Now, in my 26th year as a career counselor, I find myself musing about the validity of eight things about one's worklife that most people assume undoubtedly true: "Follow your passion," "Networking is the key to landing a job" "Job seekers must sell themselves," "Entrepreneurship is a wise path for many people." "You'll make a bigger difference by working for a non-profit or government than in the private sector." "We should strive for work-life balance." "Getting a degree is usually a wise bet." and "You make your own luck." I'd like to tell you how I went from sure to unsure on those eight commonly held beliefs and offer practical takeaways that might be helpful to you or to someone you care about.

1. "Follow your passion." I certainly used to believe "Follow your passion" is a truism. If there were a Bay Area motto, it might well be, "Follow your passion." or "Do what you love and the money will follow." Or maybe, "Do what you love and if the money doesn't follow, don't worry, your parents or someone will support you."

Most career counselor trainings I attended stressed that. And when the media asks a successful person what career advice they have for people, it's often "Follow your passion." Raise your hand: "How many of you have ever been told to follow your passion, do what you love, or some such?"

And when I started as a career counselor, I indeed routinely encouraged people to follow their passion, do what they love. And sometimes it works. Think of how many people here in the Bay Area are committed environmentalists and making a living at a solar company, a nonprofit advocacy group, etc. Alas, too often, people have tried to do what they loved and poverty followed. I recall one of my first clients--it must have been 1986--who was a truly devoted environmentalist. She was bright, dedicated, always trying to be on environmentalism's cutting edge: She protested against lead in paints. She built straw-bale houses. She even wrote a book. Fast forward to 2013. She's stayed in touch, and she's now 60-something and broke, living in welfare housing. And she's wondering, "What was all that about 'Do what you love and the money will follow?'"

The problem is that people's passions tend to be in just a few areas: the arts, entertainment, the media, sports, spiritual practices like yoga or meditation, and the environment. Raise your hand if you have a strong interest in one of those: the arts, entertainment, the media, sports, spiritual practices, or the environment?

So supply-demand means that most people in such fields are paid little or asked to be volunteers. So unless you're a star, the odds of making a living at those are not great. The Princeton Review reported a while back that of the more than 22 million artists in North America who called themselves professional artists, only 0.5% earned more than $50,000 from their art. Less than 8% earned even $1,000, not even enough to pay for their meals of ramen and tuna fish, let alone their rent, let alone their student loans.

Ironically, many people who do end up getting paid to follow their passion aren't necessarily happier. Indeed, because employers in popular fields know that many wannabe employees are waiting in the wings, employees can treat their employees poorly: pay them poorly, demand long hours, etc. "Do it for the cause!"

I think of the wine lover who got a "good job" in the wine industry. But he ends up spending a lot of time just pushing wine barrels around. Sure, he occasionally gets to run tastings for the rich and famous but, net, he wonders if his passion for wine might have been better addressed as a hobby.

Rather than pursuing one's passion as their career, as likely a path to career contentment is to find a career that isn't so crowded so it's easier to find a job with work that's interesting, with a decent boss, that's ethical, a reasonable commute, reasonable work hours, and reasonable pay. I had a client who worked in the billing department at a utility. She wasn't passionate about billing but felt better about her job than do many people in careers in areas of passion--because she found the work not too difficult or too easy, "got into it"--staying in the moment and taking pleasure with each task getting done-- it was ethical work, she was making $60K a year, full benefits, had a reasonable commute and great job security.

So now, while I'm certainly not against following your passion, I can't so blithely tell my clients to do what they love for a living. These days, I try to be more nuanced: Is following your passion worth risking the odds? Or would you more wisely do that as a sideline or hobby? Is there something else you're interested in, perhaps a little-known, under-the-radar career, that fewer people are passionate about and thus has a better risk-reward ratio?

For example, I had a client who was concerned about how elders are treated and she now works in marketing a high-quality assisted living facility. I have another client who's an Egyptologist, another who loves beautiful wine glasses. She is now a successful manufacturer's rep for a line of glasses that--she showed me--are truly beautiful. Choosing an under-the-radar field can be a wise career choice.

Here are some other under-the-radar careers I'm bullish on:

bioinformatics--the ability to tease out promising research areas from the ever more massive amounts of genomic data available. That will--hopefully sooner than later--cure or prevent everything from cancer to mental disorders.

