52 Ways to Be the Boss of You

In July 2023, I unleashed upon the world my new book, 52 Ways to Be the Boss of You, Your Mood, and Your Day.

The writing of this book began years ago, when I discovered I could not seem to choose either of these options when it came to the Day Job: A) Get happy about it, or B) quit the job. When those are the only options, I tailspin. It’s not that easy to quit a job. You need either significant savings or another job in the queue, and most of us don’t have easy access to either. I also think “get happy about it” is too simplified. I no longer shoot for that when it comes to the job. I have radically accepted “fine” as a miraculous way to feel about a day job. If it is a day job (instead of the dream), if it is forty-plus hours, you wake up to it every weekday without much paid time off to look forward to, and nobody seems to be trying all that hard when it comes to the “culture,” fine is a magnificent achievement. Being fine is an inside job. When we can’t escape the job itself, internal work is all we’ve got.

To get fine, I snatched any advice I could about happiness, meaning, job crafting, and purpose. I read, watched webinars, took personality quizzes, listened to podcasts, and tried to capture everything I possibly could that gave me little aha moments about how to survive recurring Mondays, meetings that should have been emails, and employee evaluations.

After 2020, I compiled these ideas into a list of sixty-plus simple ideas. I began writing another memoir, too, sort of the story of my experience with adulthood and surviving cancer only to find myself staring down the day job life and wondering, “I survived for this?” In that book, I write about the shock of it all. No one prepared us for this! They asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. They should have said, where do you want to be every day from eight to five? That’s more like it.

In the memoir-in-progress, I kept wanting to throw in these little tips - Make a Lifetime Achievement Award, Use Your PTO, Pause Before You Email - things like that. It wasn’t very memoir-like. I remembered my list and thought maybe I could do something else with these simple ideas. In 2022, I whittled that sixty-plus list to 52 and shared the ideas weekly with my subscribers.

Actually, my subscribers that year only got 51 ideas. Somewhere in the middle, I had this beautiful idea called Embrace Dissonance, about welcoming disagreement in your life and giving it a little room to breathe, a little thoughtful consideration. The idea was that none of us know everything so welcoming other ideas and opinions is the only way to really understand the whole story, the truth, the bigger picture - that kind of thing. Strangely, the week I meant to send that one, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It didn’t seem light and fun enough for my goal with those emails. I wanted to encourage people, light them up inside, make them feel on fire - like they could accomplish anything, like they were the BOSS. Embracing dissonance seemed like a hard sell.

In April of 2023, I was laid off. Sensing some freedom in the release, I decided to take the unexpected time off to put my 52 ideas together into a book. (Embrace Dissonance made the list this time.)

This is 52 Ways to Be the Boss of You, Your Mood, and Your Day. Each idea makes me feel a little more on fire, a little more like I can handle the unexpected monotony of life and day jobs and the Sunday night anxiety that threatens every happy weekend and vacation we (finally) take.

There is more to us than Sunday night anxiety. Work can be better.

This book is for that.