Trend watch: HR, texting, needlepoint

I am in NYC with no money. This used to happen all the time. When my company was running out of money, I would go to San Diego to give a speech and stay at a four-star hotel and not have a cent. And no credit card, of course. I would fly first class, stash all the extra treats they offered, and eat them until I could charge room service to the organization I was speaking to.

I am an ace at traveling without any money, but I'm sick of it. I thought it would never happen again. After all, I have a company credit card.

But I think Ryan Healy canceled my card. Or put a hold on it. I think this is maybe because I charged a ton of garden supplies on the card last weekend. I couldn't find my own card, so I thought I'd just charge a few things and then write the company a check. But then I charged a bunch of roses. Twenty. I mean, the farmer can just dump a bunch of dirt in a pile and dump a bunch of stones around the pile, and voila — I have a huge garden plot. So now I have a sun garden that needs a little more spunk.

I discovered the credit card problem while innocently buying a Bluetooth headset in NYC so I could do the gazillion conference calls we do at Brazen Careerist with a CEO in DC and me on a farm and Ryan and Ryan in Madison. I mean, every meeting is a conference call and I'm getting a neck ache.

Also, I'm getting fat. The conference calls are hard for me. They bore me. I like big ideas, I like hypothesizing and predicting and synthesizing. The job of actually getting stuff done is not that interesting to me. But we are in execution mode at the company, and I need to stay focused. So I eat when I’m on the conference calls. On a good day, I eat ten apples. Cut into halves, then quarters, then cookie cutter shapes like stars. On a bad day it’s one apple and ten apple pies.

So I am needlepointing, to stay focused on execution instead of food.

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We’re nearing the end of email, maybe

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The vast majority of electronic communication today is via social media, according to Paul Greenberg, a relationship management consultant. At first I didn't believe it. But then I thought about the viral nature of communication via social networks, and the statistic started to make sense.

So, I have been thinking for a while that I need to stop using email, but I was never sure my hunch was right. Finally, through the process of deciding to put photos of my kids on my blog, I realized that email is now old-fashioned. Here's why:

1. Email is inefficient.

Email is one-to-one communication and social networks one-to-many communication. (Here’s a good link about that.) If you have something meaningful or thoughtful to say, why not say it to many people? It would mean that more people share ideas and more people understand your way of thinking. Also, there are so many pieces of our life that we tell at different times to different people. Why not just say it once? We all have email overload: we parse our messages into 40 one-to-one messages instead of just a single one-to-many message.

Email is also an inefficient way to hone your writing skills. A Stanford study shows that people develop better writing in social media than in the classroom. In the classroom you write for a single reader, the teacher, who is a captive audience—it's her job to read your writing. But in social media, you have to persuade a group of readers to accept your way of thinking, and you have to be interesting. So you will get better and better at your job—which is, for all of us on some level, communicating—if you use social media instead of email. Read more

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Turning point

When the kids and I arrived at the farm the day of the wedding, I got out of the car and the farmer said, “You’re wearing black?”

Wedding day on the farm


My son went to the hen house to collect eggs. The farm cats love eating raw eggs, but on a farm, you only feed the cats scraps. My son saw a chance for an exception. He said to the farmer, “Since it’s your wedding day, can we give the cats an egg to celebrate?”

Feeding farm cats

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The nuts and bolts of building a brand

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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 goes something like this:

Board member: How is the blog redesign going?

Me: Um. I’m thinking.

Board member: That’s what you said two months ago.

Me: Yeah. That’s true. I’ll get some bids.

Board member: It’s important the we differentiate the Brazen Careerist brand of the company from the brand of you.

Me: Yeah. I get it.

Then we have a pause in the meeting while everyone is silently frustrated with my inability to make changes. Read more

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Almost a review of Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin

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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, one's twenties, a period now called emerging adulthood, looks something like this:

Learning to separate from parents.
Figuring out where one fits in the world of work.
Getting ready to be married and have kids.

The farmer is doing those things in compressed time: the two years since I have known him. Many people think it was totally crazy that he sent an email to me, out of the blue. But in hindsight it's clear that he knew he needed something to kick-start his quarterlife crisis. And when you are already forty and have not had one, you need something as cataclysmic as a girl from New York coming to the farm and shaking things up.

The farmer is on the sofa. I had to convince him to let me come here because there is a snowstorm coming. The snow is a big deal if you have a thousand animals out in freezing weather and can't get food to them. I am not going to go into all the details of the stresses of winter farming. Mostly because I don't know them. But I do know that every time there is a lot of snow, something freezes and it always seems to be life threatening: Like water for the pigs. Read more

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Check-up for self-delusion

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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 to the brain. But still, the game encourages brain trauma. And people cheer.

I can understand if it's like smoking. You're addicted, you can't stop. But what about bringing your kids to the game? What about all the people who make the Superbowl a family TV event? Kids who play football in high school are more likely to die from that than drunk driving or guns. And parents encourage their kids to play this sport?

The culture of football amazes to me — the incredible level of denial. So what I’m thinking is that people are delusional. And they know it, but they keep going. They cultivate delusion.

That’s what I think of when I hear about the HBO documentary about Temple Grandin. She’s a total freak. This is why she's interesting. Because people love an underdog—people love seeing weirdness succeed because most people feel weird and they worry it's going to hold them back. Read more

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8 Tips for anger management

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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 in prison for setting their wives on fire. Now I see it's a problem for people who think they will get fired for being unpleasant. Or for people who think their kids will grow up and hate them for being emotionally unpredictable.

I am both those people.

2. Focus on your trigger points.
The time I most consistently lose my temper is trying to get the kids out of the house in the morning. So I told myself to not lose my temper.

That didn't work.

So I have been waking up at 5:30 because I need to give myself two hours to be completely organized and calm so that I can get the kids and myself out the door for school and work at 7:30 without screaming at the kids for not eating fast enough because I changed my clothes for work three times and got behind and forgot to make lunches. Read more

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You can be happier by reading this post

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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 Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.

Let me tell you now, I am not a huge fan of the book. She is writing about her life, but her life is not all that interesting. The thing about reading stories about people’s lives is that we like conflict. That's what every novel is, it's what every memoir is. If there's no conflict then there is no path to follow in a story line.

Gretchen's conflict in this story about her is how can she be happier. Gretchen reports that she is already happy. She has an investment banker husband, two seemingly just fine daughters, a nice apartment in Manhattan, former-model good looks, etc. She basically (as she says in her forward to the book) needs something to talk about at cocktail parties. So she is writing a book so she can talk about it. Read more

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How to put blog comments to good use

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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 my life based on the comments section. But in the last week I have been particularly lost, and particularly inundated by timely comments. On top of that, I know it seems like I can tell anyone anything, but I'm not actually like that. I don't understand the normal give and take of conversation.

I don't have friends, which is typical for someone with Asperger's Syndrome. I mean, I have friends, but it's not normal. Like, I know some people call their friends a lot. My two best friends are not in Madison, and I call them to say hi once every three months. At most. The second best friend doesn't even know she's my second-best friends. She'd probably be horrified to hear it. I'm probably her twentieth best friend.

(I am the type who has a significant other and they are my friend. I am a person who should be married. I like being married because I want a friend and that's really the only way I know how to do it.)

So I didn't tell anyone I was getting married. I wrote it on my blog. And friends who follow the blog wrote to me to congratulate me. Read more

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Welcome, San Francisco Chronicle readers

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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:

Also, when I moved to Madison, I founded the company Brazen Careerist, which is funded by investor groups in Madison, WI and Washington, DC. Then I wrote this post:

Starting a company in Silicon Valley is stupid

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy the blog!

-Penelope

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