Immersive online education: the boring lectures too common in online classes will be replaced by highly interactive, simulation-centric courses.

Any jobs at Kaiser: The Obama Administration has written the health care law to make Kaiser the big beneficiary.

Alas, the Middle East will complexify yet further: Tensions are high in Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, and Libya, on top of Iraq, Afghanistan, and non-state actors like Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, not to mention the Israel/Hamas-led Palestinian conflict. Because of the Middle East oil reserves, the threat of terrorism, and a likely nuclear Iran, jobs addressing the Middle East mess should be plentiful. The FBI, CIA, military, and other agencies as well as nonprofits will likely hire more people who speak Middle Eastern languages and have cultural expertise.

One of President Obama's top priorities is comprehensive immigration reform. That will create government jobs for bureaucrats to administer the legalization process and teachers to train immigrants to pass the citizenship test. Once legal, the immigrants will be eligible for Obamacare, which will trigger great demand for bilingual health care providers. That will also spur a need for social service providers; for example, counselors and social workers. Whatever business you're in, having 12 million people "come out of the shadows" may create business opportunities that should be considered when planning for 2014 and beyond.

I'm also bullish on a number of health care careers: physician assistant, genetic counselor, optometrist, audiologist, and orthodontist. A couple of other helping professions I like: tutor and college financial aid counselor.

If you're a more data-centric type: health informatician--improving health care providers' and patients ability to get information online. Or program analyst--that's a government job in which you do research and evaluation on government programs. If you're a hands-on type: firefighter, landscape architect, and energy engineer.

If a client does wants to pursue a long-shot passion, I encourage them to work toward it for a fixed amount of time: Circle a date on your calendar, three months, six months, even two years from now. At that point, if the world is giving you signs you are going to make a living at it, wonderful! If not, you still have enough time to pursue a less risky Plan B---unlike that 60ish environmentalist client of mine who's in welfare housing.

One more strategy: Perhaps you're someone who can subsist on little money and will feel content having an easy-to-get job in a cool field. For example, countless production assistants work on film sets. They make near-minimum wage but love the idea of working near all those creatives. That does remind me of the man whose job is to follow behind the elephants in the circus with a garbage can to catch their dung, and when he was asked why he doesn't quit, he replied, "What, and leave show business?"

Of course, you also can pursue your passion seriously as an avocation. And that may even be more rewarding. I've spent a fair amount of time in the world of theatre. Alas, most professional actors spend much of their time painfully: auditioning, flying to New York, and if they get cast, it's usually a small part so spend most of rehearsal and even during the play, waiting. I know a woman who tried to make it on Broadway, failed and now does acting as a hobby and gets to play starring roles in community theatre here in the Bay Area and is having much more fun and, because she's taken a day job that's pays reasonably, she's far from eating cat food. She is doing what she loves and the money follows--just from a different source.

The question is, "What's right for you: Should you be doing what you love as your career or as your avocation?

2. "Networking is key to your career." I've become convinced that's overbroad. Yes, some of my clients have gotten all their jobs and otherwise boosted their career thanks to networking. And most of them love the process: schmoozing at events, becoming LinkedIn Ninjas, and so on. Jobs seem to come to them. Alas, for some other people, networking has been a waste of time. They go to meet-and-greets, they become LinkedIn ninjas, yet derive nothing that helps their career. Still other people have been hurt by networking. I'm one of them. No matter how much I try, I too often come off as too intense and a know-it-all. I interrupt too much, even though I know it's wrong. I think I do better writing -and hopefully speaking to audiences. The message: One size does not fit all: The mantra "Network, network, network" works only for some people.

Here's how you might assess how much effort you should devote to networking. The more of these you answer yes, the more you might want to network: 1. Does your career need networking, for example, if you're unemployed or are looking to move up or to another employer? 2. To date, have you found your networking has been worth the effort? The past is a reasonable predictor of the future. 3. Do you enjoy networking? 4. Even if you're good at networking and enjoy it, is that the wisest use of that time--What could you be doing otherwise? 5. Is your existing networking liberally laced with people who can help you? Building a network usually takes a long time. By the time you build one that nets you a job, you could be homeless.

