note all of the visual ideas before looking for a single image Describe the image on each card, then search for the images you need. I often use Flickr’s Creative Commons libraries for images that I can freely use with attribution.

Step 5: Preparing
Most of these ideas should be very clear from the previous steps, but keep them in mind as you’re actually preparing for the event.

Use absolute minimal word count on each slide The fewer words per slide, the better. You want the audience listening to you, not trying to make out the 200 words on your slide.

Have one point per slide – no more, no less Do not overcrowd the audience with ideas all at once. Have one idea on your slide. Talk about that idea. Move on to the next slide and the next idea.

Having lots of slides you move quickly through is better than a few slides you drone on and on about The visual refreshment is much more likely to engage an audience over the length of your talk than a small number of slides held up there for a long time.

Practice. Edit. Practice some more. You know you’ve practiced enough when it feels natural to you. You can click through the slides and not even have to think about what’s on the screen. You can just keep eye contact on the crowd, focus on speaking slowly and making your points clear, and be confident knowing that those slides behind you are just accentuating you and the strength of your ideas.

Good luck.

When I look back on that decision now, what I see is that I loved my job, but I hated big aspects of my career, at least in the direction it was headed.

I spent more time than I would like away from my family on trips that felt unimportant. At the same time, I very much enjoyed the people I would spend time with on those trips and in my workplace. I still miss the daily interactions with most of them.

Although my job offered some creative outlets, I couldn’t help but feel that my career path didn’t offer many creative outlets at all without going back to school for some intense graduate work. The future held repetitive grunt work – and a lot of it.

I loved my job and felt reasonably secure in it, but if the project I worked on was eliminated, I could have wound up in a place I really didn’t want to be had I been reassigned.

I loved my job, but I hated my career. It took me some time to realize this, too.

There’s really a big difference between the two. I often get emails from people who describe a situation where they seem to hate their job but love their career. They don’t get along with their boss. They feel as though they’re being pulled away from what they should be doing by workplace forces. None of these elements were ever true for me.

Some people, of course, seem to dislike both their job and their career. They don’t like their boss or their working situation and, at the same time, they don’t see leaving their current situation as a solution, either.

Of course, each of these situations demands a different solution.

If you hate your career but love your job, as I did, you need to look at a completely different career path. For me, I switched from a research-oriented job to writing – a radical career shift. For a few years, I spent a lot of my spare energy on writing as a release and I realized that, when the writing finally took off, that this was the path I wanted to follow with my time and energy moving forward. I miss my old job, but I don’t miss my old career path and where it was seemingly headed.

If you hate your job but love your career, start polishing up your resume and your skill set now. Don’t worry about the pressures of your current work environment. Instead, focus your energy on your exit path. Don’t sit there and stew and let the stress of the situation make you become strongly bitter and, eventually, unemployable. Make a move, and move on. If your work environment is so dysfunctional that it makes Office Space seem healthy, it’s time to move on.

If you hate both your job and your career, switch to a “transition” job – and quickly. Look for employment in an area where you can easily get into that doesn’t demand too much of you and get out of the stressful situation. Once you’re in this new position, start evaluating where you want to go from here. Preferably, it’s in an entirely new direction.

Two final notes. First, security isn’t everything. Many people are afraid to move on because they feel their job is safe. Very few jobs are truly safe these days, and if you’re in a situation where you’re miserable, others are probably aware of it and you begin to slowly look more and more expendable the longer your misery continues. Don’t wait for the hatchet – take action and move on to something that excites you and makes you want to go into work, do a great job, and move forward in your career path.

Second, money isn’t everything, either. If your job or your career path is making you deeply stressed, it’s likely also making you sick, reducing your current state of health and also possibly reducing your long-term health. No amount of money is worth actively sacrificing your health and well-being. It is far better to live a frugal life with your sanity and your health than have a well-paying job that’s sapping your vitality away.

Jennifer on Twitter wondered about moving to find work. “How about life changes? Got fired. Do I move or stay where there are no jobs?”

This is never an easy decision to make. There are a lot of factors involved, and many of them push in opposing directions. Here are three key factors I would consider.

Could you actually earn more money in another area? In other words, if you take your resume to another part of the country, could you actually find employment with income that exceeds what you could currently earn?

It’s easy to think this is true, particularly if you were recently fired from a job, know of others employed in that field, and simply can’t find any openings in your local area. However, it may be that there are very limited hiring opportunities in your field anywhere. This is certainly true in some fields and less true in other ones.

Your best approach is to look for job openings in other parts of the country. Are there are a lot of job openings in other areas? Are they promising job openings?

You might also want to start applying for jobs that look interesting before you move. Try applying for a bunch of jobs in large cities that you can easily travel to, go there for interviews (if needed), then move only if you actually find a job that earns well and seems stable.

Would that difference in pay more than exceed a different cost of living? Quite often, you’ll find jobs in other areas that pay the same as what you were making, except that the new area has a much higher cost of living. I know of computer programmers who can live well in the Midwest, take the exact same job on a coast without much additional pay, and be practically homeless.

Before you apply for any job, know how the cost of living in that area compares to your current cost of living. If it’s significantly higher, you’re going to need a significantly higher salary to account for it and maintain your current standard of living.

A good way to calculate this is to get the cost of living index for the current area where you live, as well as the cost of living index for where you’d be headed. Take your current salary, multiply it by the cost of living index of the area you want to move to, then divide it by the cost of living index of the area you’re currently living in.

An example: let’s say I lived in Des Moines, IA and I had a job offer on Long Island. The cost of living index for Des Moines is 90, while Long Island’s index is 400. If I was making $20,000 in Des Moines, I would multiply that by 400, then divide the result by 90. That means I’d have to make about $89,000 to have an equivalent standard of living on Long Island. Obviously, I’d probably be seriously downgrading my living quarters in this case (or else this is one major career upgrade). Of course, the reverse is true – if you’re making $89,000 on Long Island, you can have a roughly equivalent standard of living on $20,000 in Des Moines.

