Still looking for your dream job? Keith Ferrazzi helps you find it

Recently I blogged about how overwhelming it can be to choose a career path when you have loads of interests.

(That post is here, if you’d like to check it out.)

It’s like author Keith Ferrazzi was reading my mind, or reading my blog, because just a few days later his e-mail newsletter was headlined “Target Your Dream Job in an Hour.”

Rather than seeing too many possibilities as paralyzing, Ferrazzi suggests putting them to work — making a list of every job you’ve ever dreamed of having, along with everything you’re good at, everything you’re not good at, the things that make you happy and the companies you’d like to work for.

In his post, Ferrazzi writes:

The idea here is to brainstorm – don’t limit yourself by what you feel is “possible.”  You will start to see patterns among the jobs you list here. Similar traits between them.  That’s the real value, so the more inputs you have here the better.

So you make the lists, then you look for themes. Hmmm, there are a lot of mentions of teaching, or look at how many times I mention being active or making art.

What I like about this is how liberating it sounds to consider everything within bounds. Don’t worry about how much school it would take or that you’re already in your 50s and have decades of experience doing something else. Just open yourself up to the possibilities.

There’s plenty of time to get practical after you’ve made your lists.

Have you used list making to find your dream job? Did you do Keith Ferrazzi’s lists or something else? Did it work?

Don Draper is a loathsome excuse for a human being

Mad Men is a hypnotizing time capsule with all the smoking and drinking and the great costumes. But oh is Don Draper a creep!

Don Draper is a loathsome excuse for a human being. He’s a serial philanderer who lies to everyone and takes his family for granted, and somehow didn’t lose his job after disappearing for weeks without a phone call or explanation.

Yet, the arrogant user at the center of the cultish series Mad Men inspires women to bat their eyelashes, including several on Twitter who’ve tweeted things like “I’d like to take a meeting with Don Draper. Mmm.”

Really? Because it’d be so great to have an exchange like this one with a guy who shows you so much respect? Here Don and his boss Roger meet with a female client.

Ms. MAGGIE SIFF (Actress): (As Rachel Menken) You are right, Roger. This place really runs on charm.

Mr. JON HAMM (Actor): (As Don Draper) This is ridiculous.

Mr. JOHN SLATTERY (Actor): (As Roger Sterling) Don.

Mr. HAMM: (As Don Draper) I’m not going to let a woman talk to me like this. This meeting is over. Good luck, Ms. Menken.

I’ll momentarily hold aside the sexist power fantasy of Mad Men, a world where professional men openly comment wolfishly on the attractiveness of the subservient secretaries, or in some cases, seduce and/ or marry them.

What is it about Don Draper? It’s not just the period costumes of the stylish series, which typically put him in dapper suits and hats, a real contrast today’s jeans and T-shirt ethos.

I think it’s the swagger. Draper’s supreme confidence is sexy, in spite of what an ass he is.

Much has been made of men typically being attracted to pretty young things, while women are attracted to power and money. I think we women have learned that the men with power and money generally carry themselves like men with power and money.

But ladies, I think there’s a difference between finding a man in a great suit attractive and letting said guy treat us as badly as Don treats Betty. I think one of the most important choices we make in our lives is spending it with a life partner who shows us respect, gives us affection and generally makes our lives better, not worse, for the companionship.

Have you been seduced by swagger?

Blue Hill at Stone Barns a once-in-a-lifetime dining experience

If the current locavore food movement were a religion, a trip to Blue Hill would be its trip to Mecca.

Blue Hill is perhaps best known around the country as the site of the Obamas’ New York date night dinner. That’s the Manhattan location, a good restaurant in a city crowded with good restaurants.

Here's an interior photo from Travel and Leisure. Click through for their review.

To know the real Blue Hill is to make a trek about an hour north to Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Here superstar chef Dan Barber and his family run not only a lauded restaurant but also a real working farm – it’s the very definition of farm to table dining.

