'Laptop test' is a career guide for one of Facebook's first employees
Author and comedian Paul Ollinger says how you look at your laptop in the morning is a good indicator of whether you're on the right path
Every day Paul Ollinger wakes up at 5am, turns on his laptop, and gets straight to work.
It's not because he's got colleagues in other time zones, and it's not because he answers to a workaholic boss who expects him to be on call all the time.
In fact, Ollinger doesn't have colleagues or a boss per se. He's a stand-up comedian, and he rises at 5 to start working because he's just too excited to stay asleep any longer.
Ollinger, 47, was one of the first 250 employees at Facebook, working in sales; he left the company in 2011.
About two years ago he became a full-time comedian, fulfilling a dream that he'd had for most of his adult life. In April 2016, he published his first book, a comedic guide to applying to business school titled "You Should Totally Get an MBA." (Ollinger graduated from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in 1997.)
The fact that he wakes up so eager to start writing material for shows is, for him, a meaningful sign that he's doing exactly the kind of work he's supposed to be doing. He calls it the "laptop test."
"What's your orientation toward your laptop when you wake up in the morning?," he says. "Are you dying to open it — do you see it as opportunity? Or do you see it as Pandora's box?"