If you're trying to get ahead in the corporate world, appearing smart in meetings should be your top priority. This can be hard if you find yourself daydreaming about Mexico, margaritas or queso cheese dip.
Sarah Cooper
In the corporate world, there is no ground more fertile for appearing smart than the rich earth that is electronic communication. Your email writing, sending and ignoring skills are just as important as your nodding skills, and even more important than your copying and pasting skills.
Black women usually don't get the luxury of faking their way through life and still succeeding, but when a white guy does it, he may even get to be the president of the United States.
Getting up and drawing a Venn diagram is a great way to appear smart. It doesn't matter if your Venn diagram is wildly inaccurate, in fact, the more inaccurate the better.
Wearing a giant, over-sized scarf will make you look deeply intelligent in almost any situation, but especially a book club.
There are many ways to deal with annoying coworkers, but obviously the most effective way is to picture them as rappers. Picturing your coworkers as rappers makes you laugh and provides a helpful nickname that can be used when talking about them behind their backs.
Stealing something from Apple is the most innovative way to be seen as an innovative, digital-first company.
When something really affects you, it's hard to find the humor in it sometimes. There's are a lot of reasons why there are so many white male comedians, but I think part of it is that they are able to joke about a lot of things because a lot of things don't affect them personally.
Never, ever, ever show up to your office holiday party on time.
Coming from a large immigrant family, my parents didn't encourage a lot of 'play' when I was growing up. It was hard to get my Dad to even sit down to watch television with us (he'd watch it standing up, always ready to go do something more productive). Downtime was discouraged, as was any college degree that wasn't law, medicine or business.
Laughter is so important.
Engineers aren't professional grammarticians, but they love correcting people. Even more, they love making you feel stupid.
If you're ever struggling for something to say, just take a noun and verbalize it. Using simple words in new and interesting ways will creativize your presence.
The best thing about going to a tech conference is that you can tell everyone you're going to a tech conference. But while you're there, it's important you make a smart impression so people will remember you, or at least wait a few days before throwing away your business card.
20 or 30 exclamation points can go a long way to making the tone of your email excited and cheerful.
Facebook has created a rash of mental zombies in a meme-feeding frenzy.
I was still working at Google when I wrote the blog post '10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings.' I was scared to share it at first because I didn't want my coworkers to think that I was making fun of them - which I totally was. But then afterward I had people coming up to me like, 'I have a meeting trick! Put my meeting trick in your next post!'
My Dad doesn't see limitations; he either sees hard workers or people who are lazy. As a result, despite any disability or obstacle, my siblings and I all lead relatively happy and successful lives. I believe a good deal of this is due to the fact that excuses were rarely tolerated.
I've been blogging since the 80s. Okay maybe not that long. But starting around 2004, I launched and abandoned many blogs, and would continue to do so over the next decade.
The biggest lesson I've learned about drawing is that it takes time. Which is really annoying.
I voted for Hillary Clinton.
Believe it or not, joining a video conference call from home doesn't always have to make you feel like an idiot.
I guess a younger me would like that I tried acting? Although I swore that I'd actually go to L.A. and try to make it in movies and I didn't do that. I did try, though. And I found that I didn't like it.
Stand up comedy can be a tough world to break into. It can take years of painful soul searching, disappointing performances, and pounding the pavement day in and day out with very little reward.
I love getting things done. That's why I spend several hours a day reading productivity articles. And when the day is done, I bookmark the ones I didn't get to for later. I learned that trick in a productivity article.
Finding your voice as a stand up comedian means deeply knowing who you are as an artist and a human being.
When I finally accepted a full time job, I saw that as giving up on my artistic dreams. But three years later, I wrote a blog post based on life in the corporate world, which went viral and became the basis for my first book, which allowed me to quit my job to be creatively independent once again.
If you want to add visuals to your blog posts, presentations or whatever it is, and you're as bad at drawing as I am, I think tracing photos is a good place to start.
Most people see a job offer from Google as a victory, and I should have seen it that way. I should have at least seen the salary that way.
I'm kind of an introvert, so I really do have to get over some anxiety to get on stage and connect with an audience. Once I do, it's amazing, but it is a bit of a struggle.
Open mics are a great way to rework your material to see what punchlines land best.
Well, I started trying stand-up before I joined Google, actually. And then I went broke because that's what happens when you try stand-up comedy. You're actually paying to perform.
I didn't set out to be a Trump impressionist at all. It wasn't that I wanted to be Trump. It's that I was asking, 'What if Trump was me?'
Who's more annoying to work with, boomers or millennials? Depends on how you feel about emojis.
When you're Jamaican, you don't consider yourself African American even though everyone else considers you that.
Slide decks are only as great as their giant, useless appendixes, so make sure yours has a ton of useless, not even remotely relevant slides in it. You'll look like you really did your research.
For most of my 20s I felt the need to focus solely on my goals and let nothing distract me.
I just want everyone who voted for Donald Trump to get what they deserve. But then I remember most people didn't vote for him, and they shouldn't suffer.
Like everyone, appearing smart during meetings is my top priority. Sometimes this can be difficult if you start daydreaming about your next vacation, your next nap, or bacon.
I was a user experience designer for Google Docs.
One of the best things you can do to get on an engineer's good side is make him feel as much like a regular person as possible, without insulting his intelligence. Say things like, 'You're too cool to be an engineer,' or 'Nice kicks!' or 'You don't seem lonely at all.' Note: This only works on male engineers.
I don't want to spend my energy on people who don't like me.
Women say things that are direct - they are told they are too abrasive. I got that feedback in the corporate world.
At my last job in the tech world, we'd throttle our wi-fi to experience what download speeds might be like for someone in the developing world. It was our attempt to experience it first hand. I thought it was a bit ridiculous because, no matter what we did, we wouldn't be able to fully experience their world unless we were living it every day.
I've heard Donald Trump say some pretty unhinged things. I've heard them over and over and over again. But nothing is more dangerous to our democracy than his attacks on mail-in voting in the middle of a pandemic.
People love self-deprecating humor.
That's why Trump is so funny, because he thinks he sounds brilliant.
You absolutely cannot be big time tech guy without attending Burning Man.
Live comedy in a club, with an audience - it's hard to recreate that experience in a digital world. With Zoom, your face is there the whole time, and you feel like you have to always be on. You feel like you always have to be paying attention, and it can be exhausting.
I had been writing and performing stand-up comedy pretty much the entire time I worked at Google.
