This is only a snippet of a full post about stepping down from my position at my company. You can read the whole thing over at Brazen Careerist. It’s been a hell of a ride you guys!

At the end of this month, I’m stepping down as Community Manager for Brazen Careerist. As a founder and a stockholder I’ll always be involved in the company, but career-wise I’m moving on.

I spent most my life establishing relationships with people who made me feel safe. In high school I spiked up my hair and wore nothing but tee-shirts from punk-rock bands you have never heard of. At the time I thought I was making a statement, but really I was just making it easier to know who my friends were.

In college, I joined a fraternity with Ryan Healy, my freshmen-year roommate at the time. I hung out with the same people for all four years—again, it was all about feeling safe. Some of them remain my closest friends. Others I will never talk to again because we were never really friends to begin with.

When we moved to Madison and teamed up with Penelope, everything changed. More >>

In a couple weeks, I’m presenting at the 2010 Career Summit.  My session is all about taking control of what you’re doing online, unlearning bad habits and being smarter with your time.  It’s something I’ve struggled with a lot as a Community Manager and I’m hoping that I can help people avoid some of the core mistakes that I’ve made.

Social media is great, but there are also a lot of things that social media is not good for.  Here are are few that I have learned over the years:

Blogs don’t generate money.

Plenty of talented individuals have made a small fortune from blogging, but most of us aren’t them.  Posts that talk about how easy it is to set up a blog (like this one) and make lots of passive income are stupid.  You should ignore them.  It’s not that easy.

Passive income is a joke.  Ramit Sethi compares passive-income seekers to people with bad taste.  They’re easy to pick out in a crowd.  I think this is particularly true for bloggers seeking passive income.  Their blogs remind me of used-car lots.

And WTF is passive income anyway?  Selling eBooks?  Advertising?  Webinars?  Most of the people who are doing this well (Chris Guillebeau is a great example) have made managing their online presence a big part of their life in order to make it work.

The better way to get value out of your blog is to focus on selling your offline skills because that’s where most of us have the best chance of making lots of money anyways.  I never made a dime off of my blog, but I did start a company with two other brilliant people because of blogging.

Twitter probably won’t get you a job.

I realized this was true after Jamie Varon didn’t get a job at Twitter and instead got the attention she needed to start her own company.  Twitter isn’t for job seekers.  Twitter is for entrepreneurs.

Twitter worked well for Jamie because she came up with a creative way to showcase her talent.  And Twitter is a great way to showcase your talent to a lot of strangers at once.  The problem is that most people who use Twitter aren’t being creative like that..

Unless you’re tweeting for recreational reasons, tweeting seems worthless without something else compelling to share with people.  Not to mention the fact that 71 percent of tweets are ignored anyway.  Nobody gives a damn about what you have to say in 140 characters or less unless they know that you’re interesting beyond your tweets.

You don’t need to spend a lot of time online.

We’ve been programmed to believe that more equals better, but this is wrong.  What I’m discovering is that the most talented people are being exclusive about who they network with.  There are only a handful of people out there who can significantly help you out anyway.  So this seems smart.

Being stingy about the amount of time that you spend online is a good thing because while you’re ogling down your Google reader for hours on end top performers are out there getting all of the real work done.  A good rule of thumb is that top performers spend about 15 percent of their time online and 85 percent of their time doing behind-the-scenes stuff.  I read this on Ryan Rancatore’s blog.

This makes a lot of sense to me because if I ever have a day where I just want to idly surf the web from the comfort of my own bed it doesn’t take long for me to get an email from my teammates in DC. It’s easy to identify who is doing real work versus who is just screwing around all day.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to impress my girlfriend’s parents. I want them to like me. I know for a fact that they didn’t like her last boyfriend and I feel like setting myself apart from this dude is really important. So last weekend we offered to watch their horse farm while they went to visit their other daughter.