For example, a review on Serious Eats starts:

Reviewers and food writers like me often throw around words like gutsy, important, and groundbreaking with impunity, and the result is that these words have lost their impact. So at the risk of doing just that, I am hereby proclaiming that Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the combination working farm and restaurant presided over by chef and partner Dan Barber, might be, just might be, the most important and gutsiest restaurant in America right now.

Food & Wine names it one of 10 restaurants that will change your life.

John and I felt lucky to get 6:30 p.m. reservations on a Friday evening. Then we sat at our table in the bigger than expected dining room and saw numerous other open seats, so apparently we didn’t win the seating lottery.

There are only two choices on the menu – the five-course farmers feast or the eight-course version. One of the parade of wait staff taking care of our every need explained the amount of food is the same, it’s more a choice of how many dishes you’d like to sample.

Faced with a choice of two foolishly expensive meals, I decided for us: the eight-course feast with wine pairings for each course. If you’re making a trip to Mecca, you go all the way, right?

Our first amuse bouche was veggies skewered upright, like in this image from ArtichokeHeart.

We were still early in our pre-dinner cocktails when a lovely amuse bouche arrived – artfully arranged fresh vegetables held aloft on skewers rising vertically from a block of wood. Then another amuse, and another, in rather quick succession. At one point I think we had three partially finished nibbles on the table.

I began to worry they were rushing us through so they could turn our table for a later seating. The food was tasty, especially little bite-sized beet burgers and single kale chips for each of us, but the pacing felt we weren’t keeping up with the conveyor belt.

Before we’d finished a half dozen pre-meal snacks that preceded the actual eight courses, the parade slowed to a more manageable pace, giving us a bit more time to savor the flavors of each dish. We spent about five hours on this bacchanal, with nearly all of that time spent with a plate and a glass in front of us, and much of it being doted on by one or more servers.

Our waiter asked us about allergies or preferences before the meal started, so John asked for no scallops or eggs and we both answered no to a question about organ meats.  Our requests meant that sometimes we got the same item for a course, other times we ate different things.

Not having taken notes, we’re hard pressed to recall a single specific course. Instead we carried away an overall impression of an exceptional meal, a blur of well-executed dishes, nicely paired great wines, superb service and lovely atmosphere. It’s more about the total being greater than the sum of the parts.

And speaking of the sum – I can safely say this was the most expensive meal we’ve ever eaten. Perhaps by twice. Including tip, it was in the ballpark of the monthly rent of my two-bedroom apartment in Ann Arbor.

So we probably won’t be back, but I consider it a tuition payment in my studies of locavore food. Or a tithe to the church of farm to table dining.

—

• See a Flickr photo set of Stone Barns that isn’t mine but is beautiful.
• Read another blogger’s impressions
• And another
• And another who says it was their best meal of 2009, if not of all time

Glamour’s sleep challenge encourages women to make sleep a priority

Arianna Huffington and Cindi Leive are doing a 30-day sleep challenge and encouraging other women to do the same. Click here for video of them talking about it with Joy Behar.

I love sleeping in on Saturdays.

While just about every book or article on getting good sleep suggests going to bed and waking at the same time every day, I struggle with that because I’m typically sleep deprived during the week and look forward to catching up on weekends.

I don’t have the usual reasons: I don’t work 12 hours a day, I don’t have kids. Instead I blame my body clock. Left to my own devices, I stay up past midnight and sleep til about 9, so every school night I’m fighting my body’s rhythms.

So Glamour magazine’s Sleep Challenge 2010, which suggests a New Year’s resolution of getting enough sleep, spoke to me. The call to arms, or perhaps call to pillow, says in part:

You probably already know about the health consequences of sleep deprivation, how cheating your body out of the R&R it needs can make you more prone to illness, stress, traffic accidents and even weight gain. (Dr. Breus swears that sleeping will actually do more to take off weight than exercise! Love that.)

But there’s more to it than simple physical problems. Rob yourself of sleep, ladies, and you’ll find you never function at your personal best. Work decisions, relationship challenges, any life situation that requires that you to know your own mind—they all require the judgment, problem-solving and creativity that only a rested brain is capable of and are all handled best when you bring to them the creativity and judgment that are enhanced by sleep. “Everything you do, you’ll do better with a good night’s sleep,” says Dr. Breus. Yet women who constantly push themselves to get by on less never know what that “peak performance” feels like.

Starting Jan. 4, HuffPost’s Arianna Huffington and Glamour’s Cindi Leive committed to getting a full night’s sleep for a month and blogging about the experience.

One of Cindi’s blog posts that caught my eye is the to-don’t list — what will you do less of in order to get more sleep? For me, it’s often dumb stuff that keeps me awake too late: watching something from Netflix, surfing the Web, putting away laundry. It’s nothing that couldn’t wait until a more reasonable time the next day.

Do you get enough sleep? If not, what keeps you from sleeping? Is is anything you could change?

Kathy Griffin succeeds by following her own path

Kathy Griffin’s humor is not for everyone. She’s bawdy — both in her choice of topics and in the way she talks about them.

But if you’re not easily offended, Griffin’s self-effacing, celebrity-slaying humor might work for you. Like, oh, her Emmy acceptance speech that not only doesn’t thank God but specifically says Jesus was in no way responsible for her success.

Here she talks about that scandal on Larry King:

Her bio says she’s best known for her four years on Suddenly Susan, but today she’s set herself apart from other sitcom actresses by starring in the Bravo reality show My Life On the D List, which makes fun of her hard work to scratch out some measure of fame, and by appealing to a gay audience, hosting the Gay Porn Awards and advocating for gay rights.

(HUGE warning that the clip from the Gay Porn Awards is so not appropriate for work.)

She co-hosted New Year’s Eve with Anderson Cooper on CNN, and got buzz for dropping the F bomb on live TV. She knows the value of a good controversy in generating publicity.

Here’s why I want to interview Kathy Griffin: she’s blazing her own trail. As she says in the Larry King interview, she bought her own billboard for D List, not waiting for the system to give her what she wants but throwing herself out there and making it happen. She regularly plays Madison Square Garden so clearly she’s built enough of a fan base that she’s doing something right.

Mark Bittman’s many jobs before becoming my food writer idol

I love Mark Bittman’s food writing. He makes cooking unintimidating. Even recipes with fancy or unfamiliar ingredients feel accessible because he explains it all so clearly.

His book How to Cook Everything is my go-to when I’m trying to figure out how long to cook salmon or the best way to store raspberries.

This video is a great example of Bittman’s style. Note that there are no measurements and his approach is more a concept that could be applied multiple ways:

Some of my favorite Bittman resources:

• 101 meals ready in 10 minutes or less
• 101 simple salads
• 101 picnic dishes

Because I admire him and the way he does his job, I was especially excited to find this video with Bittman talking about the many other jobs he’s done, besides being a food writer:

Earlier this week I said I’m hoping to interview author Richard Russo for my blog. I would also love to talk to Mark Bittman. So I’m putting these declarations out there on my 2010 to-do list.

One final Bittman video, this one is him talking for about 20 minutes about how Americans eat and why it needs to change. Bittman has a new book out called Food Matters that fits into the Omnivore’s Dilemma niche in explaining the errors of our ways and proposing some solutions. So this video is not about Bittman’s career evolution but instead about the transformation he’s hoping our society will make in its eating habits.

Richard Russo on why your day job might not be bad for your creativity

Because our society doesn’t generally pay well for creativity, many people who aspire to act, sing, paint or write have a day job to pay the bills.

They might aspire to that glorious day when they’re discovered and can quit the practical job, supporting themselves solely on their art.

