Education 2.0 & 3.0

When it comes to self improvement, the usual go-to advice revolves around role models. Find people you admire and use their lives as a template to discover better ways of approaching your own and a marker by which to begin to raise your own expectations for yourself. In bite-sized form, this same technique is probably behind the internet's mania for inspirational quotes.

First identify the people that really trigger negative emotions in you. "Try this: turn your thoughts to that person you keep running into at networking events, whose elevator pitch always leaves you feeling greasy; the columnist whose opinions never fail to stoke the fires of your outrage; the once-cool, indie filmmaker who sold out and started dating fashion models; or the work colleague who seems to have made sucking up to his superiors his job description--any of the people who get under your skin or repel you," she writes.