No horses died (phew!) but I had a little accident with a tractor. While mowing the lawn I ran it into one of their barns and tore down a couple of sheets of siding in the process. This isn’t a cheap barn either. Not the kind that you can hammer a couple new pieces of plywood to at least. So I started to panic.

I’ve made a business out of helping people, I mean, that’s basically what a Community Manager does. However, mistakes of the “whoops my link doesn’t work” variety are the kind that I deal with them every day. Mistakes like “gee, I totally mangled your dream barn” aren’t really my forte.

Confront things head on

My girlfriend is a saint. She offered to tell her parents about the barn siding for me. I was really close to letting her do that because I’ve seen her mom pissed off but when she got on the phone I found myself reaching for it.

At my first post-college job I made the mistake of letting someone else deliver a mistake to my boss. Nothing makes you look less capable than having somebody else communicate your own failures.

Just look at all the celebrities and politicians that have “people” answer for their mistakes and it just ends up blowing up more.

Provide a solution

After I delivered the bad news about the barn I immediately offered to pay for the damages and drive an hour outside of Madison to do the repairs myself. I’m still waiting on the bill with fingers crossed that it doesn’t leave me drinking Busch Light for the next month, but the fact that I took ownership over the solution kept me from crippling myself with anxiety.

The great thing about making mistakes is that you’re offered a new opportunity to prove yourself by fixing the mistake. Because let’s face it, people fuck up every day at work and in their personal lives. The only thing that separates the winners from the losers is whether or not you try to fix the problem or sit around whining about it.

Do something to show that you really care

I bought brunch. I also said thanks for everything that they do for me. And I think that I’m allowed to mow the lawn again which is something that I was really worried about. I love to mow lawns and their lawn is the Mecca for landscapers.

It all comes back to being accountable and not being a whiner. There’s a little bit of a whiner in all of us though (some of us more than others). For a moment we all question whether or not we can’t point the blame somewhere else and avoid catastrophe, but I’m starting to realize that the real catastrophe is not being able to handle that one moment when everyone finds out that there is a problem…. and yes, you are the one behind it.

Learning to deal with failure is one of the hardest things that young pros have to learn. If it’s any consolation, they make for some really great stories after they’re over.

I’m lucky to be a Community Manager. It affords me with a wealth of opportunities to connect with motivated, interesting people. About a month ago it provided me with an opportunity to connect with Shane Mac—driven entrepreneur, unstoppable content creator and all around righteous dude.

It’s hard not to be inspired by someone like Shane because he has a new idea to share with me every time we chat. I really liked his idea for Ask Summit and was happy that he asked me to be a part of it. I’ll let Shane and his partner in crime, Andrew Swenson, explain what Ask Summit actually is, but I wanted to share my interview for the project. I answered the question: What do you say to people who tell you that they hate their job.

What really bugs me about people who say that they hate their job is that they take no accountability for making their situation any better. You gotta take charge of your own destiny to make things happen. I talk about this below with Shane …

What do you say when people tell you that they hate their jobs? Any sympathy for their strife? Let me know what you think …

Penelope Trunk told me that she couldn’t be my mentor. “You’re too difficult,” was what she said. At the time I didn’t care because I thought that I hated her. Emotions run high in early-stage start ups. Ours was no exception.

Over time I realized that I didn’t really hate Penelope. What I really hated was my lack of confidence when becoming self employed. Once I figured that out, we became friends.

A friend. Not a mentor. I have learned plenty about myself just from being around her, but I don’t want to be like her. I have a lot of people like this in my life.

Trial and error is my mantra. I’ve always learned things the hard way. It makes sense that I would ally myself with people I don’t typically agree with. Things are more interesting that way, and you learn more too.

When is the last time that you learned anything about yourself without conflict? The biggest lesson that I learned in 2009 was to push back when people are expecting too much out of me. I learned to set expectations for people, and if they didn’t like it, tough luck. I didn’t learn how to do this through someone I wanted to be like, I learned it through people who are nothing like me at all.

In essence, the big epiphany moments, the light bulbs, every “a-ha” was something that I came to when I stepped closer towards people I didn’t want to be like and further from people who made me feel comfortable. Chaos has been my muse, and so far she’s treated me quite well.

Life would be boring without the people that make us tick. They force us to think in different ways because we want to debate their ideas. Some days we win, others we lose. In the end, we all learn something.

I’ve never had a mentor in the traditional sense, and I think that maybe I don’t need one. I’m not the type of person who needs people to hold in high regard. I just need people who push me. And usually the best person to do that is someone who is not very much like me at all.

I almost always cut the first paragraph out of each blog post. I do this because my first paragraph rarely accomplishes anything other than self absorption. Writer’s masturbation, if you will.

I’m telling you this because you might spend a lot of time beating around the bush, too. Sometimes we end up hurting ourselves when we indulge in such tomfoolery.

I spent two days in Tulum, Mexico convinced that I was going deaf. I went diving through a bunch of reefs and caves. I was convinced that all the pressure changes knocked something loose. It’s stupid, but these are the kinds of neurotic thoughts I’ll do back flips over on a daily basis.

It took me two days of blue funk to pony up and go to a Mexican doctor. I barely understood his broken English, but he squirted a syringe of what looked like club soda into my ear, then ten minutes later pulled out a ball of wax. He showed me the dime-sized wad before tossing it down the drain and writing me a bill for 1,299 pesos.

The money didn’t matter. The time I spent worrying about the outcome cost me two days of vacation, and that did matter. I could have been sipping tequila on the Riviera Maya—not a care in the world—but I spent two days comatose from my own angst instead.

I want to learn to be better at confronting things early. I want to axe out the stage of fear where I let hours decay while I think about ungodly outcomes. I think if we all learned to do that a little better, we’d be a lot happier with our lives.

Sure, it’s quite possible that you’re the ass-kicking lord of confrontation—by god you better be blogging and sharing some of that wealth—but I’m not. And if you’re anything like me, please raise your glasses, then go schedule some time to reflect on the things you’ve been brooding over for way too long.

Like maybe there’s tension at work and you’ve been avoiding butting heads because it’s unnerving. Confront that.

Or maybe you just haven’t been blogging because you’re afraid that what you say will suck. Confront that, too.

Whatever it is that’s holding you back from living life, unabridged, confront that shit and move on. Once you’re done, you’ll feel stupid for not doing it sooner, but relieved that you finally did.

When I adopted Charlie, it fit. I’m the type of person who likes having someone to take care of, and when I was working from home I felt less lonely. I had always loved having dogs, and this was going to be the first dog that was all mine. Up until last weekend when I finally gave Charlie away, we were always able to adapt to the changes we had to face together.

When Brazen Careerist moved out of my apartment and into a real office things changed, but we were able to adapt. When the business started getting more demanding, we were able to adapt too. Even when we moved into a 900 square foot apartment with my girlfriend, who initially didn’t like dogs, we adapted.

The change that pushed me over the edge was that I felt stuck. Even worse, I felt as if the dog was stuck too. He showed me that he felt stuck by pulling used coffee filters out of the garbage, tossing the grinds all over the carpet or by opening the refrigerator and eating multiple sticks of butter and then vomiting.

Meanwhile, I showed him I was stuck by spending money. Three-hundred dollars a month on average to be exact. That’s chump change compared to what parents spend on daycare for their kids, but for a twenty-something making startup money, doggie daycare is a bitch.

Pun, definitely intended.

When Charlie first came into my life I wrote a post where I said, “you couldn’t take my dog away from me with an army behind you.” I really believed that, and I can honestly say that I tried everything to make it work.

Giving Charlie up was easily one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. There are days when I regret the decision. There are even days where I look down by my fireplace and wonder why he’s not there. But I really have to believe that letting him get unstuck was the right thing to do. Hopefully, it will help me get unstuck too.