Unless you’re significantly improving your standard of living (by getting a salary that exceeds your calculated number) or you’re getting a spectacular career growth opportunity, it doesn’t make sense to move.

Do you have a support network in the area where you’re moving to? This is another factor that ties heavily into the cost-of-living question as well as quality of life factors. If you’re moving away from family and friends, you’re moving away from a lot of time and money-saving conveniences.

I know that when I first moved far away from my family and friends, I was stunned at how many little things they helped me with. Free meals were gone. Useful advice was gone. Many of my social circles were gone. These things added up to a lot of value, financial and otherwise. I would go out solely to meet new people and cement friendships. All of my meals were on me. I had to seek out new sources of entertainment. This added up to substantial costs.

This factor varies heavily for different people, but it can be a huge factor and one that shouldn’t be overlooked when considering a move.

It may seem as though I’m attempting to talk people out of moving to get a better job. I’m not. Rather, I’m simply illustrating the point that moving for a better job often puts you in a worse financial position, let alone the impact on other aspects of your life.

Before you make that leap, know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether or not you’re getting positive value out of the move.

Terrence on Facebook wants to know about “Meditation and focusing techniques.”

Meditation and focusing is a big part of my daily routine. I strive to be a good parent, a good husband, and a successful writer and small business owner. Alone, those demands on my time and attention are intense, but when you add on top of that my hobbies, community work, and other interests, it’s key that when I’m involved with something, I need to have ease of mind and also an ability to focus on the task at hand.

I do lots of little things to make this possible. After making a long list of these techniques, I realized that seven of them stood out from the pack.

Get plenty of sleep This wasn’t quite as true with me when I was a college student, as I would be able to focus reasonably well on very little sleep. Today, though, I realize that I may not have been focusing quite at my optimum at those times. My most productive and worthwhile days almost always come after a good night of sleep.

For me, the best amount of sleep is somewhere between seven and eight hours total, and with a bit more added on for each interruption during the night. The more dreams I have mixed in with deep sleep, the better my next day seems to go. If I get less than that for one night, I seem to do well the next day, but if I chain together days with inadequate sleep, my attention starts to really slip. My work simply isn’t as good and there’s not as much of it produced.

Eliminate distractions – and no excuses I do my best work when I’m able to slip into a “zone,” where I’m so in touch with what I’m doing that I lose all track of time and awareness of the outside world. This “zone” is often easily interrupted by things such as phone calls, instant messages, email, and things like this that can “pop” in and distract me.

Thus, I tend to get into the zone most effectively by eliminating as many paths to distraction as I can. I turn off my cell phone and my business phone. I block many of the websites that most distract me. I turn off all of my social media “pop up” programs. I close the door to my office. These touches reduce the number of ways in which I can be distracted from the task at hand.

Work in bursts I tend to embed myself with a single task until either it’s done or my run of concentration on it breaks. This period can be anywhere from ten minutes to two hours, but when I find my mind starting to wander away from the task at hand, I put it aside for a while and do something else.

I find that whenever I push through breaks in my concentration, I tend to work a lot more slowly and the progress I do make is of low quality. I’m almost always better off if I just go do something different for a while. I’ll move from writing to reading email. I’ll move from email to reading a relevant book. I’ll move from reading to working on an article.

Handle expected transitions with meditation Whenever I know I’m about to transition from working to personal time, or when I’m going to start working during our children’s naptime, I take a short break (ten to twenty minutes) to meditate and get my mind relaxed and ready to handle a completely different set of challenges.

This is something I more or less used to do while commuting. I would try to completely blank my mind on my way from home to work so that I could work effectively. I’d try to blank my mind on my way from work to home so that I could be an effective parent and husband.

Meditate using “cool waves” My usual meditation technique is to just sit in a comfortable place, close my eyes, and try as best I can to blank out my mind. I try to avoid all thoughts and to think about nothing at all (or as close to it as possible).

If I can achieve that, I try to imagine cool waves are slowly coming up my body, as if I’m lying on a beach as the tide is coming in and the water is cool – not cold, but not even lukewarm. Once it reaches my face, I imagine it receding just as slowly.

Some people complain of falling asleep while meditating. This only happens to me if I get inadequate sleep, which is my single fundamental technique for focusing on the task at hand.

Don’t “overwork” Being successful at parenting or at work requires some degree of balance. If you spend too much time in one zone or another, you lose out on the ability to subconsciously reflect on what you’ve achieved in that area of life.

The consequence of that seems to be (for me) that I lose the ability to govern what is important work and what isn’t important work. I’ll get heavily distracted by social networking, for example, and fail to write good posts. I’ll stop spending time gathering good ideas and end up writing articles based on substandard ideas. When you can’t judge what’s important and what isn’t, you end up treating the trivial with as much importance as the vital and that just causes stress and a reduction of quality on the important things.

Don’t let work interrupt your personal life Do you live to work or work to live? If your job is all that matters to you, leave that cell phone on all the time and ignore your kids when you get a call from work or when you sit on the deck looking up resources for your job. Your children and spouse and friends certainly do notice this. They can tell when you’re paying attention to them or to something else and they decide based on that how important they are to you and how much attention and effort they should give in return in your relationship.

Take time off. Go home at five. Roll around in the grass with your children while work is the last thing on your mind. It’ll make you a better worker and a happier person.

On Facebook, Brittaney asked “what should every soon to be college graduate know about finances before entering the real world?”

