Kate and I are getting acclimated to each other.
I am used to how when I was coaching Kate she thought everything I said was genius. But now that she lives with me she would like me to not be so bossy.
Kate discovers that the best time to talk with me is late at night when the boys are asleep and I’m too tired to work—that’s when I’m the least stressed out. And she is getting used to me having an assistant for everything. Read more
This post takes place in Beverly Hills. I’m just going to tell you right now that I go there to get Botox. If anyone is surprised, I’ll be surprised. The path to self-acceptance is paved with injectables.
Step 1: Try to change yourself.
I was going to write a big post about how I’m confessing to getting Botox and then I thought better of it, that it would make me look too old. Then I thought maybe it’ll make me look rich. Because honestly, Botox is really expensive and it’s not just Botox but also fillers. I don’t even know what the brand is. I just go to the dermatologist and say “make me look younger.” Read more
Why do people spend so much time telling you a list of books to read in your twenties or a list of places to go in your twenties? Those are actually ways only to escape your twenties. Escaping by doing that stuff just sets you up for a disaster in your thirties.
Here are things to do in your twenties to make your thirties fun.
1. Build a career that enables you to work from home.
The best way to get control of your life is working from home, because once you’re home, then things start to shift in favor of you instead of your company. Read more
We flew first class to Seattle so we could get the cello on board without a fight for overhead space. So imagine the come down when my son walked into the dorm room at cello camp. “Oh,” he said. “A dorm room is like a one-star hotel.”
I thought to myself: Who am I? Am I a person who flies first class, or am I a person who shares a bathroom with ten strangers?
There are cello lessons all day and we run around Seattle Pacific University with me marveling at the dahlias (are they perennials here?) and my son doing too-risky parkour (“Mom. I think my penis broke.”)
My son tells me I have to sleep in the top bunk because he doesn’t want to fall out. I climb up there and remember the kid down the hall who rolled out my freshman year, so I sleep on the floor.
Am I a person who has a garden that covers an acre? Am I a person who has no bed? Read more
Recently I wrote a post about how to pick a husband if you want to have kids. A lot of people asked that I write the male corollary to that post. So, here it is.
This post is about identity. How to see yourself. How to figure out if you can remake yourself. How to make a life that is true to yourself. And, put more bluntly, how to get the best deal in a wife given who you are.
For men, there are three choices: breadwinner, and stay-at-home dad, and shared responsibilities. Read more
This webinar is to show you how to leverage your strengths with Myers Briggs. It includes four days of of video sessions and email-based course materials. You can purchase this workshop for anytime, on-demand access. The cost is $195.
I have too much to say about Myers Briggs to be contained in just my blog posts. So I’m doing a webinar. Also, Melissa and I have so much fun with you guys in these webinars, and we want to do another. During the last two, people kept saying we should do a Myers Briggs one.
So here it is, with a special guest: the guy who taught me about Myers Briggs, Rob Toomey. It started out that I interviewed him, in the olden days, when I was a columnist at the Boston Globe and actually did interviews. Then I would call him just to ask him things:
Q: Why do I hate my INTJ co-worker?
A: Everyone hates INTJs but INTJs don’t care. They just want the work done.
Okay. To be fair, Rob doesn’t talk like that. He’s very diplomatic. I am summarizing his wisdom. But in the webinar, it will be a lot of Rob talking. (And he will be fun, because he’s an ENTP, and ENTPs are fun.)
The biggest reason to understand Myers Briggs is that just about every company in the Fortune 500 uses it as part of training for senior management. If you understand the meaning of your own score you will immediately become more effective at meeting your goals, and if you understand other people’s scores you’ll be way better at communicating with them.
Naturally, when I heard that top leaders in the Fortune 500 get this training, I had to have it too. And my path to expertise was the typical journalist path: I bugged my source incessantly til Rob was not a source but a friend.
Then when I was running Brazen Careerist, I would not shut up about Myers Briggs. I told everyone in the company that they had to take the test, and when they refused, I said, “Forget it, I’m so good at it I know your score anyway.”
Just to prove me wrong, they took the test.
And I was right. Which I tell you only to show how smart you can be about everyone if you understand Myers Briggs.
So this is the last thing I’m gonna tell you about the webinar. Everyone should sign up. I’m not kidding. Having a solid understanding of Myers Briggs has changed every aspect of my life. And it’s going to be really fun because I love Rob and I love Melissa, and this is my dream-come-true Myers Briggs party.
Here’s the official announcement of what we’ll do: Read more
I’m great at remaking myself. I’ve been a pro-volleyball player, a serial entrepreneur, a stay-at-home mom. I’ve modeled nude and I’ve stood as a spokesperson for education reform.
The hardest part about being able to remake myself so often is that I’m never sure who I am.
The other day my son said, “Mom, what’s your name right now?”
I said “Penelope”. I knew that was the right answer, because everyone in my life calls me Penelope. But it’s not my legal name. Adrienne is still my legal name. So sometimes, I get into trouble, and he sees it. Like the time we checked into a hotel and I had no ID for the name Penelope so I told the hotel clerk to look me up on Wikipedia. My son stood next to me the whole time, ostensibly eating free snacks in the lobby, but clearly the scene made an impression. (At airport check-in he said, “Mom! Let’s use your Wikipedia page to go to the front of the line!”) Read more
I am sleeping in the downstairs bedroom. Alone. Or sometimes with the dog.
I hate writing this story because I want to be a person you admire, but I also hate not writing it. Because I want to be a person I admire. I want to be a person known for honesty.
Which means I need to tell you that I wish I cared more that I’m not talking to the Farmer.
I hate that I have stories I don’t want to tell. Because I have found that almost always, the secrets we keep matter a lot to us, but they don’t matter to other people.
For example, I emailed to Melissa one day. “I have a secret: I drank wine at breakfast today and I haven’t stopped.”
I thought Melissa would email back that I’m an idiot and I’ll be in rehab.
But she emailed back, “I forgot to get a refill for Lexapro and today is the first time in a year that I’ve initiated sex.” Read more
The research about inspiration is, generally, that it improves our wellbeing but we cannot control when it comes to us. That said, opening ourselves to new experiences makes inspiration more likely. And surrounding ourselves with inspired people makes us more likely to feel inspired ourselves.
We constantly look for work that inspires us, but I have found in my career that often the jobs that were most inspiring to me were not necessarily at companies doing inspiring work. One example of this is a job I had at CyberMedia. Read more
The novel Fifty Shades of Grey is selling faster than a Harry Potter book right now. The book is about sexual domination in a contemporary setting, including the career woman who has everything, including a hot, successful boyfriend.
The big news is that we have enough data to show that the majority of women buying Fifty Shades of Gray are in their 20s and 30s living in urban areas, according to the publisher’s data, and the Atlantic. To be clear, these women are incredibly powerful. In urban areas, more women than men graduate college, women out earn men in their 20s, and we are almost to the point where women in their 30s are outnumbering men as breadwinners. Which means that it is the women who have tons of power who are also having tons of rape fantasies. Read more
