If you're trying to get ahead in the corporate world, appearing smart in meetings should be your top priority. This can be hard if you find yourself daydreaming about Mexico, margaritas or queso cheese dip.
Laughter is so important.
Most people see a job offer from Google as a victory, and I should have seen it that way. I should have at least seen the salary that way.
If you're ever struggling for something to say, just take a noun and verbalize it. Using simple words in new and interesting ways will creativize your presence.
Facebook has created a rash of mental zombies in a meme-feeding frenzy.
Who's more annoying to work with, boomers or millennials? Depends on how you feel about emojis.
The biggest lesson I've learned about drawing is that it takes time. Which is really annoying.
In the corporate world, there is no ground more fertile for appearing smart than the rich earth that is electronic communication. Your email writing, sending and ignoring skills are just as important as your nodding skills, and even more important than your copying and pasting skills.
I voted for Hillary Clinton.
I was still working at Google when I wrote the blog post '10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings.' I was scared to share it at first because I didn't want my coworkers to think that I was making fun of them - which I totally was. But then afterward I had people coming up to me like, 'I have a meeting trick! Put my meeting trick in your next post!'
Creating a distraction is a skill we should all have. Never take for granted your ability to spot something interesting out of the corner of you eye and take attention away from your thoughtlessness.
20 or 30 exclamation points can go a long way to making the tone of your email excited and cheerful.
If you want to add visuals to your blog posts, presentations or whatever it is, and you're as bad at drawing as I am, I think tracing photos is a good place to start.
My Dad doesn't see limitations; he either sees hard workers or people who are lazy. As a result, despite any disability or obstacle, my siblings and I all lead relatively happy and successful lives. I believe a good deal of this is due to the fact that excuses were rarely tolerated.
People love self-deprecating humor.
Believe it or not, joining a video conference call from home doesn't always have to make you feel like an idiot.
For most of my 20s I felt the need to focus solely on my goals and let nothing distract me.
Engineers aren't professional grammarticians, but they love correcting people. Even more, they love making you feel stupid.
Coming from a large immigrant family, my parents didn't encourage a lot of 'play' when I was growing up. It was hard to get my Dad to even sit down to watch television with us (he'd watch it standing up, always ready to go do something more productive). Downtime was discouraged, as was any college degree that wasn't law, medicine or business.
At my last job in the tech world, we'd throttle our wi-fi to experience what download speeds might be like for someone in the developing world. It was our attempt to experience it first hand. I thought it was a bit ridiculous because, no matter what we did, we wouldn't be able to fully experience their world unless we were living it every day.
