Light bulb moments; we’ve all had them, sudden flashes of inspiration and the realisation that the solution to a problem is staring us in the face. Entrepreneurs have them too; only theirs are often the basis of their next business idea, some of which go on to burn brightly. Illuminating inspiration/photo credit:Pixabay Five years ago, professional drummer Tim Kitchen was doing a steady trade in online session drumming, essentially, recording drums for people over the internet.

Making mistakes as a new freelancer is part of the learning curve. Nobody becomes a freelancer one morning, lands a bunch of new high-paying clients, kicks $10,000 in a week and spends the rest of the month drinking mojitos on some fancy white-sand beach. When I was just getting started, a lot of things did go wrong. I was somewhat clueless what to charge for my work, when and how to say no to continuous growth in a project’s scope and how to avoid the vicious feast-famine cycle.

With the decline of manufacturing jobs, and the onset of automation to take over almost all kinds of work, society is on the hunt for a long-term, scalable solution to our future productivity. What will happen to displaced workers? How will mass unemployment hurt our increasingly globalized economy? One concept, a universal basic income, has been debated by thinkers as far back as the 16th century.

Dear Liz, I got laid off from my job at an insurance company about 18 months ago. I got a job right away but I jumped too fast to take that job. I should have asked more questions. It was a horrible situation and I quit after four weeks. Then I was jobless again. I wanted to take the time to evaluate job opportunities more carefully, but I wasn’t getting a lot of interviews. I ended up signing on with two temp agencies and going on short-term temp assignments.

What is the one skill all successful people possess? It certainly isn’t the ability to invent things, or communication skills or technical skills. Successful people come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are highly technical and some aren’t. Some of them have a knack for business and other successful people don’t. That’s okay! They can always hire people who know more about business than they do.

Dear Liz, I am in major distress. I hate my job. It started out as a run-of-the-mill unexciting job a year ago and it has gone downhill since then. My original boss, a huge pain in the neck, got promoted and now supervises all three of the departments that I might be qualified to work in, so I am stuck. I’ve tried to make it work. It’s simply a toxic environment.

Dear Liz, I am a fan of your writing. I am not sure what to do about a situation that arose at my job. I work on a team of researchers and data librarians. It’s a well-educated team and several of our team members, including me, are well-known in their fields. We work independently for much of our time but we also work as a team. I had my annual review last week and my Director, whom I respect, said “Your work is exemplary.

It’s never going to be the right time to chase your dreams. In 2015, I received a promotion and, after two years of balancing working and going to school—both full time– I graduated from business school with an MBA in marketing. If there were a set path toward advancing in my career, one that—as the same for many in my generation—didn’t exist five to 10 years ago, I was doing all I could to be on it.

Part of the series “Women, Leadership and Vision” Kristen Pressner (Photo by Matthew Lee) In my 18-year corporate career culminating in my role as a Vice President, I personally experienced every managerial and leadership behavior you can think of, from the most evolved and progressive, to the most archaic, backward, and damaging.

Life on campus is not as easy as it may appear. Pressure from parents, stressful classes, and social anxieties all contribute to the struggle that the over 20 million American college students endure. But above all those strains lies the overwhelming weight of student loan debt, about $35,051 on average per 2015 grad.  The soaring cost of going to college has had an immense impact on college life.