One of the most important things I’ve learned from being in a startup is to not let yourself get stuck. When people get stuck, businesses fail. Give it the proverbial “college try” of course, but if it doesn’t work, move on.

Such is the same in other aspects of our life.

I was thinking that at the end of the post I might tell you to not get a dog if your life is unstable, like mine. But I don’t really think that’s right. In fact, a dog might be exactly what you need.

When I got Charlie, I was lost in a lot of different ways. I was in a new city. I had been struggling to find meaningful relationships with people. I wasn’t even sure if Brazen Careerist was going to work. Then I adopted a 2-month-old chocolate lab puppy. He didn’t fix any of my problems, but he reminded me to take joy in the more simple pleasures of life—something that I had forgotten.

So who am I to say that having a dog isn’t right for you? During the two years that I spent with my own dog, I’ve experienced so much joy. And even though after two years of fetching, chasing and cleaning up poop our relationship no longer made sense, I wouldn’t trade the time I had with Charlie for anything.

I want to tell you about my New Year’s resolution. I know a lot of you hate the idea of resolutions, but honestly I don’t understand why. It’s all about rebirth. That’s what the Babylonians thought when they first came up with it. And who are we to question the Babylonians?

In 2010, I’m going to write more. I wrote a lot in 2009 actually, but most of it was marketing copy for Brazen Careerist. In 2010 I’m going to take things back to a more personal place.

I’ve gone through a lot of changes in the past year, and there’s a lot that you don’t know. For instance, I spent the last year trying to train a dog who knows how to open a refrigerator door. I failed miserably, and a week ago I had to give him away.

I also moved in with my girlfriend, who I’m incredibly in love with. The only problem is that we live in Wisconsin, in a 900 square foot apartment with 1,500 books (mine and hers).

Oh yeah. I spent two days in Mexico convinced that I was going deaf. I went to a Mexican doctor and he pulled a dime-sized ball of wax from my ear. I was fine, and it reminded me to stop being so neurotic.

Those are just a few things that I’m likely to write about.

I thought it would complement all these changes quite nicely if I changed my blog design too (thanks Zerflin). Even though blogging isn’t anything new to me, I hope that the experience I have this time around is as fresh and as fun as the great new look my buddy Benjamin has given to the site.

My goal is to keep writing and keep posting, even when I suck. And hopefully some of it will make you laugh. That’s one of my goals, too.

So here it goes. I’m back in the Blog-O-Sphere.

This summer has been packed with change for me. I moved into a new apartment—the nicest place I’ve ever lived. As we speak my girlfriend is moving in with me. Huge changes.

“Bigger and better things,” is the first phrase that come to mind, though I don’t think that bigger is the word I should use to describe it.

I’m certainly not living in a bigger place. Compared to the dump I lived in last year, it’s actually a lot smaller. And sometimes smaller is what we want.

We just launched the new-and-improved Brazen Careerist—a career management tool for next-generation professionals. It will help change the way people control their professional identity. We’re going to get bigger. That’s scary when bigger doesn’t always mean better.

What I learned from the transition into my new, cozy apartment is that living in a big place might mean living in a dump. It’s hard to maintain and it doesn’t always feel like a home. One of my chief concerns with the new Brazen Careerist was that the same principal would hold true.

But I’m not scared about that anymore.

I spent the last month and a half reaching out to bloggers in our community to ask for help promoting the Community when we finally go live. It’s something we had never done before because we never felt this passionately about a product launch. I figured it would be a challenge, but after sending over 100 requests, I didn’t receive a single “No.”

I’ve always felt humbled being able to say that Brazen Careerist would be nothing without its community. And after experiences such overwhelming support pre-launch, I don’t even care how cliché it sounds when I say it.

And through that I realized why I had been so scared in the first place. Not because the Community was going to get big and clunky—Ryan Healy has been way too anal for that to happen—but because I am going to have to change the way I work as a Community Manager.

I pulled Penelope aside a couple weeks ago to talk to her about this.

