How to Embrace the Most Embarrassing Parts of Your Resume

Everyone’s resume has a dud or two. Glaring gaps after getting fired. That new boss who reorganized your team–and maybe didn’t like you that much–and gave you a title demotion you’re still embarrassed about. And let’s not forget your short-lived stint as VP of operations at a hypergrowth startup, where your chief responsibility was packing boxes til midnight on Fridays until your partner cried foul.

I feel uncomfortable about parts of my career history, too. I went headfirst into marketing after college before realizing it was an Excel job and I expected a Powerpoint one. I started a restaurant that flopped. I made lateral moves, playing hot potato with my career for about a decade without ever cracking the ranks of leadership.

But what if duds like these aren’t duds? What if they’re simply the points on the zigzagging line that leads to the presently crystallized version of you? Someone with experience, know-how, and the crucial leadership traits of humility and empathy gleaned from working in the battlefields and the trenches–not just commanding the fleets?

Or hey, maybe not. Even so, the ability to take command of your resume–whatever it looks like–and tell a compelling narrative about your career couldn’t be more critical. Selling your experience is a vital skill, whether you’re on a job interview or wooing clients for your solo business. But to do that well, you first need to come to grips with the parts of your job history that you’re least interested in talking about. And that means working your way through these three phases:

1. Hide

2. Apologize

3. Accept

Here’s what that looks like.

PHASE 1: HIDING

For years I was embarrassed that I worked at Walmart. At parties or industry events, I answered the question the same way many of my coworkers did.

Them: So where do you work, anyway?
Me: Retail.
Them: Cool.

Eventually, I started to realize that masking is a form of self-judgment. I wasn’t confident about working at Walmart. I was afraid to mention the company because I was afraid of people’s perceptions: Main-Street-obliterating, fair-wage–damaging, soul-destroying behemoth corrupting society.

By acting awkwardly, I made things awkward for others.

That may not have been true, but whatever they were going to think, I wanted to avoid confronting it. Rather than acknowledge this part of my identity, I hid it. I didn’t mention it in my biography, my blog, any of my books, radio lead-ins, or newspaper interviews.

And I called this humility. But it was really fear. After a few years, I finally figured this out and decided that from then on, I would tell anybody exactly where I worked if they asked. Of course, I did this in a tentative, awkward way.

PHASE 2: APOLOGIZING

It went something like this:

Them: So where do you work, anyway?
Me: (grimacing) Uh . . . Walmart?
Them: Oh, uh, okay, haha . . . yeah, I heard of the place! Haha, uh . . .

By acting awkwardly, I made things awkward for others. By apologizing for myself, I forced others to apologize, too. Eventually, I realized that apologizing was a form of self-judgment in the way that hiding my job history was.

Arguably, it even made things worse. I was communicating a part of myself, then immediately sounding a Family Feud–style buzzer after my own response:

“We surveyed 100 people and the top five answers are on the board. Name a place you have worked.”

“Uh . . . Walmart?”

NNNNNNN!

Apologizing avoids ownership. It creates distance. It suggests a mistake–one that you then need to account for. Apologizing is what you do when your dog craps on the neighbor’s lawn and then you notice your neighbor watching from the window. (Sorry, Keith!)

Do this kind of thing on a job interview, even unwittingly, and a hiring manager will notice immediately. Eventually I clued in to this bad habit myself, and after a couple years of apologizing for my own resume, I finally moved on to the third and final step.

PHASE 3: ACCEPTANCE

Them: So where do you work, anyway?
Me: Walmart.
Them: Cool.

Sounds silly, but it really was that simple. Gone was the tendency to hide the truth from others that reflected my desire to hide it from myself. Gone was the tentativeness and questioning, telling others that I was questioning part of myself–and inviting them to question me, too.

Accepting yourself communicates confidence [and] insulates you from the tide of emotions that wells up whenever other people’s views intersect with your own.