This is actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer because different college graduates find themselves in very different positions. Some have crippling student loan debt, others have a little, others have none. Some have credit card debt, while others do not. Some have a degree and a resume that’s going to make it easy to find a job, while others will not. All of these factors are going to result in very different life trajectories when students leave college.

The question really is what advice is useful to all of these people? Here are the pieces of advice I would give to outgoing students in all of these situations.

1. That thing you really want? You don’t need it.
The single most effective tool that people have in their personal finance toolbox is self-control. A lack of self-control causes people to make purchases both big and small that go beyond what they can actually afford, which eventually results in accumulated debt and a lot of difficulty. It also encourages people to slack off on their career progress and in other areas of their life, but we’re focusing on finances here.

Whenever you feel like you’re making good money and you deserve some unnecessary item, wait. Give it thirty days. If you still want that item, go ahead and buy it. If you decide that you don’t want that item and instead want something else during that period, switch to the new item and restart the clock. This will give you plenty of time to think about the purchase and decide whether it’s really something you want to do – and if you come through on the other side with a big “yes,” you’re likely okay making that purchase.

Another powerful tactic is to leave your credit cards at home. Go out just with a bit of cash in your wallet – no credit cards, no debit cards. Spend that cash. When it runs out, you’re done. There’s no way for you to turn to the plastic in the middle of an excursion for more drinks or for items you don’t need.

2. Increasing your debt level is an extremely bad idea.
Never, ever take on any type of debt without a ton of consideration. Debt is one of the worst things you can do to yourself. If you have to go into debt for any reason, buy the least expensive thing you possibly can, eliminate that debt, then start saving up for a replacement. Never go into debt for something you don’t absolutely need.

It’s absolutely as simple as can be. When you go into debt, you’re essentially agreeing to pay some company substantially more than whatever item you’re considering buying is worth. If you buy a car with a 6% plan over 60 months, you’re going to wind up paying roughly 20% more for that car than the sticker value. If you’re looking at a $10,000 car – guess what? You just lost $2,000 out of impatience. If you buy a bunch of stuff you don’t really need on a 20% APR credit card – say, $1,000 worth – and you don’t pay it off for a year, you’ve just lost somewhere around $200. It’s gone – and you got nothing in return for it except for your impatience.

If you can’t afford something without debt, don’t buy it. Look for a less expensive alternative. Go to Goodwill or to a used car dealership. If you really want a nicer version, start saving now. That way, the interest works for you rather than against you, as the interest accumulates in your savings account rather than accumulating in the pocket of your lender.

3. Believing that “your future self will take care of it” ensures a miserable life.
The best move you can make financially and career-wise at any given moment is the move that gives you the most options tomorrow or a year from now or five years from now. Do not put burdens on your future self or your future will just look like a series of closed doors and unattainable opportunities.

“Buy now and pay later” plans are bad. Putting off big projects? Bad. Putting off opportunities to build connections in your field? Bad. Debt of any kind? Bad.

If you have a choice between sucking it up and dealing with something challenging now or putting it off until later, always suck it up and take it on right now. Live more frugally than you thought possible today so you can afford to move across the country and take that amazing job tomorrow. Stay out of debt today so you can afford to start your own business tomorrow. Go to a convention today so you can get a much better job elsewhere tomorrow.

Whenever you have a choice, make the choice to open doors for your future self, not put additional burdens on your future self.

4. Start retirement savings the first day you possibly can.
Many jobs today offer retirement plans. Many of those retirement plans include employer matching, which means that you can immediately multiply your contributions just by putting money in. Never, ever turn down this opportunity. Sign up and get on board the first day you possibly can.

How much should you contribute? 10% total (your contribution plus your employer) is good. 15% total is better.

What should you invest in? Just ask whoever runs the plan if they have a “target retirement” fund and choose the one with the year that most closely matches the year when you’ll be 70 years old. Put all of your contributions into that. It will suit you very well to start with.

For one, you’ll never miss that money in your paycheck if you never see it to begin with. If you start contributing from day one, your check with the contributions subtracted will be your normal paycheck. For another, starting right now means that you’ll essentially never have to worry about it. So often, when people move through their career, they become paranoid about retirement. What will I do about retirement? Starting from day one means you never ever have to worry about it.

5. If you don’t have any specific long term goals, use your money to eliminate debt.
The first experience that people have with money when they get their first good post-college job is the sensation of receiving a big fat paycheck. It’s usually the biggest paycheck that you’ve received to this point and it’s often very tempting to go buy something silly with it. Go do it. Once.

When you get that second check, though, it’s time to get down to business. Pay your expenses, then take a big fat helping of what’s left over and use it to make a big extra payment on one of your debts – preferably the one with the highest interest rate. Take care of it now, because the longer it sits around, the more of your money winds up in the pocket of a lender (as mentioned under tip #2) and the more restricted you’ll be with your paychecks down the road (as mentioned under tip #3).

An exception to that: the first thing you should do is make sure you have $1,000 set aside in a savings account somewhere as your emergency money. It’ll really save you in a pinch. After that, though, start hammering the debt – hard.

Get rid of your student loans. Get rid of your credit card debt. Get rid of your car loan if you have one. Get rid of any and all debts you accumulated during college. They’re weights around your neck – and the neck of your future self (never, ever forget the third tip, above).

6. If you don’t have any specific long term goals and no debt, keep your extra money in a savings account.
Why in a savings account? When you’re first out of college, you’re likely to jump around a lot. You don’t have kids and you’re likely not married, so it’s a lot easier to make a big shift. You’ll move. You’ll switch jobs. You’ll possibly switch careers.

This kind of action needs flexibility. You don’t want to have your money locked away somewhere where you can’t touch it (which means things like CDs are out). You also don’t want that money in a place where it can easily lose value (so stocks are out, too). A savings account doesn’t return much, but it is secure and it is easy to access money from. It’s perfect.

