After I realized that the most underrated skill is asking good questions, I realized that I am not very good at it. I don’t ask for help enough because I don’t know what question to ask. And also, I worry the question will be bad and then the person won’t want to help me again.

So I started forcing myself to ask for help. Like, I put myself on a schedule. And the result was not so much that I got good help (I did) but what I really got was good at asking questions. Because I thought so much about it.

Here are things I’ve been noticing about what makes a person good at asking questions:

1. Surround yourself with people who make you curious.
The first time we had a bonfire at the farm I was dating the farmer and he was winning over my boys with tree climbing and hot-dog roasting. I was concerned about fire safety, but I knew it was hopeless when I realized that the number-one rule I learned about building fires – put them out before you go to bed – does not apply on the farm. He just lets it burn out itself.

Here’s something I like about the farmer. He asks questions. When we were dating, and I had a fireplace in my house, he said he’d build a fire. But it turned out he had no idea how to make a small fire. You have to light kindling and then get the little sticks to catch, and then little logs, and the farmer lost interest after about three minutes.

I think this is what draws us to each other, though: We learn stuff we didn’t even know we needed to learn. It’s so hard to learn when you don’t know the right question to ask. Being around each other gives us the chance to learn stuff we’d never seek to learn. Like building fires.

It also gives us practice figuring out what question to ask.

 2. Learn rules for asking questions.
Each industry has rules. Each circle of friends has rules. I think a reason I love work so much is that it’s all about rules. And there is no industry more full of rules than the venture capital industry. It has to be because it’s a matching system between two wildly different types of people: crazy, rule-breaking risk-taking entrepreneurs, and risk-averse, by-the-book, right-out-of-Wharton venture capitalists.

But the VCs are most valuable to startup founders when the founders are learning from the VCs. So there’s a lot of rule teaching going on. One of my favorite recent examples of this is how to ask for time from a busy person. Mark Suster, who is a VC, warns that you should never ask a busy person to lunch, because it’s too big of a time commitment. He has great examples of terrible ways to ask for time and also good ways, like, “grab a quick coffee” which is not so clearly defined, but clearly short in duration.

3. Get your timing right.
When my step-mom was in and out of the hospital getting chemotherapy, I learned a lot about how to deal with doctors. When it comes to cancer, once you pick a doctor, most people advise that you stay with that doctor. And then get to know the doctor well. Because ongoing quality of life depends, in part, on being able to ask good question of that doctor – asking what is happening, how things are going, and what is likely to come next. These are difficult questions for most people because this is an area where the vocabulary is new, and everything feels like a biology test you need to study harder for.

The best advice I got for asking questions was to not worry about asking too many questions, and instead focus on asking them in a good way for the doctor—ask in the morning, when doctors make their rounds. Leave questions at the nurse’s station, and then the doctor can pick up the question when they are starting their day. If you make it easier to answer your questions, you will get more attentive responses.

4. Your questions get better with more information.
The best questions are ones that come after a bunch of questions. The first question is never the real question.

I saw this in action with my sons. When we visited the Baha'i Temple in Illinois.

The first question was: “Can we play tag?” And they stepped on every step and jumped every railing and then asked if there's an area for kids.

The next question was “Do Baha'i people celebrate Christmas or Chanukkah?”

By the end, my older son asked me, “Do you think that the B’hai people would mind that we're Jewish?”

I liked that I could see his questions getting sharper and sharper as he figured out what really matters to him about the visit to the temple.

I thought to myself that I need to be the type of person who asks a series of questions rather than just one. I need to trust that questions are more interesting than answers, and people will not get annoyed as long as each question reflects a little more understanding on my part.

5. Be true to your passion.
Asking good questions means risking that the answer is totally obvious. That’s the scary part of asking a question. Here are tips for asking good questions in life, and here are tips for asking good questions in interviews.

But here’s something I’ve learned. If you ask a question about something you are passionate about and totally engaged in, the question will be good. Case in point: there are no stupid questions when you are asking a doctor about cancer treatment for a close relative.

But there are a lot of stupid questions from people who use the act of asking a question as a substitute for passion and engagement. Other people cannot do the work for you to make you care. When you genuinely care about a topic and have done honest investigation in that vein, trust that your question will be engaging to other people. Passion is always interesting.

Melissa and I had a fight yesterday. We have this fight once or twice a month. Someone who neither of us knows well will ask Melissa something about me just out of an odd curiosity about my life. Something stupid, like, What’s Penelope doing for Thanksgiving?

It’s stupid, yes, but I think it’s even more stupid that Melissa answers. So I tell her don’t talk to anyone about me. I don’t want her to be a source of Penelope information. I just want her to be a friend.

You will notice this is very hypocritical of me. But I don’t care. I make the rule anyway: No talking about me. Ever.

Then she thinks everything is an exception. Like, telling her co-worker what it’s like sitting across from me while I make up dialogue that she is not saying.

So I say, “I’m not talking to you anymore. You’re a terrible friend.”

She says, “I am not a terrible friend. I have really good intentions.”

“Okay. You’re a retarded friend. You don’t understand boundaries.”

“I’m trying. And you see everything black and white and it’s not.”

“Do you think that when Jennifer Aniston’s friend tells the National Enquirer where Jennifer's eating then her friend just says, oh sorry, I’m trying.”

“Are you crazy? You are not Jennifer Aniston.”

“I’m making a point.”

“No. You’re not. You’re sounding crazy.”

“Well, so are you. We should just not be friends. I don’t even need any friends.”

“Call me back when you are not angry.”

“Okay.”

Then I call back in ten minutes. But the truth is, I don’t really like having friends. I don’t like that friends are as much trouble as a boyfriend but they don’t go down on you.

Still, I don’t want to end up being a crazy person. Did you see Grey Gardens? I worry a lot that I’ll end up like them. Has anyone said that Big Edie and Little Edie have Asperger’s? I am diagnosing them right now. I’m not even going to google it to see if I’m alone in this theory because I know I’m right.

Anyway, I worry that if I don’t take steps to be normal in friendships then I’ll end up like them.

