I keep wanting to use the word webinar, but I can't decide if it is too jargony. This  lexical conundrum reminds me of when the word workout went mainstream. It sounded too jargony  to me, and I used to say go-to-the-gym and a not-so-snappy stand-in.

Should I use the word webinar?

Should I tell you how many times Ryan Paugh told me that I have to announce the webinar if I want people to come to it? I kept not announcing anything because I didn't know what to call it.

Whatever we are calling it, it will happen on this Friday, 1pm est. (Sign up here.) I know that people in Australia cannot listen at this time slot. You have told me before, and I'm listening. One day I will do a webinar at midnight. One day I will record webinars so it won't matter so much what time slot they happen in. One day there will be world peace.

On Friday we will talk about finding fulfillment, which is actually like establishing world peace, just doing it one person at a time. In an act of full disclosure, I'm going to tell you that knowing what to do is not the hard part of finding fulfillment. Doing it is the hard part. It's like breaking up with a terrible boyfriend when the sex is really good. Not that I have ever had this problem. I have found that part of what makes a terrible boyfriend is terrible sex. But whatever. I can imagine the problem. The problem is that you  know what to do and you don't do it.

Wait. Actually, that's the problem with everything. Like, I knew I was going to have to write a post about the webinar where I don't know if I should use the word webinar. I knew it wasn't going to change if I waited so long to write the post that Ryan Paugh wants to kill me. But I waited anyway. Why do we not take the action that we know is the right action? I will not be covering this problem in the webinar.

But sign up anyway. Here.

I am a person who lives and dies by her to-do list. And right now, I’m dying.

I’m dying because I am following all the prescribed rules except one.

Here are things I’m doing well:

1. I clear my inbox.  I deal with each email the second I read it–by responding, deleting, or transferring to my to do list.

2. I have a single list. I have A’s, B’s, and C’s for my priorities, so I can tell what is most important to do on any given day.

3. I make sure I have long-term goals. And I put them in my list of A’s. I identify the items I must get done before the end of the day. But I also add at least one non-deadline-based item that helps me reach a bigger, life-changing goal.

4. I rewrite the list every day by hand. Because if something on the list is not worth taking the time to rewrite by hand, it’s not worth taking the time to do.

5. I make sure I get all the A’s done first. Only then do I move on to less important items. Just kidding. I don’t do this. But I should. Honestly, I can tell that it doesn’t really matter if I follow all the other rules when I’m not doing this one. (more…)

Thanks to dating sites, we have a great way to gather data about the human condition without having to write grant proposals to the National Science Foundation. I first became aware of this bastion of data when OK Cupid announced that older women benefit from showing cleavage in their photos, but younger women don't. I immediately started showing more cleavage at work because we know that people want to do business with people they want to date, and men think women who look datable are actually harder workers.

Now the site that specializes in matching married people looking to cheat, AshleyMadison.com, has released its list of the most adulterous professions based on the 1.9 million people who are registered on the site. (via BoingBoing)

Here's the list: (more…)

This video chat will take place Friday, March 12, 1pm eastern. (Sign up here.) This chat will be about how to get a job by looking in the right places. (And, I am experimenting with mysterious titles for my video chats. Do more people sign up if the title sounds like a Nancy Drew mystery?)

The last video chat was so out of control that I actually got reprimanded from just about everyone in the company. Except Andrew Shell, who said it was funny and funny is all people care about.

So I have a choice of doing a private chat for Andrew, or I can switch up the format to be less obnoxious. And, as I am trying to be more likable, being less obnoxious will be good for me. So this week I'm doing the video chat alone. And for those of you who are disappointed that Ryan Paugh won't be there, take solace in this: The headset for doing the video alone is much better with my hair than the headset for doing a video with Ryan.

Sign up here to join the video chat on Friday.

Psychology Today did an interview with me. It was about my most triumphant moments in my life, and how I overcame obstacles to get there. I knew immediately that the interview was going to be a disaster, so I told them I wanted to do the interview written, rather than on the phone.

Then I didn’t write the interview for a week.

Then I complained about the questions: I don’t really believe in triumph. Because the most triumphant moments are the days when I have no idea how I'm going to fix anything, but I get out of bed anyway. On the other hand, the moments of huge achievement are not actually that hard to get to. By the time you're close, you are so motivated to get there that it doesn't feel like work at all.

So I wrote that. And then I felt bad.  So I tried to give an example. People like examples. And  I like Psychology Today. And I didn’t want to disappoint them.

So I wrote that the moment when I was a freelance writer and a new mom and had post-partum depression but I knew I had to keep working so I had to get out of bed and write. Maybe there were fifty moments like that. Or five hundred. But those are the moments of triumph.  The thing is, I think it was probably messed up that I kept working and did not check myself into a hospital. And then I started thinking that all my moments of triumph came at the heels of me having done something totally terrible. (more…)

This is not an exhaustive list on the topic. In fact, it may be an inexhaustible topic. There are older lists of what I hate. So today's post is merely my most recent list.

