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Putting the benefit statement in your verbal Nutshell Resume brings your job to life and makes it memorable.

The second rule for staffing from strength is to make each job demanding and big. It should have challenge to bring out whatever strength a man may have. It should have scope so that any strength that is relevant to the task can produce significant results.

A business attached to your time is a job. - A business that earns income exclusive of your time satisfies the Commandment of Time.

Eric responded with perhaps the best piece of career advice that I have ever heard. He covered my spreadsheet with his hand and told me not to be an idiot (also a great piece of advice). Then he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job--fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies grow more slowly or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to not be doing them. Politics and stagnation set in, and everyone falters. He told me, "If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don't ask what seat. You just get on." I made up my mind that instant. Google was tiny and disorganized, but it was a rocket ship. And even more important to me, it was a rocket ship with a mission I believed in deeply.

he told me he was CEO of a company that made screws. Then he offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was an ongoing process. This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are the best job for you won't become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for the better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.

NEGOTIATING TACTIC: Most of the negotiation happens outside the room. Call your contacts. Figure out the salary amount you'd love, what you can realistically get, and what you'll settle for. And don't just ask for money. Literally bring a strategic plan of what you want to do in the position and hand it to your hiring manager. Do you realize how few people come to a negotiation with a plan for their role? This alone could win you $2,000 to $5,000. And, of course, it allows you to negotiate on the value you're going to bring to the company, not just the amount they'll pay you.

The greatest lessons you learn in the beginning of a career are about people--how to work with people, be managed by people, manage expectations with people, and lead other people. As such, the team you choose to join, and your boss, are huge factors in the value of a professional experience early in your career. Choose opportunities based on the quality of people you will get to work with.

taking a "scalable" profession is not a good idea, simply because there are far too few winners in these professions. Well, these professions produce a large cemetery: the pool of starving actors is larger than the one of starving accountants, even if you assume that, on average, they earn the same income.

get your head down in the office and hope for promotion every couple of years until you're 65.

Lori, who wisely focused on solving Facebook's recruiting problem before focusing on herself. This is not just thinking communally--the expected and often smart choice for a woman--but simply good business.

the single best time to negotiate salary is when you're starting a new job. You have the most leverage then and--with some basic preparation--you can earn PS3,000 or PS6,000 in a simple ten-minute conversation, then retire to a nearby cafe for a light lunch. Delightful.

Have another job offer--and use it. This is the single most effective thing you can do to increase your salary. When you have another job offer, your potential employers will have a newfound respect for your skills. It's like seeing the hot girl in the bar who's surrounded by guys. You want her more because everyone else does, too.

Taking risks, choosing growth, challenging ourselves, and asking for promotions (with smiles on our faces, of course) are all important elements of managing a career. One of my favorite quotes comes from author Alice Walker, who observed, "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."

Twentysomethings who don't feel anxious and incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed.

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the "real world"? What advice should they ignore? [My advice is to] take risks, now. The advantages that college students and new grads have are their youth, drive, lack of significant responsibilities, and, importantly, lack of the creature comforts one acquires with time. Nothing to lose, everything to gain. Barnacles of the good life tend to slow you down, if you don't get used to risk-taking early in your career.

Technique 25: The nutshell resume Just as job-seeking top managers roll a different written resume off their printers for each position they're applying for, let a different true story about your professional life roll off your tongue for each listener. Before responding to 'What do you do?' ask yourself, 'What possible interest could this person have in my answer? Could he refer business to me? Buy from me? Hire me? Marry my sister? Become my buddy?'

If the first step in establishing a professional identity is claiming our interests and talents, then the next step is claiming a story about our interests and talents, a narrative we can take with us to interviews and coffee dates.

don't expect people to say it's their dream to work here forever. I roll my eyes at that. No one knows where they will be in five years. Still, the burden is on the applicants to show that working here makes sense beyond the person just wanting a job or the building being two blocks from their apartment."

Interviewers want to hear a reasonable story about the past, present, and future. How does what you did before relate to what you want to do now, and how might that get you to what you want to do next? Everyone realizes most applicants don't actually know what their careers will look like. Even the ones who think they do often change their minds.

Your starting salary is even more important than you think because it sets the bar for future raises and, in all likelihood, your starting salary at future jobs. A PS1,000 or PS2,000 salary increase, in other words, can equal many times that over your career. Now let me show you how to get thousands by negotiating for a better salary.

Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.