Richard Russo, a Pulitzer prize winning novelist, got to do just that, retiring from his post as an English professor when he was 47 to pursue writing full time. But in this video interview, Russo discusses how the other things he’s done, including teaching and writing screenplays, have helped him as a novelist — they weren’t merely distractions or simple ways to support himself, but they helped inform who he is creatively.

He wrote an essay on Powells.com when Bridge of Sighs came out, answering why it took six years to finish. He explains that among other things, he was working on the screenplay version of his previous novel, Empire Falls, and discusses how writing screenplays influences his novels.

Richard Russo's latest book is That Old Cape Magic. Click here to buy it from Powell's.

I cheerfully admit that part of the reason I’ve enjoyed writing movie scripts is that they play to my particular storytelling strengths: characters developed by means of dialogue and action/behavior. Even as a novelist I like to slow time down, let my story develop from one scene to the next. Screenwriting puts a premium on precisely these skills. What comes less naturally to me are narration (which typically speeds up time by summarizing events), character development by means of entering their private thoughts, and descriptions of the physical world in which the action takes place. These are all essential skills for a novelist but are of little use to a screenwriter. The camera can see in a split second what would take the writer several pages to describe, and what characters are thinking has to be in their dialogue or the expressions on the actors’ faces. The last time I dealt with the passage of movie time through a montage, the director gave me withering look and said, “I hate fucking montages!” Far better, he believed, to insert a card at the bottom of the screen reading, “Two Months Later.”

For all of these reasons writing screenplays is a little like sitting down to a meal that contains just the foods you like best, the ones that are good for you having been, by some stroke of good fortune, actually forbidden. It’s great for awhile, but after a few months you develop rickets. When I return to novel writing after doing a screenwriting stint, I’m overwhelmed by the great variety and abundance of the feast I’ve been ignoring. My God, are those brussel sprouts? Bring them on. Liver? You betcha. The result is fiction that’s more lush, not more spare. The two books I’ve published since I started dividing my time between novels and movies — Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs — are my least “movie-like,” devoted as they are to the passage of time, to their characters’ interiors, to the physical worlds they inhabit. If anything, I’ve become even more expansive, digressive and self-indulgent than before. I recall finishing one long narrative passage in Empire and thinking, “There. I pity the poor dumb screenwriter who has to find the film equivalent of that!” Who turned out, of course, to be me.

Richard Russo is one of my favorite writers. His books have compelling plots, interesting characters, believable dialogue, a great mix of drama and comedy. I want to interview him for my blog. Anyone want to introduce me?

The happiest people in the world — Costa Rica?

The World Database of Happiness. For a data nerd, seeing "database" and "happiness" together is clearly too good to resist.

A recent Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times said Costa Rica is the happiest place on earth.

I thought Walt Disney said that was Orlando, but Kristof writes:

Costa Rica is one of the very few countries to have abolished its army, and it’s also arguably the happiest nation on earth.

There are several ways of measuring happiness in countries, all inexact, but this pearl of Central America does stunningly well by whatever system is used. For example, the World Database of Happiness, compiled by a Dutch sociologist on the basis of answers to surveys by Gallup and others, lists Costa Rica in the top spot out of 148 nations.

That’s because Costa Ricans, asked to rate their own happiness on a 10-point scale, average 8.5. Denmark is next at 8.3, the United States ranks 20th at 7.4 and Togo and Tanzania bring up the caboose at 2.6.

A few weeks ago I blogged about a ranking of the states that put New York at dead last in happiness scores. Now this evaluation bumps it up a level to study global happiness.

So if the U.S. is 20th in the world, and New York is at the bottom in the U.S., there are a whole lotta people in the world happier than New Yorkers. Does that mean it’s time to pack up and move? Or to just borrow some inspiration and bring it home?

Kristof writes:

Latin countries generally do well in happiness surveys. Mexico and Colombia rank higher than the United States in self-reported contentment. Perhaps one reason is a cultural emphasis on family and friends, on social capital over financial capital — but then again, Mexicans sometimes slip into the United States, presumably in pursuit of both happiness and assets.

Cross-country comparisons of happiness are controversial and uncertain. But what does seem quite clear is that Costa Rica’s national decision to invest in education rather than arms has paid rich dividends. Maybe the lesson for the United States is that we should devote fewer resources to shoring up foreign armies and more to bolstering schools both at home and abroad.

I’m still slowly making my way through the wonderfully written Geography of Bliss, which also explores the connection between where we live and how happy we are. If I ever finish it, I’ll offer a short book report.

Why do you think Costa Rica is the happiest place on earth? Do you believe it is?

What should I be when I grow up? How do you know?

I’ve pretty much worked in the same field since high school — I got a job pasting up newspaper pages using X-Acto knives and hot wax when I was 17 and I’ve earned my paycheck from something related to writing or media ever since.

This week I met a friend of a friend who is studying criminal justice after getting fed up with her previous career in fashion.

I found myself simultaneously impressed by her bravery to make a big leap, and overwhelmed at the prospect of how you’d do that.

It’s not that I’m only interested in one thing. Actually the opposite. If I were to ever make a career switch, part of what I’d find most daunting is how to narrow the myriad choices.

If only life's decisions involved just two choices. How do you pick when faced with myriad career possibilities?

I love to cook, but I know enough people in restaurants to know that’s a difficult path. But working for a farmers market or an upscale grocery store or a cookware store, who knows?

I love animals but it would break my heart to see them suffering at an animal shelter or vet’s office. But doggy day care or grooming or dog walking?

Is there something I don’t even know about yet that I could excel at and love?

This About.com article called How to Make a Career Choice When You Have No Idea What You Want to Do breaks down the process into some sort of obvious steps like taking self-assessment tests, making a list of possibilities, talking to people, narrowing the options.

When I was in business school, I spent what felt like an eternity taking an online self assessment career test. After answering hundreds of questions about my skills and interests, the wizardry of the test told me I’d be good at public relations. OK, so the test worked, because that’s the job I was already doing and I’d like to think I did it well, but I was kind of hoping that after getting an MBA from a top 10 business school, I might make a leap into something new and challenging.

Fortunately I lucked into a job where I’ve had the chance to develop new skills while bringing with me my earlier life experience in news. It’s sort of the best of both worlds to blend continuity and change.

For those of you who’ve made a big career leap, how did you decide to do it?

For anyone contemplating a change, what’s your process for making the decision about whether to do it?

Here are some online career assessment tests that are free:

• Career Explorer
• Queendom
• Quest Careers
• Career Diagnosis
• Life Script

For $75, you can take Career Leader, the test Michigan offers its MBA students to help in career selection.

My life goals in painting form

My fabulous artist husband, John Tebeau, is doing a painting of me with a few of my favorite things: friends, food, music. The central image is me with my Jazz Fest second line parasol.

After I blogged about New Year’s resolutions, several of you asked the fair question: what are MY resolutions?

The honest answer is I’m still working on my big-picture 2010 goals. I’ve started with some tactical changes: commenting on one other blog every day, doing some form of exercise every day, taking better care of my health.

I have a comprehensive vision statement that touches how I want the professional, personal, creative and relationship components of my life to fit together and I’m giving that a thorough review. We’ve been talking a lot lately about our long-term plans for our life so I’m making sure my goals document is in sync.

Meantime, John is working on a real big picture for me. It’s what he and I have called a spell painting, but you could also call it a wish painting or his interpretation of the popular vision board.

He’s doing a portrait of me surrounded by images of things I like having in my life: good food, happy music, socializing with friends, big dogs. In the center, me with my Jazz Fest parasol. It’s a visual reminder of my life priorities and what makes my heart feel good.

Like Julie Andrews singing My Favorite Things in painting form.

If you had a painting of your favorite things, what would it look like?