Some jobseekers do better by devoting most of their job search time simply to answering jobs ads, but taking the time to do it really well, to reveal their true strengths and weaknesses so an employer will believe what they're writing and be able to assess whether there's a good match between the applicant and the job. So the message here, as with the other seven career beliefs: There are few black and white truths. Nuance is required. One size does not fit all. So, moving forward, should you do more or less networking?

3. "Job seekers must sell themselves." Another common career belief that I accepted too unquestioningly is that job seekers must sell themselves. After all, that's the American way--market, market market. At trainings and conferences for career counselors, we were taught new and ever more powerful tools to teach our clients for how to sell themselves: PAR stories, microanalyze mock video interviews, have perfect canned answers for the toughest interview questions,. We were told it was okay for us to write their resume for them, write their cover letter for them, write their thank-you letter for them.

But after a while, I started feeling oily. What about the job applicants who chose to do their own work? Imagine how you'd feel if you did your own work and lost out to an inferior candidate who paid a pro to write their cover letter, application, and thank you letter. Would that be fair to candidates who don't have the money to hire a hired gun and simply presented themselves unvarnished? Was I putting shine on less qualified applicants thereby hurting the chances of more qualified people? If I did my job well and my clients got the job, was I also hurting the employer, who's now saddled with a worse employee than if it weren't for my efforts? Were the coworkers similarly saddled? And if a worse person is hired, doesn't that mean that the products or services the organization provides are more likely to be worse, and then in turn, society to be worse? I had become a career counselor to make things better. Was I fooling myself? Was I making things worse?!

I've come to take a more nuanced position. There's nothing wrong, indeed everything right about helping someone find a well-suited career. There's everything right about helping someone on the job to be more successful and happy there. But it strikes me that there's something wrong with helping a job applicant look better than they are, and the weaker the applicant, the more that feels wrong. It feels as wrong as a college applicant hiring someone to write their application essay. I still do help clients land a job but only those I feel I can honestly champion for the job to which they aspire.

I've become especially reluctant to write or even heavily edit anyone's resume. Employers don't use a resume just to see a candidate's work history. For any white-collar or professional job, they look at resumes to compare candidates on how well they organize their thoughts, write, and produce an error-free document. If I write or even significantly edit someone's resume, that employer will get an inflated estimate of how well that candidate thinks, organizes, writes, and is detail-oriented. If writing someone else's resume were ethical, why didn't I or any resume writer write on the resume, "Written by Marty Nemko, Professional Resume Writer?" If you were to hire a resume writer, how many of you would want the resume writer to write on it, "Written by Jane Jones, Professional Resume Writer?" So I invite you to think twice when deciding whether you should write your own resume or hire a hired-gun.

So what do I say to a client who wants me to help them land a job? I do turn away some prospective clients whom I sense would be a liability in the workplaces they want to work in but more often, I simply try to help them realize that "selling themselves" is not the right metaphor. You may be able to sell yourself into a job but if it's not the right job, you'll likely do poorly, get fired or laid off, and you'll be back to see me. And you won't feel good about yourself. It seems to me that the right metaphor for job-seeking is not selling, it's matchmaking: You honestly reveal your strengths and your weaknesses and the wrong employers will reject you and a right one will hire you. For example, one of my weaknesses is that I'm a poor team player. If I were applying for a job, I'd mention that, while I'm capable of doing difficult projects on my own, I do poorly on a team: I tend to get frustrated when I don't have enough control. That would get me rejected from the wrong jobs and accepted for a right one.

So I invite you to consider: Next time you look for a job, try to think of it not as selling but matchmaking.

4. Self-employment is a wise path for many people The fourth so-called career "truth" I've come to question is that self-employment is a wise path for many people. I started out believing that. After all, that was how my father--a Holocaust survivor who came here without any education or money--made enough money to move my mom, my sister and me out of the Bronx tenement where I grew up and into the bottom half of a duplex in Queens. I've also been positively predisposed to self-employment because most employers try to pay people as little as they can get away with and in a tough job market, that's often little and with few benefits. Even nonprofits and universities, which claim to care about workers, use lots of volunteer interns, which enables them to skirt the minimum wage law. All that made me feel that self-employment can often be a wise choice.

But having been self-employed as a career counselor and consultant to corporations for 26 years and helping my clients to become successfully self-employed, I'm a bit sobered. Being successful in self-employment is more difficult than many people think. It requires you to be good not only at your profession but willing and able to market yourself. And, in a tiny business, there's no support structure: no IT department, no accounting dept. It's all on you, and if you hire people to do all that, it's difficult to be left with a decent income, especially because you may be paying individual rates for health insurance.

I do think some people are wise to consider self-employment if they are very good at what they do, are good at solving business-related problems by themselves, are good at marketing and don't mind doing it. Or they might find a trusted partner complementary skill set, for example, is a great marketer.

For those who are cut out for self-employment, I am bullish on businesses in which you provide a service and that don't require much money to start. Examples:

· Broker who brings together business classes with corporations that want projects done. Class projects would be of real-world use rather than just go into the ether.

· Tutor--some make over $100 an hour, especially working with learning disabled or autism-spectrum children.

· Relationship ad coaching--it's hard to create a the right ad for meeting the person of your dreams.

· Fundraising auction planner--it's one of the most potent ways that nonprofits raise money

· Spacemaker: Clean out basements, garages, and attics and then installing shelf and cabinet systems.

· Running people's garage or estate sales for a percentage of the take.

· Job agent--helping people land a job by making those initial inquiries that job hunters hate, kind of like the agents that represent performers and authors.

So I encourage you to dispassionately consider whether, for you, being self-employed is a wiser option than being employed by someone else.

5. "You'll make a bigger difference by working for a non-profit or government than for a company." I felt that way. After all, I went to Berkeley and having been living in the Bay Area for 40 years now. But I've had a few eye-opening experiences that are making me question that.

I recall visiting the federal buildings in Oakland--those twin skyscrapers downtown--and walking through the hall and seeing clean desk after clean desk with employee after employee literally polishing their nails or reading a magazine.

Then there was the caller to my radio show asking what he should do about the fact that when he wanted to get his government work crew of carpenters to work faster, they slit his tires. In that same call, he said that they have so little work to do that they'd build a fence--slowly--then knock it down and build it again so they could look busy.

Think about how much you pay in taxes: income tax, sales tax, property tax, etc. Do you think you get good value for your tax dollar? I'm a little less bullish on government work these days even if salaries, benefits, vacation, holidays, and job security tend to be very good.

Regarding nonprofits, a number of clients have told me how inefficient the nonprofit they work for is--they feel guilty asking people to donate.

Yet when I think about companies, I wonder if, net, they bring at least as much benefit to humankind. I think about the companies that make TVs at a price anyone can afford--Well maybe not a 90-incher but a 32-inch TV that's much bigger than what I grew up with now costs just $200. Google makes much of the world's information available to everyone for free. Toyota made my 45 mpg, completely reliable Prius. Bayer here in Berkeley makes aspirin we can buy for pennies a dose. Whirlpool made my refrigerator that cost me $900 15 years ago and still runs perfectly. A corporate homebuilder built my house at a price I couldn't build it for if I hired a bunch of handypeople to do it. Even the so-called corporate food: I can buy a pound of on-the-vine tomatoes at a pleasant supermarket for $2. At the farmer's market, they want $2.50 per tomato. Even if I thought it was worth it, I can afford it but can poor people? So while, of course, some government and nonprofit jobs are most worthy--I'm grateful, for example, for the existence of 911--might you want to take a more nuanced view: The private sector, unlike what some people believe, may not be an intrinsically less worthy place to work.

6. "We should strive for work-life balance." It's an article of faith that work-life balance should be the goal. After all, who could argue against "balance?" It's the Aristotelian Golden Mean. Indeed, President Obama and his administration uses the word "balanced" as way of describing a number of its initiatives, from dealing with the debt to dealing with illegal immigration. And yet as I look back on the 4,000 career counseling clients I've had the privilege of serving these last 26 years plus my friends and colleagues, many of the people who feel best about their worklife and are most energized overall, who feel really content with their lives and made the biggest contribution, are people who work long hours, whom most people would describe as lacking work-life balance. Indeed, some people denigrate them as workaholics---a term that evokes a comparison with alcoholic--someone addicted to something bad.

But is that a fair way to describe a cancer researcher who works some nights and weekends to try additional experiments? Is that a fair way to describe an outstanding relationship counselor who sees extra clients each week rather than refer them to a less effective counselor? Is that a fair way to describe an accounts-payable clerk who devotes week hours 40-50 to ensuring everyone gets paid promptly and accurately, even if it's just to make more money to support her family?

