A couple years ago, I participated in a blogging round table at HoneyAndLance.com and I thought it was one of the coolest ideas I’d seen. So, I hope my friends there won’t mind if I borrow (heavily) from their call-for-posts post. WorkLoveLife is hosting a round table. The subject is mentors. Any blogger can participate, but a few of you I’m contacting directly to make sure you do. Ahem.

How It Works

Write a post on the topic on your blog. I’m not curating the posts, there are no prizes or winners, and all posts are included in no particular order. If you do participate, please drop the link to your post in the comments section of this post. When all is said and done, I’ll post a round-up of everyone who participated with links to your blog posts on the subject. I think the rest of the participating bloggers would appreciate you spreading the link love on your blog, too, after I post the round-up.

I’ll be looking for your post to be up by next Monday, March 1.

Benefits

As my friends at HoneyAndLance pointed out, there are many benefits to participating:

1. Test out your writing chops.

2. By interlinking the posts everyone will pump up their pageranking and take advantage of search engine traffic. Having a keyword like “mentors” or “personal board of directors” could be popular, too, and give your post a long tail.

3. Drive our individual audiences to other blogs.

4. Read interesting and diverse perspectives.

To Get the Ideas Cranking

The mentorship round table topic was spawned from a single tweet I sent out last week.

It got a ton of response – more than I thought one sentence would get, but apparently it rings true for a lot of people. I got a bunch of replies from people who could relate, and it spurred a lot of online (and offline) conversations with friends about the nature of mentorship. I joke that it takes a board of directors to run my life. But you’ll have to read my post to find out more about that.

So, who are your mentors? What do you do when you outgrow a mentor? How do you find your mentors? What value is there in having a mentor? Do any of you think having a mentor is pointless? Are you a mentor to someone else? Tell us your story. Again, don’t forget to post your link in the comments!

I’m looking forward to hearing what you think.

I’m getting a little tired of Gen Y bloggers proudly flouting their “workaholism” in post after post of how they love their jobs, don’t see a need for work/life balance anymore and question whether or not their relationships are holding them back.

Of course, I’m guilty of several of these posts myself.

I remember Ryan Paugh from BrazenCareerist once wondering in a post if he was going to feel embarrassed by something he wrote 10 years later (I couldn’t find the link). His conclusion was that he probably would, and I concur. Even just a year later, I look back at some of my own posts and shake my head. I’ve changed my mind about some of those sanctimonious posts I wrote. (Maybe I’ll change my mind about this sanctimonious post, too at some point.)

There’s nothing like a good round of cancer scares to put things in perspective. As I’ve been forced to relax and let my “workaholism” tendencies fade into the background, I’ve figured out a few things. One is that the stress in my life came from the label I gave myself as a “workaholic.” I have found that I’m not actually working on less projects now, but that my mind has released the “have-to, have-to, have-to” thoughts that kept my mind racing even when I wasn’t working on something.

I’ve also watched my boyfriend run his distribution business over the past few months. He travels 3 hours away to tend his business weekly, aside from his local branch. He has a business in the sense that he’s not freelancing or consulting or designing websites – he has an office manager, employees with health insurance, customers who demand his time, and expenses that would make me cringe. He experiences a kind of daily stress and time demands that we Gen Y I-run-my-personal-brand types can’t imagine. I don’t care how many nights you slept in your office waiting for your start-up site to go live.

So here’s the deal. You’re not a workaholic. And you’re no different from the young-go-getters of the 1980s. (Please watch “Working Girl.” I mean, those people were always on and always “working.” We’re not the first people to discover taking our jobs seriously.)

We’re simply at the work-hard-to-get-ahead life stage. Like I said, we’re not the first. We’re supposed to be working hard right now because later, we’re going to want to take a break. I know, I know. You luuuuuuhhv your job. Great. For now. Later you will find that you luuuuuuuhhv being home to cook dinner for your kids. The other thing is that “getting ahead” looks different today than it did 20 years ago. Our parents worked late hours, took extra projects on, and went to night school to get higher degrees and certifications. We still do all that stuff, just now we’re also tending to our blogs, websites, overall web presence, personal brands, etc.

We don’t have a “life” to balance yet.
We’re in our twenties. We don’t have kids yet (for the most part), and we might have girlfriends or boyfriends, but not the kind of relationships that require time, energy and work to maintain because they simply haven’t become that important or demanding yet. We’re not trying to figure out how to make our 10-year-old marriage last because we see the love of earlier years fading. We don’t have children pulling us away from our “me” time. Jesus, you’ve still got time for the gym. Ask a working mom if she’s got time for that… if she does it’s at 5 a.m. while everyone else is still sleeping. That is what work/life balance is – not trying to schedule time in for a trip to the bar with friends.

We regard our life activities like they are work.
We blog because we love it, and yes, it gets us ahead in our careers, but that’s not why we keep at it. Blogging, networking, going to social media conferences and volunteering for organizations isn’t your job. We do it because in our day and age it is the new softball team. I spoke on a panel at an economic summit this week and I tried to stretch my mind to figure out how this will advance my career. My boyfriend pointed out that I did it because I think its fun. Oh yeah. That’s my LIFE, not my WORK.

