Bullish: Do You Belong In An Institution?

By Contributor Jen Dziura 

This article originally appeared on TheGrindstone

I’ve been thinking a lot about institutions – those who can’t function without them, and those who can’t fit into them.

Two things converged for me this past week: I’m working through a training program in executive coaching and considering the difficulties of coaching my clients to function better within large organizations, especially in cases where the clients may not really want to be part of such an institution the first place. And then, a question came in from someone wondering whether to drop out of college to start a business.

And personally, I have a storied history with institutions: I was always in combat with teachers and professors (like my third-grade teacher who incorrected corrected “ice cream sundae” to “ice cream sunday” – rage, rage, against the dying of literacy!) In my masters in education, I’ve viewed my classmates as horrifyingly subservient and unskeptical. And I always harp on multiple income streams – I don’t want any one boss to have enough power over me that he or she can tell me when to get up in the morning and where to sit for forty hours per week.

Read the rest at TheGrindstone.

Jennifer Dziura (jenniferdziura.com) writes career and life coaching advice for young women at TheGrindstone and TheGloss. She believes you can make money without being a douchebag. She believes in working harder and smarter now so you can have "balance" when you're wrinkly and covered in diamonds. She believes in starting businesses on zero dollars, selling expensive things to rich people, and laughing very hard at people who try to "manifest their dreams" without learning any real skills or shaping the fuck up. She likes to help. Jennifer also performs (sort of) educational one-woman shows about philosophy and punctuation. Her "The History of Women in 30 Minutes" has appeared in the Women in Comedy Festival.

Bullish Life: How To Remember Names (Without Stupid Mnemonic Devices)

By Contributor Jen Dziura 

This article originally appeared on TheGloss.

I teach evening classes to adults, and I often have about 90 students at a time. I remember all their names (at least the names of the students who show up regularly).

My first year of teaching, I didn’t. I just gave up: there are 16 of them per class and only one of me, and also a lot of them are named “Iftikhar” and “Joo-Eun.”

Once, I forgot a student’s name, and he said, “It’s John. John. Like a toilet.” And that made me sad. And I did indeed think of a toilet every time I called on him. This is not how John or I want to live.

There are some very good ways to remember names.

First, let’s get this out of the way. Do not say, “Oh, I’m terrible with names.” Wrote commenter Bob V. about this column, “Whenever I hear a student say that they are not good at math, I want to tell them that I’m not good at juggling either. I tried it for about five minutes once and gave up.” Same with being on time or drawing or even carrying a tune. Saying you suck at something that you have failed to research and practice is a weak cop-out.

Read the rest at TheGloss.

Jennifer Dziura (jenniferdziura.com) writes career and life coaching advice for young women at TheGrindstone and TheGloss. She believes you can make money without being a douchebag. She believes in working harder and smarter now so you can have "balance" when you're wrinkly and covered in diamonds. She believes in starting businesses on zero dollars, selling expensive things to rich people, and laughing very hard at people who try to "manifest their dreams" without learning any real skills or shaping the fuck up. She likes to help. Jennifer also performs (sort of) educational one-woman shows about philosophy and punctuation. Her "The History of Women in 30 Minutes" is appearing on Sunday night of the Women in Comedy Festival.

Bullish: How Business Is Like Dating

By Contributor Jen Dziura 

This article originally appeared on TheGloss.

Business is a lot like dating. Like cold-hearted, competitive dating among people who don’t love each other. In other words, like awful, awful dating.

Once upon a time, when I was considering moving to New York, I looked for jobs. A Director of Marketing position was available at a company I’ll call QuixoticIdea.Com. I was an unconventional candidate — I’d never held a “real job,” but had run a company for about five years despite my relative youth — so I wrote what I remember to be a pretty persuasive email regarding some marketing ideas I had for QuixoticIdea.

The CEO of the company got back to me right away. He wanted to do a phone interview. Cool. During the phone interview, he asked me a lot of really detailed questions about my ideas. He said he’d get back to me about maybe doing an in-person interview.

Read the rest at TheGloss.

Jennifer Dziura (jenniferdziura.com) writes career and life coaching advice for young women at TheGrindstone and TheGloss. She believes you can make money without being a douchebag. She believes in working harder and smarter now so you can have "balance" when you're wrinkly and covered in diamonds. She believes in starting businesses on zero dollars, selling expensive things to rich people, and laughing very hard at people who try to "manifest their dreams" without learning any real skills or shaping the fuck up. She likes to help. Jennifer also performs (sort of) educational one-woman shows about philosophy and punctuation. Her "The History of Women in 30 Minutes" is appearing in the Women in Comedy Festival.

Bullish: How To Do Many Different Things At Once

By Contributor Jen Dziura 

This article originally appeared on TheGloss.

I am writing this column at 1:55 in the morning, drinking a Hoegaarden, before I catch a 10am train to Boston for a 7pm gig. You can take the bus from NYC to Boston for $15, but I paid over $100 for the train (damn you, Amtrak!) because I get a lot done on trains and planes, and four hours on a train will be enough to submit the final chapter of a textbook from my hotel just before heading over to the venue.

For some reason, the train back to New York was even more expensive, so I’ll surely be doubly motivated to write enough to make sure I make a profit on my mode of transport. I also calculate ROI in foreign countries — not that I’m against just enjoying a vacation (see Bullish: How to Travel Like a Gentlewoman). But when alone, I monumentally enjoy sitting in a Swedish cafe, writing math problems and contemplating that my herring platter is being paid for tenfold while I am eating that very herring platter and scribbling away on a legal pad that may now be inadvertently imbued with aquavit and lingonberries.

Let’s talk about how to do everything you ought to be doing in this world, all of it at once.

Read the rest at TheGloss.

Jennifer Dziura (jenniferdziura.com) writes career and life coaching advice for young women at TheGrindstone and TheGloss. She believes you can make money without being a douchebag. She believes in working harder and smarter now so you can have "balance" when you're wrinkly and covered in diamonds. She believes in starting businesses on zero dollars, selling expensive things to rich people, and laughing very hard at people who try to "manifest their dreams" without learning any real skills or shaping the fuck up. She likes to help. Jennifer also performs (sort of) educational one-woman shows about philosophy and punctuation. Her "The History of Women in 30 Minutes" is appearing in the Women in Comedy Festival.

Bullish: Be Broke Without Going Crazy

By Contributor Jen Dziura 

This article originally appeared on TheGloss, which is why Jen's talking about summer. Frankly, we think her advice is good year round!

It’s summer [see lead-in. -Ed.], when everyone gets lazy and begins asking the sometimes unintentionally infuriating question, “Are you getting out of the city?”

If you’re twenty-five and broke, well, no, probably not. And, no, you don’t want to contribute to a summer share in the Hamptons with fourteen other girls, because you have work to do and a career to build, and picking up the tiny crumbs of the privileged really doesn’t get you ahead or provide for a relaxing vacation, which, to me, requires a lack of class fury (see Bullish: Social Class in the Office).

I have this friend who constantly forwards everyone these articles from New York Magazine and The New York Times about how expensive it is to live in New York, or how New Yorkers are unhappy, or how New York ranks below Lesotho on some international scale of how long the average person has to work to be able to afford a colonoscopy. One article claimed that it takes $300,000 a year to live decently. Which, if you consider having a summer home and sending three children to private school (plus tutors, camps, and college counselors) requirements for living decently, is true.

Read the rest at TheGloss.

Jennifer Dziura (jenniferdziura.com) writes career and life coaching advice for young women at TheGrindstone and TheGloss. She believes you can make money without being a douchebag. She believes in working harder and smarter now so you can have "balance" when you're wrinkly and covered in diamonds. She believes in starting businesses on zero dollars, selling expensive things to rich people, and laughing very hard at people who try to "manifest their dreams" without learning any real skills or shaping the fuck up. She likes to help. Jennifer also performs (sort of) educational one-woman shows about philosophy and punctuation. Her "The History of Women in 30 Minutes" is appearing in the Women in Comedy Festival.

Bullish: Using Your College Skills to Succeed After College

By Contributor Jen Dziura

This article originally appeared on TheGrindstone.

I always say that you shouldn’t take business advice from someone whose only business is giving business advice (Pyramids: Great shape for a pharaoh’s tomb, bad shape for a business model), and that multiple streams of income are crucial.

One of my businesses is offering educational comedy shows to universities — I do about six gigs a year — and this was how I recently found myself at sunny Palm Beach State University, where I had offered, since I was in town anyway, to speak to any college classes that wanted to have me. That turned out to be an introductory composition class.

My speaking topic is “Forging Your Own Career,” but I tend to do my public speaking a bit on the fly — you really just have to get a feeling for things once you get there. Colleges are more different from each other than nearly any other group of groups of people; there is no Chamber of Commerce that only takes the top 8% of businesses, and then some other Chamber of Commerce for people who couldn’t get into that Chamber of Commerce, and then a bunch of Chambers of Commerce full of people who were excluded from the other Chambers of Commerce for a host of financial and sociocultural reasons.


Read the rest at TheGrindstone.

Jennifer Dziura (jenniferdziura.com) writes career and life coaching advice for young women at TheGrindstone and TheGloss. She believes you can make money without being a douchebag. She believes in working harder and smarter now so you can have "balance" when you're wrinkly and covered in diamonds. She believes in starting businesses on zero dollars, selling expensive things to rich people, and laughing very hard at people who try to "manifest their dreams" without learning any real skills or shaping the fuck up. She likes to help. Jennifer also performs (sort of) educational one-woman shows about philosophy and punctuation. Her "The History of Women in 30 Minutes" is appearing in the Women in Comedy Festival.