Loneliness is a serious matter.  It’s a medical condition. New York Magazine ran an article about loneliness about two years ago. I’m going to quote liberally from it, so I’d better link to it now: Is Urban Loneliness a Myth? by Jennifer Senior (one of my favorite journalists).  She writes: “Studies show that loneliness is associated with morning surges in cortisol, the stress hormone, and increased vascular resistance, which results in higher blood pressure. They also show the lonely drink more, exercise less, get divorced more often, and have more family estrangement and run-ins with the neighbors. And they’re fatter.”

I read that, more than a year ago, and then I started paying attention to how people avoid loneliness.

1. Get a friend at work. Or leave.

Friendship is one of the key factors that make the difference between a bad job and a good job. This research comes from a huge poll from Gallup. Tom Rath, the Gallup pollster who puts data into bestselling books, wrote Vital Friends, which, in a nutshell is about how it’s nearly impossible to hate your job if you have a friend at work.

I have found this to be true. You could have that nagging feeling that the work is not right for you—maybe you’d be better suited in another field—but you will not dread going to work if a friend is there for you.

2. Pick a location that does not feel lonely.

Loneliness isn’t about objective matters, like whether we live alone. It’s about subjective matters, like whether we feel alone, according to Senior. And loneliness, it turns out, is relative. If you live in a town full of single people, you feel less alone than if your town is full of married people.

If you are not married but your friends are, a city is better because it trades on weak ties, according to Stanford University professor Mark Granovetter, in his essay The Strength of Weak Ties.

Weak ties provide a lot of value in our lives. They are, for example, much better for helping us find jobs because they offer us diversity and breadth. The same goes for love. Think about it: if you’re single, you already know all your friends’ single friends. It’s your acquaintance’s single friends you don’t know.

3. Learn rules for friendship, and then bend them to suit you.
One of the most interesting things about Aspergers, I think, is that the need for friendship is very low. It’s there, for sure. People with Aspergers want a friend. But they pretty much want just one. So they spend a lot of time searching for that friend and then don’t let the friend go. People with Asperger’s are extremely loyal, but you couldn’t call us clingy because our need for alone time is so high. (A common marriage for two people with Aspergers is two separate bedrooms so they can have maximum alone time. Knowing the person is next door is often enough.)

I am like this, for the most part. So I’m fascinated by how other people have their friendships. I have had to study the rules of making friends to make sure I have some. (Michelle Winner wrote a great book about these rules.)

For example, I used to have a schedule of when to call people, because friends call friends. But it tired me out. I ended up picking friends who don’t use the phone.

Then I had a schedule of when to visit friends. Because friends hang out together. But instead, I found myself focusing on friends who were out of town. It was an easy solution.

I know I’m not the only person who is confused by the ideas of friendship. I had a friend who was a call girl, and she did only a minimum of seven days with a client. Her specialty was going on business trips with men who could not get their wife to come with him on the trip because she had to stay home with the kids.  I asked my friend if it was just crazy, nonstop sex for a week, and how was that not exhausting. She said the week-long trips were the best type of clients because, “Mostly, the guys just wanted a friend.”

I miss her taking pictures all the time. For example this self-portrait. Which she took 500 versions of. She wore the same clothes for a week— something that feels natural to do on a farm—and even though the paint is red and her clothes are pink, she magically matches my bathroom walls.

She left me with a folder of 50 photos for my blog. That’s a good gift. And she left my kids with the feeling that they made a new friend.

I took this photo from the front seat. I told her maybe I didn’t like it. She looks sad. But she said, “We were sad. It’s a sad movie. The Dalmatians are being turned into coats!”

I wish I were gay, and attracted to people less than half my height, because then I could marry Melissa and she’d never leave. But she cannot live here. She needs to get married.

She wants kids.  And I don’t think she will find a husband on our farm, although I have to say our plumber is smart and sweet and hot in a country-boy kind of way. But he’s married.

Now that she’s gone, I’m sort of sinking into a depression. And lately, all my depressions look like this: The farmer does not pay enough attention to me. Blah. And my career does not seem to have a rocket ship trajectory. Blah.

But if career paths are really learning paths rather than earning paths, then my career is about learning to  make connections. And maybe I do have a rocket.

1. Watch for personal patterns in moments of failure and success.

I have built three Internet companies based on communities of math teachers, then city managers, and finally young professionals. And I have built a writing career on documenting how I sort out the rules of engagement in life.

You can see how far I’ve come because my first big break in writing was when my hypertext (which is here) got me lecture gigs at Brown University and the University of Paris. Publisher’s Weekly bitched about my inability to be emotionally connected in my writing, but  I got into graduate school at Boston University for my cunning ability to describe really bad sex.

I wonder if my editor will cut that part.

2. Focus on one person at a time.

The thing about writing for an editor is that you write for one person. Did you ever get coached for speaking? I did — the TAI Group. I love them. They gave me incredible coaching and if I had to get a job that was commission-based and made me scared my kids would starve if I couldn’t make a sale, I would choose to sell speaking coaching from the TAI Group.

TAI taught me that you have to connect with a single person in the audience. Talk to that one person until you know you have made a deep connection. And then move to another person. Do not scan the audience trying to connect with everyone. If you try to connect with everyone, you connect with no one. If you connect deeply with one person, the whole audience can feel that connection and they actually feel connected to you.

Really. This works. It’s super hard to do because our intuition is to ditch someone before we make a connection because it’s so scary in a speech to try so hard, in front of everyone.

Speech-making mirrors life. We must risk making deep connections. This would be a good jumping off point for a post about intimacy but I fear I have no ability to understand intimacy, so instead this will be a jumping off point for writing for an editor.

If I write for him, with him in mind, then I connect with him really well, and, in turn, connect with you—just like in the speech.

Right now, I am stressing because my editor might cut all this stuff. About connection. So I have to write more.

3. Have patience while you look for an engagement point.

I’m becoming fascinated with how people make connections. So much of it, I think, is that you assume people will be interesting. Moira Gunn has a show on NPR called TechNation where she interviews scientists about topics she knows nothing about. She is renowned for knowing how to start a conversation with anyone.