We haven’t suffered the consequences of workaholism yet.
You probably haven’t even been burnt out yet, let alone laid off from your first job at a start-up, driven to real addiction, been divorced or suffered stress-related health problems. When you get there, remind me again of how much you OMG luv luv luv your job. Because I want to know if it was worth it. (The only one I haven’t done is divorce. And no, the 80-hour work weeks from the start-up that went under were not worth it. I’d happily give back the crow’s feet those earned me.)

We’re still seeking definition and identity with labels.
I wrote two weeks ago about my struggle to let go of my self-image as a go-getter, a woman on the make, etc. Elysa Rice seconded my “who am I if not a…” idea. We’ve been students forever, and now we’re joining the workforce and struggling with this notion that we need a label. We don’t. It’s a personal revolution in thought that occurs when you realize that you just are and that being a “workaholic” or a rising star or a go-getter is just a label that you try to live up to.

We like to inflate our own self-importance.
I’m really talking to myself as much to anyone else here. I think we inherently have some kind of egoistic tick that makes us trump up our own value. Gen Y doesn’t do this anymore than any other generation… we just have a syndicated platform by which to do it, in my opinion. When I declared myself a workaholic with no respect for this work/life balance nonsense, I was always rushing around in a state of self-importance trying to do everything I “needed” to do. My reality was that when I backed off, nobody suffered as a result of my loss in super-productivity, in fact no one really noticed.

I’m definitely not the oldest of my blogging compadres, but sometimes I feel like my life experiences have aged me a little. I guess there’s a part of me that wants to save my fellow twenty-somethings some of the pain I went through learning things the hard way. But then again, I didn’t listen to the people who tried to warn me. I figured I was different. I was unique. I wasn’t.

But hey, maybe I’m wrong. What do you think – are we really workaholics?

This is a guest post by Marina Cilona, who writes her own fabulous blog, Connecting Ideas.

When I was younger, at high school or university, I had this concept of a successful person as someone who knew a lot about what they were doing. The successful person I dreamed up in my head had a lot of information and used it to stay in control, move through their day with confidence and ease and solve problems with well-thought about solutions. So for me the key to success has always been knowledge you see, you have to know what you’re doing in order to be successful at it.

I’m not going to lie to you – the successful person I always pictured was me. That was my goal for my job: to have all of the knowledge I needed in order to be confident and strong on a day to day basis. In the past year that I’ve been working I’ve realized that my idea of success was dependent on the assumption that there is a protocol, an established way of doing things, that I would need to learn and become really good at in order to be successful.

Then I got a job in a ‘write your own ticket’ sort of company like so many other new, online media companies are. It’s a company that doesn’t have any age or experience prerequisites for success. It’s a company without an established protocol. Your success in the company I work for depends on how well you understand the fact that anyone can publish and access information on the web. Everyone’s a publisher, a mini media mogul and everyone has control of their attention when it comes to their online viewing. So anything my company publishes online is subject to rapidly changing trends, trends that every single person who uses the net shapes. My boss never lied to me when I started. He said it wouldn’t be easy. It’s supposed to be hard to grasp, evasive even, because online media is not a long established industry. It’s still rapidly developing and that can be hard for someone who had such a simple and static definition of success. How the hell am I supposed to feel successful when there is no established protocol for me to dare I say rote learn and then excel at?

I’ll have days where control will feel too far out of my reach to even connect myself with my original idea of a successful person. My confidence, which is so rooted in my intellectual abilities, my power to actually understand things, will rapidly dwindle and I’ll start to feel that I have no capability. On those days I won’t feel productive or, well, competent and I’ll wonder when someone is going to notice and fire me.

For me these bad days happen when I’m reminded of just how much I don’t understand yet. I work for an innovations company. By its very nature its job is to ‘light up the edges’ by conceptualizing new ways for people to communicate with each other that just don’t exist yet. This means that when I started a year ago I needed to get really comfortable really quickly with not knowing, with just trying and moving forward without clarity. You may say that at 23 I’m still stuck in some adolescent hell where I’ll never build up the confidence to feel successful or truly understand my own capabilities. But it all comes down to learning which makes it worthwhile for me. Even though I’m not learning things that have been tried and tested, I still feel like I’m learning on crack. My fear over how much I don’t know, even on it’s worst days, never makes me want to quit and find a job with more direct tasks and clearly defined project and outcomes. I’m learning too much this way and hey, brick walls are put in place to make sure we understand and prove how badly we want things. So if I want to be successful I need to work harder to understand what that means given the challenges and the unknowns of online media.

The thing is I don’t think I’m alone in this battle. So many jobs that are filled by smart, well-educated and driven Gen Yers are new. They were invented along with new technologies and new ways of doing things that need to be managed and communicated.

If you think this isn’t you, if you think these days never happen to you and you never descend to this level of doubt well I don’t believe you. You may deal with it differently or understand it differently but NO ONE and I say this with complete confidence, spends 100 percent of their time riding the top of the wave. You have to struggle through the current sometimes. Those are the times when you actually learn something and those are the days that I think you’ll feel like you’re working towards your own success.

The point I want to make is that it’s supposed to be hard. But that’s what makes us interesting. Be proud of that. This may not seem like the most profound thing you’ve read but it needs to be written and sometimes, on the bad days, it needs to be reread to remind you of the wall and of why you’re trying to push through it.

Marina writes a blog, Connecting Ideas, about work and relationships (and what happens when you work with your partner). She writes about her thoughts which run the gamut of equal pay, writing, love, intimacy, friendship and generally being in her twenties.

I spent a glorious week in New York City earlier this month. My best friend from college lives in hipper-than-thou Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and I spent a few days with her getting to know that neighborhood and its denizens pretty well. Then I spent a weekend in the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania, where my best friend from high school got married. As we toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house marveling at the architecture, and biking the Laurel Highlands that surrounds it, I struck up conversations with intellectuals from Japan, Russia, Israel, France, Italy and the UK. When I returned to Brooklyn, I ate up my favorite Middle Eastern delicacies and gobbled up conversations about great works of literature and laughed my ass off as artist-musician-writer types joked satirically about mass American culture. 

There’s a contest going on over at Brazen Careerist that you must check out if you liked the My Life Coach Rocks post. Jenny (that’s my life coach!) is hosting a contest over at BC about overcoming fear in order to literally rock your 20s, as well you should!

Jenny’s question is about choice and overcoming the paralysis it can cause to make your life the best possible. Head over to Brazen Careerist and leave a comment. If you win, you’ll join Jenny (and me!) for a weekend experience at a resort where Jenny and her speakers will teach you to:

1. Create a springboard to accelerate personal success in life and work.
2. Focus attention on the key factors that open the doors to designing your dream life.
3. Challenge you and empowering you to take the actions that will move you forward NOW.

So what are you waiting for? Go comment!

I’d like to start out by saying that I hope this doesn’t affect my readership. I think the world of my readers, and I understand that we are all entitled to our own personal political beliefs. This is simply my opinion. Feel free to agree and disagree, but please do not resort to angry name-calling. Keep it civil and intelligent.

If people are the greatest resource a nation has, then a primary goal of government is to inspire those people to do what is necessary to make that nation great. This is simply an exercise in the marketing of ideas on the grandest scale. While McCain might be a maverick who can help to clean up Washington, Obama is the candidate who has nailed the ability to communicate and inspire people to do more. Inspiring confidence and communicating with people may mean more than any bill either candidate can get signed into law.

– From “Marketing and the Economy; Why America Needs Obama and Coca-Cola” by Joe Marchese, MediaPost

This post may be too late for some, and I actually considered not posting it. I’m not very eloquent about my political beliefs – my expertise is in marketing. Then my mom told me she was still undecided. So this one is for you, Mom.

I’ve been in marketing for about a year and a half now. I’m no Guy Kawasaki, but I’ve really taken to the field. I’m fascinated by what motivates people to make a purchase, choose a certain product or brand, and how pyschographics plays into that. So, when Ad Age named Barack Obama Marketer of the Year, I wasn’t surprised. The man is a marketing genius. I actually think this is why people compare him to JFK. It’s not so much the youth thing – it’s the agent of change thing.

Whether or not you agree with the issues, I think you should vote for Obama.

Obama is the candidate that has been able to inspire large chunks of the population to believe that things can change for the better. Whenever I’ve had conversations with my acquaintances and friends about why I am voting for Obama, I cite consumer confidence.

Either way, I think the markets will see an upswing after Nov. 2. Any change in leadership is a positive one, in my opinion. But I think we will see a greater upswing in national confidence if Obama is elected. For one thing, other great nations would like to see Obama as president. If he were elected, I think you would see faith restored in the international markets.

If McCain is elected, a large portion of the population will be left dejected and with a total loss of faith in their nation. This election is more to us than any other election. For someone my age, the belief that I can, along with my fellow Americans, create lasting and vital change hinges on the outcome of this election. Obama has been able to inspire a historically apathetic voting demographic to become involved in politics, to show up at the polls (I’ll be voting for the first time since 2000), and to take an earnest interest in the future of their nation.

McCain simply doesn’t connect with people on that level. If McCain is elected, my belief in America as a great nation that can lead the world into an era of positive change will be shattered. I will know that my nation has failed the vision test, that I live in a country blinded by fear-mongering, hatred and impotence. Change will be slow, not swift. We will have elected a corporation where we needed a start-up. It will be titanic effort instead of nimble agility, which is what we see with brands that “act small” versus the colossus of slow-to-change industries.

It takes more than wielding power to get a law passed. Like Joe Marchese said earlier this month in an article on MediaPost, the American brand has taken a beating recently. Which message would we like to send our nation and to other nations – one where we’re too blinded by fear of change and backward-looking issues to make the leap of faith, or one that stands for change, belief and hope?

I for one, regardless of the issues, because let’s face it – it’s less about abortion, the economy, and oil than it is about the kind of nation we’d like to have, would like to put our nation’s best face forward. I don’t think that’s what McCain will be about. I want a strong person in power who is ready to lead this nation into the 21st century. It’s not about the issues – it’s about the message.

What message do you want to send?