Instead I gained a clear and simple truth, grounded in fact: This is where I’ve worked, and whatever others may think, I still gained some valuable experience from it–experience that helped me make better decisions about my career later on. Ask me about that, and I’d be glad to talk about it.

This way, I consciously remove myself from any possible judgment. And if I am judged negatively, that needs to be wholly owned by the other person–I won’t do their judging for them. The physicist Richard Feynman has said, “You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”

Accepting yourself communicates confidence, which is a well-known career asset. More than that, it insulates you from the tide of emotions that wells up whenever other people’s views intersect with your own–sometimes muddling your thoughts and bending your beliefs.

What do you do with their views? How do you stop judging yourself? Laugh at it! At least to yourself. A big laugh helps you look deep, examine your self-judgments, and push through the steps to embracing the most (no-longer) cringeworthy parts of your work experience:

• H–Hide

• A–Apologize

• A–Accept

HAA!

Listen, we’re all full of self-judgments: We tell ourselves we’re fat, lazy, don’t exercise enough, aren’t worthy of a raise, aren’t worthy of love, wouldn’t find another job if we were fired or a new significant other if we’re dumped. Those can become dangerously self-fulfilling prophecies if you let them, especially in the job market. Sometimes we forget that we’re all trying our best–all of us–to do better.

It’s a process. And that’s nowhere truer than in our careers; tell yourself you’ve finally “arrived,” and your skills, curiosity, and potential will stagnate in short order.

Find what’s hidden, stop apologizing, and accept yourself. It’s the best thing you can do for your occasionally humiliating resume–and the career you’re rightly proud that it’s led to.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Fast Company.

The 3 S’s of Success

“How can I be successful?”

It’s a question many of us ask ourselves and have trouble answering. Because what is success, anyway? Is it writing a book and selling a million copies? Is it winning awards and gaining respect from your peers? Or is just feeling satisfied with your work?

We’re often told that success is in the eye of the beholder — that we need to define it for ourselves, on terms that are meaningful to us.

I believe that’s true but that advice doesn’t tell us how to do it. Try as we might, many of our achievements wind up fitting a mold that suits somebody else — employers, parents, societal expectations — at least as much as, if not more than, it suits us personally. And we still find ourselves left unsatisfied or unhappy, wishing we had something more or something else, no matter how ‘successful’ we’ve been.

I think one of the reasons why is because there roughly are three types of success. I call them the 3 S’s. The trick is to first decide that you can’t have all three of them at once and that you therefore must figure out which one you’re really aiming at.

Here’s how I draw the 3 S’s of success on a triangle:

1. Sales success is about getting people to buy something you’ve created. Your book is a commercial hit! Everybody’s reading it, everybody’s talking about it, you’re on TV. You sell hundreds and then thousands and then millions of copies. Dump trucks beep while backing into your driveway before pouring out endless shiny coins as royalty payments. Sales success is about money. How much did you sell?

2. Social success means you’re widely recognized among your peers and people you respect. Critical success. Industry renown! To extend the book example, let’s say the New York Times reviews your latest novel and some writers you respect send you letters saying they thought the book was great (whether or not it’s a commercial hit).

3. Self success is in your head. It’s invisible. Only you know if you have it, because it corresponds to internal measures you’ve established on your own. Self success means you’ve achieved what you wanted to achieve. For yourself. You’re proud and satisfied with your work.

These three categories are broad and approximate but I think that’s why they’re useful: Chances are good that any major achievement you reach will fall more clearly into one than another. They apply to pretty much all industries, professions, and aspects of life.

The point is that success is not one-dimensional.

In order to be truly happy with your successes, you first need to decide what kind of success you want.

Are you in marketing? Sales success means your product flew off the shelves and your numbers blew away forecasts. Social success means you were written up in prestigious magazines, nominated for an award, or shouted out by the CEO at the all-hands meeting. Self success? That’s the same: How do you feel about your accomplishments?