Gunn gently steers the person to a place where they can make a connection. One of Gunn's favorite interviews was with a food safety researcher who ended up talking about mussels. He told her that you are only supposed to eat them in months that have Rs in them, because in June, July and August the water is warm and bacteria levels go up, and mussels are basically filters.

Melissa met me by stalking me at a conference where I was speaking. I thought I was avoiding her, but she waited until I was clearly lost trying to find the room where I was to speak. She said,  "You look lost. I can get you to your room."

4. Say something simple and true.

People who say they are shy are usually not shy, but rather, they are under the impression that they have to say something genius and complicated and impressive as an opener, according to Bernardo Carducci from the Shyness Research Institute. But in fact, people like openings that are simple and true—these openers have plenty emotional and intellectual space to join in.

I’m smitten with Joel Johnson’s bio page. Look at it. He’s done incredible stuff, but he uses the page to create space for the reader to join him—in an e.e. cummings sort of way. There is something about the combination of lists of achievements and fully-formed sentences that pushes a reader away. Roland Barthes writes about how the connection between the reader and the writer is in the white spaces on the page, not the text. If this is true, which I think it is, then Joel has one of the best bios for making real connections that I’ve ever read.

He makes me want to change my bio, but honestly, I’m scared to make my bio more about connecting and less about me because I want to make sure people know how great I am. It’s a personal failing.

Note, that last line is not something simple and true. It is perhaps a partial-truth.

5. Practice.

Anything you want to be good at requires that you do it over and over again, and Carducci says that creating a good opener for conversation is no exception. Here's his book, for those of you who are operating under the delusion that reading about something is a replacement for real-life practice.

And

I miss Melissa.

My son introduced me to your blog which I appreciate. I am your polar opposite. You have complete freedom to say whatever you want…for whatever reason is not important. We can all use a little more honesty.

In general, I think people can say much more than they think they can. It used to be that no one blogged about unemployment, bad bosses or screaming at their kids. Now these are all pretty common posts. This should tell you that topics that you think will change what people think about you don’t actually do that. Consider what you’re doing – if it’s within the realm of normal, people don’t care that you’re doing it—it’s not interesting.

Of course, things that I think are totally normal, like, having a miscarriage at work, turn out to be very controversial. But really, I am still not sure why. I mean, just thinking logically, hundreds of thousands of women have miscarriages every year, and most of those women have not had a kid so they are working, so hundreds of thousands of women each year have a miscarriage at work.

I think my inability to understand why this is controversial might be a blessing.

I also am not sure I understand privacy. I don’t understand why people use it. I have had a lot of talks with the farmer about this. He told me that we cannot be intimate if we don’t have some things that are private. So I told him I would not write about sex.

But then I wrote sort of about sex. I wrote about when he wouldn’t go down on me. I told him it was me writing about not sex. And sex is off limits but not sex is not off limits.

He was not happy. I’m sure most of you will agree with him. That I should not have written about that.

But then I think, he has known, since before he even met me, that I write about everything. And then, when he met me, he read my novel, which is not a novel but really a memoir that the publisher made me call a novel because no one would believe it was true.  But it is not really a novel either, but a hypertext wishing it were a novel, which is what Publisher’s Weekly wrote when they said it was great writing with incompetent structure.

The problem of me not understanding intimacy is maybe because I don’t understand why we separate ourselves to be different people at different times.

I don’t think I am able to manage being different versions of myself depending on the social context. So everyone gets the same version of me. I have found, for example, that venture capitalists like my blog. After all, they have invested in my company. But it’s not just the investment. They tell me they like my blog and they like the blog posts that say things we’re not supposed to say. Like, I can't handle my insane travel schedule, and my company is running out of money and I want to fucking kill the investor who is sailing in Bermuda without a phone to hear me panicking. Investors like that. Because they like honesty.

People like honesty. They might wince, but they don’t generally hold honesty against you.

What people do hold against me, I think, is that I don’t seem to be able to create intimacy with the farmer. It’s a downfall, I think.

But I also think that that’s why he picked me.

He read my writing, about sex with every other guy, when he first started dating me. (That’s probably why he dumped me. Well, one of the fifty reasons he dumped me fifty times. And, by the way, he hates that I always have a different number for the number of times he dumped me. But I tell him you don’t care. Whatever number it is, you get the point.

Fifty million.)

He knew I had never really been able to be intimate because I was too fascinated with writing about my inability to be intimate which requires writing about what should be intimate moments.

I want to tell you about this costume he bought for me. Well, actually, I bought it. He chose it. It’s a costume called “Alice” like, Alice in Wonderland. But it’s a different Wonderland.

We bought it when we were costume shopping with the kids.

I told him I couldn’t stand all the sword fighting in the Star Wars section.

Then I came back to the Star Wars section and told him I found a section for grown-ups. “Let’s get one,” I said.

“You said you wouldn’t wear one of those.”

“Well, I will. Which do you like?”

“All of them.”

There were about 50 costumes. I picked one. I called him over to look. The dressing room was in the middle of the room, so I opened the curtain just a peek.

The kids came running over and said, “Mommy! I love your costume!”

The farmer said, “No. That’s terrible.”

He said that the key to a costume like this is to have a lot of space between the bottom of the skirt and the top of the tights. They are garter belt tights.

Okay. So I try on the other costume, and it’s the Alice costume, and we get it. And the boys spend the next month asking me if I’m going to wear it trick or treating.

I wear it to bed.

It is intimate, but it feels intimate because I’m doing something I’ve never done before. It doesn’t feel any more intimate to me than founding a company feels.

I know my Brazen Careerist co-founders, Ryan and Ryan, are going to freak out when they read that line. But they don’t have to worry because what I really mean is that nothing feels truly intimate to me.

And I kind of like it that way because I don’t have to have lots of different versions of myself. I don’t have to separate being a mom from being a blogger. I don’t have to separate being Alice from being a startup founder. It’s all the same me.

A lot of commenters accuse me of being a nutcase because one day I am breaking a lamp over my head and the next day I am dispensing advice about effective elevator pitches.

