CNN Money played with the 2008 Census data released on Monday and discovered that the nationwide average commute is 25.5 minutes. If you work five days a week and fifty weeks a year, that’s 12,750 minutes spent in the car. For the math whizzes out there, that’s 212.5 hours or 8.85 days.

The average American spend over a week sitting in his or her car driving to or from work. It’s no wonder driving is more dangerous than flying, we spent over a week in the car just getting to and from work. This doesn’t count the time we spend on vacation, going out, whatever.

The longest commute belonged to citizens of East Stroudsburg, PA where many of the residents commute the 60 miles to work in NYC, spending 40.6 minutes a trip. The shortest belonged to folks of Grand Forks, ND where the average commute was a scant 14.3 minutes each way.

When I used to drive to work, mine was about 25 minutes to the home office each way. At one point I supported a client around the Washington DC area and my commute ranged anywhere from 45 minutes to several hours if the weather or traffic wasn’t cooperative. I passed the time listening to some audiobooks, sports talk radio, and/or NPR shows.

How long is your commute? And what do you use to kill the time?

(Photo: ethandb)

One of the best lessons I ever learned was that it was OK to fail. It is OK to make mistakes. Failure has a wonderful way of teaching you lessons, sometimes very painful lessons, that you can use the next time you tackle a problem. You may not learn the lesson the first time, or the second, or fifth time, but eventually each failure will teach you something you can use later.

How did I learn this? By recognizing one crucial thing – no one starts off being the best at something. All the greats of anything did it through hard work, something you can read about in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and his 10,000 hours idea (that to truly master something you need to spend 10,000 hours on it).

And you know what? The first thousand hours were probably filled with failures.

And the best part about failure is that when you succeed, that’s all anyone will ever remember.

A few years ago, when unemployment was low and the economy was rosy, all you needed to do to get a job was get your resume in front of as many people as possible. You had to carpet bomb, stuff electronic resume boxes, and simply wait. One of the companies you reached out to probably had a job opening and you probably were a pretty good fit.

Nowadays, the jobs are harder to find and companies aren’t going to take a risk on a “pretty good fit.” So, I compiled a list of ten tips I’ve tried to use when crafting my resume during a job search.

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Taking calculated risks and not being afraid to fail is a hallmark of every successful person. You know this, I know this, but it’s difficult to translate that into our every day life. Sure, we hear stories about Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft, but how does that isn’t helpful to the everyman or woman working their 9-to-5 job.

How about this analogy, one that I read from Larry Chiang, author for a forthcoming book What They Don’t Teach You At Stanford Business School:

If you’re not crashing and burning twice a year, maybe you’re not reaching high enough. Similarly, if you’re not getting towed twice a year, maybe you’re not parking aggressively enough.

So many times we’re too afraid to fail and so we don’t make that leap. Don’t let fear make decisions for you.

In this recession, companies are turning to furloughs, or unpaid leave, as a way to cut costs without cutting people. As you can imagine, being furloughed is never a good thing. Companies in good financial shape generally don’t furlough their staff, it’s usually companies that need to cut costs or are having difficulty with cash flow. It’s not uncommon for a company to furlough staff one week and then decide they need to have layoffs the next. While that’s not always the case, you plan for the worst and hope for the best.

So, what should you do when you’re on furlough?

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When I started college in 1998, the dot-com bubble was only an anxious froth. Computers were becoming increasingly popular and hardly a day went by when you didn’t hear about some hot new startup. They hadn’t really exploded yet, that wouldn’t be for another year, but everyone wanted to get into “computers.” The path to riches was paved not with cheese, as Feivel once thought, but with Internets and electronics.

Nowadays, computers are commonplace and while computer science and engineering still pepper the top job lists, there are a few jobs out there that you probably didn’t know paid as well as they do. Thanks to US News and World Reports, we now know eleven of them. I only looked at the more interesting ones.

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Yesterday, my wife quit her job of nearly four years in the middle of the worst economic recession in many many decades.

Wait, that’s probably not framed in the best way. How about this:

Yesterday, my wife quit her job of nearly four years to pursue a doctorate at the University of Maryland.

Better?

Either way, neither one of us has a “traditional” job. As such, we’ve had to make a few adjustments in our life for the period between when she left her job (yesterday) and when she’ll start graduate school.

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You just lost your job; now what?

The instinctive path is to hit the newspapers and job boards, flooding resumes out to potential employers who might give you a chance. You might follow that activity by contacting recruiting firms to enlist them in your search. If this describes you here is some friendly advice—slow down!

We’re in a recession, a very nasty one by all accounts, and as much as you need a job, it’s important to recognize that you’ve joined a hunt that’s being undertaken by millions of others. This means competition, far more than we’ve seen in the past, and you’ll need to begin thinking long term. If you’ve been out of work for a while, you already know this.

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I always enjoy looking at these lists because they give a little glimpse into some of our nation’s most storied firms. I think these are more for entertainment purposes, much like the top paying undergraduate degrees, because the average total pay isn’t something you’ll get right out of the gate.

It’s fun to read are the various perks employees get because often times the companies that compensate the best tend to have great benefits as well. A popular company to talk about when you list slick benefits is always Google’s plethora of employee benefits.

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Earlier this year I finished writing an article in which I tried to find the salary breakeven point for private vs. public college graduates, a task that was impossible because I couldn’t find enough publicly available information at the time. I was trying to figure out whether college was “worth it” and if so, whether public or private college was a better value. Since I didn’t have enough data, I just took some “average student loan debt” figures and calculated the breakeven point.

In a recent Business Week article, they took a 2007 College Board analysis that showed college graduates earned 61% more than high school graduates over a 40 year career. Master’s degrees earn 93% more. It’s not the private college vs. public college debate but it’s certainly a good look at whether student loan debt, in general, is worth it.

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