Are you a teacher? Sales success means you’re offered promotions based on your work in the classroom because the bosses want to magnify and implement your work more widely. You’re asked to become a Vice Principal or Principal. Social success means educators invite you to present at conferences, mentor new teachers, and the superintendent recognizes you for your work. Self success? Again: How do you feel about your accomplishments?

There is a catch, though.

I believe it’s impossible to experience all three successes at once.

Picture the triangle above like one of those wobbly exercise planks at an old-school gym. If you push down on two sides, the third side lifts into the air. In our lives and work, it’s rare that any given thing we do — any single success we achieve, no matter how great — can satisfy ourselves and others in equal measure. Aspiring to that, if you ask me, is a mistake.

Sales success, for instance, can block self success. That’s what happened to me as a writer when I got hooked on bestseller lists, blog stats, and brand extensions. Personal goals took a backseat to more tangible commercial ones. I started making things because I was asked to and not because I wanted to. Sure, the saying goes “make hay while the sun shines,” and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with chasing commercial success, but I’m pointing out that if that’s your north star it can distract or block you from chasing deeply personal goals.

Look at it the other way.

Personal goals don’t necessarily have a marketable strategy so no sales or social success may follow. I’m talking about making that triple-decker chocolate birthday cake you bake for your daughter, the incredible twelfth grade chemistry lesson you put your heart into for weeks, the backyard deck you built with your bare hands. You wouldn’t expect royalty payments or critical reviews from those endeavors. You’re not trying to sell cakes, lesson plans, or decks. You could! But that wasn’t your goal.

And, finally, let’s peek at this from a final view. Critical darlings often sell poorly. You see this almost every year at the Oscars. Spotlight wins Best Picture — tense, dramatic, wonderful acting. How much did it gross at the domestic box office? $45 million. That same year Furious 7 made $353 million.

Which would you have rather made?

There is Sales, Social, and Self success.

Spend time thinking about which one you want and then go.

Good luck!

Take More Pictures: The counterintuitive way to build resilience

When I was researching my book on resilience, I discovered something so obvious it blew me away.

I think I was around nine years old when my dad bought me the Complete Major League Baseball Statistics, a frayed paperback with a green cover. I treasured it and kept it in my room for years. I flipped through it so many times.

As I paged through the numbers, I started noticing something interesting. Cy Young had the most wins of all time in baseball (511). He also had the most losses (316). Nolan Ryan had the most strikeouts (5714), and the most walks (2795).

Why would the guy with the most wins also have the most losses?

Why would the guy with the most strikeouts also have the most walks?

It’s simple—they just played the most.

They tried the most and moved through loss the most.

When everything rests on the numbers

Sometimes, achieving something really is about quantity over quality not the other way around. I’ve asked wedding photographers how they manage to capture such perfect moments. They all say the same type of thing: “I just take way more pictures. I’ll take a thousand pictures over a three-hour wedding. That’s a picture every 10 seconds. Of course I’m going to have 50 good ones. I’m throwing 950 pictures away to find them!”

Sometimes, when I’m doing Q&A after a speech, someone asks me a question along the lines of  “So, congratulations on the success of The Book of Awesome. My question is: How do I get paid millions to write about farting in elevators?”

To me, this is like asking, “So you won the lottery. How do I win the lottery, too?”

I always answer the same way, with a reply I stole from Todd Hanson, former head writer at The Onion. He said that whenever someone asks him the question “So how do I get a job writing jokes for money like you did?” he gives a straightforward answer:

“Do it for free for 10 years.”

We cannot hack our way to success

Today, we’re surrounded by tales of companies with million-dollar valuations that grow at lightning-fast rates. We hear about tiny startups that Google acquires for billions of dollars, just a few months after launch. We want to read about the fastest way to get a six-pack or accelerate our careers. But ultimately, what we want to find—quick fixes, easy answers, shortcuts—isn’t there.

