A friend approached me for career advice.
She wanted to help people become more joyful, so she was hoping to create a business as a happiness coach.
It’s a nice idea. And coaching sounds great — like being a therapist without all that pesky education. But at twenty-four, without a lot of credibility and experience, where could she begin?
Read MoreIn the third season of AMC’s Mad Men, ad exec and perpetual little boy Pete Campbell whines to his wife after an insufficient promotion, “Why can’t I get anything good all at once?”
It’s an attitude I can relate to…and probably many other people throughout history, considering we have proverbs like “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” and other colloquial exhortations to be grateful. Still, sometimes we want what we want, when we want it. What then?
Read MoreAs I look over my misspent life — in those moments when it feels like I’ve had a misspent life — I can come up with a long list of things I wish I had done, and nagging regrets about the things I did.
Some of these things are impossible to do anything about (damn biological clock), but some of them are things I can begin to resolve today, if I would stop being so morose.
Read MoreWhat do you want?
It’s a question we don’t always want to answer, for fear of being perceived as greedy or having our desires mocked.
Sometimes, we unconsciously recalibrate our answer to something realistic or reachable.
We may not even want to acknowledge the answer to ourselves — if we expect nothing, we can’t be disappointed.
Read MoreMy Brother, My Brother, & Me, a long-running podcast from brothers Justin, Travis, & Griffin McElroy, bills itself as “an advice show for the modern era” (Justin always pronounces it “modren”).
But this is not an advice show. It is a cleverly executed improv comedy show. The brothers field listener-submitted requests for advice along with selected Yahoo! Answers questions, offering deeply outlandish solutions to the problems presented. For instance, a question from a server in a restaurant about how to accommodate a guest who orders something that isn’t on the menu leads to speculation that perhaps the guest is a ghost who must return every week to the same restaurant until he is given his requested meal and is then gratefully “banished to the hell dimension” in a puff of vapor.
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