"How to Succeed in Business" by Melicious

1. Dress for the job you want. Not the job you have.  These glasses are Ocelot print. I just ordered them today. Ocelot. Not leopard. Because leopard prints are for ladies of the night and I am a lady of the day.

Selfie taken AT optometrists office while eyes
were dialating. 

Wait... that sounded like I'm a prostitute during the day. I am not... I am just a lady who sleeps at night. 

Double super wait? Does this mean I want to be an ocelot or a lady of the night? 

2. Project confidence. Ilicit confidence from your subordinates by never letting them see you actually don't have any idea what just happened. Or where you are. Or how you got there. 

I am R's boss. Seriously. They put me in charge of other people. So weird. 

3. Keep emails brief and to the point. When someone asks me a series of questions such as: 

Has that project been completed? Can we expect to see a summary? Who should we contact with questions? 

An appropriate reply is:

"No. Yes. Me." 

People are busy. Don't waste time with pleasantries or adjectives.

4. Know your audience. When communicating on legal topics as a non-lawyer, however, verbosity is key. So is using words like "verbosity."

 5. Keep things professional, but don't take yourself too seriously. Comedy is fun. People like to laugh. I refer to my staff meetings as Mel's Comedy Hour because I spend the hour trying to get my staff to like me by giving them a directive and then making jokes about things that happened when they were babies and I was was in High School and then going, "No? You don't know who Skeletor is? He-Man? Damn I'm old. Go do that thing I told you to do. And get older." 

6. Become a mentor. Or find a mentor. Mentorship is key. Tonight I was chatting with a coworker with a much better title than I have on how to survive her meeting with the CEO, CFO, and someone else that is scary. Here was my advice/motivation:

There is no  "worst that can happen" because the meeting itself is already the worst... so it's all uphill from there!

and

Speak loudly like you went to school for exactly what you're talking about. Wave your hands around. Make a joke. And then trail off while everyone tries to remember what we were talking about. ... the less the joke makes sense, the better. It just has to sound funny.  

I'm pretty sure my advice is going to win her that meeting. Because meetings are a competition. I win all the time by saying things like "FUCK!" really loudly and then people are startled because I'm wearing a pink dress and a blue sweater and cussing like a sailor and they can't figure out if it's funny or scary or amazing so they pretty much stop arguing with me.

7. Strive for Work-Life Balance. For example, if there is a parade of cows outside your office but you're on a conference call, mute your phone, pull out your cell, and start taking pictures and posting them to Facebook STAT. Because holy shit there was a herd of cattle downtown and you almost never see that every day.

8. Be flexible. If you have a total of 30 minutes in your day to pee, eat, and/or actually do your job in between meetings and someone asks you if they can squeeze in for 30 minutes somewhere in your day, send them a screenshot of your calendar. If they persist, draw them a picture.

You don't even have to be good at drawing.

9. Be a leader. I don't even know what that means.

10. Can I go home now?