Some things take time. They take time. They just take time. It’s not about the number of hits but rather the number of times you step up to the plate. The most important questions to ask yourself are:
 

1. Am I gaining experience?

2. Will these experiences help?

3. Can I afford to stay on this path for a while?

Sometimes? No. Other times? Yes. And either way you’ll help yourself see that you are learning, doing, and moving—even if that means lots of failure on the way.

“I’m a big fan of poof”

Seth Godin, bestselling author of over 20 books, offered similar advice in an interview with Tim Ferriss: “The number of failures I’ve had dramatically exceeds most people’s, and I’m super proud of that. I’m more proud of the failures than the successes because it’s about this mantra of ‘Is this generous? Is this going to connect? Is this going to change people for the better? Is it worth trying?’ If it meets those criteria and I can cajole myself into doing it, then I ought to.”

And in and interview with Jonathan Fields on Good Life Project, he said, “I’m a big fan of poof.” What’s poof? The idea that you try and if it’s not working—poof. You go try something else.

I’m writing this article as part of my research, lessons, and ideas on resilience in You Are Awesome. That book came out over a year ago now. Is it a hit? Is it a flop? Honestly, it almost doesn’t matter. Because, either way, the only choice I have is to move on to the next thing.

Sure, I want it to succeed. But I can’t determine that. All I get to do is take more pictures. All I get to do is keep going with my next book, next talk, next project, next whatever, whether this one is a hit or goes poof.

You need to do the same.

Success stories are not stories of success  

We need to stop looking at successful people with the lens that their lives contain a success that led to a success that led to another success. Because you know what we’re really looking at? Not success, not really. Just people who are just really good at moving through failures.

Moving through failures, swimming through failure, recovering and going forward from failure? That’s the real success. Successful people get to where they’re going because they are willing to try something when the possibility of failure is high … they know and accept that and don’t shy away from it.

So when it comes to long-term success, remember it’s not how many home runs you hit. It’s how many at-bats you take. The wins will only pile up if you keep stepping up to the plate.

This is an edited excerpt from You Are Awesome: How To Navigate Chance, Wrestle with Failure, and Live and Intentional Life

You Need To Take More Vacation … And Here’s How To Do It

Mandatory vacation is the way of the future

Have you ever felt burned out after a vacation?

I’m not talking about being exhausted from fighting with your family at Disney World all week. I’m talking about how you knew, the whole time walking around Epcot, that a world of work was waiting for you upon your return.

Our vacation systems are completely broken.

They don’t work.

The classic corporate vacation system goes something like this: You get a set number of vacation days a year (often only two to three weeks), you fill out some 1996-era form to apply for time off, you get your boss’s signature, and then you file it with a team assistant or log it in some terrible database. It’s an admin headache. Then most people have to frantically cram extra work into the weeks before they leave for vacation in order to actually extract themselves from the office. By the time we finally turn on our out-of-office messages, we’re beyond stressed, and we know that we’ll have an even bigger pile of work waiting for us when we return.

What a nightmare.

For most of us, it’s hard to actually use vacation time to recharge.

So it’s no wonder that absenteeism remains a massive problem for most companies, with payrolls dotted with sick leaves, disability leaves, and stress leaves.

In the UK, the Department for Work and Pensions says that absenteeism costs the country’s economy more than £100 billion per year. A white paper published by the Workforce Institute and produced by Circadian, a workforce solutions company, calls absenteeism a bottom-line killer that costs employers $3,600 per hourly employee and $2,650 per salaried employee per year. It doesn’t help that, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the United States is the only country out of 21 wealthy countries that doesn’t require employers to offer paid vacation time. (Check out this world map on Wikipedia to see where your country stacks up. We love you, Enlightened Swedes!)

Now.

Let’s solve this problem.

First question is this big one.

Would it help if we got more paid vacation?

No, not necessarily.

According to a study from the U.S. Travel Association and GfK, a market research firm, just over 40% of Americans plan not to use all their paid time off anyway. It’s not the amount we’re given then, it’s the amount we’re taking, or feel able to take.

So what’s the progressive approach?

Is it the Netflix or Twitter policies that say take as much vacation as you want, whenever you want it? Open-ended, unlimited vacation sounds great on paper, doesn’t it? Very progressive, right? No, that approach is broken too.

What happens in practice with unlimited vacation time? Warrior mentality. Peer pressure. Social signals that say you’re a slacker if you’re not in the office. Mathias Meyer, the CEO of German tech company Travis CI, wrote a blog post about his company abandoning its unlimited vacation policy:

“When people are uncertain about how many days it’s okay to take off, you’ll see curious things happen. People will hesitate to take a vacation as they don’t want to seem like that person who’s taking the most vacation days. It’s a race to the bottom instead of a race towards a well rested and happy team.”

The point is that in unlimited vacation time systems, you probably won’t actually take a few weeks to travel through South America after your wedding, because there’s too much social pressure against going away for so long. Work objectives, goals, and deadlines are demanding. You look at your peers and see that nobody is backpacking through China this summer, so you don’t go either. You don’t want to let your team down, so your dream of visiting Machu Picchu sits on the shelf forever.

What’s the solution?

Recurring, scheduled mandatory vacation.

Yes, that’s right — an entirely new approach to managing vacation. And one that preliminary research shows works much more effectively.

Designer Stefan Sagmeister said in his TED talk, “The Power of Time Off,” that every seven years he takes one year off. He said:

“In that year, we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.”

He does warn that the sabbaticals take a lot of planning, and that you get the most benefit from them after you’ve worked for a significant amount of time.

Why does he do this? He says:

“Right now we spend about the first 25 years of our lives learning, then there are another 40 years that are really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years.”

As he says, that one year is the source of his creativity, inspiration, and ideas for the next seven years.

I wanted to test this theory so I collaborated with Shashank Nigam, the CEO of SimpliFlying, a global aviation strategy firm of about 10 people, to ask a simple question:

“What if we force people to take a scheduled week off every seven weeks?”

The idea was that this would be a microcosm of the Sagmeister principle of one year off every seven years. And it was entirely mandatory. In fact, we designed it so that if you contacted the office while you were on vacation — whether through email, WhatsApp, Slack, or anything else — you didn’t get paid for that vacation week. We tried to build in a financial punishment for working when you aren’t supposed to be working, in order to establish a norm about disconnecting from the office.

The system is designed so that you don’t get a say in when you go. Some may say that’s a downside, but for this experiment, we believed that putting a structure in place would be a significant benefit. The team and clients would know well ahead of time when someone would be taking a week off. And the point is you actually go. And everybody goes. So there are no questions, paperwork, or guilt involved with not being at the office.

With this 12 week experiment we had managers rate employee productivity, creativity, and happiness levels before and after the mandatory time off. (We used a five-point Likert scale, using simple statements such as “Ravi is demonstrating creativity in his work,” with the options ranging from one, Strongly Disagree, to five, Strongly Agree.)

And what did we find out?

Creativity went up 33%, happiness levels rose 25%, and productivity increased 13%. It’s a small sample, sure, but there’s a meaningful story here. When we dive deeper on creativity, the average employee score was 3.0 before time off and 4.0 after time off. For happiness, the average employee score was 3.2 before time off and 4.0 afterward. And for productivity, the average employee score was 3.2 before and rose to 3.6.

This complements the feedback we got from employees who, upon their return, wrote blog posts about their experiences with the process and what they did with their time. Many talked about how people finally found time to cross things off of their bucket lists — finally holding an art exhibition, learning a new language, or traveling somewhere they’d never been before.

Now, this is a small company, and we haven’t tested the results in a large organization. But the question is: Could something this simple work in your workplace? Are you the leader in charge of a team who could try this? Do you run a company where you want to give it a shot?

Let me share two pieces of constructive feedback that came back:

• Frequency was too high. Employees found that once every seven weeks (while beautiful on paper) was just too frequent for a small company like SimpliFlying. Its competitive advantage is agility, and having staff take time off too often upset the work rhythm. Nigam proposed adjusting it to every twelve weeks. But with employee input, we redesigned it to once every eight weeks.

• Staggering was important. Let’s say that two or three people work together on a project team. We found that it didn’t make sense for these people to take time off back-to-back. Batons get dropped if there are consecutive absences. We revised the arrangement so that no one can take a week off right after someone has just come back from one. The high-level design is important and needs to work for the business.

This is early research, but it confirms something we said at the beginning: Vacation systems are broken and aren’t actually doing what they’re advertised to do. If you show up drained after your vacation, that means you didn’t get the benefit of creating space.

Why is creating space so important?

Consider this quote from Tim Kreider, who wrote “The ‘Busy’ Trap” for the New York Times:

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

Vacations systems are broken.

But early results say that mandatory vacation could fix them.

Life is short so the earlier we get cracking the more time we’ll be spending doing better and more important work.

Check out the video version of this article below:

An earlier version of this article appeared in Harvard Business Review

How To Make More Money Than A Harvard MBA

Harvard makes you feel rich.

I walked through campus for two years feeling like I’d been cast in the lead role of Moneybags McGee in a movie about ruling the world and having it all.

On Harvard’s campus, tall twisting oak trees blow softly in the wind, casting polka-dot shadows over beautiful red-brick buildings, manicured ivy, and rolling lawns. Students ease open thirty-foot-tall carved wooden doors to grab made-to-order sushi from the cafeteria before eating with friends on brown leather couches against walls covered with expensive original art.

The students at Harvard Business School feel rich because they either are rich… or they’re about to get rich.

The average graduating salary is $140,000! To put that in perspective, the average American makes $905 a week or $47,060 a year. That means a fresh-faced, dewy-eyed twenty-six-year-old with two years of business school under his or her belt makes three times what the average American citizen makes. I know my salary almost tripled after I graduated from Harvard.

Yes, Harvard makes you feel rich because it actually makes you rich.

Or does it?

I was sad when I graduated, because all my friends were scattering in different directions. After a big road trip, it was suddenly all over and then:

• Mark and his wife moved to Houston, and he got a job with a high-end consulting company. A full 25% of Harvard Business School grads go work for consulting firms, and the hours are notoriously tough. Unless they land a local assignment, most consultants fly out Monday mornings and fly home Thursday nights, every single week, every single month, forever.

• Chris went to Washington, DC to be assistant principal at a big charter school. We kept in touch, but he was always at work when I called. We talked about our road trip and I’d ask him, “Are you getting any sleep these days?” He’d say, “Well, I get to work every morning around 7:00 a.m. and get home around 9:00 p.m. I usually go in for a few hours on the weekend, too. So yeah, enough sleep, but not much else.”

• Ryan went into private equity in New York. 29% of Harvard Business School grads get finance jobs in sub-industries like investment banking, private equity, or hedge funds. They help big companies buy each other, invest in illiquid assets, create complicated investments. But Ryan told me he started work around 10:00 a.m. and worked till 11:00 p.m., seven days a week.

• Sonia went to work in Silicon Valley at a big tech company. The tech giants hire 19% of the graduates from our class and had great reputations for gourmet meals, dry-cleaning, and Ping-Pong tables at the office. When I reached out to Sonia a year after graduation she told me she loved her job and was working about eighty hours a week.

It seemed crazy to me, but all my friends were working like 80 to 100 hours a week. And a week only has 168 hours in it! I remember thinking, “Is everyone nuts?”

I thought back to Harvard and remembered going out for dinner with a group of McKinsey consultants during a recruiting event. They flew to Boston and wined and dined us at a ritzy joint. We drank expensive wines, ate delicious food, and talked about world issues into the wee hours. My brain was overheating because of the stimulating conversation. These folks were warm, friendly, and killer smart. It was a great night.