To me though, someone is a nutcase for pretending to not be both those people. Each of us can give good advice on something. And each of us has a messed up personal life sometimes. One person can do both those things. The only thing weird is that we don’t admit it. Why can’t career advisors also talk about the things going wrong in their lives? Why can’t startup founders also be sex kittens?

What I know is that I am really really grateful for not having to hide who I am at work. It is true, what Louise said, that I can say whatever I want, as long as I’m interesting. I can still make a living, and I can still have friends. (Well, I’m not that great at friends, but hypothetically I can have friends because there are people who have told me they want to be my friend.)

So I think the farmer picked me because I’m bad at intimacy. He is bad at it, too. He is comfortable with that—not being close to me.

So we are comfortable with our non-intimacy.

I mean, I say that, but I know there is more to life. I just can’t seem to find it.

It’s a good answer, right? I had choices: I could admit to reading like a crazy person. I could admit to trying to be in professional sports but not quite there, or I could give an answer that impressed everyone: I work in currency arbitrage. In reality, I was so incompetent at this job that when currencies went wild after the Berlin Wall fell, I lost a few million dollars for a few violent traders. The only possible reason to keep a dyslexic, literary, arbitrage clerk around was because she was good looking. But I wasn’t good looking enough. I got fired.

Immediately I focused on getting on the pro volleyball tour. At that point, “What do you do?” questions did not get “I’m getting a job in a children’s book store because I worked in the family book store for ten years and I can tell you the publisher of any author–quiz me.”  Instead, I said, “I’m moving to Los Angeles to play professional beach volleyball.” To me, the book store was a step back to support volleyball, which was a step forward.

Describing my move to LA over and over again to prying relatives and concerned strangers actually made me believe it. How you answer the question “What do you do?” is important because it frames your story for you in a much more visceral way than it frames it for anyone else.

Recently, I had the problem again. I was sort of working at my startup, Brazen Careerist, but not really. The company got a new CEO and was moving to Washington, DC , and I was staying in Wisconsin and marrying the farmer.

“What do you do?” came up a lot because I was redecorating the farm house and traveling back and forth between DC and Madison and NY and Darlington. People in cities asked me what I was doing because clearly, I was not full-time at Brazen Careerist. And people in Darlington asked me because clearly I did not have a life in Darlington.

After trying out a lot of answers that came out poorly (like, I’m working at my company but not really) I came up with “I’m taking a few months off my job to decorate the house while I’m moving to the farm.”

It was a good answer. It was true, of course, but there are lots of true answers this type of question, and not all truthful answers are effective answers. It was a good answer because it reminded me that moving to the farm was a huge job. But also it made me realize that I had given myself an enormous education in interior design in a very short period of time.

I learned about Steampunk styling from hundreds of hours on the Internet. I absolutely fell in love with the idea of repurposing old things for new things, and seeing old in a new way.

I learned about color theory and practice from Maria Killam, who spent hours on the phone with me until I understood when orange on the fabric swatch will look red on a sofa (and why you should never do color on your wall without a consult from an expert).

I obsessively guarded against having anything in the house that did not have a use. All things had to be special and beautiful but nothing could be there only because it was special and beautiful.

When I told people I was decorating the house, they were happy for me. And worried for me. Because I am not going to make a living as a decorator. But the best answer to the question “What do you do?” is “Here’s what I’m passionately learning right now.”

If I had answered in a way that focused on my worries about not knowing where my career was going, then there would have been nothing to talk about. But when I answered in a way that revealed my excitement about the house and everything I was learning, then there was a lot to talk about.

I tell you this to show that everyone has trouble answering the question at some points in their life, but the more comfortable we are being lost, the faster we can get unlost, and this is a good example of why—you can tell yourself better stories about yourself.

So here are some steps to help you get better at the process of answering the question “What do you do?”

1.    Understand the question.
Assume there is no hidden, evil agenda. Assume the person asking simply wants to know more about you. Of course, only people who have a good answer to the question themselves end up asking the question of others, but still, it’s a reasonable question.

2.    Focus on a differentiator.
The problem with getting to know someone is that if you ask people, “What’s important to you?” you won’t learn anything. Because 90% of people will say things like family, friends, learning, being kind, or other routine things — the things, actually, that are on my refrigerator, in the first photo.

You get to know more about a person by asking how they spend their time. Because, while we all have similar goals (really, I bet the same few New Years Resolutions are made by 80% of all people) we all try to reach them in different ways.

This actually reminds me of the opening of  Anna Karenina. “All happy families are the same, and each unhappy families is unhappy in different ways.” The modern version of that is “all goals for attaining a happy life are the same, but all the paths to not reaching those goals are misguided in different ways.”

So the question “What do you do?” is an attempt to find out what makes you different.  Which means that everyone has an answer.

3.     Don’t focus on your job.
This is not a job interview—it’s an attempt to get to know you so the person can connect with you. So you don’t need to go straight to your job for an answer. Some people have a job that does define them. Some people do not. Once you realize you can go either way on this, you can come up with the best answer for you.

4.     Focus on where you spend your time and energy.
If you work at Starbuck’s to support your marathon training, you can say you’re training for a marathon. That is interesting and will immediately spark a fine conversation. Plus, you show that you are someone worth getting to know—you set challenging goals for yourself and you work hard to meet them.

5.     Focus on what you are learning.
A career is not an earning path, it’s a learning path. So if you tell someone what you are learning about now, they will not actually care what your job is. What you choose to learn, and what interests you, actually says way more about you than the type of job you have. Some people learn a lot on their jobs, some people learn more away from their jobs. Where you learn is not as important as what you learn.

If you are not learning anything, and not doing anything special, ask yourself why. You can do anything in your free time. Make it matter.

6.      Don’t be defensive
Remember that people are asking to be kind. They are trying to create a connection so that you can talk to each other about things that matter to both of you. Surely that is appealing to you as well. So be helpful with your answer by being vulnerable and forthcoming instead of defensive.

7.     Ask about the other person.
Sometimes we get so stressed answering the question that we forget to actually make conversation. Ask the other person what he or she does. Then find common ground. At work or at a cocktail party or talking to someone we wish we didn’t have to talk to—being interested in  both ourselves and in someone else is one of the most important things we can do.

This is the broom closet I hid in.

Photis saw me go in. He said, "What are you doing?"

"Taking a break," I said. And I shut the door.

Remember when I told you Photis is a really good guy but a little bit weird? Here's a good example of that. At the broom closet he said, "Okay." And he walked back to the party.

I stayed in the closet thinking of how many people would need to be in the room before I could open the door. I thought that maybe everyone was getting drunk and that's what I should do to fit in. I wanted to talk to Ryan Paugh, who is my social skills guide for moments like this. But I couldn't talk to him because then I'd have to leave the closet.

My eyes started adjusting to the darkness and I found a sort of a shelf to sit on and then I worried that I was a little too comfortable. Because what if the CEO realized I was in the broom closet? He would start thinking that the farm is really making me crazy and he needs to do something to limit the impact of my craziness on the company.

Just as I was trying to figure out how long I could be in the closet, the door opened and a woman screamed.

"What are you doing here?!!?!?"

"I am just taking a break here," I told her. I tried to sound really calm so she would not be scared. But I didn't want to sound so calm that I sounded like a serial killer. I said, "It is my party. And I have social anxiety."

She did not even pause to think of what that meant. She said, "Get out of the closet. This is against the rules."

I asked if I could stay five minutes. I said I wouldn't touch anything.

She was looking a little violent. Like maybe she's the serial killer.

So I left the closet.

And the party was in gear. And I was blown away by how interesting people were. And how far they had traveled. And how easily Ryan Paugh talked to every single one of them. Here's a photo of Ryan with Regina Twine, who came to the party from Raleigh, NC, and Junayd Mahmood, who came from Senator Gillibrand's office on Capitol Hill.

I'm a big fan of Senator Gillibrand. She has two young kids and a seemingly high-functioning marriage, and she is a good legislator. I thought Junayd would give me a peek of insight on how she does it. But instead, he told me what every other person at the party with an extremely interesting government job told me that night: Nothing juicy.

Also, for the first time, I met the guy who has been the site manager for my blog for three years, Jason Unger. What do you call this kind of person? Blog administrator? I don't know. Really, you call this sort of person a saint. Because when I make a mistake on the blog, I go nuts and call him. Typically what happens is that something on this site has been functioning a certain way for the last ten months and suddenly I notice it and I don't like it and I call Jason up at 5am and wake his wife and his baby for something that is totally unimportant.

So, anyway, it's appropriate that in the photo with Jason, I am giving orders instead of smiling for the camera.

Do you know what I like about a big party? When it really gets rolling, it gets intimate. When the room was full, people were discovering that everyone in the room was interesting and no one would notice if I was gone. That's when the party got great. And I sat on the floor with Maggie McGary.

And she told me about her ex-husband who could not separate from his parents and she got a divorce. And you know how when there's a car crash, you like to drive by slowly to see what happened to get that relieved feeling that it's not you? Well, I kept not being sure if I was listening to Maggie like that, or listening to Maggie like I need to change course. (But maybe that's how you listen to me, too.)

The way to go to a party if you hate parties is just to force yourself. Really. Everyone is nervous walking into a roomful of people they don't know. There is no trick. There is nothing to do but go. I tell you this because I know: Because I had so much fun and I loved all the people who read my blog, and I loved all the friends they brought with them and I also loved all the guys at Brazen Careerist because I can tell things are going really well and I loved Photis for knowing that the closet was a reasonable choice.

Although by the end of the night, I could have used another broom closet break. But there wasn't one. So I rewarded myself for going to a party and having a good time by laying down at the bar.

For a while, I thought that the farm is really what I fell in love with. I felt an overwhelming sense that I belonged on this farm from the moment I got out of my car.

But also, the moment I got out of my car, I fell in love with the farmer.

And I did not fall in love with the farmer when I went to check him out at the farmer’s market before I agreed to drive out to his farm. Which tells me that love at first sight is a combination of things: the right setting and right person.

I had love at first sight with my first husband, too. I remember seeing him in a group. I remember asking him if he’s Jewish (very important to me then – I wanted to raise Jewish kids) and I remember us being surrounded by the smartest people in LA who were trying to figure out nonlinear media before anyone had even heard of the Internet.

The setting of smart people talking about ideas primed me to fall in love, like the farm setting primed me the next time.

This started getting me thinking about how you fall in love at work. With your job. I think it’s also love at first sight.

When people are interviewing each other face to face, it’s clear that all the candidates are qualified—everyone has been screened to know that the potential employees are skilled enough, the potential company is interesting enough, the job is a decent enough fit. So that leaves chemistry as the important thing in an interview. And I think it works similarly to falling in love.

The obvious corollary, of course, is looks. We are can’t help choosing to work with people who we think are good-looking. It’s against the law, yes, I know. But we do it anyway, often subconsciously.

The idea that our love-at-first-sight tools work similarly for other relationships is not that far-fetched.  First, it’s clear that researchers at Ohio State University found that after just a few minutes of meeting someone face-to-face, people decide what sort of relationship they want to have with that person. And that decision is a good predictor of what will happen in the future between the two people because people act in accordance with their decision.

Here are ways to apply what we know about love at first sight to getting the job you want:

1.     Interviews during ovulation are bad.
Women are more likely to fall in love with a man when ovulating. But ovulation changes the type of man women seek. Women prefer gender stereotypes during ovulation—which means not only a square jaw, but a dominant caretaker and a poor-communicator –questionable traits to seek in a co-worker.

2.     Telling someone you really want them is good.
You are more likely to have love at first sight if the person likes you. We are naturally more attracted to people who give us cues that they are attracted to us. So telling the interviewer how much you really really want the job is not optional.

3.     When discussing your skills, focus on complementary not similar.
We are genetically predisposed to fall in love with someone not like us—it keeps the gene pool safe. So when you want someone to fall in love with the idea of working with you, focus on personality characteristics you offer them that they don’t already have.