We may or may not choose to work long hours, but rather than denigrate people who do so as "out of balance" let alone pathologize them as workaholics, might it be fairer to think of them as hard workers or even as heroes?

Some claim that working long hours causes people to make errors and to burn out. I'm not advocating the 100-hour-workweeks that medical interns are forced to endure. I view that as more like a fraternity hazing than anything else. But as I look back on all the clients I've had who were burned out, they were not mainly the people who worked long hours. Indeed many worked short hours but at a job that was too difficult for them or where the work was unethical. So as you decide how many hours a week to devote to work, rather than simply accepting the blanket stricture to strive for work-life balance, I invite you to recognize that one size does not fit all. Decide, for yourself, what's the right level of work-life balance for you, for your family, and for society. And think twice before labeling a hard worker "out of balance" let alone "a workaholic."

7. "Getting a degree is usually a wise bet." You'd think I'd be an strong advocate for getting degrees. After all, my parents constantly told me that education is The Answer. And indeed, I have a Ph.D-- from right here at Berkeley--and in the field of educational psychology. And indeed, I used to believe that getting degrees is usually a wise choice: not just but for career preparation but for enlightenment.

But over the past decades, I've become less sure. The first sense I got of that was in graduate school when I was forced to take so many courses that would contribute little to my being a good professional or even good citizen and human being. For example, Professor Leonard Marascuilo was a statistics professor who was able to convince the administration that every education doctoral student needed five graduate level courses in statistics. Many if not most Ph.D.s use a statistics consultant to do their statistics. Were those five courses truly the best use of students' time and money?

Then, when I become a consultant to colleges, the private conversations behind those ivy-covered walls were very different from the rhetoric in college brochures and PR efforts about caring about students and helping them to grow. Too many administrators seemed to care most about bringing in research dollars, hiring more research-centric professors--whether they could teach well was pretty irrelevant--, about its US News ranking, about increasing alumni donations, and about protecting their own careers. Discussions about undergraduate education were mainly about increasing retention while lowering their cost to the university, but never about lowering the price paid by students.

More recently, I have read but am not surprised by the definitive study of how much learning occurs in undergraduate education, Academically Adrift, published by the University of Chicago Press, that found that 36% of college graduates grew not at all in writing and critical thinking. And regarding the achievement gap that is so worrying the nation, the students who did poorly in high school were, on average, the least likely to grow.

Of course, many people attend college mainly to improve their employability. And in decades past, colleges did, a fact that colleges continue to trumpet. But an Associated Press analysis of data from 2011 found 53.6% of college graduates under 25 were unemployed—or, if they were lucky enough, under-employed, meaning they were working in jobs they could have gotten out of high school. That's especially likely in fields that don't particularly impress employers such as sociology, art history, or American studies.

I think of a recent client, I'll call him Joe. He was the first in his family to go to college and his family was so proud that he got into UC San Diego and even more proud that he graduated with a 3.6 GPA, majoring in psychology, but the best job he's been able to find is working at an electronics retailer where his job includes such tasks as finding someone to unclog the toilets.

Alas, even science and technology majors have according to a 2012 Georgetown University study, Hard Times, an unemployment rate higher than the national average of 7.6%. For example, major in science: the unemployment rate is 8.2% Mechanical engineering: 8.6% Information systems: 11.7%.

But what about graduate school as a way to improve employability? In April, 2013, The Atlantic reported that "Nine months after graduation, just 56 percent of the law school class of 2012 had found stable jobs in law." And PhDs? The National Science Foundation reports--and this really shocked me--that fewer than 40% of new PhDs had a job waiting for them at graduation. Another 35% had signed up for a post-doc--That mainly consists of more studying. And 28% had nothing!

I couldn't find national averages for that supposedly most marketable degree, the MBA. But according to a November 2012 Bloomberg/BusinessWeek report, 10% of Berkeley MBAs were unemployed three months after graduation and 23% of MBAs from USC were. I can only imagine less prestigious MBA programs' unemployment rate.