“How exactly does a Community Manager scale?” I asked.

“Where does his/her career path lead?”

“Ryan, you’re doing a great job,” she reminded me.

And I realized that I know exactly how to scale my job. Well, not exactly. The Community Manager role in business is still a little young to know the exact path, but I know that it involves growing along with the Community and continuing to be a voice to as many as possible even when that number rockets through the thousands, to the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions.

Long story short, I know that you’re all going to love the new Brazen Careerist. It’s cleaner. It’s more fun. It’s social media. And the focus is finally right where it should be—on you.

And even though you may be a little shell-shocked at first—like my girlfriend feels about her shoes being housed in the same apartment as my 90lb Labrador—the bigger-and-better Brazen Careerist is going to be everything we promise that it’s going to be. And I’m still going to do everything I can to be your voice and bug our development team to make the changes you all want to see.

If you haven’t already checked out the new Brazen Careerist, please go take a look. And if you’ve never joined, now is the perfect time to go become a member.

Our Community Feedback group is open and for business. Let us know what you think!

Four months ago, I was sitting in a bar with Ryan and Dan Healy, and Penelope. It was Inauguration Day. We watched our country make history swearing in the 44th President of the United States.

The room was a can of sardines, but more optimistic. Tangled in a motley web of businessmen, congressmen and college students, we parked it next to a middle-aged bald guy. Pulling out a shot glass from his jacket pocket and slamming it on the table, he asked the barkeep to pour some whiskey.

“Hey,” he said. “Would you guys like to take a shot with me?”

Dan and I looked at one another, then back at the guy. “Sure,” we decided.

“It means a lot that you both are doing this with me,” he said. “I’ll tell you why after Obama takes his oath.”

We sat there, quietly sipped on beers, listened to Biden take his oath, then Obama. Looking over at our friend, I saw tears.

“Cheers,” he said. We took our shots. I forgot what whiskey tasted like midday on a Tuesday. Closing my eyes for a moment, I regained my composure. When opened them, the man was pointing to a pin he was wearing on his chest, a young man in uniform holding a puppy.

“This is my son,” he said. “He died in Iraq four years ago.”

He told us how passionate his son was to go into the Middle East—keen on making the world a better place—only to find himself appalled by how everything was being done. He couldn’t wait to come home and dedicate his life to changing America’s foreign policies.

He never got to do that, but his fortitude lived on through his father. Obama’s Inauguration—in his eyes—was the catalyst for change that his son had dreamed about.

“On Memorial Day,” he said, “do me a favor.”

“Tell my son’s story to someone … anyone.” He just wanted his son’s story to be told. And today, I’m doing the best I can to live up to my promise.

During the month of May, two amazing bloggers, Sam Davidson and Matt Chevy, teamed up to get young bloggers talking about change. I couldn’t think of what to write about. Then I remember the promise I kept to that stranger on Inauguration Day and the lesson that I learned.

It has nothing to do with politics, or foreign policy, or Republicans versus Democrats. It’s about the power each of us has to make a difference today, right now, if we’re devoted enough and perseverant enough to make things happen. It’s a fragile gift, because we never know when that chance might be taken from us.

I’ve been thinking a lot today about the people I know whose dreams of cultivating change were cut too short. Like my friend Kaity, who might have lived on to help save the rainforests if she didn’t die of an over dose two years ago. Or my friend Chris, who would have made one kick-ass electrical engineer if he didn’t die tragically in a fire before he even graduated college. And of course, Sgt. Mark Allen Maida … a total stranger to me if it wasn’t for his father.

As another Memorial Day drifts past, and we all go back to work, school or whatever else we do with our time, let’s try not to forget how easy it is to fall back into idle behaviors. Let’s try to remain focused on the things in our lives that we want to and need to change.

Change isn’t enclosed in bubble wrap. It’s not going to wait until we’re ready to commit. And when the chance has gone, we rarely get a chance like it again.