Which is notable because hatred is a process. Neurologists have proven that love and hate are closely related, and I have found it's hard to hate a person unless I am also close to that person, and the same is true for a topic. In that vein, life is the process of expanding our love and our knowledge, and I suppose, our hate.

So here are some things that I have recently reached the point of thinking so much about that I feel qualified to hate them:

1. Sarcasm
The use of sarcasm is always inappropriate. Sarcasm reveals insecurity and cynicism – both things that make a person unlikable. Sarcasm is always negative in meaning, and the tone is always disparaging. On top of that, people who use sarcasm think they are being funny, but this is a poor man’s humor; because comedy is about timing. You say it, then there’s a beat, and then people laugh. With sarcasm, you say it, there’s a beat when someone realizes you’ve said something you don’t mean, and a beat to process what you did mean. The timing is off.

So comedians rarely use sarcasm because it’s not funny. And top performers don’t use sarcasm because it’s mean. (more…)

Yep, that's right. I'm going to tell you how to write a blog that will help you meet your goals. Tuesday night at 8 p.m. eastern. The chat will be upbeat and inspirational. At the beginning. And then I will rant about my pet peeves. For example:

• Why you should not try to make money from your blog
• Why you should not start a second blog
• Why you should take care to link to other blogs, a lot

But mostly, I'll answer your questions, which you can ask in real-time.

I'm doing this video stuff with Ryan Paugh. (I am linking to his personal blog to show you that I take my own advice.) Ryan keeps coming to these events a little bit drunk. But that doesn't stop us from getting rave reviews. Here's one he forwarded to me from his mom: "Great job, Ry."

So sign up here. And you will have a great blog. Or you will at least know why you don't.

I have this idea that I am going to start working from home. I tried to go into the office. But the only alone time I have in my day is the time I’m not with the kids, and if I spend my alone time with other people, then I don’t have alone time and I start to panic, and I do things like tell the guy in the cube next to me that he can’t talk to me.

1. Get a spot where you can concentrate.
So I tried working from home, but then I started feeling like I am the most alone person in the world. So I thought I’d change it up a little; I’d work from home, but the farmer’s home.

I call him to tell him I’m coming to his house early.

“How early?” he asks.

“Now.”

“Don’t you have to work today?”

“I’m not going to the office any more. I don’t want to talk to people.”

There is a beat of silence, and I think the farmer is going to say something. Or maybe the silence is long enough that he is thinking I am going to talk. He has asked me to not talk over him, but I have a hard time telling if it is his turn to talk or mine. I start to panic because the rhythm of conversation is getting irregular, so I say, “Okay. Bye.” And I hang up before he can say anything else. I note to myself that this is the fourth conversation in a row that I did not talk over him. (more…)

I am switching up the blog a bit. It's time to take the Brazen Careerist part off of my blog. It's time for the blog to just be Penelope Trunk, and only my company should use the name Brazen Careerist.

We have been saying this in Brazen Careerist board meetings for about five months. The conversation goes something like this:

Board member: How is the blog redesign going?

Me: Um. I'm thinking.

Board member: That's what you said two months ago.

Me: Yeah. That's true. I'll get some bids.

Board member: It's important the we differentiate the Brazen Careerist brand of the company from the brand of you.

Me: Yeah. I get it.

Then we have a pause in the meeting while everyone is silently frustrated with my inability to make changes. (more…)

I’m in the midst of dumping my happiness obsession for something else, but I wonder what is the key to a good life if I’m giving up on happiness? I thought maybe it was interestingness, but I am a little worried because I confess that I’d rather fall asleep in the farmer’s arms than solve the meaning of life. Or maybe I am doing them both at the same time? I don’t know. I just know that ideas overwhelm me sometimes, and until I go to a doctor to get medication to calm my head down, I’m not convinced I need more interestingness in my life than my already-spinning head.

Then I thought maybe I needed expertise: striving to be an expert would be my obsession. Which it might be. But I don’t think it replaces happiness. It sort of sits next to it. Like, obsessing about being an expert comes naturally to me, but I’m not sure why.

So I’m still looking for what can replace happiness as my what-am-I-doing-here thing. And I’m thinking that maybe it’s mindfulness. It kills me to even write the word, because for the last decade, while I was busy turning Ashtanga yoga into a competitive sport, my teachers kept talking about mindfulness. I kept thinking to myself, I wish they’d shut up and just rank us so I know if I’m best. (more…)

My current favorite blogger is Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports. (Not safe for work.) His topic, as far as I can tell, is smut and snobbery. I think that even though my blog is pointed at the intersection of life and work, I wish it were at the intersection of smut and snobbery. Because I am an aficionado of smut, and I could use a place to show off.

This is my favorite blog post ever by Dave: The Thong is Dead. (Maybe not safe for work.) He does so many great things in that post. He has genuine social commentary about who decides what is fashionable underwear. He shows us a glimpse into his personal life because he has an underwear discussion with his wife. And he provides a great photo of a girls’s ass, in boyshorts. All this in 500 words.

For me to get all of that into one post would take about 1000 words. Seth Godin writes posts like that—dependably dense: really short but packed with value—but never as scintillatingly smutty as Dave. Where Seth makes a living as a high-paid speaker by republishing a compendium of blog posts every two years, Dave can make a living as the intelligentsia by repackaging other peoples’ soft porn. (more…)

The culmination of my four-year obsession with happiness research is that I think people need to choose between an interesting life or happy life. (Note: This does not mean you are interesting or not interesting. I am talking about what values guide your decision making.) I think the things that make life happy have to do with complacency, and the things that make life interesting have to do with lack of complacency. If you want to read more about this, search on my sidebar "happiness" and "interesting" and you'll get a bazillion posts because I've been obsessed with the topic.

I have discovered that I would rather be interesting than happy. The good news is that even though I’m punting on the quest for happiness, I do have a good sense of how to know if you should be seeking happiness yourself, or if your quest for interesting makes happiness a lost cause.

Here’s the test:

1. Did you relocate away from family for a better job or another more interesting experience? Minus one

You would have to earn $150,000 more from a job if you were doing it far away from family, according to economist Nattavudh Powdthavee of University of York.

2. Did you relocate to be near family? Plus one

Happiness does not come from a job, or from being revered by your peers. It comes from personal relationships. (more…)

Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin, has arrived. I read it on the farmer’s sofa.

The farmer is going through a midlife crisis. It’s not really a midlife crisis, though. As an expert on the process of coming of age in one’s twenties, I’d have to say that the farmer is actually going through a quarterlife crisis.

Typically, one’s twenties, a period now called emerging adulthood, looks something like this:

Learning to separate from parents.
Figuring out where one fits in the world of work.
Getting ready to be married and have kids.

The farmer is doing those things in compressed time: the two years since I have known him. Many people think it was totally crazy that he sent an email to me, out of the blue. But in hindsight it’s clear that he knew he needed something to kick-start his quarterlife crisis. And when you are already forty and have not had one, you need something as cataclysmic as a girl from New York coming to the farm and shaking things up.

The farmer is on the sofa. I had to convince him to let me come here because there is a snowstorm coming. The snow is a big deal if you have a thousand animals out in freezing weather and can’t get food to them. I am not going to go into all the details of the stresses of winter farming. Mostly because I don’t know them. But I do know that every time there is a lot of snow, something freezes and it always seems to be life threatening: Like water for the pigs. (more…)

Agents contact me on a regular basis to ask me if I want to do a book about my life.

I say no.

I say no because I have no idea how to do a book about my life. I’m sure I have no idea because I already have had a six-figure book deal to write about my life that I’m not delivering on, and the editor has dumped me. (Read: Phone calls to collect on the large advance I’ve already spent.) So my qualifications to tell you advice about how to write about one's life are questionable. But whatever; I have never stood on ceremony over qualifications.

Maybe the problem is that my life story needs a redemptive moment. This is what my agent-who-is-no-longer-my-agent tells me.  And this is a warning to any agent who thinks they might want to be my agent: My past agent dumped me because (even though I did deliver on my first book deal) I am terrible at writing book proposals and I am terrible at following publishing industry rules. And her number one rule is that if you write about your life there must be a redemptive moment because people like that. “That’s what sells,” is my not-my-agent’s way of saying “That’s what people like to read.” (more…)

It’s safe to say that the majority of the world thinks Twitter is a waste of time. Yes, Twitter is a darling of the New York Times and frequents front pages of mainstream media. But Twitter gets coverage not because the intelligentsia loves Twitter, but because the intelligentsia hates feeling like it’s falling behind.

This post is for all the people who think Twitter is stupid but wish they didn’t.  Here are five ways Twitter can save your life:

1. Twitter lets you find people like you.
The core of every career problem is actually loneliness. You don’t change jobs because you don’t have faith in yourself. You don’t ask for more money because you don’t believe in your own value. You don’t quit because you worry about not being associated with a company. Believing in ourselves is the only thing that keeps us going and if we stop believing in ourselves, we get stuck.

Twitter helps solve this problem because you can find people like you. That voice inside your head telling you that no one has your problem? Do a search. Every problem you can imagine is tweeted about somewhere. You can find someone talking about it. The most important reason to be on Twitter is to connect with people, so if one person is there, talking about the problem you have, then they want to talk with you about it.

The more people you find who are like you, the more you can connect with others and feel okay with who you are, and then you believe in yourself and you start to move on. Twitter is a live index of people and the weirdness we harbor, which is a gift to the world of loneliness. (more…)

It’s unbelievable to me that everyone continues to watch football when we know that men are getting genuinely, permanently, brain damaged. The game is tantamount to cockfighting, only with people instead of animals.

The NFL has finally admitted the problem, to the extent it is poised to be the largest funding source for research about trauma to the brain. But still, the game encourages brain trauma. And people cheer.

I can understand if it’s like smoking. You’re addicted, you can’t stop. But what about bringing your kids to the game? What about all the people who make the Superbowl a family TV event? Kids who play football in high school are more likely to die from that than drunk driving or guns. And parents encourage their kids to play this sport?

The culture of football amazes to me — the incredible level of denial. So what I'm thinking is that people are delusional. And they know it, but they keep going. They cultivate delusion.

That's what I think of when I hear about the HBO documentary about Temple Grandin. She's a total freak. This is why she’s interesting. Because people love an underdog—people love seeing weirdness succeed because most people feel weird and they worry it’s going to hold them back. (more…)

Is this even a good headline for a blog post? I don't know. Do you want to know what I'm like unedited? Read this blog post. I never post unedited, but my editor has a day job, and he has no time to deal with manufactured emergencies like this one, so I'm just posting this post as is.

I'm supposed to be doing a web chat thing tonight. I had this idea that this would be a good format for me. And I had this idea that I could stick to a schedule. But look. It's the day of my video chat and I have not even announced it. Because I'm nervous.

I'm nervous about a new format. I did a radio show and I hated it. That does not bode well for video. But I like speaking in front of groups. (I do it a lot.) And I like having conversations with blog readers. So it seems like maybe this video discussion or whatever it is might work. (more…)

I have earned a lot of money in my life. But I have never had an extravagant life. I don’t own a house. I’ve never bought a new car. I’ve never bought a new piece of living room furniture, and I do not own a single piece of real jewelry. What I have spent money on was always intended to help me with my career. That was so I know that I can always earn money doing something I love.

I leased a BMW when it was clear that that mattered when it came to making deals in LA. I hired a stylist when I realized my clothes were holding me back in NYC. In Madison I have tons of household help so my kids don’t have a crazy schedule because of my work schedule.

I am convinced that frugality is a key quality for a successful career.  Here is why frugality helps your career:

1. Spending money is generally a distraction.
We know this. That people use it as therapy. People use it to fill holes they perceive in their lives. But the psychic energy it takes to spend money actually distracts us from what matters to us. Pay Pal reports that people wish their significant other would spend less money on Valentine’s Day. This encapsulates the whole problem to me. (more…)

I've been walking around with the July/August 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review constantly, for close to three years. Sometimes, if I’m getting on a plane, I’ll put it with the other heavy stuff into my luggage, and then get it out later. When my last car broke down in the middle of an intersection, I got the magazine out of the trunk before I abandoned the car.

The article that I’m attached to is The Making of an Expert by Anders Ericsson, Michael Prietula and Edward Cokely. I would not normally bother to tell you all three authors for one article in my blog. This is not a medical journal. But I love the article so much, that I want you to know all of them.

The article changed how I think about what I am doing here. In my life. I think I am trying to be an expert.

Being an expert is not what you think, probably. For one thing, the article explains that “there is no correlation between IQ and expert performance in fields such as chess, music, sports, and medicine. The only innate differences that turn out to be significant—and they matter primarily in sports – are height and body size. “

So what factor does correlate with success? One thing emerges very clearly is that successful performers “had practiced intensively, had studied with devoted teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically by their families throughout their developing years.” (more…)

I collect data points constantly, and I index them by topic, and I always hope that they will come together in an interesting, useful way. Lots of times, that doesn’t happen, and I  just have to throw ideas away, because I have a rule for myself that I have to be useful in every post.

But today I’m trying something new. I’m doing a post that is useless to you. Here are four ideas I was just about to toss out as incurably useless, but instead, I bring them to you:

1. Law firms are making concessions for women.
One of the top law firms in the world, Allen Overy, just announced they are letting people become part-time partners. This would be news if no one had tried it before. But many firms that have already done this in response to the extreme brain drain in the legal profession due to women leaving law firms because they are so inflexible.

So now there is the idea that there can be a part-time partner. Fortunately, like most things in workplace reform, Gen X-ers have already been the guinea pigs. My friends, in fact, have tried this. And it turns out that if you give a lawyer a part-time job, she ends up working 50 hours a week instead of 80, and gets part-time credit, which isn’t exactly encouraging.

2. People live together instead of getting married.
This is not news you can use because you already know it. This is what I said to Hannah Seligson, who asked me to write about her new book, A Little Bit Married: How to Know When it's Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door. (more…)