I am not saying, "Don't get a degree." Indeed, 90% of those Cal-Berkeley MBAs were employed, I'm guessing most of them well employed. I'm merely asking you to not just reflexively follow the conventional wisdom: "Degree good." Decide whether, for you, going back for a degree is wiser than for example, learning at I call You U: working at the elbow of a successful, ethical master, reading and attending short-courses such as those offered through your professional association, through UC Extension and so on.

And if you're going to get a degree, I invite you to not give disproportionate weight to the ostensible practicality of a STEM major: science, technology, engineering and math. Not only as I mentioned, are today's unemployment rates in even in STEM fields surprisingly high, if those fields don't play to your strengths, you're particularly likely to not graduate or to graduate with skills insufficient to succeed in those fields. You might be wiser to major in something that, on the face of it, seems less practical, for example, rhetoric, which, more than most fields, teaches you the skill of persuasion and logical reasoning, which are crucial to almost any career. Ironically, that might make you more endurably employable than pursuing an expressly careerist degree.

At this point, I also want to put in a word for an initiative that would enable students to more wisely decide if returning to school for a degree would be worthwhile, and where they should go. Colleges receive billions in taxpayer-funded aid every year yet have less accountability than we require of tire manufacturers. Every tire must have, molded into each sidewall, its tread life, temperature, and traction rating. Each home for sale comes with pages of disclosures. Every packaged food must prominently list its calories, sodium, fat content and so on. Yet colleges aren't required to prominently post anything.

Doesn't it make sense that with college one of our most expensive and potentially life-changing purchases, all higher education programs be required to post a College Scorecard, consumerist information that would help prospective students decide whether to attend. President Obama, in his State of the Union address, proposed such a Scorecard but it had little teeth. The College Scorecard Version 2.0 should include, for example:

· The cost of attending subtracting cash financial aid for the length of the program, disaggregated by family income and assets.

· The percentage of students that graduate in the "expected time," broken down by students' high school record.

· How much growth in writing and critical thinking skills do students make?

· The percentage of students that are professionally employed within a year of graduation.

Colleges claim to care about students. How many of you would appreciate having that kind of information as you decide if and where to go back to school? I can think of no better way for universities to show they care about you than to present that crucial information students need to decide whether to spend the years and fortune on that institution.

I want to stress that I am not against getting degrees. I just want you to evaluate the decision to spend the time and money carefully. Richard Bolles author of What Color is Your Parachute, says that many people choose their vacation more carefully than they choose their career. I merely invite you to as carefully consider whether you should go back to school as how you should spend your vacation.

8. "You make your own luck" or its variations: "Luck comes to the well-prepared." and "Luck is where preparation meets opportunity." Those are odes to working hard. I'm no longer so sure that hard work is as often rewarded as those aphorisms imply.

Of course, many people do succeed because of hard work but I've also seen many succeed without hard work: They had the good luck to be born smart and/or winsome, or were, indeed in the right place at the right time. A dishwasher happened to be on duty when the sink clogged. He was able to fix it and had the good luck that boss happened to be there to watch him and the luck that it just happened the boss was about to open another branch of his restaurant the next day, and asked him to help manage the restaurant. Luck!

Yet I've seen other people work their guts out and are grateful when they get a part-time $10 an hour job to so they can afford to eat and yes, maybe, buy drugs or alcohol to dull their pain.

So again, the message is nuance: It may be time to replace blanket beliefs such as "You make your own luck." with: Yes, work hard, it boosts your odds of success, but perhaps be a bit more charitable, not just in dollars but in spirit toward the people we might write off as lazy. They may indeed have had the bad luck to have been born unintelligent or unattractive or into a home that didn't nurture whatever gifts they were born with. Or they never ended up at the right place at the right time but rather met some people that were bad influences. So they, consciously or unconsciously, realize that even if they work hard they're unlikely to reap much success. If you're successful, you might want to feel grateful and if you're not, yes work hard and try to surround yourself with people most likely to bring out the best in you.

So in sum, my core message today is that we tend to fall victim to group-think, even when it comes to our worklife. What would seem wiser for us as individuals and collectively as a society would be to replace group-think with each of us thinking in a more nuanced way:

· Instead of blithely mouthing the mantra "Follow your passion," assess whether, for you, the risk-reward ratio of trying to get paid well enough to do what you love is a wiser choice than pursuing something with a better risk-reward ratio, perhaps an under-the-radar career, and pursuing your passion on the side.

· Instead of the broad-brush advice to "network, network, network," look at your track record in networking and your needs, and then decide how much effort you should put into networking rather than for example, getting more skilled in your work.

· Instead of accepting that when looking for a job you must sell yourself, consider whether it's wiser to think of job-hunting less as selling and more as matchmaking. Might that be wiser not just for you, but in the larger scheme of things: to the employer and even to the larger society?

· We might also take a closer look at whether self-employment is as desirable as is widely touted. Are you enough of a self-starter, able and willing to market, able to handle all the inevitable problems without hiring help for everything, and, is the service or product you provide so good that you can compete with larger businesses?

· Might it be worth revisiting the conventional wisdom that you'll make a bigger difference by working for a non-profit or government than in the private sector? There is good and bad in all sectors.

· Instead of blanketly accepting that we must all strive for work-life balance, should we hold a more nuanced view: that one lifestyle needn't fit all. If we truly celebrate diversity, instead of pathologizing hard workers as workaholics, like alcoholics, addicted to something bad, might a fairer descriptor be "hard worker" or even" hero?"

· Instead of that broad-brush statement, "Getting a degree is usually a wise bet," more recent data suggests that it can be a tough call, requiring a careful examination of the pros, cons and opportunity costs of school, including asking fair questions like, "What percent of graduates are professionally employed in their field three months after graduation?"

· And rather than smugly asserting that we make our own luck, might we want to feel gratitude for the luck that contributed to our successes and a feel bit more charitable toward those who started out life with fewer of the building blocks for success?

I want to end by telling you one more story. The year was 1939. The town was Sierpc, Poland. My father was a teenager living with his family. One day there was a knock on the door and it was two Nazis in black boots. But unlike in the movies, they didn't yell. One was silent and the other whispered: "You will be out of your house with only what you can carry on your back by noon tomorrow or else." The next day, there were two trucks in the town square and 12 Nazis, but now they weren't whispering. "Rouse!" And they went into the Jewish households and threw the able-bodied people on one truck and the old, young, and infirm on another. My father never saw his parents again. At the end of the war, my father was dropped in the Bronx without a penny to his name, No English, no family, no education. Only the scars of the Holocaust tortures. What did he do? He took the only job he could get: sewing shirts in a factory in Harlem. And at night, what did he do? He went to Roosevelt High School's night school to learn English. And what did he do on the weekend? He went to the owner of the factory and asked, "Can I buy the shirts I sewed for you during the week and sell them out of a cardboard box on the street ?" What did he do with the money? He used it to pay the first and last month's rent on the only storefront he could afford: 105 Moore St in Brooklyn. On one side was a Puerto Rican deli specializing in chicharones (deep-fried pork intestines) and the smell of that merged with the smell coming from the store on the other side: a live chicken market--the smell of stale blood. My father's store was so small that he had to display most of the merchandise on folding tables in front of the store. But the neighborhood was terrible so on the weekends, when the kids were out of school, they'd come by and grab clothing from the tables and run away. So when I was old enough, on Saturdays, I'd play security guard at my father's store. And I remember standing in front of the store one day and business was slow, so my father was standing there next to me, and I asked him, "Daddy, how come you so rarely talk about the Holocaust?" And he stiffened, which he rarely did, and said, "Martin, the Nazis took five years from my life. I won't give them one minute more." He said, "Martin, never look back. Always take the next step forward."

Each of us has had bad things happen to us but I've had the privilege of having been career counselor to some of our most successful, contributory people as well as to some real strugglers. And one of the differentiating factors is that most of the successful ones follow my father's advice: Never look back; always take the next step forward. I can leave you with no better advice.

Then I tried noble work—teaching in the inner-city. But the problems those kids faced were so big, so multi-dimensional, that despite my trying hard, very hard, I felt I wasn’t making much difference.

Next, I tried prestige: got a PhD from Berkeley, became a professor. But in my social science field, I often felt like an emperor with no clothes. So much social “science” is poorly substantiated, politically motivated theory. My students ate it up but I felt I was often feeding them ersatz food.

I’ve been trying the values route: focusing on what did I most value: work. To that end, I decided to be a career counselor. I believed that helping people find right livelihood would make my life feel meaningful. But now, 26 years and 4,000 clients later, despite a 96 percent client satisfaction rate and the San Francisco Bay Guardian naming me “The Bay Area’s Best Career Coach,” that feels a bit empty too. Some of my work, for example, helping people to make the most of their current job—feels good. That helps them live up to their potential, and, in turn, their employer to provide good products and services. But too often, my clients come away with a plan they’re excited about but fail to execute. Even when a client lands a good job, I too often wonder if my efforts to package my client yielded a net negative to society: some more deserving person, who couldn’t afford a career coach, didn’t get the job.

I particularly value meritocracy. I believe that more good accrues from ensuring a meritocracy than nearly anything else. 30 years ago that would have meant dismantling the ol’ white boy’s network. But alas, today, the ol’ boy network has largely been replaced by the Diversity Industry, all-powerful and hell-bent on ensuring that women and minorities get slots in colleges and employment even when less qualified. The schools, colleges, and media, are very biased against men, especially white men. A result is that many fewer men than women are getting college degrees--In an era in which a degree is the basic prerequisite for most decent jobs, this is a disaster for men. While at the very top, men are still overrepresented--largely because they're willing to forgo recreation and other pursuits in favor of becoming the very best, for the other 99%, men are certainly not treated, on average, fairly, related to their merit. But The Diversity Industry is so powerful, it has shut off dissent. I have tried prodigiously to protest the rampant reverse discrimination and male-unfriendly schools and colleges, to no avail. When I write politically correct letters to the editor, they’re routinely published yet when I write to protest reverse discrimination, my letters are always censored. I've had over 1,000 columns and articles published, yet when I write about reverse discrimination, the pieces are deemed unworthy of publication. Ive written a screenplay on the topic, Affirmative Actions, which the London Daily News said was “Sure to trigger a bidding war” yet no film studio would touch it. My first five books, politically correct, have been published and critically and commercially successful, having sold over 200,000 copies. Yet, when I wrote what I believe is my best book, the politically incorrect “The Silenced Majority,” it was rejected by 28 of 28 publishers. So, Ive been totally censored, shut out. So much for living my values. Today, it seems that’s permissible only when your values are politically correct.

Many people find the meaning of life through relationships. While I have a pretty good marriage, I’m not sure the meaning of life, at least for me, fully resides there. And my only child, who is an ardent feminist, refuses to talk to me, in large measure because of my views on reverse discrimination. I am unlikely, as so many parents do, to find enough of life’s meaning through my family.

Many other people find the meaning of life in religious faith. But I can’t find meaning in a God that would, for example, allow deadly earthquakes or millions of babies to be born every year with horrifically painful diseases and then die months later leaving bereft parents.

Is that all there is? I'll soon turn 63, with signs of aging creeping in that remind me that the coming five years, or if I'm lucky, ten, will probably be my last highly productive years. I want to live as meaningful life as possible in the time I have. How the hell do I do it?

Here’s my current thinking, subject to revision. It comes down to spending as much time as possible using my best skills (writing and speaking) to make a difference.

My current choice is to stay focused on being the best career and life coach I can be, writing my weekly AOL and US News posts, doing my radio show, and advocating for two major education reforms:government requiring colleges to post, on its home page, substantive consumer information for prospective students, and a replacement for homework: dream-team-taught interactive online lessons for each of the standards in the Common Core curriculum now being adopted nationwide.

I guess I should be grateful--that's a pretty full life. Yet somehow, I still feel empty. Maybe I'm just constitutionally a kvetch.

1. Universities screen applicants using criteria less related to teaching ability: GPA, GRE, and an essay.

2. The university-based teacher training program is more than a year long, expensive, and usually heavily taught by theoreticians who have never taught, let alone been master K-12 teachers. Many of them couldn't even control a K-12 classroom, let alone effectively teach and inspire most kids.

• Group classes by ability/achievement, at least for academic subjects.
• Give teachersthe optionto send kids who take too great a toll on the other students' learning (disruptive kids, special education kids, not-English-speaking kids) to special classes so those kids can get more of the on-target instruction they need, while the regular teacher's other 29 kids aren't deprived of their right to an appropriate-level education.
• Make easily accessible, on the Internet, fabulous teacher-ready curriculum, including online video lecturettes (rich with visuals) by the nation's most effective and inspirational teachers that the kids could use for homework instead of traditional homework, which too often gets blown-off, cheated on and, which certainly rarely inspires.