Outdoor Haven

Millennials will represent 75% of the American workforce by 2025. This statistic is commonly used, but there isn’t much thought put into the implications of that number. The reality of this number will fundamentally change businesses, as it is unprecedented for one single generation to comprise such a majority of the workforce. This number is significant when compared to the 63.3% of executives eligible for retirement within the next few years. That number breaks down to roughly 10,000 people retiring every day. As baby boomers retire, younger employees have the opportunity to step into vacant roles. Millennials are currently leading the way in getting promoted, as one study found 87% of millennials have taken on management roles in recent years. This is compared to 38% of those in Generation X and 19% of Baby Boomers. Jared Freeman became the youngest president ever at ASECU last year. (Credit: Trey Taulbee/University of Mobile)  What can millennials do to prep...

There’s an odd sense of vertigo when you see a face you recognize in a glossy magazine. Still, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Abai Schulze confidently gazing at me from the magazine rack. In an economics class full of the standard George Washington University overachievers, she stood out. Even then she spoke about her twin passions of fashion and improving life in Ethiopia, the country of her birth. That struck me as an odd pairing at the time. But not long after graduation, Schulze founded ZAAF, a premium leather goods and accessories collection handcrafted by artisans in Ethiopia. She’s one of a rising tide of African designers, such as Maki Oh from Nigeria, aAks from Ghana, among others. Schultze recently turned 28 but started the business when she was 25. ZAAF brought in revenue of $160k last year and has 15 full-time employees and an additional 5-7 part-time employees depending on the season. They are based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. However, I wanted to know ...

American women have made incredible gains in recent decades, but there’s one playing field that has yet to be leveled: the workplace. Although women make up about half the S&P 500 labor force, they represent only 25 percent of senior managers, just 19 percent of board seats, and a meager 4.6 percent of CEO roles at those companies. And it’s not because we’re unqualified. A woman’s path to the top is often blocked by five roles men project onto us in the workplace. When men see female colleagues as glowering mothers or tempting mistresses, it’s not just demeaning; it stunts our career potential. The good news, though, is that once you learn how these roles manifest themselves at the office, you can combat them. Stand tall, take note of peers’ actions, and get ready to shatter that glass ceiling. 1. The Mistress Heidi Roizen is a successful venture capitalist, corporate director, and entrepreneur, but even she isn’t immune to inappropriate stereotyping. On her blog,...

Recently I interviewed respected designers and asked them about the books that influenced their thinking and skyrocketed their careers. Then Visme reached out with an infographic they made to illustrate these interviews. Here is an infographic featuring 5 designers sharing their top 5 books ranging from architecture, history, art, copywriting, leadership, business and of course design. If you’re looking for books to improve your creativity, check the full list of designers and their recommended books. Felipe Memoria is a designer and founding partner at the digital product development firm, Work & Co . He was born in Brazil, where he published “Design for the Internet: Designing the Perfect Experience”, a widely regarded book on creating digital products. Vignelli A to Z by Massimo Vignelli Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography by Franz Schulze Unimark International: The Design of Business and the Business Design by Jan Conradi Talent is Overrated: W...

Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images For years, I got zero results on LinkedIn. Zilch. Nada. A big goose egg. Today, I get nearly all my clients from LinkedIn. They call – or email – me. In this article, I’m going to show you three unbelievably effective ways to turn LinkedIn into an engine that can power your career to a much greater extent than it is today. It doesn’t matter whether you are a physician, engineer, artist, consultant, sales executive, or mathematician. Okay, that’s not really true; I’m not sure these tactics will work for mathematicians. But everyone else, move closer. 1. Put something besides your job title in your headline . Your headline is those words right under your name. Most people write something like “Assistant Vice President at Megabank”. Here’s the problem: this doesn’t tell me anything. Are you an expert on credit risk or marketing? Do you work with consumers or businesses? Are you a dynamic innovator or a detail-oriented project ...

Source: Apple Love them or hate them, there is no denying that Apple’s annual events generate a lot of attention. While they’ve lost a bit of their shine in the post-Steve Jobs era, they still do an excellent job of taking something as mundane as the release of a new phone model and transform it into something newsworthy. However, the last event on September 7th stood out. While the technological updates introduced can be best described as incremental, Apple did make a bold announcement: the decades-old headphone jack is now a thing of the past. It was a move bound to cause controversy and conspiracy theories, but Apple insisted that it represented a natural progression towards a more sophisticated long-term view of the product. The real controversy, however, came when Phil Schiller, head of Apple’s marketing team, said that the decision took “courage.” Almost immediately, the collective eye-rolling began. The internet reacted as it often does, with righteous ind...

Shutterstock Sensitive people get a bad rap. Research suggests that genes are responsible for the 15-20% of people who qualify as “highly sensitive.” Psychologist Elain Aron has studied this phenomenon extensively, and using MRI scans of highly sensitive people’s brains, she’s found that they experience sounds, feelings, and even the presence of other people much more intensely than the average person. Sensitivity And Emotional Intelligence Emotional intelligence (EQ) is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships. The good news is that highly sensitive people aren’t more or less emotionally intelligent than others. They just use emotional intelligence differently. Highly sensitive people experience things more intensely. Their strong emotions are easier to identify (and potentially use to their benefit) than the average person. This also h...

Historically, when new technologies become easier to use, they transform industries. That’s what’s happening with artificial intelligence and big data; as the barriers to implementation disappear (cost, computing power, etc.), more and more industries will put the technologies into use, and more and more startups will appear with new ideas of how to disrupt the status quo with these technologies. By my predictions, the AI revolution isn’t coming, it’s already here, and we’ll see it first in a few key sectors. Healthcare Most people agree that healthcare is broken, and many startups believe that the biggest answer is putting the power back in the hands of the patient. We’re all carrying the equivalent of Star Trek’s tricorder around in our pockets (or an early version, at any rate) and smartphones and other smart devices will continue to advance and integrate with AI and big data to allow individuals to self-diagnose. Sequencing of individual genomes a...

Shutterstock What is the one skill all successful people possess? It certainly isn’t the ability to invent things, or communication skills or technical skills. Successful people come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are highly technical and some aren’t. Some of them have a knack for business and other successful people don’t. That’s okay! They can always hire people who know more about business than they do. The one skill all successful people possess is the ability to learn  from their mistakes. It is not really an ability — it is a willingness. People who achieve their dreams make way more mistakes than most people do, because they try way more things than most people do. They are always experimenting. They are always moving forward. If something they try doesn’t work out for them, they say “Oh well — great learning!” and they try something else. People who are not successful either don’t try new things, or they try them but they get frustra...

I don’t know your background, what your career is, what your aspirations are. Frankly – I don’t know anything about you. Well, I do know one thing. I know that you’ve failed. You sucked it up big time at the office once or maybe even 400 times. You’ve gotten it wrong in at least one job, probably more. You’ve been disappointed in yourself, shocked by the end result, embarrassed, whatever. You went home, shut the door and dealt with it privately or you brought someone in to share the misery. Maybe you framed it as anger or frustration at someone else, but inside you were mostly pissed at yourself. We all know it’s happened at least once. Congratulations. Welcome to the club, here’s your card. In other news, you’re now ahead of the curve. Certainly you’re farther along than where you were when you made your first big bold steps into that first office you ever worked (and if you haven’t started your first big kid job yet, you’ve got this coming to you). I...

Shutterstock Dear Liz, I’m in a jam at work and I have no idea how to get out of it. I like my job in general but the hours are killing me. It’s my first salaried job. Just keeping up with my regular work takes me more than eight hours a day and then my boss gives me special projects on top of it. I get to work at seven-thirty a.m. and I never leave before 6:30 or 6:45 at night. To make it worse, my boss doesn’t appreciate the extra time I spend  in the office. She is out the door every day at five or five-fifteen. She shakes her head at me and says “You need help with your time management! When Linda was in your job, she got everything done by five.” I never met Linda because she left the state when she quit this job, but I don’t know she got everything done in eight hours. It’s just not that kind of job. My CEO works late and he has commented to me a few times “I really appreciate your dedication, Rosalind” but that’s as far as it has ever gone...

Shutterstock Dear Liz, My first boss out of college was Lloyd, and he was a great boss. I didn’t really appreciate how awesome it was to work for Lloyd until I left that job. I took a better job at an international consulting firm and I liked the travel, but I missed working for Lloyd. My second boss was Clara. Then I worked for Jeanine. Both Clara and Jeanine were angry, competitive, difficult managers. I would go home half in tears at least once a month. Nothing I did would ever please them. It wasn’t just me. The whole team was upset and turnover was bad. I got out of the consulting firm after two years and went to work for a client.  That’s where I work now. Once again I was hired by a man, Jeremy. Jeremy got promoted to CFO and now I work for Rachel, who is another horrible boss. I am only 26 but I have learned that I cannot work for a female boss. They are too mean, too picky and too quick to take offense. I need to work for a man. I have...

Shutterstock Dear Liz, I am feeling so deflated. I had three incredible interviews over the past four weeks with a great firm. I almost felt like I was part of the team because they were so welcoming and happy to talk with me. The CEO said at one point “I can see you running even a larger slice of our business than this job entails — over time.” Then after three fantastic interviews the recruiter Patrick told me “They like you a lot, but they’re going to bring in some more candidates to interview.” I was pretty taken aback and pretty angry. I’m not even sure I want the job any more. What was lacking in me that made them want to meet more candidates? Should I wait while they interview those people (I don’t think they have more candidates to interview, so they’re going to have to find some) or just drop out of the process? Thanks Liz, Gabbie Dear Gabbie, Don’t despair! They met you, they loved you and they all thought “Wow! This Gabbie is incr...

Shutterstock Dear Liz, Over the past six months I’ve come to the realization that my job is not a good fit for me anymore. I can do the job in my sleep and my manager doesn’t want me to take on any more responsibility. I’m bored, I don’t get paid enough and I’m undervalued at work. Everyone in our department has the same problem. I have what some people call a “job job.” It’s not a career path. It’s just a job to pay the bills, and I shouldn’t have stayed here as long as I have. I tried for two and a half years to make this job a bigger and more challenging job than it was, but it didn’t work. I am tired of trying. Every good idea I suggest gets shot down. My manager doesn’t want to hear new ideas. She doesn’t want to think that hard. She just wants me to do my work and keep quiet. I’m going to launch a stealth job search but I worry that my current job is so menial it won’t help me get a better job. What should I do? How did I get stuck in a dumb jo...