Q: What do landing the perfect job, finding your ideal mate, and winning friends all have in common?

A: They all require you to know how to market yourself.

Yes, it’s the reason people sweat interviews (and first dates), spend hours drafting cover letters, and even pay others to assemble their résumés — we don’t always know the best way to sell ourselves. Marketing yourself is an essential skill to get where you want to go, but the process is often easier said than done.

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I was twenty when the overwhelming urge to head to the Southwest struck. I was a junior in college, living on a tiny island off the coast of Maine, and I was hungry to explore the alien landscape of slickrock and sandstone, to see arches and mesas and unimaginable rock formations with my own eyes. The canyons were calling to me, so in the spring of 1998, I took a Greyhound bus from Maine to Utah.

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Disclaimer: I’ve never been skydiving.

The first step of blogging, like skydiving, is making the commitment to do it. Once you’ve decided you’re going to skydive, you’ve got to decide on a method for your jump. Are you going in tandem? How about an accelerated free fall? Or should you static line that bad boy?

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Advertising, like language, is no modern phenomenon. Today, we’re so overburdened with ads that advertising has garnered a negative connotation. “Ugh, how can we get ads off of Facebook?” or “Why can’t they skip the ads before the movie starts?” are common 21^st century woes.

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One of the most internationally ubiquitous weapons, the Russian AK-47, has undergone a little makeover. The assault rifle was developed in the 1940s in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died almost exactly one year ago. Prior to his death, the weapons engineer wrote of his “spiritual pain” in wondering if the AK-47 has done more harm than good. Although Kalashnikov’s intentions to invent a weapon of defense may have been noble, it’s impossible to determine if the weapon has wrought more destruction than it has ever defended, given the AK-47’s uncontrolled global distribution.

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Unless you’ve been under a rock, you know that good jobs are hard to find and the competition is stiffer than ever. However, to say that the methods used by companies and potential employees to find one another have changed a tad in the last ten years or so would be a gross understatement. The birth and evolution of social media have shattered the antiquated process of carefully crafting a résumé on a typewriter (with a bottle of Liquid Paper in hand, of course) and then pounding the pavement to hand-deliver it to as many companies as possible. With all facets of the job/employee hunt shifting to the interwebs, does the old-school, paper résumé still hold any relevance in today’s world?

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