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.

When you take yourself seriously you will make others take you seriously. You will put your ideas out there. You won't hide them. You won't delete them. You will keep trying.

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.

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.

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.

I was born in Jamaica, my whole family's Jamaican, and they always give me a hard time for being the least Jamaican member of the family. But I think it's their fault for naming me Sarah.

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.

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.

Creating a distraction is a skill we should all have. Never take for granted your ability to spot something interesting out of the corner of you eye and take attention away from your thoughtlessness.

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.

Don't treat your ideas like they're nothing, don't treat yourself like you're nothing, because you and your ideas are important and meaningful and have the potential to become so much more than you realize.

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.

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.

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.

In this fast-paced business world, female leaders need to make sure they're not perceived as pushy, aggressive or competent. One way to do that is to alter your leadership style to account for the (sometimes) fragile male ego.

The desire to get from point A to point B in the shortest, most efficient amount of time without ever wandering off path, can mean you miss out on those happy accidents that push you further and faster in a direction you never even considered.

When anti-choice men talk about abortion, you get the feeling they really have no idea what they're talking about - they haven't done even the slightest bit of research about how hard the choice really is and how painful the experience really is.

The only time my Dad ever said I might have not gotten something because of how I look was when I auditioned for Tyler Perry's 'Meet the Browns.' My dad didn't think I was 'black enough' for the show. My dad isn't the most politically correct person.

The laugh track was invented to cue the audience to the jokes and encourage laughter in response. But it has another effect: if you hear people laughing and you're not, you start to question if maybe there's something wrong with you for not getting it.

I love how much people are drawn to my 'impersonations' of Trump because they aren't really impersonations at all. I'm not trying to be Trump so much as I'm trying to make Trump me. In doing them, I simply ask myself, 'How would I, Sarah Cooper, say these words?'

When sharing your ideas, overconfidence is a killer. You don't want your male coworkers to think you're getting all uppity. Instead, downplay your ideas as just 'thinking out loud,' 'throwing something out there,' or sharing something 'dumb,' 'random,' or 'crazy.'

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.

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.

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.

As a woman of color, I've come to rely on straight white men telling me my experience of the world has nothing to do with my gender, race or class. (Unless something good happens to me, in which case they tell me my gender, race and/or class is exactly why that thing happened).

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.

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.

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.

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.

My advice for finding a literary agent would be first, put your work out there as much as possible and hopefully someone will find you, because I still have literary agents writing to me after they find my site. You want someone who understands your work and is going to be your cheerleader from day one.

Men love explaining things. But when he's explaining something and you already know that, it might be tempting to say 'I already know that.' Instead, have him explain it to you over and over again. It will make him feel useful and will give you some time to think about out how to avoid him in the future.

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.

The path to achieving your goals, as an entrepreneur or as part of a company, is just as important as reaching them. That's something I hope men can see as well. If you're going to be stepping on people to get there, that's not good. It doesn't matter if you get there if you leave a path of destroyed people behind you.

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.

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 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!'

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