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“I want you to know that the thrill you feel being on the path to your dream is not mutually exclusive from the feeling of discomfort, and, on occasion, misery.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Remember that you are not obliged to meet anyone where they are emotionally, especially if where they are is toxic or unhinged. The more visibly upset you get, the more you perpetuate the negativity; the more rattled and distracted you are, the more you give the bullies what they want. Unless”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“You worked too hard to get here to let it go because some business-y bullshit bums you out. If you focus on becoming great at what you do (which we will talk about more specifically later in this book, and which I heartily encourage), if you keep your mind open to learning and seek out new challenges and opportunities and are kind to people in the process, no one and nothing can slow you down—especially not something as frivolous as the corporate-culture nonsense conducted under those fluorescent lights. And,”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“I'm loath to bring up the E word here, and I'm even more embarrassed to talk about "millennials" in this way because it is a terrible cliché you've heard a hundred million times, and it is not a cliché I actually believe to be true. However, in writing a book for people in their twenties in 2017, I'd be remiss to not discuss this biggest criticism against them. If you are a twenty-something working in the world of Gen Xers and baby boomers, many older people think you are entitled. This is probably not news to you. Your bosses meet over glasses of wine and get parent drunk about how lazy you are and how you don't respect authority and don't take initiative and also what a pain in the ass and entitled they feel you are. Boo-hoo.
It doesn't matter that the assessment is a wild, sweeping stereotype, nor that it's not actually true or fair--after managing millennials successfully for years, I know it's not. There's not an entire generation of lazy jerks walking around, waiting to steal jobs and assignments they don't deserve. Also, people of all ages can and do act entitled, and this is just a tidy, cantankerous way to label a whole census block of folks and make them seem less threatening because some people (cough cough: olds) feel afraid that they might be aging out of their careers and not feel as relevant as before.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“class called Environmental Science, which involved me and a bunch of burnouts walking around the park behind school while they got stoned and I collected creek samples and worms (the only class that year in which I got an A).”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Perms”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“No matter how hard you try to bend and appease and please and hide yourself away to make those whom you “intimidateâ€� happy, their feelings about you may never abate. The best you can do is recognize that “I feel intimidatedâ€� is really code for “You threaten me/I need attention and love.â€� Recognizing this doesn’t mean you have to transform into a lovable, validation-parroting Furby. If it feels right, you can choose to be more open and emotionally generous at work; if it doesn’t, you can simply say “fuck ’em,â€� keep your head down, and focus on your work.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Even when you think no one is watching, good people, kind people, smart people, the senior people you want to work with and for, recognize this kind of work. We see you. We praise your work and talk about how amazing you are in secret boss e-mails we send to each other: “If you ever have a position open, this is the person you should hire.â€� “Oh, I just heard you hired X, that was a VERY SMART move.â€� We go out of our way for you. We recommend you for jobs you don’t even know you want. Your goodness, coupled with hard work and skill, means something, even when you feel most despondent, even when you’re dealing with dark office bullshit. Even when you think it does not, your greatness counts.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Being great means being prepared, putting in more effort than you need to.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“If you’re a craftswoman, you should dedicate time to perfecting your craft. You should follow the trends in your industry with at least the enthusiasm you’d give to following juicy celebrity gossip or season 2 of your favorite show. You should understand why your company succeeds and how it fails, even if it’s boring, even if you hate charts. If you’re a creative, you should understand the business side of things, enough so you’re empowered and don’t feel helpless or lost. Learn how to read a P&L statement. Examine the fine print in your contract before you sign, even if it’s making your eyes cross.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“You can’t just be weird, you also have to be good. And you have to be kind to people. But beyond that, you only need to be yourself. You have to let that freak flag blow around and around at full mast and let the world take you in. It is TOTALLY COOL to be who you are, because this is so much better than trying constantly to be a shiny perfect droid person. You—and everyone around you—will have so much more fun. You will enjoy the experience you worked so hard to live.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Disasters are temporary; don’t get attached to them.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Unless someone tells you directly that they hate an idea, don’t want to collaborate with you, or don’t like your work, you are better off assuming a positive than a negative. Even when some of what you’re sensing is true, the truth doesn’t matter as much as your perception of it. Fixating on possible shade, inserting your own narcissism into someone else’s bad day, distorting conversations, and projecting negative feelings that don’t really exist or, if they do, are slight and insignificant—it’s all a slippery slope toward the crazy abyss.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Mistakes and unfortunate events like these will happen to you and to almost every weirdo you know. You may even get “in troubleâ€� for them. When you do, don’t blow them out of proportion; don’t obsess over them. Don’t let your weird brain take over and turn this all into the disaster that it is not. The events themselves don’t actually matter; how you recover from them does. If something is your fault, don’t deny it, don’t get defensive, just apologize. Quickly and succinctly. If you can, do it in person: “I am so sorry about today. It won’t happen again.â€� Then make sure it doesn’t, at least not for a long time.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Networking is small talk with a mission. The key to being successful at it is to approach it strategically: Do your homework on potential mentors and professional allies before you meet them, virtually or IRL. Find your commonalities—we went to the same school! We know the same lady! We both have dogs OMG. Compliment them about specific parts of their careers or projects you particularly admired.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“If you focus on becoming great at what you do (which we will talk about more specifically later in this book, and which I heartily encourage), if you keep your mind open to learning and seek out new challenges and opportunities and are kind to people in the process, no one and nothing can slow you down—especially not something as frivolous as the corporate-culture nonsense conducted under those fluorescent lights. And,”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Sometimes, too often, you feel apologetic just for being you, in your skin. You overanalyze situations to a paralyzing degree. But you’re getting better. You’re trying to own your space on this planet. There’s a glimmer inside you, an ember that says you are not just good but great, that knows you belong, that wants not only to compete but also to win. You fan that flame inside cautiously, optimistically, quietly. You don’t joke about this. Maybe much of working life and the professional world still seems gobsmacking, inorganic, insane. But you’re trying to normalize it all, to make a confident home out of your body. To do this, you’ll need to soothe the self-hating, self-sabotaging parts of your brain. You’ll need to shut down—or at least slow down—the overthinking and self-consciousness that lead you to false conclusions, the paralyzing insecurity and inappropriate attention grabs. You need to survive yourself.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“The secret to becoming successful is little more than resilience, smarts, and the audacity to keep going when the world tells you to fuck off.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Your natural, normal instinct when they tell you no will be to feel abject and rejected, but try to think of the job search process like the relationship search process—if they don’t want you, you don’t want them. That’s it. If they don’t want you, you don’t want them. Say it over and over again. Chant it like a mantra while drinking wine out of the bottle and crying in the mirror in your underwear. Then wake up the next morning and look for the next thing. You’re OK. The next thing will come. It will be better than this other thing. High-five yourself for having the courage to go for something you wanted, even if it didn’t work out, even if you didn’t get it. Knowing what you want is half of this crazy battle. Each rejection helps to crystallize this. You will get the next job. You will get the job that’s right for you right now. And then you will have a whole new set of problems.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“​Ask questions, but not too many: three or four, max. If the person hasn’t answered these yet, ask: What does success look like in this role? What are the expectations for the first six months? Asking the interviewer about a project that’s made her most proud is always a nice way to shift the focus away from you for a minute, and lets you get to know the person who might be your boss.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Being a weirdo or an outlier or even a slacker and achieving real, high-level success are not mutually exclusive, even if all the CEOs you’ve seen look vanilla and the same. And even if all the business-success books are written by normals who you couldn’t imagine struggling with e-mail hoarding and having toothpaste in their hair. You are not shut out of the club just because you are awkward and not perfect or don’t look the part. Perfection is a fantasy anyway. If you are a card-carrying weirdo, your sensitivity and raw way of being in the world is not a detriment, it’s an asset. Your all-in, all-fucks-given intensity, your difference, is exactly what makes you special and a breath of fresh air in the business world. Your weirdness is an asset. Embracing it (in addition to working hard and becoming great at what you do) will help you succeed in almost any profession that you feel passionate about. If you want it, you can have a totally rewarding career that makes you real money and allows you to stay true to the misfit you really are.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“How do I walk the line between being ambitious, competitive, and powerful and being a 1980s-movie dragon career lady in shoulder-pads who everyone hates (and I hate too)? And, most important: How do I do all this and stay true to who I am?”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“I kept choking, but I made it despite myself.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“(there are never enough years in a world that has both alcohol and kittens. I imagine you understand).”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“He woke every morning at 5:30 a.m., had one of those Very Productive People/Secrets of Success agendas from 5:30 to 6:30, when he ate a teaspoon of skim milk and two almonds and did 280 crunches and rubbed the New Yorker all over his body* before he lint-brushed his entire life.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Destiny is not a GPS system that turns on the minute you start doing the right things and tells you exactly where to go. You have to accept uncertainty and the scariness of the unknown. You have to keep moving somewhere, one foot in front of the other, to give yourself hope that it will be better than it was before.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“we don’t always know what we need, we don’t always know what’s right, until it happens, and that humility and openness to different outcomes and possibilities might actually be the most important qualities you can have as you search for your first (and third, and even final) job.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“You have merit as precisely what you are at this moment. Stick with that.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Roll around in the world, examine what you like and what you don’t, study what comes naturally to you and what doesn’t. Follow your bad feelings to their origin. Lift up the rock of your envy of that girl who makes textiles/writes graphic novels/builds buildings/takes pictures. Expose yourself. Get to a place where you are vulnerable and open. In this journey of exploration, there may come a moment when what you want to do will slap you in the face, when doing this thing and imagining yourself doing this thing will feel so special as to almost be illicit, and when thinking about getting paid just for doing this thing will nearly kill you with happiness. When someone else is doing what you want to do, you will blaze with jealousy. It will burn and burn and burn inside you. Actually doing what you want to do will make you feel so afraid your body will shake, and you will want to throw up. Whether your career dream is specific or broad, creative or medical or political or technical, gaining access to this dream will feel exhilarating. This is how you know you’ve found it.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures

“Now listen with more intention, because probably what you’re actually hearing is: I wish that were me. And instead of wasting all this time being jealous, sad, or pissed, you should channel that energy into transforming your life.”
― Jennifer Romolini, Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures