But many of you are making lots of social media mistakes. I know because so many people tell me that social media is a waste of their time. They’re wasting their time, and continuing to make mistakes, because there’s a set of common lies that people believe about social media. Here are those lies:

Lie #1: LinkedIn is for networking.

LinkedIn is great. I’m on LinkedIn. I have 650 connections. At first I wondered, why do I need this list of connections published on LinkedIn? What was the purpose of it? But now I get it. With LinkedIn, people can tell that I am a very connected person.

Most of you already know I’m well connected—I’m a print journalist, blogger, and startup founder, which are all very network-intensive jobs. But if you’re someone who doesn’t know how to tell whether someone is connected, LinkedIn is a great scorecard.

Potential employers like LinkedIn because they can glance at your LinkedIn profile and get a sense of how connected you are and how much money you make. (Yes, large networks correlate to large salaries.) That's the utility of the scorecard.

But what you cannot do on LinkedIn is build a network. Networks are built on relationships, which grow from conversation. LinkedIn is not for conversations. So you need to go somewhere else to build your network, and then, when it’s big, display it on LinkedIn so you’ll look great.

Lie #2: Twitter is for conversation.

So if you need conversation to grow relationships into a network, then you look for the social media tools that are for conversation. Right? Twitter seems easy. It’s only 140 characters, so it’s appealing to someone who is weary of spending every waking minute using social media.

The problem with using Twitter for conversation is that we need more than 140 characters to make a genuine connection with someone. So you’re not going to have a whole conversation there; Twitter is great for finding people who have similar ideas, and for keeping track of them in a superficial way.

But you still need to go elsewhere—offline or online—to solidify the relationship to the point where you would actually care about each other in the way a solid network connection does, but Twitter is a good start.

Lie #3: Blogs are personal journals.

Your blog is a record of what you’re thinking, and that record will represent you online, as a high-ranking search result when someone googles your name. So if you care about building a network, you’ll stop using your blog as a diary.

Your blog is intellectual exercise for you—to keep yourself thinking in a disciplined way about things that interest you. And it’s an intellectual exercise for other people—to follow your thought process and decide if they’d like to engage you in conversation. The blogosphere is a cocktail party for the intelligentsia without J Brand jeans or Jimmy Choo shoes. It’s just ideas, bouncing back and forth, and you’re deciding who to talk to.

I know I’m always telling people to stop worrying about what their blog is going to be and to just start blogging. I say this assuming that you understand that a blog is a networking tool. It’s one of the most important ways you can create career stability, by being who you are and connecting with people who like you for who you are. Your blog is a career-management dream-come-true.

Lie #4: Social media is no place for business.

The most common thing idiots say to me about my company is that we are never going to make money. But, we already do. Because companies definitely understand the need to leverage social media to meet their bottom-line goals. And my company helps them do that.

Companies understand they need to participate in conversation, and they are looking a professional places to do it. If you want to be known to companies, you will use social media to allow them to get to know you. (Wait. This just in. Government agencies get it as well! Check out the TSA's stellar use of social media.  A mommy blogger wrote a post accusing airport security of taking her son from her during a security check. TSA disputed her claim by posting video of woman and her son on the TSA blog. The mommy blogger published an apology.)

Which brings me to the seven-second rule. Someone who just met you for the first time, in person, will give you about three seconds to impress them. So you are very careful to show your best first impression in this situation. You already know this.

The same is true online. You probably get ten seconds instead of seven seconds, but the person will google your name, looking for something relevant in the top results, and click. If they are not impressed in the first ten seconds, they won’t keep reading about you.

If they go to Facebook, you have no idea what they’ll find out about you because so many people write on your wall about unprofessional things. If they end up at LinkedIn and you have a relatively shallow level of experience, you will not look good next to the typical LinkedIn user who is 40 years old, earning more than $100K, and has 15 years of experience.

So where do you want people to meet you for the first time online? Somewhere they can hear you talking about ideas. For bloggers, this is often a blog URL. Others could try Brazen Careerist, where your profile is comprised of your thoughts and ideas—you, being you.

The problem is that we are not taught to ask good questions. We’re trained to answer questions. But only answering questions doesn’t make an interesting life. After all, if you have all the answers, and you’re spewing them all the time, then you are not learning anything new.

Asking questions is how we get smarter. One of the earliest signs of a child with Asperger syndrome is that they fall behind in their learning because they do not understand how to ask a question. It doesn’t occur to them that someone would have information.

And maybe all my blog posts are actually about my obsession with a good question. For example, my recent rant about how blogs need topics is really about how a good blog is based on a good question. (My question is: how can we make the the intersection of work and life better?)

Today I’m going to focus on the kinds of questions that back us into a corner.

1) The question that asks: What is the meaning of life?

I think a lot about how people ask questions because I get them all the time. Often, the questions are so vague and poorly framed that I can’t believe the person actually sent an email. Here’s an example of one:

Hi Penelope,

I am from Bangalore India and an avid reader of your blog. I have recently quit my job at [big, international tech company] after working with them for many years. I would like to start something of my own but do not know how to go about it.

Can you guide me please?

Thanks for taking time out to read my mail. I will look forward to your response.

I sent a reprimanding email back to this person. In hindsight, I should have directed him to the post titled How to Write an Email that Generates a Good Response. Instead, I told him that there is no answer to this question. The question is so vague that it is not actually a question but a plea for respite from the inherent difficulties of adult life.

2. The question that reveals that you don’t care.

The questions that are most interesting are ones that create a conversation. My friend, Marci Alboher is great at these questions, because I love the conversations we have, even though she never likes my answers.

One of the most frequent mistakes people make in a job interview is when you switch to complete BS when the interviewer asks, at the end, “Do you have any questions for me?” Face it: the best way to ask questions in an interview is to ask them the whole time, not just at the end, so you can create the conversation that the interviewer needs so she can learn that yes, you are the right person with the right ideas for this position. If you wait until the end of the interview, it’s obvious that you don’t care—you have already had your conversation, based only on you answering the questions and having nothing to contribute on your own.

3. The question that generates an answer you can’t cope with.

I like to think that I’ve learned to be great at asking questions. I spend days dreaming up the perfect question for my mentor who I haven’t spoken to in a month. I want to make sure I ask a question that is interesting, and engaging to him and useful to me.

And I hear so many bad questions that I think I have become immune to asking them.

But it turns out that I’m not. Because I knew I was going to have a hard time getting myself to write a blog post today. Last year, I’d often go five days with no post. But that was when I was CEO of Brazen Careerist, and traveling every week, and also worrying that the company had no money.

Today I have a relatively calm life. The company is going great, and there is a new CEO, and my job is to write this blog, be a thought leader about the workplace, and talk to the press.  So I need to be posting more regularly.

I know that having a trick works for me, from days when I can’t get myself to go to the gym. Like, I tell myself I will go to the gym and just sit in the locker room and listen to my ipod and then go home. Invariably, if I convince myself to do that, I don’t actually stay in the locker room. I end up doing some sort of exercise.

So I thought of a trick for blogging. I told myself that I’d make a game of it. I asked my Brazen Careerist chat group (sign-up required) for a topic. I told them I’d write about the first three topics people suggested.

But here’s what happened: I didn’t like the topics. Well, some of them I liked a lot. Like, Karen Gaustad and Mara Lunaria both asked why we link to Facebook profiles from Brazen Careerist. It’s a good question, because I talk all the time about how Facebook is a network for personal –and often unprofessional — aspects of your life, and Brazen Careerist is for building your professional network. So I actually don’t know why we link to Facebook. I keep asking Ryan and Ryan and they say something which I will summarize like this: Wait. Hold it. I can’t even summarize what they say, because I can’t remember exactly, but I think it’s something like “You’re too old to understand” but I don’t want to write that.

Okay. So I asked a good question that generated good questions in return. But I don’t like that question. I try to spend my life not hiding from hard questions. You’d think it’d be the abortion stuff that flummoxes me. But I’m pretty clear on how I feel about that. Why to link to Facebook, though? That’s a tough one.

4) The question that has unintended consequences.

Melissa Mansfield asked me to write about how companies that are highly ethical and also highly profitable. She will think I didn’t write about this topic. But I did. Because we can’t control companies. We can only control ourselves. So I’m always more focused on how I can change the world personally than how I can try to require institutions to change the world.

The thing is, though, that ethical workplace behavior is based on asking good questions. They lead to honest conversations and meaningful connections and the world of good behavior is build on relationships like these.

Not that every good question leads to a great relationship. The world is not perfect, of course. Because sometimes you ask a question that reveals only that the person you’re asking is useless.

Here are three examples of topics your parents talk about all the time in their careers, but these topics will not be a part of new millennium careers. Watch out for these three terms — they probably come with outdated advice.

1. Career change
When Baby Boomers change careers, they stand on mountaintops. They announce that career change is a new trend, and they are doing it, of course, to save the world. The Baby Boomer specialty is saving the world by screaming from mountaintops, and then borrowing some more money to support that habit.

The other thing about Baby Boomers and career change is that they didn’t really do it before now. I mean, they did, but it was cataclysmic and often seen as reckless. For example, it’s what men did in their 40s after a midlife crises. Or what people did when they got to middle management and realized they were sub-par at their chosen career. (Note: It’s very easy to delude yourself that you’re competent until you get to your mid-30s. Around then, the less competent end up competing with people in their late 20s and losing.)

Gen Y will change careers at least five times. And, if they’re smart, the job hopping they do – which happens every 18 months in their 20s – will span a wide range of jobs. Which means that the idea of career change is outdated. People do it all the time. But they don’t call it career change, they call it finding a job.