Keep your money there until you feel roots beginning to take hold. At that point, you’ll be in a much different place and have much different problems to think about. (You’ll be your “future self” mentioned above, and you’ll be incredibly happy that your younger self was sensible enough to keep a lot of doors of opportunity open.)

7. It is unlikely that you’ll stay in your first post-college job – or even your first post-college career path – forever, so plan accordingly
The most valuable things you’ll get out of your first post-college job are relationships and transferable skills. Take advantage of any opportunities that allow you to meet people in your field. Go to conferences and talk to lots of people. Take part in meetings. Get to know as many of your peers as you can – as well as the people that are further along in your carer ladder.

At the same time, focus a lot on your transferable skills. Practice your written communication skills whenever possible by writing reports and such. Practice your public speaking skills by jumping on every chance you can find to present your work or the work of your organization. The more universal skills you have – presentation skills, writing skills, time management skills – the more valuable you’ll be no matter what you wind up doing.

These are the valuable things you’ll get from your first job, not your paycheck. Your paycheck helps pay the bills, helps eliminate whatever debts you have hanging around your neck, and helps you prepare for whatever that next opportunity is.

All of this stuff will come together at once in a few years and that’s when you’ll hit your career and your finances out of the park.

8. Don’t be ashamed to live with your parents for a while, but don’t view it as a long-term solution.
You’ll find lots of different takes on this proposition. Some people will view this move as a sign that someone is failing at their post-college life. Others will look at it as the normal course of events. Some will see it only as a fallback plan.

I see it as an opportunity if your parents are willing. It’s a chance to spend your first professional year destroying your debt and solidifying your professional standing without many of the expenses of everyday independent living. It’s not a fallback plan, but a boost.

Remember, though, that a good boost doesn’t last forever. It merely launches you on your way. Have a plan to get yourself out of the situation the day you move in. Specify a deadline for you to move on and make that clear to your parents so that they can plan accordingly as well. You should not be a leech to them – they’ve already given you so much over the past twenty-odd years that you should be chomping at the bit to give them the peace of mind that comes with having a truly independent and self-sufficient child.

9. Your specific investment choices matter less than the simple fact you’re investing.
So often, people put off investing because they’re afraid of making a mistake and investing in the wrong thing. That, in itself, is a far bigger mistake. You’re far better off investing in a poorly-returning investment than not investing at all.

The first application of this is hinted at in tip #4, above. You’re better off starting the first possible day on your retirement plan. Why? It’s your investing dollars that make the difference when you’re just starting out, not the perfect investment.

Even putting money in a savings account is a form of investment (it’s a stable and highly liquid investment with low returns). Just like elsewhere, you’re far better off starting a savings plan now than you are putting it off because you’re not sure exactly where to put the money. If you don’t know, put it in a savings account. You can always move it later.

Don’t let your uncertainty about the specifics keep you from saving and investing money now. If you don’t know for sure, just go as simply as possible.

10. You have an incredibly long life ahead of you. Use that knowledge to your advantage.
If you’re just starting your first post-college job, it’s likely that you’re in your early 20s or your mid 20s. A person of that age right now will live on average well into their 80s. You will probably be working productively fifty years from now. Fifty years.

Spending two years of your career working at a startup is a blip in the big scheme of things. Taking three years to work for the Peace Corps? Another blip. Taking on risks and adventures like these do not have the same risk for someone who has fifty years of career ahead of them versus someone who is looking at retirement shortly.

Take those risks now when you’re young and single and unencumbered with debts and other obligations. This is what it means to keep your doors open. There’s a long hallway ahead of you with a lot of doors in it. You have plenty of time to look through a lot of those doors, and you should. At the same time, you should be trying to stay out of debt and give your future self skills so that you can see what’s behind as many doors as you can.

After all, you’ve got half a century to explore.

A final tip: almost all advice you get has something of value in it, and you’ll be rewarded for figuring it out.
You’re going to read and hear a lot of advice. You’re going to think that an awful lot of it doesn’t apply to you – and there’s at least a chance that you’re going to think the same thing about this article.

If you feel that way, you’re missing out on an opportunity. Almost every piece of sincere advice has something you can pull out and apply to your life.

If you find yourself discarding advice and advisors just because you can’t quickly see how they fit, you’re missing out on opportunity. Take in that advice. Let it sit in the back of your head for a while. See if you can see those patterns in your own life. You might just find that when a big problem comes along, you already have the answer in hand.

These questions have been a constant part of my life since I was very young – and it’s still a guiding question in my life. Now that I’m a parent to three children and a mentor to other adults, I can see clearly how the same thoughts float through the heads of others.

What will I do with my life? How will I leave my mark on the world?

Let’s look at those questions through the stories of three people and see where they lead.

Her Dream
Right now, I’m serving as something of an informal mentor to a 19 year old young woman who is incredibly passionate about photography. She’s one of those types who can spend hours examining lenses and she’s beginning to develop an innate sense of lighting, framing, and lens selection.

She rarely spends even a few hours of freedom without getting out her camera and taking pictures of whatever she finds, putting her composition skills to work. The past few times I’ve seen her with her camera out, I’ve just enjoyed watching her work with the same enjoyment I take watching anyone performing something they love with skill.

Here’s the challenging part: while photography is something she deeply enjoys, she’s unsure whether or not it’s something she actually wants to make a career out of.

Instead, her path to her dream is through a side business, one where she’s not reliant on it for income and can scale it back when she wishes. Right now, she’s building a client list and has taken on a healthy number of professional jobs, and is slowly expanding operations into marketing and promotion.

However, her major in college is business-oriented. She’s not majoring in anything directly related to photography at all. Instead, her studies will make it possible for her to find a role in a corporate structure while also building a small business around her photography passion.

She’s using her career to support her talent and passion.

