Marty Nemko quotes:

Answering ads rarely works for career changers because you have no experience in the job for which you're applying.

As a writer, you have control: You can play around with your own thoughts and when you find those insufficient, draw upon others': their wisdom, their humor, their failings.

You need to create a 30-minute buffer between the end of your work time and sleep time.

A half-hour before bedtime, I remind myself that I now deserve to prepare myself for a good night's sleep. You can't focus on your work if you're sleep-deprived even if you have a fascinating job.

Entrepreneurship may be the most under-taught subject.

I think people's feeling the need to be more dependent on others is caused more by the lack of good-paying jobs and by today's zeitgeist that insists it takes a village. That's disempowering although possibly true for many people.

Being sleep-derived not only hurts you at work, it hurts your health. You need to value yourself enough to have good sleep hygiene.

Being a good writer may result in your being nicer to more people, having a bigger positive impact.

Essayists write at a length that enables them, within a year, to explore a number of topics, whereas in a book, they'll likely only get to address one.

I believe the personal essay is underrated for both writer and reader. It affords the writer great freedom: to speak personally yet invoke others' ideas, to be rational and/or emotional, to be confident or admit doubt.

If you don't know what career you'd change to, I've come to believe in starting with your values. What do you care most about: producing a new product, a cause, health, something unpopular but important, whatever. Next, get expertise in that, perhaps not at State U let alone private U but at You U: self-study, articles,, webinars, volunteering, etc. Then use your network rather than answering ads to land a launchpad job in that career.

If you have an ability, you want to exercise it, not anesthetize it.

I'm one of the many people for whom coffee helps but often, inattention is a symptom of something else: for example, that you're not getting six to eight hours of sleep.

It's absurd how aspirants to designer-label colleges become obsessed with perfection so they can get into one. I'm not convinced it's worth prostituting yourself for that.

Liberalism's key principle is to redistribute wealth from the haves to the have nots. That takes money from the entities with the greatest potential to improve society (for example, corporations that create jobs, invent life-saving medicines, etc.) and redistributes it to the people, whom on average, will never contribute more to society than to hold a menial job.

Only someone who already knows and likes you is likely to give you a good job with modest relevant experience.

Senescence is an inevitability. All we can do is try to strike the balance between graceful acceptance and raging against the dying light.

Some parents let kids "learn on their own skin" and many of those kids end up, as adults, languishing on their parents' sofas.

Sometimes, low-level jobs are challenging even to someone with CEO potential.

The lack of crispness comes significantly from a societal change in what's valued: a replacement of bold individual initiative with collaboration, consensus, teamwork etc. All that team-involved decision-making often leads to tepid solutions and a slow-moving organization.

We're in an era in which we want to believe people have roughly equal potential. IQ gives the lie to that.

What may create even more jobs is to develop more entrepreneurs, of course, ethical ones.

You might want to keep trying to rise, using a path that builds on your natural strengths: sales, analysis, managing people, whatever, and keep asking for honest feedback. When you reach the point at which it feels clear you've topped out, revise your job description or take a step back. Up is not the only way.