It used to be that the smart kids went to graduate school. But today, the workplace is different, and it might be that only the desperate kids go to graduate school. Today there are new rules, and new standards for success. And for most people, graduate school is the path to nowhere. Here are seven reasons why: Read more
Welcome London Guardian readers, and thank you for visiting my blog. I write about careers, and often the advice I give includes stories from my own life. Here are some places to start reading that will give you a taste of this intersection of work and life. Read more
When I was growing up, there was lots of chatter in the media about how models gave girls bad role models. Today that’s old news. What we should talk about now is how the media portrays moms.
Take a look at the spread in People magazine of Jennifer Lopez and her one-month-old twins. The photos are so elegant that at first I thought it was a parody. But in fact, it is mommy porn: the visual fantasy of what being a working mom could be. And it really could be that, if it weren’t that someone like Jennifer Lopez must have a household full of helpers in order to keep her career on track while she has kids: a cook, a trainer, two or three nannies, a cleaner, an assistant, a stylist. And others I’m sure I can’t even imagine. Read more
When I started doing Twitter, I put my Twitter feed on the sidebar of my blog. It seemed smart: more content means more traffic, and more traffic is good. But after two weeks of Twitter, I removed it. And then, when I was blogging about important topics like ditching Hebrew school as a career harbinger, commenters asked what happened to my Twitter feed. Read more
I got an email from this guy who told me he thinks I need a friend on a farm. I think he wrote the email right after I wrote about being a pint-sized ENTJ on the estate-sized front lawn of my grandma’s house. I am not sure how he knew I am fascinated with farms, but I am. And I’m always curious about how family farms work here in Wisconsin: what life is like, and why do people keep choosing that? Read more
There are a lot of rules for first-time managers. For example, never hold a meeting without an agenda, because if you don’t know what you’re going to do there, then no one else will know what you’re doing, either. But the rule about agendas is a great example, because, like most rules for good management, it is about being kind.
Your job as a manager is to make sure your employees are growing and learning and enjoying their time at work. Bringing them to a meeting without an agenda is wasting their time, and that is disrespectful. A meeting without an agenda is like saying, “My time is so much more important than yours that instead of taking time to prepare, I’m going to figure out what we’re doing in real-time, and you will sit here and watch me.” Read more
One of the most dangerous things you can do in your career is to think you are different from everyone else. The biggest validation of that idea comes in AA meetings — it is widely understood by this group that thinking you’re different is just an excuse not to get help, an excuse to think you live outside what we already know to be true. It’s a dangerous way to live because you are reinventing the wheel for yourself and you risk just spinning in place. Read more
My career is built on branding. The first time I tried it was in beach volleyball. Like many professional sports, the way to make a living is from sponsors. While other people changed partners every week trying to trade up for someone better, I picked someone shorter than I was, so she’d stick with me. Then I focused more energy on branding us as a team to sponsors than I did on winning tournaments. We stood out because other people marketed themselves as individuals, not a team. So let me give a shout out to Dance France, for all the logos they had me splash across my butt: Victory for brand management. Read more
Let me first say that my lawyer is not happy when I blog about my divorce. But now that I’ve been in a front-page article of the New York Times for blogging about the divorce, I think we’ve passed the point of discretion. Read more
The transition from college to adulthood might be the hardest one we make in our whole lives. After we spend twenty years learning how to get good grades, we go into a workforce where those skills are largely irrelevant. Read more
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penelope@penelopetrunk.com