His Dream
Another young man, aged eighteen years, is about to start college. He’s passionate about music. He has some dreams of being able to play music professionally for a living, with his backup plan revolving around teaching music.

His path to his dream is taking advantage of everything his college has to offer. His intent is to bury himself in his music while in school, not only maximizing his skill, but trying to gain exposure.

His coursework will be fairly easy and not highly time consuming as he is focusing on education classes and a fairly low credit load. His spare time will be used to improve his skills and to build connections and a following by meeting other musicians, sharing his music online, and being involved in the music community on campus.

He’s using his collegiate years to open every possible door.

My Dream
All throughout my early life, I dreamed of writing for a living. I have always felt most at peace when communicating through the written word, whether reading it or writing it.

When I attended college, however, I didn’t believe that such a path held a real future for me, so I studied the sciences and got a high-paying job out of college.

Even after that, however, I spent my spare time reading and writing until I eventually found some success with my writing after years of failure. When that foundation was strong enough, I made the leap into the long-term career I had always dreamed of.

I used my first career to lay a foundation for a second career utilizing my talents and passion.

What Does This All Mean For You?
The biggest lesson is that there are many, many paths to making your career dreams a reality. You don’t have to start off in that career path or plan your entire life around it.

However, there are a few central elements all of these stories have in common.

All three of these people dream of doing something they enjoy with a significant amount of their time. One person loves photography. Another loves music. Another loves writing. I have friends who love everything from packing meat to programming computers. Find whatever productive thing there is that just feels right to you and that you love doing as much as possible and do it. Don’t worry about the long term plan.

All three of these people have spent a lot of time “woodshedding.” By woodshedding, I mean that they’ve engaged in this activity they love for a long time without any profit. The young woman has taken tens of thousands of photographs without a dime of compensation. The young man has practiced his music for thousands of hours, again without compensation. I’ve written far more words without compensation than I’ve ever written for compensation.

We do these things because we’re passionate about it. We love doing them so much that we’ll spend our time doing them anyway just because we enjoy it so much. When you find something that you’ll do for years and years without any compensation at all, you’re probably onto something that may earn you a great deal of compensation – or at least a career ticket – later on.

All three of these people share what they make. The young woman I mentioned is perhaps the newest to this, but she’s now sharing photographs by the bucketload online. The young man has a healthy pile of his music out there on YouTube and on other websites. You’re reading The Simple Dollar, which is my writing shared quite freely.

All three of these people are on different life trajectories. One is likely to become a music teacher. Another person is heading straight for middle management. Yet another is self-employed and deeply involved in parenting. It doesn’t matter what your path is – you can find room for what you want to be doing.

These traits seem to be common among anyone who has a dream and a passion. They’re passionate about something, so passionate in fact that they’ll do it for free. They share what they make with the people around them. They’re doing this no matter what path their life seems to be following.

What’s holding you back from doing the same?

He took a high-paying job with a rather prestigious title at a well-known company. The biggest drawback of this job is that he carries around a company phone and receives calls on it at all hours of the night.

At first, this wasn’t a big deal for him. He actually only needs to be at the office a couple days a week. The rest of the time, he telecommutes or, on some days, he just deals with crises.

As time passed, though, he got married, then they had a child. This child is currently three months old.

The child wakes up multiple times during the night. Coupled with that are the calls that my friend gets from his job, often three or more per week in the middle of the night.

Simply put, he’s sleep deprived. He’s fallen pretty ill twice in the last month. He not only looks miserable, he is miserable. He’s drinking more than he ever has, mostly to take the edge off of the constant jumpiness in his life.

He’s growing to loathe the job he once loved. His life has changed while his job hasn’t, and the relationship isn’t harmonious any more.

What should he do?

I know this is a story that’s familiar to a lot of people. You have a great job on paper, but deep down inside, you hate that job. How do you get through it?

The solutions to the problem are different in the short term and in the long term. I’m going to suggest both short term and long term tactics for dealing with this type of situation.

(Yes, this is advice for a friend of mine, but it’s good general advice for anyone who might find themselves in a similar situation.)

Effective Short-Term Results
How can you make the pain of your job subside in the short term?

Figure out exactly what’s wrong. Why are you unhappy? Why are those things happening? Dig into the problem until you can figure out where the roots of your unhappiness really are.

Talk to your supervisor. If there are elements of your job that you are finding untenable, be completely up front about them with your supervisor. Explain what the core problem is and ask if you can find a solution.

For example, in the above picture, my friend might want to simply tell his supervisor that the constant nighttime calls are creating a disastrous home life.

Have a solid short-term fix in mind. Is there something simple that can be done to help with this situation? If you’ve evaluated what the problem really is, see if you can imagine some situation where the worst of that problem is resolved while causing minimal additional problems.

For example, my friend might suggest having someone who can take the “emergency” calls during some periods during the week. This person wouldn’t be the ultimate “go-to” guy most of the time. Instead, this person would serve to keep the edge off of my friend so he can get the basic rest he needs to function.

Lasting Long-Term Results
The solutions above can certainly take the edge off of a challenging situation, but they often don’t completely resolve the greater issue that led to the job discomfort to begin with. The real solution revolves around making sure you have a healthy exit plan.

Live on less than you earn. If you’re bringing home $50,000 a year, don’t spend $50,000 a year. Spend $30,000 or so and put the rest away for whatever might happen to you down the road – like a job turning sour. It’s never, ever too late to start doing this.

The easiest method for doing this is to automate it. Have your bank automatically take part of your paycheck and transfer it to a savings account so that it’s out of sight and out of mind. Let it build quietly in there and don’t think about it until the time comes. Eventually, that money will help you leave and transition on to the next step in your life when the job becomes untenable.

Have connections in your industry. Get as involved as you can with the business you’re in. Connect with people in your industry on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. Go to conventions for the real purpose that conventions exist – building relationships.

These relationships will be there for you when you’re ready to move on to the next stage in your career. They’ll point out job opportunities to you. They might even feed job opportunities to you. This often happens whether you are actively looking or not – I know that I had several job offers that trickled in at my previous job.

Jump at every chance to do something that stands out. When there’s a chance to present – particularly to people outside your organization – do it. When there’s a chance to write something that people outside the organization will see, do it. Start a blog. Write a book. Do anything and everything you can to do exceptional things that will cause your name to stand out or, at the very least, provide some interesting resume fodder.

Not only are many of these things exceptional and intriguing, they also sharpen many of your transferable skills and demonstrate them directly to employers.

It is those “stand out” things that get your foot in the door with future jobs. When a job opens in a hot field, they’re often inundated with applications. The thing that stands out from the field are the exceptional steps that you’ve taken along the way. Everyone’s done a ho-hum job, and almost all of those resumes are thrown straight in the trash.

Your job is not your life. Your job is an exchange of your energy and time for your employer’s financial resources and other benefits, nothing more, nothing less. If that equation changes to the point where you feel like you’re giving far more than you’re receiving, you need to resolve the situation in both the short term and the long term.

I’ve been a paralegal with the same law firm for four years. I love the job and the work that I do. I feel like I’m genuinely helping people.

In October, my boyfriend and I sat down and looked at our finances as you suggested. We came to the conclusion that we needed more income, so I took on a second job in the evenings at a local Home Depot.

Since then, the extra income has been very useful, but now I just come home at night exhausted and I have to practically drag myself out of bed in the mornings. I don’t have any energy with my paralegal work and my boss has started to notice. We had a one-on-one meeting about it. He asked whether I was committed to the job. I told him that I didn’t have enough money to make ends meet and had to take on a second job.

I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid of losing the paralegal job, but I’m also afraid of losing the income we really need to get out of our financial hole.

Amy hits upon a major concern for anyone working multiple jobs. You only have so many hours in a day.

I’ll show you what my own schedule looked like when I was launching The Simple Dollar as a side business. This was a normal weekday.

4:30 AM – Wake up
4:30 AM – 5:00 AM – Shower, hygiene, breakfast
5:00 AM – 6:30 AM – Writing
6:30 AM – 8:00 AM – Get kids up and ready for child care, take them there, commute to work
8:00 AM – 4:30 PM – Work
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM – Commute home, prepare supper
6:00 PM – 10:30 PM – Writing
11:00 PM – Sleep

Simply put, I was burning the candle at both ends and this caused several problems.

I had limited time for leisure activities and activities of self-improvement. There was no time for anything other than work and minimal family time.

My performance at both my regular job and my early writing suffered. It was difficult to write good articles. It was also difficult to take on challenging tasks at work. I could muddle through, but I’d have to be blind to not see that the situation was having a negative impact on my work.

I was exhausted and I got sick quite often. I used to fall ill almost every other week, making it even harder to catch up. Today, I haven’t had any sort of real illness in almost a year.

How did I resolve all of this? It was really a three-step plan.

First, I set a clear deadline for myself a few months down the road where I would choose one job or the other. When I realized that something had to give – as Amy has – I set a deadline for that final decision. For me, it was almost exactly three months down the road.

Why wait so long? This gave me time to reflect on my situation and make the correct decision. It also gave me time to get my financial house as ready as I could for losing a significant income stream.

Second, I lived incredibly lean during the period leading up to that deadline. I cooked everything at home. I made sack lunches. I didn’t do much of anything outside the apartment (of course, it’s not as if I had a lot of time for it anyway).

During that period, I beefed up my emergency fund with all of the money I saved through living lean. Thus, when I was ready to choose, I knew that I had some support against the loss of the income stream.

I would highly recommend that Amy follow this same path. Eventually, she will lose one job or the other, so she should take the choice into her own hands. She should set a deadline, live as lean as she can until then, and then make the choice.

Finally, when I did make my choice (which was writing), I redoubled my commitment to it. In Amy’s case, if she chooses the paralegal work, she should start off by meeting with her boss and simply stating the facts of it. She made a difficult financial choice to stick with this job. She should also look for a plan to maximize her chances to increase her income at the job that she chose.

Which job should one choose? For my situation, I chose the one that I felt would give me the best opportunity to spend time with my family. Both paths seemed to afford me the basic income I would need and both provided work that I found enjoyable. The difference really came down to how my family was affected.

For many people, however, and this includes Amy, the decision should come down to which job offers the best income potential if you commit yourself to that career path, unless that choice is deeply untenable for some other reason (an uncomfortable workplace, unethical work, etc.).

Working exceptional hours over a long period is untenable and negatively impacts your performance. Set a deadline for the hard choice you’ll have to make. Conserve your resources as you lead up to that deadline. Then, make the leap into whichever situation is the best for you.

Even if that path doesn’t lead you exactly where you hoped, you’ll at least be able to tackle that path with energy and a clear mind, which are the greatest tools you can bring to the table when it comes to your career.

In other words, I had about two weeks of vacation coming to me. I wasn’t really sure what to do with that time, though. I didn’t have children. My wife didn’t have any vacation time coming. So I asked him what I should do with the time. He looked at me thoughtfully and simply said, “Why don’t you just take a sabbatical?”

A sabbatical means a period in which you choose not to work in order to achieve something else that will improve your life. If you take a week off of work in order to re-pave your driveway, that’s a sabbatical. If you take two weeks off in order to take a class, that’s a sabbatical.

So what did I do during that week? I drafted a novel. It was the second novel-length work of fiction that I’ve completed in my life (and, like the first one, I now think it’s pretty awful). It was also a great learning experience for me. It taught me how to organize the threads of a complex story. It showed me that I had the capacity to write such a lengthy thing. It gave me the experience that I can build on with better stories later on.

Since that first experience in 2004, I’ve tried to take a sabbatical once a year or so. I’ll take a week off of work in order to work on some project or increase some personal skill of mine. One year, I used the sabbatical to take a Photoshop course. Another year, I spent the sabbatical working on my finances and, eventually, laying the foundations for The Simple Dollar. I plan to use a sabbatical in the fall of this year to “woodshed” on the piano, focusing squarely on mastering a couple of piano pieces.

What can you do on your sabbatical? Complete a personal project that needs a lot of focused time. Teach yourself a new skill that you know will be valuable in the future. Take a compressed course to pick up a skill.

The specifics depend entirely on you and what things you wish to accomplish and learn in your own life. Building a skill that you can use professionally is almost always a strong idea, as is a class that leads directly to a professionally useful skill. Completing a large personal project is also quite valuable, as is setting up the infrastructure for a side business or a larger personal project.

I could write a very long list of such ideas. Learn how to use a particular computer program like Photoshop. Learn a computer programming language like Scheme. Start an online business. Write a novel. Clean out every closet and nook and cranny in your home. Re-shingle your roof. Give a number of speeches and presentations to improve your public speaking skills. Take a compressed course on a topic valuable to your career at the local college. The list goes on and on.

The key is to make sure that you’re either doing something to improve your skill set or doing something that improves the value of the things in your life, particularly something that you can’t quite accomplish while working.

Why not just take a vacation? For starters, sabbaticals are easier to propose to supervisors. My experience – and the shared experience of others – is that it’s much easier to sell a supervisor on using vacation time for a skill-building exercise than it is for an actual vacation. Why? When you take normal vacation time, you’re not really increasing your value to the company during that time spent. If you’re building skills during that time, then you typically do increase your value. Even if you don’t build a skill that’s of value to the workplace, knowing that you’re local in case of an emergency can again make vacation time easier to sell to a tough supervisor.

For another, after a sabbatical, you have a genuine accomplishment. You learned a new skill or you took care of something significant that needed finishing. That sense of accomplishment is incredibly valuable, as it fills you with confidence as well as the rewards of whatever it is that you’ve accomplished.

After a sabbatical, you’re in a better place. That in itself is a tremendous reward and a strong source of good feeling which you can use to fuel your return to work. Good luck.

What’s deliberate practice? I first learned about the topic from Stephen Dubner at the New York Times, who was writing about how Alex Rodriguez built his baseball skills. Dubner noted that not only did Rodriguez practice in abundance, he applied three basic tenets to his practice:

1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.

This scene from The Karate Kid illustrates that idea:

I described it in this way:

Many people, when they want to learn how to play a guitar, pick it up and try to bang out some awful rendition of Stairway to Heaven. They’ll practice at that song some, trying it over and over again, and they might eventually figure out how to make it passable, but playing anything else is going to be rather difficult and the person (unless they have obscene natural talent) will never get good enough to play in front of others and earn a positive reaction.

On the other hand, if you sit down for an hour and just work on a single chord, then spend another hour just working on one other chord, then spend two or three hours alternating between the two, you’ll begin to master the basics of how to actually play a lot of things. Add a third chord to that and you can play most of Tom Petty’s songbook. Add a couple more and you can play virtually every well-known pop and rock song of the last sixty years.

So let’s start there, with music. Just be patient – we’ll get around to some personally applicable stuff in a bit.

As many of you know, I’m learning to play the piano. I take lessons once a week from a wonderful piano teacher, and I do my best to practice during the week.

When I have practice time at home, I can choose either to attempt to play a specific song – say, Clocks by Coldplay – or I can choose to work on things like mastering jumping back and forth between chords over and over again, or play scales over and over again, while focusing on getting the finger work for these repetitive moves down cold.

The first kind of practice – playing the songs – is a lot more fun. It’s enjoyable to tackle a song that I really like. The other type of practice – deliberate, repetitive tasks – can be really boring at times.

What’s interesting, though, is that when I go to piano practice and run through what I’ve been working on, I’ll find that if I work on a particular song all week, I’ll be better at that song, but I’ll be just as bad – if not worse – at other songs. On the other hand, if I work on those boring deliberate tasks all week, I might not be as good at that one song, but I’ve usually improved at it and I’ve improved at every song.

The deliberate practice is boring, but it pays off.

The same thing is true with public speaking, appearing on the radio, and podcasting. In each of those cases, it’s always most fun to think about and practice the message I want to deliver as a whole.

Instead, I find that if I practice deliberately – focusing on specific things like speaking at a slower cadence, using voice practice to lower my speaking voice a bit, using good posture to project my voice, and improving the language of my message – not only does the presentation at hand improve, but so do all future presentations, impromptu or otherwise.

So how does this help me maximize my career and my income?

First of all, modern workplaces do not encourage deliberate practice. Most modern jobs simply want people to be competent in a lot of areas, not excellent in one or two. Deliberate practice focuses on excellence in a specific area, so your employer isn’t going to invest time and money in your deliberate practice.

On the other hand, people who do excel at a particular skill tend to rise quickly, earn more, and often eventually become independent contractors, earning even more. Think about it this way. If you have several new employees at your company and one of them is astoundingly good at some particular attribute of their job – say, speaking or managing the books – that person is going to stand out. They’re going to be first in line for promotions and raises and they’re most likely going to be the one that has the door open to them for new career paths.

Here’s an example. Let’s say that you’re in an adminstrative assistant pool at work. Most of the people in the pool can type at about seventy words per minute, as can you. However, you go home at night and put in an hour of deliberate practice to improve your typing speed and eventually you inch up to ninety words per minute. You’re now the most productive typist in the pool. A permanent adiminstrative assistant position opens up. Who’s going to get it – and get the financial rewards that go along with it?

Here’s another example. Let’s say you just got a postdoctoral research position at a university and you’re in a lab with three other postdocs. Each day, you spend an extra hour or two focusing on honing your presentation skills. Eventually, you’ll be outshining the others when it comes time to present your research, and your lab head will notice this. You’ll be chosen to go to conferences to present the lab’s work, enabling you to make contacts that will eventually further your career while the others are left behind.

Applying deliberate practice to key skills you’ll use in your career path – or even simply on skills you enjoy building – can have a powerful positive effect on your career trajectory, earning you more money and more opportunities.

I double-majored in life science and computer science. What on earth am I doing writing a blog about personal finance? Shouldn’t I be in a room somewhere writing data analysis programs?

The truth is that many people don’t follow a straight line from high school to their career path. Today, that path often goes through college, but quite often, it doesn’t involve studying the field that a person ends up practicing in their career. I dabbled in several different career paths during and immediately after college before more or less stumbling onto the path that I’m currently on.

In other words, don’t believe that your college major defines what you have to be doing for the rest of your life.

Of course, having a degree in a field outside of where you want to go with your career can be a challenge, and that’s the focus of You Majored in What? by Katharine Brooks. The book focuses on the person who finds themselves out of college and interested in entering a career path that doesn’t match their degree. What now?

1: A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings and You Find a Job
Brooks opens the book by simply stating that most people who depart high school, go to college, and choose a major do not follow a straight path from that point to a job in their field of study. Many different kinds of unexpected events can occur along the way, from an internal change within you to countless types of unexpected opportunities handed to you by others. In my own path, for example, I didn’t ever really expect that I would find my side hobby of writing turning into anything that could earn me significant money.

2: Connecting the Dots
Most of us spend our time spread across a lot of activities, many of which seemingly have little connection to each other. We don’t spend all of our time focused on one single area. We’re engaged in our professional area or our studies, but we’re also involved in community projects, various social groups, hobbies, and countless other things. Quite often, though, these things that we spend our time on have some deep underlying patterns that actually do connect them together. The career we should end up with should be one that taps deeply into those underlying patterns.

3: Mental Wanderings
Another element of finding the right career path, regardless of our area of study, comes down to how we think and what we think about. When our thoughts are idle, where does our mind wander to and how does it evaluate those things? People who do free-form associations, for example, excel in different areas than those who think in an orderly and linear fashion. People whose mind wanders to social concerns, for example, should be focused on different areas than those whose minds wander to music or wander to solving problems.

4: Wandering Beyond Majors and Minors
Transferable skills are key, in other words. Often, what you learn in college isn’t so much the material of your major, but how to study effectively and learn quickly, how to present, how to work in teams, how to work with others, how to be a leader, how to communicate ideas in a written format, how to manage your time, and so on. These skills are vital parts of many different career paths, and people who have them have a leg up no matter where they end up.

5: Why Settle for One Career When You Can Have Ten?
You don’t have to spend your life simply following one career path. I’m 32 and I’m on at least my third career path at this point, for one. The things that many people use as an excuse to stand in the way of switching career paths, though, is age, money, and education. These are traps that people create for themselves, and money often underlines all three of them. Being conservative with your money gives you the freedom to change careers and start anew if you wish. If you start piling up the debts and the commitments, such shifts become much harder.

6: Even Wanderers Make Plans
Career-hopping doesn’t mean that long-term goals are pointless. If anything, such a situation makes goal-setting on the three-to-five year horizon that much stronger, particularly if you want to successfully career-hop. Goals for financial success and self-improvement are particularly strong because they enable you to make a greater variety of personal choices when you achieve them, as you’ll have the money to support you and the skills to move forward.

7: Paging Dr. Frankenstein
Quite often, such wanderings can wind up being very lucrative because of the skills that are combined together. For example, a person who spent some time in China teaching English, followed by some years as a computer programmer, might find themselves being a very valuable technology vice president at an international corporation because of those combined skills. A programmer might transition into being a writer, then find that they’re very skilled at producing internet content because of the meshing of skills.

8: My Job as a Krackel Bar
A key part of career hopping is understanding how to write a very effective resume that highlights the skills you have that relate to the job you’re seeking. The advantage of career hopping is that you’ll often have a medley of skills and highlights to choose from (while a disadvantage is sometimes a lack of depth), so you should seek to make it clear that you offer a unique set of traits that stands out from the crowd.

9: Channeling Jane Austen
Brooks also argues that an effective cover letter is key to this process, which means that you’ll need to sharpen your writing skills to highlight your unique skill set. I think it goes even further than this, as a person with a unique skill set will often find many opportunities to write.

10: Wandering Into the Workplace
Often, a person with a “career wanderer” background will have an advantage if they reach an interview situation, as they’ll have a wide variety of experiences and stories to tell during the interview process. Before interviewing, focus on identifying stories to tell that will show off your diversity of skills and how they set you apart as a candidate for this particular job.

Is You Majored in What? Worth Reading?
As with many personal finance books, this book hits a home run with the specific target audience: if you’re a person who is struggling with the “right” major in college or is near the end of college and uncertain if they’ve made the right choice or is thinking of switching careers in the professional world (especially early on), this is a great book to read. It outlines many of the specific things that a person needs to do and to think about if they’re going to be a career-hopper, and I found the advice to be very solid (based on my own experiences).

Now, if you’re already very sure about your career path, this book won’t be of any real help to you. It’s very much focused on the career-hopper, particularly those who jump to career paths unrelated to their current career.

If you are a career-hopper or at least unsure of your path, though, pick this one up.

Check out additional reviews and notes of You Majored in What? on Amazon.com.