The majority of people in the US would like to be self-employed, according to Dartmouth economist, David Blanchflower. This makes sense because people who work for themselves are happier than people who work at someone else’s company, according to research from Estaban Calvo at the Harvard School of Public Health. However the majority are not self-employed, and one of the most important reasons for this is that people do not know how to come up with an idea for a business.
1. Read all the time, among broad sources and materials.
In a study spanning sixty years of economically underprivileged Harvard graduates, psychiatrist George Valliant concluded (in a great article in the Atlantic) that the only consistent indicator of who will be happy later in life is who did chores as a child.
This information should make almost everyone happy, since obviously just graduating from Harvard isn’t enough to guarantee happiness. It also gave me a burst of hope for our new life on the farm. The type of farm we live on has big cash flow and little incomes. I’m not sure if this qualifies us for the Harvard study demographic, but just in case, my kids do a lot of chores. They take care of farm animals and get rewarded with computer time. Not quite American Gothic. But still, maybe a path to happiness.
I am going to be a better person at self-promotion because I don't brag enough. Ryan Paugh, who was basically my intern when I met him, and now he’s almost my boss and definitely my social-skills mentor, tells me that I am popular because I’m interesting but that I suck at self-promotion. (He uses, as an example, the day I promoted an event on my blog a few hours after it actually happened.)
I do not tell Ryan to shut up because he has taught me a ton about myself since the day I started working with him. And in fact, he makes me feel qualified to tell you how you can fire up your career by paying close attention to the people with the least work experience.
1. Recognize interns are gatekeepers to the good stuff.
When it was time to promote my second book, I went to Keith Ferrazzi, author of one of my favorite career advice books. I needed a quotation from Keith that said something like, “I am The Great Keith Ferazzi and I can tell you for sure that your career will be crap and you will die drowning in the blood of a rabid coyote if you do not buy Penelope Trunk's book.”
Just so you don't get confused, I'm going to start calling my first book my first book and my second book my second book. At this point, I have written enough about oral sex and family atrocities that you will not be shocked to hear that my first book is really a memoir that my publisher – out of the University of Colorado — decided was too disturbing to be sold as a memoir, so it was published as a novel. Read more
Hi there. You are probably here because you read the article about me having Asperger’s syndrome. I have never seen the Mail on Sunday, but it must be a big publication because thousands of readers are coming to the blog from London today.
(For readers who did not see the article, I like it. Here’s a link. And, sidenote, the author, Louette Harding, was so good at interviewing – so patient and so insightful and I wish I could talk with her every day. But maybe that’s just because we talked about me and this is just evidence that I am really hard to be friends with.)
If you are here for the first time, here are some shortcuts to posts I’ve written about having Asperger’s syndrome:
Why I need a sick day to register my car
5 Ways to make telecommuting better
How I deal with sensory integration dysfunction
Really, though, almost all of this blog is about having Asperger’s syndrome because most of my writing is me trying to figure out the rules for succeeding in the workplace. I know that people say I have an odd take on the rules, but I think I’m usually right, I’m just more literal and more blunt than most people.
Here are some examples: Read more
It's the fifth annual Penelope Trunk Q&A. It's not that I don't answer questions. I actually answer almost every question I receive. But only rarely in a blog post. The problem is that most questions suck. Look, here are posts about how to ask good questions.
In fact, I’ve been getting so ornery about questions sucking that I did a webinar about how to write a good blog post and I got pissed off in the middle because the questions were so bad that I walked off camera and half the video is Ryan Paugh telling me not to be a brat.
So, in the spirit of not being a brat, I am answering questions that I think are interesting. Read more
When I first met the farmer, I knew he was not a normal farmer because normal farmers don't email bloggers for a date. But also, he gave himself away because he quoted Garrison Keillor to me. Then, when I thought I could not put up with him dumping me anymore, and this time would be the last time, just as I thought that, he started reading Moby Dick, and he got so excited about certain chapters that he'd read them out loud to me on his porch in the bright sun of long summer nights.
When I first started forwarding my mail to the farmer's address, he had to buy a larger mailbox. “Why do people send you so many books?” he asked. “Don't they read your blog? You never review books you like.” [This is largely true.]
