Penelope Trunk

Archives

The sign of a great career is having great opportunities, and saying no

Posted to: Fulfillment | Knowing yourself
July 29th, 2009
+-----------------+

This is about the farmer. The guy I met last year, and I drove through tornados, twice, to see. He dumped me. But I kept his toothbrush in my bathroom for five months while other men paraded through. And the way you can gauge if you love someone is if you keep the toothbrush even …

Read More...


What Generation Z will be like at work

Posted to: Management | Office Politics
July 27th, 2009
+-----------------+

It's great fun to track trends to try to figure out what the future holds. The Generation after Gen Y is a mystery. Sort of. There are some things we know. And what we know, we know doesn't change much. For example, people thought Gen Y's sunny optimism would die down under the ardors of …

Read More...


Will taking drugs help your career? Maybe you need Adderall

Posted to: Fulfillment | Productivity
July 23rd, 2009
+-----------------+

Most of us have a terrible time focusing on our work.
Left uninterrupted, we are likely to interrupt ourselves. The Internet, everyone's interrupter of choice, is the most tantalizing type of reward system to our brain: intermittent but unpredictable rewards, in the form of a randomly great video or a juicy email here or there. (This …

Read More...


How to decide how much to reveal about yourself

Posted to: How to blog | Knowing yourself
July 21st, 2009
+-----------------+

People ask me all the time how I can be so honest about my life in my blog. They want to know how I can write about marriage, sex, abortions, or running out of money over and over again. It's an endless list really, of the stuff I write about that people can’t believe I'm …

Read More...


How to feel steady in a shaky economy

July 20th, 2009
+-----------------+

Now that we have a recession, and maybe not so much a recession but a new way of doing business, people are starting to look at their career goals differently. And while interesting was the big goal when we were flush with cash, security will be the brass ring of the near future.
Because really, there …

Read More...


Sarah Palin’s resignation inspires me

Posted to: Fulfillment | Productivity
July 13th, 2009
+-----------------+

There are a million times we intuitively know what we should be doing in our careers, but the chatter around us makes us question ourselves. Too much. If I have one regret in my career it's that I didn't trust myself more, earlier.
Watching Sarah Palin resign from her governor post in Alaska inspires me to …

Read More...


How to face cash-flow issues in a start-up

Posted to: Entrepreneurship
July 9th, 2009
+-----------------+

When I launched my company, Wired magazine contacted me to write a column about how to run a start-up. The editor, Dylan Tweney, blew me away with his offer. It wasn't just that he took me to lunch in the grown-local lunchroom at Wired. He also had this unbelievable faith in me that I knew …

Read More...


How to have more self-discipline

Posted to: Self-management
July 8th, 2009
+-----------------+

For a while I have been fascinated by the research about happiness. Some of my favorite research is from Sonja Lyumbomirsky, psychology professor at University of California Riverside. (She’s great at listing really small things you can do to impact your happiness.) And from Dan Gilbert's Hedonic Psychology Lab at Harvard. (I follow PhD students …

Read More...


+================+