The best way to find a job is to hone your skills, update your ideas, and adjust yourself as the workplace changes. Which means that you are not likely to have a single career for more than a few years. Or, more likely, it becomes semantic: is this a change or a shift? And really, who cares? Just keep your skills up, know what you like and what you’re good at, and stay employable. All the time. Not just the year you want to scream from mountaintops.

2. Networking
Do you know who is using social media? Gen X. The average Twitter user is in their 30s. The median age of LinkedIn is 40. The majority of people who are joining Facebook right now are over 35. This is because Gen X wants to meet new people online and reconnect with all the friends they lost along the way. Gen X is using social media to network.

Gen Y doesn’t need to. They never lost their connections because they’ve been online since they were ten. They do not need to meet more people online to expand their network because they are native networkers – they have had the tools and the predisposition to use them since before Gen X even knew what Facebook was.

So while Gen X is busy using Twitter to let people know what they are up to and promote the hell out of whatever they are doing, Gen Y is using Twitter for tweetups – meetups set up via Twitter. Which is a way of making genuine friends offline.

Even though Baby Boomers have been telling their kids forever to network. Networking is a dirty word to Gen Y. (Think about it: A Boomer says, "I'm going to a networking event." A Gen-Yer says, "I'm going to a party.") To young people, networking is sort of like job hunting: Both are for people who don’t have a grip, because if you’re smart, networking and job hunting are like breathing. You do it all the time, so you don’t need to talk about it. It only comes up if you stop and want to start again.

3. Midlife crisis
It’s not that you won’t have crises. But they’ll be earlier. The midlife crisis is a result of people getting on a path that someone else paved before them. If you see that you have a limited range of choices and you have to make one, then you don’t need to know very much about yourself in order to move forward. That’s what Baby Boomers did – they chose a path. Even the women chose a path that men laid out before them. The women fought to be able to take those paths, too.

So when the Boomers hit their 40s, they realized that the paths they chose from were all wrong, and to find a good path, they would actually need to know who they are. The crisis point is that it’s pretty hard to focus on yourself when you have kids, a mortgage and a marriage that is probably faltering because what marriage doesn’t need a lot of attention after ten years? There is not a lot of space for you to be retooling your idea of yourself. That’s the crisis. You need time and space that you don’t have.

Now, though, people take that time and space in their 20s. Gen X did it instinctively, and weathered belittling from Baby Boomers with labels like slackers. So Gen X is not having midlife crises. We had our crises in our 20s. And Gen Y is doing the same thing, but with more optimism (they always have that) and more support (their parents would do anything for them.)

Today the crisis happens earlier. The people at risk of having a crises are those who do not give themselves a chance to explore and falter in their 20s. Beware of the lives that look too perfect in their 20s. Those are the people who will be a mess in their 30s. And it will be a quarterlife crisis.

Also, Holly Hoffman wanted to meet Guy Kawasaki. And really, it's not like I’m his best friend, but because I know him, I could say to Holly, "Oh, I'll introduce you." And I did that. And Holly was thank-you-thank-you, even though Guy is so nice that you can just walk up to him and introduce yourself and he'll be nice. To everyone.

And I'm standing there with a bunch of 25 year olds, because I'm always hanging out with 25 year olds because that's basically my job—I work with them and my business is for them. But I was not with THE 25 year old because the night before, I woke up to him peeing on the carpet in my hotel room.

When I asked what he was doing, he said, “Oh, sorry” and then he went back to bed. So I woke him up. And yelled at him.

He said he was drunk. He went back to sleep. I woke him up. I said, “I told you you had to go down on me and you didn't. You asked a woman out after she wrote a whole blog post about oral sex and you don't even do oral sex.

I’m pissed.”

He says, "I was too tired.”

“Too tired for ten times? We've had sex ten times.”

The night deteriorated and I told him to leave the next morning, by 8am.

He says, “Can you wake me at 7:30?”

And I say, “No, I'm not your mother.”

So at the party, that night, I was surrounded by 25 year olds, but not that 25 year old, and you can imagine that I was really happy when someone my own age came up to me.

But I really couldn't tell why he was coming up to me. I have said before that I think I have Asperger Syndrome, and I think it's full blown when it comes to dating. So I have to be direct. So when this guy who is clearly in my age bracket comes up to me and says, "Hi, I like your blog," I ask, "Are you trying to date me?"

I know this is not normal. But I had been to a million parties and I had had a glass of wine, and I just wanted to sort people quickly.

He thought for a minute and then he said, “Yes."

Great, right? He showed me that he can cope with my weirdness and still come out okay. So we hung out talked for a while, and then I realized my phone was dead. And the night was early and I needed to text people and so I wanted to go back to my hotel room to get my charger.

The guy said he'd walk there with me.

I tell Ryan Paugh because I think maybe I’m missing something.

Ryan says, “He thinks you're having sex with him.”

“What?”

“Yeah. You can't take a guy to your hotel room and not have sex.”

“Oh. Wait. But I told him I need my charger.”

“No.”

“Okay. Okay.”

So I tell the guy, “No.” Then I walk him over to his friends, who are at the same party, and I tell them our date is over: “I'm getting my charger and he can't come with me because I don't want to have sex with him.”

His friends laugh.

I think this is a good sign.

So the next night we have a date. It is very low pressure because he is from a state that is far away and does not have a direct flight from Madison. And he is not a gazillionaire, so he is not going to buy a house for us to share in Chicago when we meet at O’Hare. So: No future.

I tell him, "Be careful of that wet spot on the floor." And then we have a one-night stand. At least I think it is going to be a one-night stand. But then in bed, I can tell that he’s not thinking one-night stand because he does sweet things that guys never do to me, like stroke my hair. I do that with my kids.

And then things deteriorate quickly. Well, for three weeks, things are good. I like him and I call him. And I see him again. Then things get bad because he twitters about me. And I think, I do not want the world to know I’m dating him because maybe I don’t want to be dating him.

And he tells me I’m out of my mind that I’m worried about who is twittering about me. He says something, which I will summarize as: Get a life.

So I am not with him. Because you can’t be with someone who thinks you’re out of your mind. And I’m not with the 25 year old, who, by the way, is also twittering about me, in an odd sort of way.

So I’m thinking the lesson here is that if work and sex are mixing then it’s a sign the dating isn’t working. But really, there must be a ton of people who think sex and work overlap because, look, my blog has 33,000 subscribers.

So maybe the lesson is I shouldn’t date people I meet through my blog. But then I think, who have I met not through my blog in the last two years? And maybe the answer is no one.

First of all, I get five to ten books every week. And I throw most of them away. Second, honestly, for the most part, you have to be my friend for me to write a whole post about your book. Sure, there are exceptions. For example, Tim Ferriss is not my friend but I wrote about his book anyway. But the exceptions are mostly for academic books with research that blew me away.

So stop thinking that I am going to write about your book if you simply send it to me. But really, if you want to promote a book, the best thing to do is make a lot of friends before the book comes out. Just like you don't want to wait to build a job search network until you need a job, you don't want to build a book promotion network when you need press.

So, Ramit has put up with a lot from me, including me being an hour late to have coffee with him. More than once. He has earned a post.

Also, he's earned it because he's an incredibly hard worker when it comes to promotion. The other person I know who works this hard is Tim Ferriss, but Tim tells you that he doesn't. Ramit admits to hard work, so I like him better. And Ramit tells me all the stuff he is doing, like convincing people to listen to MP3s where he is selling stuff, which I told him I would never link to on my blog because I'd feel like a used car salesman, but still I admire how many avenues Ramit will travel to sell stuff.

I am not a great seller. Which you can tell on my blog, actually. I mean, I have a company and no one even knows what it does. I could be selling the shit out of it on this blog, but instead, I am writing about requiring my dates to bake cookies with me. Ramit does not have posts about having sex in his apartment. But he does have posts about his friends trying to get laid and I enjoy that.

So I told Ramit that while I am sure that he is the direct-mail genius of Web 2.0, I cannot help without having to go to a mikvah afterward. And since I don't do mikvah, I can't do all his upsell, upsell, upsell stuff.

He replied, “How about a free plane ticket?” But not for me. And that is why I love Ramit.

So Ramit wants you to buy the book. I'm pretty sure he wants you to buy it today. Because Ramit is a Svengali of Amazon ranking and somehow Ramit's book was number one on Amazon yesterday.

And if you buy the book, you can send him the receipt and you might win a plane ticket.

Here’s how: If you order the book and email your receipt to penelope@iwillteachyoutoberich.com within the next 48 hours, you will be entered to win a free plane ticket to anywhere in the US.

If I write a crappy enough post about the book—like this one, where I manage to write about the book but never tell you one little thing about it—then maybe no one but you will send a receipt and then you'll win.

So before you leave a comment complaining that this is just about Ramit and me and Ramit making money, remember that the plane ticket is all about you.

But I do want to say something about his book. I am very bad with finances. I have known this for a while but recently, two things have really bothered me. First, I read that ENTJs are very good with finances, so this makes me think that I am underperforming there. Second, I noticed that every guy I date is amazed at how much money I have coming in (a lot) and how much I have going out (more than a lot) and how crappy a car I drive. (Actually, it’s not just the car, it’s the consistently odd choices, like no living room furniture because it costs too much.)

The first thing I tell those guys is to shut up. And then I tell them that they don’t understand because my financial issues are different than everyone else’s. But you know what? I don’t believe that. I don’t believe peoples’ problems are special. Still, I wasn’t making much headway until Ramit’s book came. The book is geared toward people in their 20s who still have a lot to learn and Ramit is teaching them (hence the title: I Will Teach You to Be Rich), but I am not in my 20s and I learned a lot anyway.

I always have a book in the kitchen that I read to distract myself from two young boys who are always turning harmless stuff into guns and killing each other. So for the past couple of months, while my kids have been shooting each other, I have been reading Ramit’s book, one or two pages at a time. And what it did was make me realize that there are tons of small things I can do to make big improvements. And also, knowing what to do feels empowering, even if I still have a financial mess on my hands.

I actually think this is the way career advice works as well. First, you need to know your problems are not unique. Then you need to know what people do to solve those common problems. The action of actually making change is the last step, but the first two are harder.

One of the things my ex-husband and I did well, as did our peers, was learn to tag-team in the layoff department. We both got laid off pretty much all the time throughout the 90s. And somehow, we got a sort of routine, and it became a normal way of life.

Today there is a generation of us in the workforce, totally familiar with layoffs, and totally unfamiliar with the idea that a job is secure. Ever. The good news about this is that there is not a huge difference between someone laid off and someone not laid off in that all of us feel vulnerable and scared.

Which means the etiquette is different than it used to be for talking to someone who’s been laid off.

1. Don't ask "how's the job hunt?"
Do you know how many times a day someone hears this if he is unemployed? Ten. And even if it's not ten really, it's ten in his head. He asks himself that, and he imagines other people asking that, and he stresses about the answer. Because the job hunt doesn't change much from day to day, but it's demoralizing to report that.

So trust that someone who is laid off who has something great to report will volunteer it without you asking.

2. Ask about extracurriculars.
At this point, we have a generation that is accustomed to changing jobs often and thinking in terms of the in-between time with jobs. In between jobs is the best time for real vacations and often the best time for gaining deep knowledge of something totally new. This trend is becoming more pronounced during the current downturn. People are focusing on hobbies, kids, and their health – all interesting topics to talk about.

Those of you who are employed might find a little inspiration here. We all know that it doesn't make sense to only do this stuff during the in-between time. So find out what changes your unemployed friends made to refocus themselves, and see if you can do it now. Before you get laid off.

3. Ask about health insurance.
There needs to be more collective knowledge on how to deal with health insurance during stints of unemployment. For most people, COBRA is about as cost-effective as a penthouse in New York City. So ask about how people are solving the insurance problem because the more we share information, the smarter we are at solving the problem when it hits us.

(What I learned from my last conversation: Move to Massachusetts. Everyone is covered there. )

4. Talk about industry news.
One of the hardest things about being laid off is keeping up in one's industry. If you're at the office each day, you keep up, sort of, through osmosis. But if you are not working in your field, you have to try a lot harder to keep up. Just hearing it first hand from someone who’s still employed is helpful.

So tell the person what you're working on. Trends you're hearing about. Personnel shifts you've seen. Also, gossip counts as news. Workplace gossip is a positive way to bond. The laid-off worker is cut out of this positive gossip loop, unless you supply some. So forget what your mom told you about gossip being bad karma. In this case, gossip equals good karma.

5. Offer up one good contact.
You do not need to pretend that connecting in LinkedIn is going to help this person. I mean, they should have been building their network long before the layoff loomed. But you could offer up one person you know well who could talk with the person laid off.

The truth is that we all know someone who is out of work. And we all know that the next person could be us. Anyone who is feeling smug about having a job has no grip on reality. Sure, some of it is your own doing, your own talent. But some of it is luck. Anyone could be laid off at any time.

This is why almost anyone you ask will help a friend who is laid off. Once. Giving five minutes of help is a reasonable request. So you can make it for a friend. If the friend is not smart enough to turn that five minutes into something bigger, that is not your problem.

6. Acknowledge trouble with the significant other.
More men are getting laid off than women, which puts women in a bad spot because most women choose a husband thinking he'll earn more than she will (yes, even smarty-pants Stanford women). It used to be that we could not openly discuss the testosterone hit that comes with being laid off. But today it's fair game, and even compassionate to acknowledge.

Not that women are picking up all the slack. They're not. Some are in support groups to cope with their boyfriends losing their seven-figure bonuses. Other women lost their jobs right along side their partner.

But the important thing here is that men and women are talking about the relationship dynamic that goes along with a layoff, so you should tread down this conversational path as well.

7. Don't be shy about gratitude
Tell a co-worker who’s been laid off that you miss him or her. And what you miss. It's hard to keep up morale when you're looking for a job. And so often we forget what we are talented at because rejection makes us feel totally un-talented.

The act of telling someone what you miss about them reminds them that they are valuable in the workplace. And it also gives you a little boost, because practicing gratitude increases your happiness by 25%. In fact, being grateful for what you have makes you happier than any job could, which is something you can remember when you're the one who is laid off.

Treat art the same way, and you will stay sane. Really. Here are five things I would nag you about if you were talking with me about your burgeoning career as an artist:

1. You cannot do art if you are starving.
The starving artist routine is total bullshit. I know because I did it. Once you know that you are not going to make rent, you can't really make art. Because your sense of self-preservation insists that your brain focus on the possibility that you will be out on the street. Your brain cannot stop solving that problem long enough to solve the problem of what is truth and beauty.

Here are some things I did while I was becoming a writer: I ate only bagels because I didn't have enough money for anything else and then I got anemic and had to go to the doctor but I didn't have health insurance so I had to lie and say I did in order to get the iron pills I needed so that I didn't pass out from exhaustion the moment I woke up in the morning. Believe me, I was not making great art during this period.

2. Art emanating from a black hole is a choice.
There's a reason that Jean-Michel Basquiat's paintings look like horror films: Because his life was a crack-house horror film. And there's a reason that Picasso is tearing apart voluptuous women in gorgeous surroundings: That's what he did in real life.

So don't kid yourself: Your art reflects your surroundings, and you can live like a pauper, but that limits the range of your art.

During my art days, I did not go out with friends. Ever. Because I didn't even have enough money to go to a coffee shop. And I was always cold because I lived in Boston and didn't have a winter coat. At many points I did not have a home, so I just sort of carried my laptop around and wrote and hoped that something would come up by the end of the day. And I almost never had clean clothes because I didn't have money to buy detergent.

So I wrote stories, every day, about not seeing anyone, and my mentor would say things like, "How about adding a character so that the narrator can have a conversation?" And that would strike me as a revolutionary idea.

3. Real artists will make art no matter what.
You do not need a studio, or a desk, or peace and quiet. Really. Because making art comes from a place that you cannot stop. People who need to make art make art no matter what.

Do you know how many blog posts I throw out? Maybe two a week. Because sometimes something happens and I absolutely have to write about it, and I see, from the beginning, that there's no way I'll be able to relate it to careers, so it's going to end up in the blogging trash can. But I write it anyway.

Do you know Christo and Jeanne-Claude? Wait. Here, look at some photos. The guy is nuts. He thinks so big that it makes him crazy. He's been making plans to put up cloth all over Central Park for 26 years. He can't stop himself. Finally, he did it. But who knew if it would ever happen? This is what I mean. If you need to do art, you just go there. Nothing stops you.

So if you think you're an artist and you are not making art now, but you think that in the right circumstance you'd make art, you are lying to yourself. I'm sorry. But it's true. Unless you are starving. If you are starving, see point number one: You need to get a job.

4. You do not need to quit your day job.
Are you making money and you're wondering if you should quit your job to do art full time? Take this test: Did you marry rich? Do you have a trust fund? Do you have reliable buyers for almost everything you produce? If you did not answer yes to any of these, then keep your day job.

Don't tell me it's crushing your soul. This whole blog is about how your soul does not depend on your job or your boss or your paycheck. Click on some links and read them.

Also, most corporate jobs can be creative outlets because businesses solve problems. So if you are an inherently creative thinker, you probably bring that to whatever job you have. You can't stop yourself.

5. You are not a better artist if you can do it full time.
I don't want to see snooty comments on this post about how great you are for being able to support yourself with your art. Because I can do that too. And you know what? I was not a worse writer when I could not support myself. The only difference between artists making money and artists not making money is that the first group is better at business. And there is no evidence that artists who are better at business make better art.

Do you want to know if you're going to be good at earning money from art? Take this test about networking from UpMo and Pepperdine University. The test will tell you how good you are at networking. And if you are not good at this test, you are not going to be good at selling your art, because the days of discovering someone with a sawed-off ear in an insane asylum are over. You need to market yourself. Do you want to know why there are so many crappy films in the world? Because there are so many great networkers who want to direct.

So everyone can stop being a snob about asking people how much money they make from their art. And everyone can stop thinking that the be-all-end-all is to quit the day job and do art full time.

Do you want to know how to be an artist? Make art. Do it because you need to do it. Because you think you will die if you don't do it. Stop making it a career problem. It's not. And, I leave you with one of my favorite posts, that I never get to link to, about me making myself crazy being an artist.

In general, I think the strength of women is that they see things more clearly. Yes, it’s a glass-half-empty world for women, compared to men, but women should leverage their stronger grip on reality. So here’s my contribution to women and clarity. I am debunking five totally annoying pieces of advice I hear people give women all the time.

1. Take a look at the lists of best companies for women to work for
This is an advertising ploy, not a plan for you to run your life. Every single time there’s a list like this, women write to me from the companies on the list to tell me how much they suck for women. But it’s not like I need those emails. I can just look at senior management, which is almost always all men, and see that corporate careers are set up for a one kind of life: very focused, no other interests, except, maybe, oneself. And this is not all that appealing to most women.

So you can forget the lists. The bar is so low to get on the lists that which company is on and which company is off is statistically irrelevant to women planning their careers.

2. Get a book deal that lets you write about men you admire
Yes, it is exciting to get a book deal, but why do women spend years writing books that fawn over the men they work with? Here are some books by women I admire, and I can’t get over that they spent years researching and reporting on men doing what, in fact, these women would probably like to be doing themselves. Why not just dump the book idea and do the cool jobs you write about instead of pretending you’re not interested in that?

If you want to get paid to write about men, aspire to be Mary Gaitskill.

3. Marry a stay-at-home dad to give you more space to grow your career
Based on my own experience and some research I don’t believe men are happy in this role. Please, stay-at-home dads, do not write to me to say you’re happy. I understand that there are exceptions to this rule, and also that all those exceptions happen to be blogging. But on balance, I find that stay-at-home dads are actually talking about some other project they are doing that is either a) BS and then they are in denial that they are totally lost or b) not BS and then they are not stay-at-home dads but rather dads with flexible work schedules.

Meanwhile, no matter how much money a woman makes, most women try to find a guy who earns more than she does. So whether or not it's good for your career is a moot point; be true to yourself and admit you don't want a stay-at-home husband.

4. Join an all-women networking group
Women are less connected in the world than men are. Men do not drop out of work during their highest earning potential years to take care of kids. So they have better connections. And, in my own work experience, men have been extremely helpful. So why would you go to a group that self-selects for people with fewer connections? There are a million ways to slice the world for networking potential – by location, by interest, by experience, by goals. Why would you do it by sex?

More importantly, it’s clear that women are not particularly supportive of each other. Everyone is competitive, but there are more problems between two women than between two men or between a man and a woman.

I would like to tell you that this is outdated research and that with the post-feminist generation women are not so back-stabbing to each other. But it’s not true. Anne Manci‘s research at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater finds that the culture in the top ranks is still disturbingly slanted toward women taking down the best women. (Thanks for the link, Kristine.)

5. Don’t cry at work
Newsflash. Women cry a lot and men don’t. So let’s just stop telling women to be men at work. No point. People who do best in their careers are people who are their true selves.

And, I have first-hand research on this topic, because I have cried at all levels of my career. To be fair, I cry mostly when I have PMS. But whatever. PMS is just your body telling your brain that you need to start crying about the stuff that you’ve been ignoring all month.

Here’s the big secret about crying though. Men who are secure with themselves and their position in the world actually deal with women crying just fine. So any guy at work who cannot deal with you crying needs to get some therapy in order to be more self-assured. You, on the other hand, are doing just fine with those workplace tears.

]]> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/12/5-career-tips-women-should-ignore/feed/ 127 http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-learned-from-years-of-hating-tim-ferriss/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-learned-from-years-of-hating-tim-ferriss/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:40:00 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/?p=1906 I have hated Tim Ferriss for a long time. I have hated him since we both had editors at Crown Publishing who sat next to each other and I heard how difficult he is.

I didn't blog about it because first of all, I'm sure the buzz about me is that I'm difficult, too. And also, his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was a bestseller and mine wasn't. So I figured people would say that I'm jealous. And really, what author is not jealous sometimes? I mean, every author wants to write a bestseller.

But at this point, two years later, my hatred goes way beyond jealousy. My hatred is more selfless than that. And while I do understand that Tim is great at accelerated learning, the time management tips I have learned from him stem from the energy I have spent hating him:

1. Don’t hang out with people who don’t respect your time
This all started at SXSW conference in 2007, right before Tim's book came out, when he was promoting the hell out of it to bloggers. Of course, this was not a bad idea, and to be fair, Tim was brilliant to start this book marketing trend. But that is beside the point. He approached me after my panel and said, "Can I get you coffee? I'd love to talk with you."

I said, "Uh. No. I have plans."

And he asked who with.

I wasn't really sure. I knew there were cool people to hang out with after my panel, though, and I knew he wasn't one of them. I gave a vague answer.

He said he was also meeting three people, and he name-dropped them. I can't remember who they were. But they were fun, interesting, and I wanted to have coffee with them. So I said okay.

Then Tim couldn't find them and I had coffee with only Tim.

Then I realized this was his strategy all along.

I told myself not to be pissy. I told myself bait-and-switch is the oldest sales tool in the world, and it's my fault for falling for it.

I even wrote a blog post that included his book.

2. Cut to the chase: Tell people who are full of sh*t that they're full of sh*t
When his book came out, there were vacuous, annoying comments all over my blog directing people to his book. Like, "The topic of priorities is an interesting one. I like how Tim Ferris handles that in his new book,blah blah" and then there's a link to the book.

At this point I knew Tim, sort of. And I called him on his phone and told him to tell his employees to stop spamming my blog.

First he implied it was his fan base and he had little control.

I said that I thought he was full of sh*t.

He said he'd make sure there were no more comments like that on my blog.

3. Self-centered people are more likely to waste your time
Really, when I found he was spamming my site, I didn't call him first. First, I emailed him. And I got some sort of crazy response about how he is only checking email twice a day and then instructions on what to do.

I emailed him back to tell him that I do not want automatic emails from him every time I try to contact him.

Which generated another, identical response about how he doesn't check mail.

So I called him to tell him that he is generating spam back to me to tell me about his email checking and I don't care. If he wants to check twice a day, fine, but don't clog my in box with emails about it.

He said he'd take me off his list.

I am STILL getting this sort of spam from him. But the scope has widened. For example, now, he has commented on my blog and he forgot to say that he doesn't want to be alerted to new comments. So every time there's a comment, he spams everyone in the comments string, telling them that he doesn't answer his email.

It's insane. I cannot believe how many automated announcements I receive saying that Tim does not have a Blackberry. (Yes, the email really says that.) What if we all sent automated emails like that? Email would be totally nonfunctional. What if Tim just shut up about his email and if he thinks its fine to answer twice a day, then he should do that? And not spam everyone about it.

4. Productivity is about meeting your goals, not getting out of doing work
The week that Tim actually works a four-hour work week will be a cold week in hell. Tim got to where he is by being an insanely hard worker. I don't know anyone who worked harder at promoting a book than he did. But the thing is, he didn't call it work. Somehow, sliming me into having coffee with him to talk about his book is not work.

Fine. But then his four-hour work week is merely semantic. Because everything Tim does he turns into what the rest of us would call work, and he calls it not-work. For example, tango. If you want to be world-record holder, it's work. It's your job to be special at dancing the tango. That's your big goal that you're working toward. How you earn money is probably just a day job. So most weeks Tim probably has a 100-hour workweek. It's just that he's doing things he likes, so he lies to you and says he only works four hours. He defines work only as doing what you don't like.

It's childish. It's a childish, semantic game. And it reminds me of him winning the Chinese National Kickboxing Championships by leveraging a little-known rule that people are disqualified if they stop outside the box. So he pushed each of his opponents outside the box to win.

He is winning the I-work-less-than-you game with a similarly questionable method: semantics.

5. Time management is about making time to connect with people
The idea of time management only matters in relation to how important the stuff is that's competing for your time. The stuff that makes time management the most difficult is relationships. Which Tim does not excel in.

Fine. Not everyone has to be good at making real connections.

But Tim runs around telling people who have lots of relationships competing for their time how to think about work/not work, forgetting that in the real world, where people are not assholes, time management is not an equation or a semantic game because relationships really matter. And figuring out how to judge time in terms of competing values is the hardest thing of all.

Tim is all about time management for achievement and winning. But there are not trophies or measurements for relationships. There is only that feeling that someone is kind. And good. And truly connected.

And Tim is not.

]]> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-learned-from-years-of-hating-tim-ferriss/feed/ 445 http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2008/12/22/how-to-write-an-email-that-generates-a-good-answer/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2008/12/22/how-to-write-an-email-that-generates-a-good-answer/#comments Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:36:42 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/?p=1842 Most people who are on top of their game respond to most emails within 48 hours. However some emails are so terribly written that it’s actually impossible to send an answer. Other emails are so terribly written that the amount of time it would take to figure out what to answer is simply not worth it.

In order to get the response you’re looking for, you need to ask a very good question. Here are five ways to do that:

1. Don’t send an essay. Your whole email should not exceed five sentences. If you need to give the person a lot of information in order to help you, send them an email asking if you can send more information. But here’s a tip: You’re most likely to get a response if you don’t need to send more information. A direct question is easiest to answer, and it doesn’t take a lot of space.

2. Don’t be vague. Here’s an interesting question: "Is there a god?" But it’s not a question for email, because any answer would be very long and philosophical. For this question, go buy a book. But that's not even the worst type of offender. At least "Is there a god" is a short, direct question. Emails that call loudest for the delete button are those with vague requests for help followed by a long-winded personal introduction and no real question. Test yourself: Write a concise subject line, and then go back to the email and delete anything not directly related to that.

3. Do heavy lifting in the self-knowledge arena before you ask for help. Most people who are lost have huge questions: Should I start a company? Should I quit my job. If you are really, really lost, don’t approach someone who is really, really in demand. You need a specific, high-payoff question for the person you are approaching. Which means you really need ask a lot of questions to get to the good question.

For example, the question, Should I quit my job? is usually about Does my job really suck? or Could I get a better job? And then there are specific questions related to that. Once you drill down to the core question, for example, is Phoenix a good place to raise kids or should I get a job somewhere else before I have kids? Then you can ask a child-rearing expert who lives in Phoenix. But no one can answer the broad question, should I quit my job?

4. Ask the right question of the right person. The best type of question is a very specific question in the exact sweet spot of this person’s expertise. I know this because I field a lot of terrible career questions.

Last week someone I barely know asked me what she should get her boyfriend for a gift. Of course, I have no idea. But a good question for me would be what to get her boyfriend a gift if her boyfriend is her boss and there is company-wide public gift-giving. That’s an office politics question, and it’s specific, and I write a lot about topics like this. So I’d take some time to answer the question. (If you’re wondering: buy a gift certificate to a bookstore. Totally impersonal and appropriate. It’ll throw everyone off.)

5. Admit when you don’t have a good question. It’s hard to ask a question that meets all this criteria. That’s because good questions come from good thinking, and it’s easier to fire off an email than to sit on your sofa and think. But most answers to most tough questions are either in your heart or in Google. So try those avenues first. Then ask an expert. Because by the time you’ve exhausted your heart and Google, you’ll probably ask a good question, because you’ll an expert as well.