Just authorize hardlywork.in to access your Facebook account. It will a generate a fake Microsoft Excel document that lives in your browser, with each row corresponding to newsfeed post, and columns for notes, comments, and more.

Go for it!

First, accept that you already know the answer: While most anyone can challenge or inspire you…Things will only happen when YOU inspire or challenge you!

And that won’t happen until addressing this mid-life “crisis” is truly a priority for you.

A small example: Since high school, I’ve had an ongoing battle with my pear-shaped body. And the older I get, the more work the battle takes. Right now this is crucial to me cuz we’re about to leave for the beaches of Thailand. But if I’m completely honest with myself…my mini-”crisis” of weight loss still isn’t a priority for me. If it were, I would find a way to put down the ice cream and get on my damn bike instead! Same thing happens with big things, like “What will inspire and fulfill me for the rest of my life?” If we are honest with ourselves, we will probably have to admit that many of mid-life’s nagging challenges/problems that exist for us, are still there because they’re not really a priority…yet.

The good news is: I can guarantee that as soon as it is truly time for this crisis to be addressed, your drive will kick into high gear, and you will address it!

So, what to do in the meantime? Some suggestions…

1. Treat right now and the short term as Pre-Work Time. Embrace that sometime in the near future, you absolutely WILL be changing the course of your life…But that now is the time you should be PREPPING for that change. This is a MIND-SET shift. It means that all that work that you’ve done so far — asking yourself questions like what you’re passionate about, etc. — and all the work you will do… is not yet supposed to yield anything. Stop looking for answers! Start enjoying being a STUDENT! This will make your “searching” phase a lot more fun! Which leads to the suggested next step…

2. Stop focusing on yourself! Focus on how OTHERS dealt with or are dealing with the same challenge you have. Suggestion: Take ten friends out to dinner (one at a time!) and ask them about their journey towards figuring out what they’re passionate about, etc. Another guarantee: As soon as you are focusing on others’ journeys, and sincerely are interested in learning about how they struggled with this, you will discover amazing things will start happening for YOU…you will start “connecting the dots” between their journey and yours…e.g. “Mary’s situation five years ago is just like mine now…That gives me an idea…” Which leads to…

3. Enjoying being a student leads to: What matters is JOURNALING YOUR JOURNEY. Focus on your journey (…what you’re discovering while you’re searching for the answer…), NOT on your destination (…whatever the solution is). Get passionate about journaling all your interviews with friends, all the things you’ve read in books and online. More important than the main, detailed entries are the “notes in the margins”— the one-line Aha’s you’ll write down while recording the detailed notes. Those marginal Aha notes are how you personalized what others said or did for yourself. Then, after several months of doing that, try to reduce everything you’ve written down to just one half page…three to five things. If magic doesn’t happen the first time, treat it as a practice run and come back several months later. Repeat as often as needed. At some point, magic absolutely will happen!!!!! You will have three to five principles/driving forces/passions/whatever that you can use for the rest of your life!!!

(Not into Old School pen-and-notebook journaling? There are many mind-mapping software tools, and then sharing tools, which are definitely Web 2.0-ish. Also, check out a download from my book, What Is Your Life’s Work, for what to journal…Old School or 2.0!)

So, a Mr. Simplicity recap…

Focus on the journey, not the destination, and you’ll find that you’ll actually arrive at the destination a lot faster and a lot easier than you thought was possible!

AND

The better you get at journaling your journey and…eventually…recapping it in three-to-five-things form…the clearer and more empowering everything will be once you arrive at your destination!

Hope that was a help!

You need to be proactive. At the start of any assignment, you need to ask super-critical questions that your manager would have coached you through if he had the time. Think of this approach as the 80/20 Rule for coaching. It won’t get you everything you need, but they’ll get you 80% of what you would have gotten if manager wasn’t so time-pressed.

60-SECOND VERSION
There are many “best” questions to ask, but when you’ve got time for only one question, make it this one…

“What does success look like?”
Or: How will I know I’m making progress and am on target?

Why this question? By far, the number one reason people get coaching “after the fact” — (only after they fail or make mistakes) — is because they began work without a clear definition of success.

If you’ve got time for only one question, make it this one. As you start any assignment: focus on how your manager (and his manager) will evaluate your efforts.

Again: You need to be proactive. No matter what, keep asking this question in follow-up meetings until you have a complete answer. Your success—and avoiding after-the-fact coaching—depends on it!

Have you ever had a relationship — business or personal — go sour? Maureen and Zelle have developed a new way to build, sustain and transition relationships with honor and grace.
It is called the State of Grace Document.

Rather than solely relying on legal contracts or corporate planning cycles or boss-subordinate evaluations, a State of Grace Document anticipates the unavoidable transitions and changes that ultimately take place in life, marriage, business, or friendship. It begins with the agreed-upon premise that we ultimately want to be at peace within ourselves and with the other person, even as we address areas that aren’t so pretty to look at.

Find your State of Grace!
Check out this worthwhile tool.

photo: under30CEO.com

How It Could Save Business’s Ass: Managers who walk over their employees are under a mistaken impression that they are supposed to be serviced, when in fact they’re supposed to be helping those employees be more productive. Fixing this misunderstanding helps the company succeed.

Potential Downsides to Avoid: Managers with Napoleon complexes really don’t like being held accountable for their laziness, and will probably be really pissed off. Be careful; don’t get yourself fired.

Getting Started:
1. Create a wiki list associated with your department or team goals and/or activities. List some useful metrics, like dollars saved by your manager’s department, and track them carefully, Key will be that the data must be able to be validated by your manager’s boss.
2. Circulate the page among your coworkers, so, as a team, you’re all documenting complaints and anything that will help the team improve. Keep working on the list as a team until you feel you have enough data to show specific areas that need improvement.
3. Now it’s time ingratiate yourself with your manager. Share the wiki list with him or her and explain how concerned you are that his/her team is getting their due credit or support. (Reverse psychology: You’re really tracking his/her report card and about to turn it in to the Big Boss…But by first inviting him/her to participate, you’re giving your boss a chance to improve on those metrics first.) It’s only fair to give them a chance to address the complaints, right?
4. If your manager does participate, you all have a powerful tool with which to present to the Powers That Be to get more credit or support or change for your team. If your manager chooses not to participate… Oh, well…Then it’s either time to take it directly to his/her boss, or, failing all that: you now have ample evidence that it’s probably time for a new job.

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12 Bad-Ass Hacks: We’re publishing one-a-month throughout 2011. Got examples of Bad-Ass Hacks? Please tell us about them. We’d love to post yours!

HACKING BIG BROTHER: Reduce Your Digital Footprint…Now!

Bad-Ass Hack: Workaround Corporate Spying and Bypass Corporate Firewalls. Why should Big Brother have all the control? Why do you have muddle through without access to tools and resources you need? Why should you tolerate them spying on you? If you need access to YouTube or social media or freeware email and messaging services, you should have it! If you don’t want The Man spying on your every keystroke, you should be able to bypass that!

What Makes This Hack Bad-Ass: What can be more bad-ass than working around, bypassing and ignoring the very things that were designed to keep you in line?!

How It Could Save Business’s Ass: Ooooooo, this blasphemy. Anarchy. Breaking the rules must be bad for business, right? Quite the opposite! While there are always some trouble-makers in most any crowd (…people will be people, right?), the vast majority of the workforce want to do their best for the company and for their customers. But because their employers put in so many safeguards to protect against the actions of the few baddies, the good people have way too many barriers placed in front of them. Risk-aversion is killing business’s ability to get stuff done, to be productive and efficient, to be great.

This bad-ass hack is fantastic for business’s ass! It frees good people to do great stuff.

Potential Downsides to Avoid: 1) Never share information with anyone who wasn’t authorized to have it, *especially* when jumping the firewall, 2) Never hack selfishly. 3) Never hack for any of the seven deadly sins. (No porn, no greed or hoarding, no revenge or wrath, no lack of diligence or getting out of virtuous work, no enhancing your own vanity.) 4) Do no harm. Don’t jump firewalls or surf banned sites in ways that will harm anyone else.

But how can you get around Big Brother? Here’s how…

Getting Started:
1. Go here. Follow the instructions to download and install Ubuntu on a USB stick.
2. Go here. Follow the instructions to set up a VPN account.
3. Boot your USB stick onto your laptop or workstation and follow these instructions, to configure VPN connection for Ipredator.

What This Does: Accessing the internet through the VPN encrypts all your internet usage! Running your workstation or laptop with this configuration on your USB stick (with the USB stick plugged in) means everything you do is stored in “virtual space” on the hard drive. Do anything you want online with that USB stick installed and Big Brother will never “see” what you’re up to. Simply unplug the USB stick and reboot your machine… The VPN on that stick encrypts all your internet traffic, and the reboot drops all the data off your machine. Cool, huh?

Alternatively, you can try this, which accomplishes the same thing, but is a little slower.

For more “how to” and “how does this work?” information and advice, go here.

Voila! No more Big Brother! Almost as good as throwing a sledgehammer through a big screen! (To psych up for this hack, check out Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad above. When 1984 [or, now 2011] won’t be like 1984.)

* Obligatory Disclaimer: There is no magic bullet, and your boss may have done something clever we hadn’t thought of here. Be careful out there!

• • • • • • • • • •
12 Bad-Ass Hacks: We’re publishing one-a-month throughout 2011. Got examples of Bad-Ass Hacks? Please tell us about them. We’d love to post yours!

At the time, the entire world was focused on all the ways those behind-the-scenes heroes help. From oil-drillers lending their expertise to how to go get them, to manufacturers of the capsule that brought them out, to iPods sent down fully loaded with Elvis and lots more…even to the psychologists helping them deal with the effects of long-term entrapment. NASA was even called it for its experience in helping crew members deal with long periods of isolation while in outer space.

At least those were the official stories.

Later, after the men were saved, we learned how those official strategies and tools were hacked.

Drugs were smuggled down to them in letters from wives, girlfriends (sometimes both), and friends.

Porn was also smuggled down to them because officials were not dealing with their “greatest need” after air, food and water.

Yes, the official channels of tools, support, discipline and structure were absolutely necessary.

But so were the underground channels…the hacks. Those 33 men made sure to workaround the system to get their needs met.

Maybe there’s something we can all learn from these heroes?

When Business Week wrote this great article, The Power of the Cloud, they were writing from an entrepreneur’s perspective. “World-class business technology used to require millions of dollars and months of installation. Now all you need is a couple of days and an Amazon gift card.”

The opening diagram that accompanies that description is a comparison of a tech startup in 1999 and in 2011. Entrepreneurship and the Cloud: Play it again, Sam; I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

But, oh how the biz world is still missing the point! The cloud is not just a boon to startups…It’s a kick-ass jump-start for any benevolent hack inside any company!

Corporate IT still making you jump through hoops to their tune? To the Cloud! HR or Accounting or Logistics still forcing you to do things their ways? To the Cloud!

When we did the early research for Hacking Work, we found that the number one hack was to jump over Corporate’s firewall, doing your work “out there,” then bringing it back “inside.”

With the explosion of the Cloud, that’s just getting easier and easier!
Hack away, hack away, hack away, all.
Up, up in the clouds!

Bad-Ass Hack: Get your peers fired. We all have to work with douchebags at some point. If we could ensure that they got shit-canned, everyone’s life would be sooooo much better.

illus: art.vassar.edu

What Makes This Hack Bad-Ass: You work hard, and they’re making you work harder. Getting them fired gives them an opportunity to improve themselves — somewhere else.

How It Could Save Business’s Ass: Bureaucracies have a hard enough time succeeding as it is without having to put up with human wastes of space. Sadly, HR has few means for getting rid of them unless they’re axe-murderers or worse. In many ways, these bad seeds keep HR in business… creating all sorts of rules and procedures and boundaries and checklists that have to be enforced and forced on all of us because the slackers and cheaters remain un-fireable.

This hack saves business’s ass by ensuring that more of the best and brightest stay instead of getting frustrated and shackled by stupid rules designed for the bad apples…and by ensuring that the laggards who are pulling all of us down get booted.

Potential Downsides to Avoid: 1) You probably won’t be going to heaven if you inappropriately get people fired, 2) If you get caught, bad things can happen to you. 3) making enemies is never good.

So how to shove the slackers overboard without encountering those downsides? Here’s how…

Getting Started:
1. Figure out who you just can’t keep working with.
2. Determine what metrics would make a really solid case for them getting the boot. Good examples are: Numbers of reports written, lines of code developed, customers obtained, hours spent in the office, numbers of donuts eaten — whatever it is that your bosses will find compelling. This is key: metrics that your bosses care about! You may have other compelling (and extremely valid) reasons for booting them off your team…But what keeps this hack good and not evil is that you’re focusing management’s attention on what the company cares about.
3. Make a graph that you post anonymously, with no labels indicating what the chart is about and definitely WITHOUT the offender’s name on it, and post their numbers every day. Slowly, on the sly, explain what the unlabeled chart means to those on your team — people you trust and who have similar views of slackers. Over time, everyone in the office *except* the target will watch the chart, chuckling as the end drawns nigh. Eventually, word will make its way up the food chain to your boss. That boss will be compelled to take action, nobody will have to point any fingers, and the office as a whole will breathe a little easier.

We have seen this hack work again and again. Sometimes it’s to get a slacker fired. In one example, a team posted on a white board all the local stores and eateries where the corporate credit card (which they were forced to use) was NOT accepted. No one said anything for months as the list grew longer and longer. And the boss passed this whiteboard every day. Eventually, the boss figured out that it was time to address the situation. Other credit cards were finally permitted for corporate expenses.

Go forth: Manage your career. Get slackers fired.
It’s good for business, it’s good for your team, it’s good for your customers.

• • • • • • • • • •
12 Bad-Ass Hacks: We’re publishing one-a-month throughout 2011. Got examples of Bad-Ass Hacks? Please tell us about them. We’d love to post yours!

typewritermuseum.org

Said Cisco’s Marie Hattar: “It is clear from the research findings that the desire among employees to be more mobile and flexible in their work lifestyles is extremely strong throughout the world – as strong as salary.”

Sooooooo…Are you gonna wait for IT and C-Suite execs to finally “get” it? Or are you gonna start benevolently hacking to create the kind of environment you need?