I am the poster-child for the saying “You have to spend money to make money”. I make a lot of money but I spend most of it on people who help me to do things so I can keep making money. For example, I have an assistant, a driver, a nanny, an editor, and a research maven. None are full-time but all make my life much better.
I have tons of debt after launching four companies. There has never been a launch that didn’t mess up my personal finances. Most entrepreneurs have no credit – I am like that as well – so I have learned to live with debt and without credit. This is what has enabled me to take risks, set lofty goals, and go after dreams that lots of people tell themselves their debt precludes.
How do I do it? It’s all mental. Here are thirteen ways to think about debt to keep it from ruining your life.
I am in the car about forty hours a week. I hired a driver. She won’t drive all the times I have to drive. Of course she won’t. Her life would suck.
It doesn’t matter. I have to be in the car for so much anyway.
I can’t ditch my son’s therapy appointments. I need to be there to say, “Of course nose picking is like cutting.” I’m an expert on cutting. Digging out eyebrow hairs so they bleed or tearing cuticles so they hurt all day. I need to be there to translate for the therapist the world of comfort through pain. Read more
After a long break from new courses, Melissa and I did a course on how to start freelancing. This is especially timely because over the last six months while I have been rejiggering my online courses Melissa has launched a freelance business.
My first thought was: Oh. Crap. Melissa is too busy to do courses with me. But she says that will never happen.
So join me for Get the Guts to Start Freelancing: it’s a four-day online course with chat and constant chatter from me, and from Melissa who will sometimes moderate and sometimes cut me off to make her own points. You’ll learn how to make a strategy to start and create tactics for attracting more clients as you grow.
This course includes four days of of video sessions and email-based course materials. You can purchase this webinar for anytime, on-demand access. The cost is $195.
One of my favorite twitter feeds is GSElevator. It’s stuff people overhear in the Goldman Sachs elevator, and most of it features bad behavior that confirms it was better for me to marry a farmer than the bankers I dated before him. But sometimes there is a gem like this one: “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence because it’s fertilized with bullshit.”
That is how I feel about women watching other women run their lives.
I am constantly wondering about other peoples’ lives. I’m fascinated by how we don’t tell each other what sucks about our life. We don’t tell our partners why we hate ourselves. We don’t tell our friends why our marriage or our job sucks. Read more
My personal hygiene is holding back the growth of my startup.
This month I am teaching a course: Get the Guts to Start Freelancing. If you are sick of me promoting my courses on this blog, then please note that this is not the post where I am promoting this course. That’ll be another one. In this post I am going to tell you that the course is four days and I will probably not change clothes for any of the days.
Here’s the problem men have today: They understand how bad it feels to be raised by a dad who is never around.
There’s a generation of boys who didn’t eat dinner with their dad. Only saw their dad on the weekend. Changed schools five times so their dad could relocate to get the best job, over and over again.
Those boys are grown up now, and they are dads. And they don’t want to be like their dad. They want something different.
This is a guest post by Cassie Boorn. She works with me at Quistic. That’s a photo of Cassie and her son. And here’s another guest post she wrote, before we started working together.
A few years ago I targeted Penelope as someone I want to work with. Then I spent a lot of time and energy getting her to hire me. You can probably tell from reading this blog that Penelope would be a difficult boss. I work hard figuring out how to make her like working with me. This is called managing up. And these are rules for managing up that I’ve learned from working with Penelope: Read more
Contact
penelope@penelopetrunk.com