We all know that love at first sight does not mean love forever. And it doesn’t necessarily mean good for you, either. But love at first sight is fun and exciting and invigorating, and I’m certain it’s good for the workplace—that is, if it is possible to have love at first sight with the idea of working with someone.

So I’m going to give you four twitter tips that no one else will tell you.

1. Focus on quality over quantity
First, let’s talk about purpose. Why are you on twitter anyway? There are tons of really valid goals for twitter, but most of them require influence. I mean, you need twitter influence in order to reach almost any goal on twitter. Because twitter is about sharing information with people who matter to you.

If you want to publicize stuff on twitter you definitely need influence. But at the other end of the spectrum (where I am) if you just want to write well, you also need influence because if you are writing and no one is listening then you are not really communicating.

The biggest reason for you to focus on influence, though, is that money doesn’t make us happy, but influence does. I spent two hours trying to find this article in the New York Times. I can’t find it because as soon as you put influence and happiness in a search string you get stuff that influences happiness but you can’t search influence influence happiness. Anyway, trust me that if you have influence, you feel happier.

Which maybe means that the smartest thing you can do is obsessively watch Twitter rankings. But it probably means that you should think about if you have the type of followers you want. For example, if your goal is to sell timeshares in Nairobi, you only need 24 followers as long as they each book two weeks out of the year.

Or, here’s another way to think about it. The founder of LinkedIn, Konstantin Guericke, once told me that you only need 30 contacts to have a quality network as long as the contacts are well connected. I think this probably means that you only need 30 twitter followers who really care about what you say if you are using twitter to build a network that will support you in your career.

2. Get a writing partner
Twitter is basically a writing platform. So why is the writing so bad? Why are people so uninteresting? I think the best way to get influence on twitter is to be interesting. More tweets that are not interesting is not as effective as a fewer tweets that are interesting. The larger a twitter following you want, the more you have to concentrate on writing what a larger audience would want—and not just what your immediate friends want.

So, when it comes to writing for a large audience, maybe you should have a helper. I have a twitter editor. For me, it’s very normal because I’ve been a writer for so long, with various editors, that it was natural for me to have a blog editor, and once you have a blog editor, a twitter editor is not a far leap.

Anyway, very few people have been creative geniuses on their own. Joshua Wolf Shenk has a whole column on Slate devoted to this topic or partnering to release creative genius. He says there’s tons of research to show that you need a cohort:

To illustrate the consistently hidden partner with an obvious example: Book editors don't put their names on covers. Their reputation largely depends on authors—who can be notoriously ungrateful and committed to the idea of their solitary genius. Jack Kerouac's On The Road sat on slush piles all around Manhattan until Malcolm Cowley, then an editor at Viking, undertook the laborious effort (literary, political, emotional) of shaping it for publication. But afterward, Kerouac and the Beats portrayed Cowley as a villain who muddied the famous unbroken typescript, which they claimed was powered by Benzedrine and holy light.

Some of you, probably those of you who think you’re such a genius that you can’t work with anyone else, doubt this premise. So here’s another good example from Shenk of us thinking that we see people do things on their own, but we don’t:

Tiger's distance control was a problem," Williams explained to Golf magazine. "So I would adjust yardages and not tell him." Woods ended up hitting the ball inside two feet from the cup and went on to win. Williams has said that he gave Woods incorrect yardages for the better part of five years.

So if you want to focus on doing good writing, which will guarantee that you build a community of people who appreciate good writing (which, we all know, eliminates 90% of the population) then you need a writing partner, or at least a good muse.

3. Focus on happiness.
I am over the happiness thing, to be honest. I am done trying to be happy. When Tyler Cowen first told me that interesting lives are nicer than happy lives, I thought he was an Asperger’s apologist. But I am really feeling that as long as I have a few friends who are all trying to live interesting lives as well, I am fine. I don’t need to strive for happiness. (Do you want to know if you strive for happiness or interestingness? Take this test.)

This is, of course, after I followed every piece of happiness advice out there and moved to one of the places in America that has the highest density of happiness: Rural Wisconsin.

But, anyway, if you want to be the center of influential social networks, you need to appear happy, according to research from Nicholas Christakis, professor of sociology at Harvard University. Maybe I am the exception to this rule. Because I am able to find the yucky messiness in any happy situation but I still have a lot of followers.

But I do appreciate the fact that the happy people do no research about happiness because they are happy (and mostly don’t read because reading creates new experiences and people who search for interesting rather than happy are the ones are more open to new experiences). And unhappy people love the happiness research. So I am a maven of unhappiness and the research to alleviate it.

And I can tell you that you should put a happy smile photo of yourself on twitter because Christakis says that you will be more influential on networks.

And, if you are trying to figure out what to spend your time on twitter doing, think about this, from Christakis:

We found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

This means that all those people on twitter who are trying to sell stuff to create an alternative revenue source in their lives (which I estimate to be an unfortunate 95% of all people on twitter) should think about using twitter to make happy friends, instead.

4. Be black on twitter
For the last year, I have been bombarding Brazen Careerist’s community manager, Ryan Paugh with my observations about the trending topics. They are always full of black people. But if I looked at my list of followers, I’d think there are almost no black people on twitter. And if I only read trending topics, I’d think twitter was mostly a black person thing.

Whenever I’m bored at night, (and I’ve worn out my weekly limit on impulsive eBay shopping),  I click the trending topics on twitter. I am not alone in this. Other white people write about their fascination with late-night trending topics from black people.

For those of you who don’t know what trending topics is, here’s an explanation from Farhad Manjoo who wrote a great piece about being black on twitter for Slate:

On Twitter, people append hashtags to categorize their messages—the tags make it easier to search for posts on a certain topic, and they can sometimes lead to worldwide call-and-response conversations in which people compete to outdo one another with ever more hilarious, bizarre, or profane posts.

So, anyway, last weekend, I clicked on the trending topic #ghettocompanies

I click on stuff like this because I can tell it’s going to be a conversation that is one that I would never find myself at in real life, but online, I can lurk. Here are some good one’s:

Yes, these examples reinforce stereotypes. I know; it reminds me of how my family sits around telling Jewish jokes that reinforce stereotypes, but we don’t care because we are Jewish.