During the tumult of our move to the farm I stopped opening the packages. But the farmer got curious, and he started reading the books. It turns out that he doesn't like them any more than I do. Here are my summaries of his summaries: Read more
You don’t need to be a basketball fan to know that LeBron James has been deciding if he should stay with his current team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, or move to another, more winning team. ESPN set aside an hour-long special episode for James to announce that he’s going to the Miami Heat.
James is extremely talented and has been called the next Michael Jordan. He is a free agent this year which is the genesis of the hoop-la surrounding his decision, and he has been madly courted by multiple teams.
Many sportswriters have said that the widespread obsession with James’ decision is totally over the top. The New York Times called the ESPN segment an ego-a-thon, which it may well be. But there’s more to our fascination with the decision than just our natural tendency to be drawn to celebrities. James encapsulates the issues each of us faces when we decide if we should relocate.
It’s friends and family vs. opportunity. James grew up in Akron, OH without a father. His basketball coaches played father figure roles to him. The Cavaliers picked him up when he was only 18, and he’s been there for the last seven years. This is his home, his support system, and his roots. Read more
In a recent interview with Fast Company, Ashton Kutcher – the celebrity-turned-Internet-mogel – said that privacy is more valuable than celebrity. This makes sense to me.
On the Internet everyone is a celebrity. I think Rebecca Blood was the first person to introduce this concept to me when she said Generation Y manages itself like celebrities online, so privacy is not necessary for them. I think the proof of this is that gen Y prefers communicating via social media rather than email; news travels faster, via larger groups of people.
Marketers and publicists have made a science out of getting benefits from being a celebrity—sponsors, a fun network, great opportunities that lead to even greater opportunities. In the age of transparency Gen Y can see how to do this and they don’t need permission from MGM or Capitol Records to act like a celebrity.
I am constantly telling people to get a strong career by managing their professional profile online . The way to a solid career is to be known for what you’re good at. All good workers are celebrities—a far cry from Horatio Alger and the Protestant work ethic, but a much more relevant trope for the new millennium.
Pace University reports that 99 percent of Gen Y is on Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn, and Redbook reports that one out of five moms is blogging. In this era, if you’re at all relevant in this day and age, you can google your name, and you will find photos, quotes, and some sort of history of your life, in a few lines or a few million lines. If you already have everything that being a celebrity can get you, then you can be private.
I am struck by the way Prince William and Kate Middleton handle the media in England.
All projects run longer than scheduled. So when I planned for remodeling the farmhouse as a two-week project, I figured it would take four weeks. But we are on week eight because we’re waiting for tile. And when the farmer and I have an argument, he says, “Go to Home Depot and buy some tile so we can take baths.”
It is useless to try to explain to him why Home Depot tile is not innovative design. He doesn’t care. He just wants to be clean. I used to think diversity was my best friend marrying a black guy. But the guy graduated from rich-kid private schools and has tenure at UCLA and, at this point, I think diversity is not skin color but rather social upbringing.
I noticed there’s a lot of information on how to create diversity, but there’s not a lot of information about how to cope with it once you have it. So here are my tips:
1. Accept that some people don’t care about what you care about.
It’s true that we have not been very clean during the remodeling. All the plumbing is on hold. We take showers under the spigot for the well, and I keep thinking a towel is dirty, and put it in the dirty laundry, and then a week later it looks relatively clean, so I use it.
The farmer is concerned that people will think we don’t wash. He says people in the country judge you by whether you’re clean. This is the hardest part of remodeling for him.
The hardest part for me was painting because everyone besides my designer, Maria Killam, told me that it’s a sin to paint woodwork. I painted anyway.
The painters were so offended by the idea of painting woodwork that after they did the whole upstairs they asked if I changed my mind because they could still leave the woodwork downstairs unpainted.
Also: The painters wouldn’t paint the pink bedroom until the farmer expressly approved, in person, the color of paint. (His commentary: “Don’t call me in from the field to look at paint again, okay?”) Read more
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.
It’s frog and toad mating season on the farm. The nighttime is noisy with nature sounds and the pond water ripples with round tadpoles. The farmer is full of mating factoids, like toads enjoy a threesome. Here’s a photo from the farmer:
