Penelope Trunk
DECEMBER 14, 2011
When we were at LegoLand I was struck by the high emotional intelligence of the employees. Their job is to make everyone feel like their Lego project is great. (You'd be surprised how many parents are there, swiping the white blocks from little kids at the Lego snowman contest.). High emotional-intelligence jobs are very hard, and I would rather sweep floors.
Eat Your Career
AUGUST 1, 2011
My former co-worker (let’s call her “Ruth”) always saw the negative in everything. When an idea was presented, she was the first one to say, “That won’t work.” Fair enough. But she never offered alternatives. She never looked for solutions. She never, ever gave anything or anyone the benefit of the doubt. Ruth was an absolute nightmare to work with.
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Lateral Action
DECEMBER 20, 2011
Thank you to everyone who entered the What Inspires You? competition by leaving comments on the original post about your inspirations. Fittingly, the comment thread turned out to be an inspiration in its own right, with over 100 entries that reminded me what a special group of people read this blog. We had such a […]. The post Competition Winners – and a Special Bonus Prize for You appeared first on Mark McGuinness | Creative Coach.
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Creative Think
AUGUST 30, 2011
It's time for one of my very favorite creative thinking strategies: Think Like A Wise Fool. Image from Wise Fool Carrying the strategy of "looking at things differently" to extremes brings us to the realm of the Wise Fool , the being for whom everyday ways of understanding have little meaning. It's the wise fool's job to extol the trivial , trifle with the exalted , and parody the common perception of a situation.
Penelope Trunk
DECEMBER 11, 2011
This post is cross-posted at TechCrunch. We need to get more guys who are running tech startups to decide instead to be stay-at-home dads. What do you think of that? Stupid, right? That’s what it sounds like when anyone suggests that we need to get more women doing startups. If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying.
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Penelope Trunk
NOVEMBER 22, 2011
I get an incredible amount of email from people with Asperger Syndrome. It’s all really similar. Here’s a sample: “I’m 45 and a lawyer and I have Aspergers. I don't know what is appropriate, and not appropriate some of the time, such as talking too much about very personal info, or saying something that offends someone. “I've gone through many friends in life.
Penelope Trunk
OCTOBER 25, 2011
(This post was originally published on Venture Beat. This photo is by Melissa.). Brazen Careerist is my third startup. People ask me all the time why I gave up my position as CEO. If you knew what startup life was really like, you would ask me why I was CEO for as long as I was. When I started building the brand of Brazen Careerist around the year 2000, I talked about ideas like job hopping as a way to build a solid career, and I warned that generation Y’s entry into the workforce would be a tot
Penelope Trunk
OCTOBER 17, 2011
The best way to understand earning power—no matter what your age—is to understand the factors that go into it. For example, most people who have careers that are plateauing usually have a learning problem that manifests itself as an earning problem. And for parents, schooling discussions are really earning discussions. Because you can say that kids with a love of learning are lifelong learners ( essential for workplace success today ), but truly, who wants an unemployed Ph.D candidat
Penelope Trunk
OCTOBER 5, 2011
When I had my second son, I had a nervous breakdown. I’m not sure exactly what the cause was. But things were bad. I had a three-year-old with autism, a baby with a facial deformity that required a team of ten different types of doctors, and no family helping me, and I didn’t take maternity leave. This is what happened: I put a knife in my head. It’s a weird thing about the knife.
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Penelope Trunk
OCTOBER 14, 2011
The farmer is separating his farm from his parent's farm. To say this has been a summer full of drama would be a total understatement. I would say that the drama has gone from his larger family , to our little family , and now, to the economics of the farm. This is probably where the drama should be: The Farmer is essentially starting a new business.
Penelope Trunk
SEPTEMBER 26, 2011
The future of the Internet is design: from fine art galleries to the size of the box you type in name. So start figuring out how to rejigger things to make your career relevant. Here's how I know what's coming: First, a flurry of emails arrive in my in-box each day touting “free infographics.” After sniffing around, I discovered that infographics garner so many clicks that SEO mavens publish quick, cheesy infographics to hand out for free in exchange for links back to publisher sites.
Penelope Trunk
OCTOBER 3, 2011
We have a huge vegetable garden. While the Farmer was planting huge crops of corn and hay, I was planting twenty types of vegetables. I have not bought vegetables from the store since May, when the first lettuce was ripe. This is a picture of me digging through our forty tomato plants. When I was putting them in the ground, I never dreamed that forty would really grow.
Penelope Trunk
AUGUST 29, 2011
It’s pretty well established that non-science degrees are not necessary for a job. In fact, the degrees cost you too much money , require too long of a commitment , and do not teach you the real-life skills they promise. Yet, I do tons of radio call-inshows where I say that graduate degrees in the humanities are so useless that they actually set you back in your career in many cases.
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Penelope Trunk
JULY 28, 2011
This is the column I wrote for BNET. Usually I keep my best ideas for my blog, but after I posted this on BNET I thought: Hold it! This is a great idea! Everyone should be doing this to make their career great. So here's the post. If you want to make yourself stand out as a top candidate for almost any job, try this approach: start a company and then sell it for nothing.
Penelope Trunk
JULY 12, 2011
I'm convinced that the biggest impact Generation Z will have on the workplace is in their schooling. They will be lifelong, self-learners, who take more personal responsibility for their ongoing education than any generation in history. I am not talking about graduate school here. I am talking about a more creative, independent way of learning that does not stop at college, but rather, picks up pace remarkably after college, when real experiential learning starts happening.
Penelope Trunk
AUGUST 30, 2011
After yesterday’s post , about how stupid grad school is, a lot of people asked, what is an alternative to grad school? This is a great question. I see this picture outside my window at least once a month. I have only a little idea of what's going on. Should I go to graduate school to figure it out? I could. I could get in. And it's clear that the next stage in my life will involve some sort of work related to farming.
Penelope Trunk
DECEMBER 20, 2011
One reason I have achieved so much in my own career is that I’ve taken shortcuts. For example, I played professional beach volleyball without learning how to play indoor sixes very well—I can really only play doubles, which is what people play on the sand. But it allowed me to skip a lot of years of indoor volleyball training and still play pro.
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Penelope Trunk
JUNE 22, 2011
Ten years ago, when I was pitching my book to publishers, one publisher leaned back in his chair and said, "I don't get it, she's never worked in Human Resources, she's not part of Generation Y, and we can't even figure out what her career is. So how is she qualified to give career advice to young people?" I got sweaty.
Penelope Trunk
AUGUST 10, 2011
This post is sponsored by Tempur-Pedic because we think you deserve to get your best night’s sleep every night. I've been reading a lot about willpower to find out how to get more. It turns out that we only have a very little bit, and we cannot be demanding it of ourselves all day long because that would exhaust our supply and make us nuts. Which is, of course, what I do.
Penelope Trunk
JULY 19, 2011
When the pig litters came in January, the Farmer helped my son pick out pigs for his 4H project. They picked four, because you never know, really, how a pig will grow. So you start with four and pick two after a few months. My son woke up every morning and fed his pigs, for six months. And after three months, he walked with the pigs, around in a circle, twice a day, to train the pig for the show.
Penelope Trunk
NOVEMBER 7, 2011
Last week I announced that I’m doing a week-long series on how to blog. Then I received an onslaught of emails reminding me of how I have always said that it’s stupid to try to earn money blogging. Here’s the post where I outline the rationale for this. But the bottom line is that making money from blogging based on getting tons of traffic is a terrible goal because so few people can do it.
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Penelope Trunk
JULY 7, 2011
I have never been a fan of vacations. Why would I need a vacation from my life if I like my life? Also, I'm a fanatic about routine. After years of obsessive research about what makes people happy, I have determined that self-discipline is the key to happiness. And self-discipline is really difficult , but not in the context of routine. So I love routine and I hate vacations because they disrupt routine.
Penelope Trunk
AUGUST 15, 2011
Melissa is back. She stole my purse. But first, before she stole my purse, she opened my mail. I walked into the kitchen and I said, “Hey, you opened my mail.”. “No I didn’t. “What’s this? What’s this opened envelope that is addressed to me?”. “Oh. That? I didn’t think you counted that as mail.”. “What does it count as?”. “I knew it was from an author.
Penelope Trunk
AUGUST 31, 2011
I make a plan where I write enough on Sunday so I don’t lose my mind trying to write posts all week in between dealing with two kids. And then I decide writing seems too hard. And I decide I should take a bath. You might think this is my way of relaxing, but it’s not. We don’t have a shower. We are in the hygiene part of the slow food movement. Maybe.
Penelope Trunk
JULY 22, 2011
Melissa left yesterday. She moved back to Austin. She moved for a job that I think is totally stupid, but her future employer reads this blog, so I have to watch what I say. On the other hand, she ended up giving references the same day I posted about me worrying about her having an affair with the Farmer , so the woman interviewing her decided not to use me as a reference.
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Penelope Trunk
AUGUST 22, 2011
Melissa rides her horse every morning before she goes to work, at noon, which is when her boss gets to work. I am sad that Melissa is happy because now she will not come back to the farm and be my permanent photographer. I used to feel sorry for Brad and Angelina because they had photographers trailing them all the time. Now I think they are lucky because if they had a blog, they’d have so many good photos to use.
Eat Your Career
JUNE 30, 2011
This article is the second in a 10-part series on the topic of overcoming career-limiting habits. In a recent study identifying the most common career-limiting habits , “It’s Not My Job” came in second place. This attitude is so prevalent in the workplace and, if you’ve ever worked with a person like this, you know how frustrating it can be. This is not the mindset of a team player.
Eat Your Career
MARCH 21, 2011
There are a few standard career management tips I recommend to every professional regardless of position, industry, experience level, or future ambitions. These things are super easy to do and they help ensure you’re taking at least a minimally active role in your professional development. No matter how busy you are, there’s just no excuse to ignore these tips.
Eat Your Career
JUNE 23, 2011
I stumbled upon this great article the other day and I wanted to share it with all of you. According to new research, 97 percent of employees report that they have a Career Limiting Habit (CLH) that keeps them from achieving their potential at work. Here is a list of the Career Limiting Habits identified in the article: 1. Unreliability. 2. “It’s not my job.”. 3.
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