But the thing I remember most is that when we were finally finishing up around two in the morning, all the McKinsey consultants were… going back to work! I’m not joking. They were jumping on conference calls with teams in Shanghai, opening laptops to do emails, or getting together to finalize presentations for the next day. At two in the morning!

Consultants and finance folks make up most of Harvard Business School grads and they work approximately 80 to 100 hours a week.

Are they really making $140,000 a year?

Do you remember fractions? I learned them back in fourth grade in a moldy classroom with flickering florescent lights in my elementary school. Pink chalk dust scrawled across blackboards showing us how one-half can be written as ½ or three-quarters can be written as ¾… with 3 being the numerator and 4 being the denominator. As in “I sat on the couch in sweatpants watching Netflix all night and ate 3⁄4 of a sausage pizza.”

Well, the Harvard salary of $140,000 is a fraction, too.

Every single job is paid by the hour.

Harvard Business School grads make double or triple the money a lot of people make, but they often work double or triple the hours, too. When you work that much, it’s harder to find time to shovel the driveway, play with your kids, or plant your garden, so maybe you hire people on the cheap to do those things for you. You will still have fun! Frankly, the money you’re making can afford luxury vacations and expensive restaurants. You may have even more fun. But there’s less time for fun.

Think about whether it’s important to you to feel the pride of a freshly shoveled driveway, the joy of watching your kids discover a new word, or see the tulips you planted in the fall finally bloom in the spring.

There’s nothing wrong with either life.

But think about the life you want.

Here’s how much a Harvard MBA makes compared to two very common jobs: an assistant manager at a retail store and an elementary school teacher.

They all make $28/hour.

Where did I get the numbers from?

Well, teachers are scheduled for seven-hour school days (usually 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.) with typically an hour off for lunch. Let’s round that up to thirty working hours a week. But we all know how hard teachers work. We know it’s way more than that! My dad is a teacher, my wife Leslie is a teacher, and they bring work home. The average teacher does an hour or two of work every single night! Marking, prepping, coaching a team. So I added ten hours a week for that.

Retail store assistant managers are typically scheduled for forty-hour work-weeks, but it’s a tough job. They end up working before or after shifts sometimes. There are questions, issues pop up, people call them at home. So I added ten hours a week for that.

And the eighty-five hours for Harvard MBAs? It’s a ballpark average figure based on my data, research, and personal experience. Working on consulting gigs in a Chicago hotel room or slaving away on an investment banking deal doesn’t exactly give you free evenings or weekends.

Although these numbers are generally accurate, of course there are exceptions. Are you the outlier teacher working eighty-five hours a week or the outlier Harvard MBA working forty? Maybe! But stick with me, because there’s still value in the higher level point here.

What’s the bottom line?

They all make $28/hour!

So how do you make more money than a Harvard MBA?

Work way less hours than they do … and make more dollars per hour.

But wait: Am I telling you to work less? No, that’s not the final takeaway. My point here isn’t that you should suddenly dial down your interests, passion, or career. My point is to calculate how much you make per hour and know this number. Remember this number. Have this number in your head. I have friends who work around the clock as downtown lawyers and they joke, “When I do the math I actually make less than minimum wage.” They’re right! And, frankly, I don’t understand them. Do not make less than minimum wage!

The way to make more money than a Harvard MBA isn’t to get your annual salary over $120,000 or $150,000 or $500,000. It’s to measure how much you make per hour and overvalue your time so you’re spending time working only on things you enjoy.

The average life expectancy is around 30,000 days and we sleep for a third of that.

That means you have less than 20,000 days in your life total.

Understand how much a Harvard MBA really makes and then overvalue you, and overvalue your time, so every single hour of your working life is spent doing something you love.

Check out the video version of this article below:

An earlier version of this article appeared in my

#1 international bestseller The Happiness Equation