But back to the how to be great at twitter part of this post. The reasons these trending topics do so well on twitter is that the groups of people who are using them are tightly knit. This information comes from Brendan Meeder, who appears to be getting a PhD from Carnegie Mellon by publishing information about how black people use Twitter.

Tightly knit groups of people retweet each other and they participate in each other’s games. This is true of lots of groups on twitter—it’s a very cliquey environment. But what’s interesting is that black people are more tightly aligned than white people. That’s why they dominate on the trending topics, according to Meeder and Manjoo.

This actually makes sense. And now, I am wondering if it’s okay to tread on racist territory too make the following analogy: There is also evidence that black people are more tightly knit than white people in prison.

I was doing research on prison violence (these  are my two pet topics for late-night research: prison violence and plane crashes. I hope there’s a special Jeopardy for these topics. I will be a millionaire.)

Anyway, prison violence is skyrocketing, and prisoners in the U.S. receive unwanted sexual advances 80,000 times per day. But the population most likely to be raped are white men under the age of 25. Of course, all men under the age of 25 are prime targets because young men are hotter than old men. But white men are more vulnerable because if a black man rapes a black man, the black prisoners will attack him. The same is true with Latino men. And if a black man rapes a Latino man or a Latino rapes a black, the men who are the same race as the victim will seek revenge. But the white people are not used to thinking of themselves in terms of race. So white men do not protect other white men.

Now I’m really on a tangent, but I can’t resist telling you. This usually starts happening in a low-security prison where guards are trying to figure out what a prisoner will be like and where to send him. The non-violent white criminals get pounced on right away. The trauma of rape makes a person start looking crazy, and then they get put in a high security prison because they are acting crazy. And in a high security prison a young, non-violent prisoner is dead meat.

Okay. So I’m a little worried about this last piece of advice, which is, in case we’ve lost focus, to act like you’re black on twitter so that people participate in your stuff and you participate in other peoples’ stuff and you have a tight-knit group.

I think people will say this is racist. But what I really want is a conversation about it. So I’m taking a risk. And maybe this is the real piece of advice. Take a risk with twitter. Try doing something with it that maybe pushes you a little outside your comfort zone. That is the way to make life the most interesting from twitter, and maybe that’s all we can ask from any technology.

I do not tell Ryan to shut up because he has taught me a ton about myself since the day I started working with him. And in fact, he makes me feel qualified to tell you how you can fire up your career by paying close attention to the people with the least work experience.

1. Recognize interns are gatekeepers to the good stuff.

When it was time to promote my second book, I went to Keith Ferrazzi, author of one of my favorite career advice books. I needed a quotation from Keith that said something like, “I am The Great Keith Ferazzi and I can tell you for sure that your career will be crap and you will die drowning in the blood of a rabid coyote if you do not buy Penelope Trunk’s book.”

Just so you don’t get confused, I’m going to start calling my first book my first book and my second book my second book. At this point, I have written enough about oral sex and family atrocities that you will not be shocked to hear that my first book is really a memoir that my publisher – out of the University of Colorado — decided was too disturbing to be sold as a memoir, so it was published as a novel.

Anyway, another thing Keith is great at is hiring interns. Keith’s intern, and gatekeeper, at the time of the publication of my second book, was Ian Ybarra. Ian said sure, he could come up with a quote. (It did not have animal references, but still, it was a nice endorsement.) Ian could see that I was a book-promotion novice, so he started giving me tips: Trade email lists, give speeches, pitch bloggers. Note: this was five years ago, when no one pitched bloggers.

Wait, please. Do not send me your book because I get too many. I’m sick of getting copies of business books. (Note to all publishers: I am getting really good at self-promotion and my blog is about to really take off, so could you please start sending me books with literary merit? Here’s my address: 15010 Oak Grove Lane, Darlington, WI 53030.) (And, a note to people who are going to say aren’t I worried that if I publish my address that stalkers will come get me in my sleep. Check me out on Google maps. The farm is so remote that even a stalker would be scared to go there in the dark.) (Finally, a note about using parentheses: Can we talk about style? Can there be more talk about style in blogging? Are links inherently parenthetical? What if each thought in a post is parenthetical, but they all add up to something that is central to our lives? Is that innovative or is it too e e cummings?) It’s so difficult to be original.

2. Don't rush on the phone; interns chat about things that really matter.

Then, one day, Ian wrote to me that he was moving with his girlfriend to Beloit. And then to Saudi Arabia. Or something like that. I can’t remember where he moved, but he grew up in a really really small town in a state that gets joked about just like Wisconsin. And he told me about how MIT courted him because he had high SAT scores in a weird zip code. When I worry about my kids going to a rural school with no orchestra, I hang my hat on hopes painted with broad brush strokes of the tidbits of Ian’s life that I may or may not remember correctly.

The next intern was Ryan Geist. I love him because I met him when he was at a big job at a big firm where I would never have been able to go to when I was his age because I was too busy not doing what the world expected me to do. What I love about Ryan is he gave those expectations a chance, and he was brave enough to say he didn’t like them, and he landed on Keith’s doorstep.

At the same time Ryan was there, so was Sara Grace. She called to get a quote from me. And I started talking to her about what she does. What her aspirations are. And she started telling me all these ways that Keith repurposes content. I was blown away. He is great at turning everything he writes or says into a post. The thing that really struck me was that he records interviews and has them transcribed in India and then edited into a post. That’s a great idea.

3. Let an intern show you your weak spot: you'll love her for it.

That’s a great idea because reporters ask interesting questions. And then I end up talking about topics I hadn’t thought about talking about before. The reporter uses 10% of what I say and the rest is gone. Poof. I do about five interviews a week, so recording them seemed like a good idea. But I realized that I actually like the process of writing. I don’t like the process of reading what I already said. (I wonder, does anyone actually like that process? It seems solipsistic. And shut up to all you people who think everything I do is solipsistic, self-promotion. Here is a list of people who are a thousand times better at self-promotion than I am and I wish I could be any of them for a day:

Guy Kawasaki

Jason Calcanis

Ramit Sethi

And probably all you people who say that I’m in love with myself and never shut up about myself are also people who rant about me into a recorder and then hit replay so you can listen to yourself rant.)

