Penelope Trunk
DECEMBER 28, 2011
I am at a hotel. I think I'm dying. I have a bruise from where the Farmer slammed me into our bed post. I took the kids and went to a hotel so I could have time to think. I think I need to move into a hotel for a month. The Farmer told me that he will not beat me up any more if I do not make him stay up late talking to me. If you asked him why he is still being violent to me, he would tell you that I’m impossible to live with.
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 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.
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Penelope Trunk
DECEMBER 1, 2011
I confess that I don’t feel like I’m working to my potential. And it makes me feel sick. I know the signs. It starts with me not being able to cope with my to-do list. It all looks too overwhelming. So I scale things back: I take out everything that has to do with starting a company. The next stage of not living up to my potential is that I can’t read anything.
Penelope Trunk
DECEMBER 5, 2011
This post is sponsored by the American Cancer Society. After I realized that the most underrated skill is asking good questions , I realized that I am not very good at it. I don’t ask for help enough because I don’t know what question to ask. And also, I worry the question will be bad and then the person won’t want to help me again. So I started forcing myself to ask for help.
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
NOVEMBER 15, 2011
This post is sponsored by the American Cancer Society. Take a look at Steve Martin's business card. I love it because it brings to light the lack of meaning we often feel during the daily routine of work life. When I was new to the workforce, I saw two ends of a spectrum. On one end, risking one's life to save dying children, and on the other end, hedge-fund banking to make millions.
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On September 4, 2024, Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Retail Worker Safety Act (S. 8358B/A. 8947C) into law, requiring retail employers in New York to adopt workplace violence prevention policies and implement training programs by March 2025. This webinar will provide a detailed overview of the Act’s requirements, including developing and providing a retail workplace violence prevention policy/plan and delivering annual interactive training to employees.
Penelope Trunk
NOVEMBER 11, 2011
My homeschool blog is mentioned in the New York Times. It's a small mention, but it's a big deal for me, because lately I've been obsessed with how people learn, and what makes a successful adult. It's appropriate that the Times would link the day I wrote about what my day is like trying to homeschool and work full-time. It's a colossal mess, really.
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 19, 2011
This is probably what you think self-employed looks like: I'm at an amusement park with my kids, in the middle of the week, and I'm on a conference call while I watch my son try to get on a ride. Being self-employed looks so nice at an amusement park. The self-employed are always free to go on a vacation. They pick up their friends at the airport in the middle of the day, they show up for poker night because they can stay out late, and they can plan their wedding without having to pret
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
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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.
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.
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Penelope Trunk
SEPTEMBER 9, 2011
During the year after 9/11 I went to counseling for post-traumatic stress. I went to a group that met weekly. The counselors explained that if we told our story over and over again, the story would have less power over us. So I have been telling my story for ten years. I am lucky to have a blog, and an amazing community to tell my story to. And recently, as the 10 th anniversary has been approaching, I’ve been telling my story again, to many news outlets.
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.
Penelope Trunk
SEPTEMBER 5, 2011
It used to be controversial to say that college is a rip off. At this point, I think the arguments have reached the mainstream. The problem is that, while some kids win the intellectual lottery , it’s too risky for most kids to skip out on the credentials. So the question is: how can you make the most of the fact that you are going to college at a time when most people think college does not prepare you for the next step in your life?
Penelope Trunk
SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
When people tell me they want to stay home with their kids and they can’t afford it, I want to yell at them about how when I was trying to write freelance and take care of the kids I had a babysitter refuse to come to the house because we had no food in the house. We had no food in the house because we had no money. I bought food on a day to day basis.
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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 14, 2011
One thing I have learned from living on a farm is that you are not really experiencing diversity unless you are also experiencing repulsion. We each have lots of assumptions about what is right and wrong, how the world works, how people should act in a civilized community. When faced with true diversity – that is, diversity of experience — we have to allow our assumptions to be challenged.
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.
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