I am switching up the blog a bit. It’s time to take the Brazen Careerist part off of my blog. It’s time for the blog to just be Penelope Trunk, and only my company should use the name Brazen Careerist.
We have been saying this in Brazen Careerist board meetings for about five months. The conversation …

Seth Godin's new book, Linchpin, has arrived. I read it on the farmer's sofa.
The farmer is going through a midlife crisis. It's not really a midlife crisis, though. As an expert on the process of coming of age in one's twenties, I'd have to say that the farmer is actually going through a quarterlife crisis.
Typically, …

It's unbelievable to me that everyone continues to watch football when we know that men are getting genuinely, permanently, brain damaged. The game is tantamount to cockfighting, only with people instead of animals.
The NFL has finally admitted the problem, to the extent it is poised to be the largest funding source for research about trauma …

People at work are asking me why I am not working as many hours as I used to. I am. But I am working on anger management. Here are seven tips I’ve tried using:
1. Face the problem and make it a priority.
I used to think anger management problem is a thing for men who are …

I'm pretty sure that the people who pay attention to happiness research are actually happier people. And happiness begets happiness. So I have a feeling that me just writing a post about happiness, and you reading it makes us all happier.
Here is why I think that:
Recently, Gretchen Rubin sent me her new book, The Happiness …

I don't usually write about my life in real time, because the difference between a blog post than reads like a diary entry and a blog post that someone would want to read is usually just time passing.
So time passing means that even though I get a ton of comments, I do not usually run …

It looks like a lot of people are coming here from the article in the San Francisco Chronicle: Big City Blues, Could a more affordable life, away from the Bay Area, actually be better, by Rob Baedeker.
Here are some of my most popular posts about figuring out where to live:

I’m moving out of New York …

When I was in the mental ward, it was mostly girls in their teens with messed up track records and eating disorders. But my roommate was from Kellogg, a top-ten business school.
I thought it was insane that she was there. She was so smart. She was going to be great at work. Her only problem …

The guy who sold me my car cancelled the plates the very next week. Luckily, I didn't know that because there was a November expiration sticker on the plate. So the fact that I was driving the car illegally for three months did not bother me. Until now. But now I'm at the DMV.
I know …

I have found that the best way to manage myself is by asking for a lot of help. The question is, how do you know who to take advice from?
The answer is not always intuitive. For example, you’d think that if Bill Gates wants to give you career advice, you should take it, right? I …

Last year I traveled almost every week. Some weeks I traveled to three different cities.
If you are excited about business travel, thinking it's a free ticket to see the world, you should stop reading now. But if you are having trouble maintaining your personal life in the face of tons of travel, these tips from …

Here’s the deal with giving flowers. Women like receiving flowers. Men think flowers are stupid.
Men think: Flowers die, they don’t do anything when they are alive, they are expensive, and they are a cliche. Men know that women in general like flowers, but men also believe that women they know personally do not like flowers. …

People often tell me that I should write career advice for people with Asperger Syndrome. This is because I am surrounded by people who have Asperger's, and I have it myself. Please, do not tell me I don't have it. First of all, it looks very different in men and women, and most of …

I starting to think that the most effective preparation for a good career is religion.
I am writing this post on the eve of Yom Kippur. I am constantly trying to figure out how religion fits in my life. Sometimes I think it doesn't fit. I mean, I'm a Jew dating a pig farmer. And I …

Self-knowledge can solve all your problems. Because it’s more difficult to understand what your problem is than to know how to solve it.
Most of the time we actually have the knowledge we need to solve a problem, but we don’t like reality, so we pretend to not have the knowledge.
This reminds me of the bazillion …