4. Lay groundwork to get a job from the intern one day.

So goal number one is to be better at promoting myself.

And goal number two is to be better at using all the content I generate to create more posts. I am also not good at this because once I generate the content, it bores me. I want to move on. So I’m not sure how I will meet this goal either.

But here’s a start:

Esquire contacted me this week about how to quit. And I decided it might make a good blog post. I see that it’s taken me too many words to get to it. So it’s hard to say that it’s the real subject of this blog post. But maybe you will like it:

Don't do an exit interview. If they wanted to hear your ideas about how to make things better, you wouldn't be quitting, would you? So this is really just a way for you to burn bridges and annoy people. Don't fall into the trap. If they insist on an exit interview, say nothing negative. At all.

Send a thank you note. Anyone you worked closely with should get a hand-written thank you note. Bring up specific times when they surprised you with kindness, made your work better, invigorated you with their own contagious brilliance or creativity. And, if you are thinking that you work with people who merely make you want to hit your head on a brick wall, remember this: Intelligent people can learn from anyone.

Take a vacation. You probably think about work all the time, not because you're a slave but because you like solving problems and learning new things and meeting interesting people. Which is what work really is. This means that the only time you can really take a vacation is in between jobs. So do that. Don't start the new job right away.

Have humility. You are probably not quitting to take a job that sucks, right? So, since you are quitting for a better job, you don't need to shove it in peoples' faces that you are moving up in the world and they are not. The world is not a race to a McMansion, the world is a contest for who can be the most kind-hearted and tolerant. That's what makes a good life—you'll get kindness in return. So be gracious and grateful.

Think of quitting as a networking event. These people are no longer your co-workers, they are the network that will help you get the job after the one you just got. And don't forget the entry-level people who look like they couldn't help anyone. The interns will get big jobs one day, and they will remember each person who saw them for who they are and who they could be.

So, I have been thinking for a while that I need to stop using email, but I was never sure my hunch was right.  Finally, through the process of deciding to put photos of my kids on my blog, I realized that email is now old-fashioned.  Here’s why:

1.     Email is inefficient.

Email is one-to-one communication and social networks one-to-many communication. (Here's a good link about that.) If you have something meaningful or thoughtful to say, why not say it to many people? It would mean that more people share ideas and more people understand your way of thinking. Also, there are so many pieces of our life that we tell at different times to different people. Why not just say it once? We all have email overload: we parse our messages into 40 one-to-one messages instead of just a single one-to-many message.

Email is also an inefficient way to hone your writing skills. A Stanford study shows that people develop better writing in social media than in the classroom. In the classroom you write for a single reader, the teacher, who is a captive audience—it’s her job to read your writing. But in social media, you have to persuade a group of readers to accept your way of thinking, and you have to be interesting. So you will get better and better at your job—which is, for all of us on some level, communicating—if you use social media instead of email.

2.     The intimacy of email is overrated.

If you want intimate communication, send a handwritten letter. I receive one of these almost every week, so I know the custom is not dead. And I pay attention to them much more than email. The act of seeing someone’s handwriting is intimate because handwriting reveals so much about a person. Email is not intimate. It’s a workplace tool, and it’s also a pile of junk we’re always trying to get to the bottom of.

Most of the information you send via email is for work, (which is the premise of Seth Godin's recent advice about using email). Email is not a good tool for ideas. It’s a good tool for sniggling details. You don’t want to spend your life in the irrelevant details of mundane tasks. So the fewer emails you send, the more time you spend in the realm of either execution or ideas—more powerful than details. Execution happens outside of email, and ideas should happen in groups—which means social networks.

3.     Your privacy is overrated.

First of all, you don’t have a lot of privacy. You are getting everything online for free, and in exchange you are letting someone sell your data. You don’t have enough money or enough time in your life to use the Internet in a way that does not invade your privacy. But, so what? The value of your privacy is very little in the age of transparency and authenticity. Privacy is almost always a way of hiding things that don't need hiding.

In social media, the relevant parts of you will fall to the relevant places, which is why you can be your true self wherever you go, and it’s okay that you don’t have privacy. Your employer is not interested in your profile on Facebook because it doesn’t reveal anything about how you perform at work—it reveals what you’re like at a party. Employers will read the parts of you that are professional, and friends will read your personal announcements.

So this is why I’m comfortable posting photos of my kids here. I used to worry that it would invade my kids’ privacy. But I’m realizing now that privacy won’t matter when my kids are growing up. When I interviewed media theorist Rebecca Blood, she said  that kids today already manage their online lives like they are Hollywood celebrities and therefore their parents cannot guild them about privacy online.

If this is what we’re doing now, I can only imagine how little privacy will matter ten years from now.

Also, one of the great things about social media is that it gives voices to groups that have hereto-with been without one. Like the experience of parenting. Sally Mann was called a pornographer when she published her stunning photos of her kids. Today, mommy bloggers publish these sort of photos (though admittedly not as stunning) every day.

Also, I am struck by this post on the blog Peaches & Coconuts. Debroah writes about struggling to get through the week when her partner is out of town on business. And she says she doesn’t over-schedule her kids so they will go to Harvard. She over-schedules them so she can get through the day. And, she notes that her kids are not going to get into Harvard anyway, she can already tell.

Many people would say, “What will the kids say when they read this?” But you know what? If we don’t write about our kids we cannot write about our experience parenting. It’s like when women first wrote about orgasms. I’m sure people said, “What will your husband think?”

Who benefitted from the conversation? Everyone, right? Good orgasms make good sex for everyone. And good parenting makes better lives for everyone. And transparency trumps privacy every time. So put your ideas in social media, not email.

So, here's my contribution to a more transparent conversation about what life is really like at the intersection of work and life: a photo of my son. I think it should be titled Breaking from Work to Eat Lunch with Superman: