Some of you may have read Jason Calacanis’ recent post The Age of Excellence, about how there’s no longer room for average or good, but rather it’s five stars or nothing. And if you did, maybe you’re wondering if your desire for life balance is putting your career at risk. Jason explained how he handled an average employee, what he refers to as “startup kryptonite:”

“If you have someone who is average, I suggest you do what I’ve started doing: offer to give them a reference to work at your competitors. I seriously did that recently. I liked someone a lot, they were really cool and really smart, but they set their target in life at doing ‘good work’ and having balance in their life…The person left and is happier in their life, and I am happy to open the seat for someone excellent.”

He predicts that unemployment will get worse, and merely good contributors will find their work outsourced to countries offering cheap labor.

Yikes! Do we really have to render ourselves unemployable in the name of a little life balance? Say it’s not so!

Well, this is where I have to disagree with some of his conclusions. Maybe he’s right if he’s just talking about startups. Maybe it’s so hard to hit a home run today that you need everyone on your team to be obsessed with doing just that.

But outside the startup world, I know plenty of people who have gotten by with good, average, mediocre, or even poor performance for years, and I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t continue to do so. While it can be hard to get a job, it’s usually very easy to keep one.

Now, I’m not suggesting that people coast through their careers, doing the least they can get away with. I think that anything worth doing is worth doing well. But this doesn’t mean that performing well enough to exceed expectations has to mean putting in more hours or raising your stress levels. Just a few ideas:

- Don’t waste time. Tackling things with a mild sense of urgency makes them more interesting than just watching the grass grow. If you finish what you’re working on, find something else to do instead of waiting for it to come to you. Skip useless meetings, with the excuse of the big important thing you’re working on.

- Get more experience. This is largely a matter of just keeping your eyes open as things happen. More depth means getting better at what you’ve been doing. More breadth means getting better at more things. Either way, things will tend to get easier over time, if you’re paying attention.

- Communicate better. Ask people if you’re doing what they want instead of assuming. Ask if someone has a better idea than what you’re planning to do. Make suggestions if you see options that might work better.

- Care. If you wouldn’t show up at work with a rumpled shirt and unkempt hair, don’t allow your work to look like that either. Small things can make a big difference. Take that extra step to make sure that your spreadsheet isn’t ugly, your email doesn’t contain random apostrophes, or your program won’t break if someone tries to divide by zero.

Do things like this, and you’ll be far above the line of minimum employability (though perhaps not at a startup), while still having room for that coveted life balance. Excellence optional, not required.

In my review of Screw Business As Usual, I mentioned that something else I was reading looked like a much better book on a similar topic. But somewhere along the way, I forgot to review that other book.

So here it is: Shake the World: It’s Not About Finding a Job, It’s About Creating a Life by James Marshall Reilly. I found it hard to put down, mainly because of all the great interviews with Tony Hsieh, Shawn Fanning, Jessica Jackley, and many others (including Rafe Furst, who is now a defendant in the DoJ’s case against Full Tilt Poker — oops!).

It’s about breaking the corporate mold, ignoring the rules, and creating your own opportunities. For people who seek fulfillment and happiness in addition to money and titles, this book will definitely provide some ideas.

Richard Branson has a new book out called Screw Business As Usual, about how it’s time for businesses to shift from being purely profit-driven to caring about people, communities, and the planet.

Sounds good in theory, but a better title for this book would have been “Richard Branson’s Résumé.” At least that’s the feeling I had in the beginning.

About a third of the way through, it gets better, and you think, “Wow, Virgin Unite really is doing good things.” But it’s an awful lot of stories, and not a lot you can really put to use.

Great message, but not such a great book. The book I’m reading now, Shake the World, looks like a much better book on a similar topic.

“You’ve been fed a lie. The lie is that if you study hard, get good grades, get into a good college, and get a degree, then your success in life is guaranteed.”

We’ve all heard this lie, and it’s certainly a convincing one. After all, it used to be true. But many people didn’t notice it gradually becoming less true as the world changed, with tuition skyrocketing and job prospects dimming.

In The Education of Millionaires, Michael Ellsberg explores alternative paths followed by millionaire and billionaire college dropouts. His point isn’t that education is unimportant, but that it doesn’t have to come from a lecture hall. He makes a strong case that what it really takes to get ahead today is self education over formal education, practical intelligence over academic intelligence.

Although I’ve read several books on this theme, I found this one to be perhaps the best of them. In fact, the only thing I didn’t love about this book was the title (just because it’s a little bland). Everything else was great.

Specifically, I liked:

• The plethora of interviews and case studies of the rich and famous, including Russell Simmons (fashion), Dustin Moskovitz and Sean Parker (Facebook), Matt Mullenwag (WordPress), David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Phillip Ruffin (casinos), and John Paul DeJoria (hair care products)
• The interviews of the not-quite-yet rich and famous (such as he and his wife), whose situations may be easier for most of us to relate to
• The practical information about key success skills such as networking, marketing, sales, branding, and bootstrapping, and his style of “teaching you how to teach yourself how to fish”
• How he anticipates and overcomes objections that most authors ignore, like “well, that might work if you have endless amounts of money to burn, but what if…”

Are we in an education bubble that will burst in the coming years? It’s hard to be sure. In the meantime, consider this book mandatory reading for any student of success, dropout or not.

A month ago, Jason Calacanis wrote an intriguing and controversial post – Do We Deserve–or Even Want–More Jobs? – about the declining work ethic of Gen-Y. Check it out if you haven’t already.

I have something to add to this, for all the people who think there aren’t any jobs out there.

For the last month, the company I work at has been trying to hire a programmer for some simple SQL Server tasks. It’s a relatively high-paying and very easy job, for someone with relevant experience. I’ve been doing the interviewing, and I think I’ve set the bar really low.

First, I ask a few simple questions in a phone screening, to confirm that the candidate has a pulse. People who are able to string a few coherent sentences together are invited in for an on-site interview, where I give a written test with two easy problems and two moderately challenging problems.

I quickly learned that I had to scrap the moderately challenging problems because everyone was getting their ass kicked by the easy ones. I’ve had more than one person make the claim of “Expert in SQL Server” on their resume, who turned out to not even know what an outer join is. This is roughly equivalent to someone claiming to be an expert carpenter, but not knowing what a hammer is.

Out of the 15 or so people I interviewed, only one of them was able to pass the dumbed down version of the test. In the end, the position was eliminated.

And yet we keep hearing about how there aren’t any jobs out there. Maybe people just need to try a little harder.

Why is it that visionaries such as Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Walt Disney seem to have extraordinary powers of ESP? Are they just born that way, or can vision be learned?

In Ten Steps Ahead: What Separates Successful Business Visionaries from the Rest of Us, Erik Calonius argues that vision is anything but an inborn talent. Instead, it’s the result of carefully training one’s brain to work with inspiration and perspective. This book is a very fun read, filled with all kinds of good stuff from neuroscience, psychology, and interviews with entrepreneurs.

One of my favorite examples is Richard Wiseman’s luck experiment. Using questionnaires and interviews, he determined whether his subjects considered themselves lucky or unlucky. He then gave them all a newspaper, and asked them to count the photographs. The “unlucky” people took two minutes to count them, while the “lucky” people took only a few seconds. Why?

Because the “unlucky” people missed the huge message on page 2 that said, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” They didn’t see the half-page message in 2-inch high type because they were too busy counting.

His explanation: “Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner, and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.”

Anyway, if you want to learn why visionaries have an uncanny ability to see and shape where the world is heading, read this book.

Is business school worth the six figure price tag? About 15 years ago, my college econ teacher said that an MBA would pay for itself, but only if it was from a top 20 school. Today, I suspect the ROI is even less.

Josh Kaufman wrote The Personal MBA as an arguably better (and certainly far less expensive) way to learn the principles of business. He used to work at Proctor & Gamble, launching new products and developing marketing measurement strategies. Now he works as an independent business educator, providing an alternative to B-schools that, according to him, ”teach many worthless, outdated, even outright damaging concepts and practices.”

Is this book really an effective substitute for business school? I don’t know. You’d have to ask someone who went to business school, and see how it worked out for them.

I’m sure we could all debate the merits of business school until the cows come home. But anyway, for someone who has any interest in business school, it would be pretty dumb not to read this book. (Business schools will still be around when you’re done reading it.)

I did find the book slightly entertaining, but it’s not really something that you’d read for pleasure. It’s no-fluff, heavy-duty business knowledge, and lot of it, on a broad range of critical topics. Anyone interested in business would consider it a must-read.

Is there any situation where Josh would consider an MBA a good idea? Yes – if someone wants to work for a prestigious consulting firm, an investment bank, or a Fortune 50 company that uses MBAs as an interview filter. In that case, a $150,000 piece of paper is the cost of entry. Otherwise, you might as well avoid the debt.

(Now, to sit back and wait for flames from business school students…)

Just a heads up that Ali Luke (née Hale) has released The Blogger’s Guide to Freelancing (née The Staff Blogging Course).

I reviewed her Staff Blogging Course nearly two years ago. (Has it really been that long?) Whenever someone asked me how they could make money blogging, I would always point them to that ebook, because it’s the best way I know to get all the information you need in one place.

Now she’s updated and expanded it to make The Blogger’s Guide to Freelancing. While I haven’t read this new version, I have no doubt that it’s even better than the original.

It looks like my old discount code, HNreader, is still good for $5 off. And when you buy it, you get a $10 discount code for another ebook of hers, The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing. And you get a six month money-back guarantee, so there’s practically no risk to try it out.

Oh, and if you previously bought the original version, you should have already received the new one for free. If not, just leave a comment, and she’ll take care of it.

Since I liked Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers so much, I’ve been meaning to read some of his other books. I finally got around to his first bestseller, The Tipping Point.

It’s about the idea that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do,” becoming epidemics when they reach a critical mass, or their tipping point. But what causes something to tip?

It happens though the efforts of a small number of people with very specific talents: connectors (social networkers), mavens (information specialists), and salesman (persuaders). If something is spread by the right people, and if it’s “sticky” enough, and if it’s delivered in the right context, it reaches a tipping point.

He shows how his theory explains the tipping points of a number of epidemics, including Paul Revere’s midnight ride, the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, Sesame Street, Hush Puppies shoes, New York crime rates, syphilis in Baltimore, suicide in Micronesia, and smoking in the U.S.

You probably won’t find it very practical, but it’s very thought provoking. I found it good, but not as good as Outliers (although I’ve heard other people say the opposite).

Forty years ago, Richard Bolles asked job seekers “What color is your parachute?” It turns out that he may not have been speaking metaphorically.

The Dewey Color System offers a free career test based entirely on color preferences – just spend a minute clicking on the colors you like most or least. They claim it is now the world’s most accurate career test.

Compared to the general public, CEOs are three times more likely to choose magenta, three times less likely to choose red, and three and a half times less likely to choose yellow.

What does this mean? According to the Color Career Counselor test, CEOs are more sensitive and private than average, less likely to be dominant or a perfectionist, and more likely to be emotionally unstable.

The makers of this test say it measures 16 personality factors, including independence, anxiety, self-control, extraversion, and tough-mindedness. They also say it may identify things such as overeating tendencies or emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.

Its supporters say that this simple test is as valid as the much lengthier Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (not a career test, BTW) and Gallup StrengthsFinder, and much harder to influence. Some people have called it eerily accurate, others have likened it to horoscopes.

I gave it a try to see how accurate it was for me. (It asks for an email address at the end, but it’s optional, and you have to skip past one ad). The results were mixed at best.

For my best occupational category, it said:

You’re a CREATOR
Keywords: Nonconforming, Impulsive, Expressive, Romantic, Intuitive, Sensitive, and Emotional

Check, kind of.

For my second best occupational category, it said:

You’re a SOCIAL MANAGER
Keywords: Tactful, Cooperative, Generous, Understanding, Insightful, Friendly, and Cheerful

Um, no.

And as with any career test I’ve ever seen, the list of suggested occupations is so ridiculously broad as to be useless.

While I wasn’t wowed by my results, I think color preference probably does say something about you. But for now, a good old fashioned verbal test seems more likely to show your true colors.

Photo by tibchris