Browsing the Work Advice category...

Thursday, Feb 16, 2012

Info

Posted by Admin ()

To trackback to this post please right-click on this url: Trackback

Post belongs to the Work Advice category

Tags: , ,

I always thought leaving New York City would be good for me because when you live there, the push to get the best of everything is very strong. New Yorkers are maximizers, a term coined by psychologist Barry Schwartz for someone who is always thinking they can do better. These people are generally unhappy.

There’s a spectrum, for sure. But if maximizing were a scale of 1-10, 10 being the highest  in NYC everyone is in the 6-10 range. And the 6s think they’re really laid back. I wanted to be in the 1-5 range, where research shows that people lead much happier lives.

I knew I’d need to leave New York City to do that. In Madison, WI, I have to admit, I remained a maximizer. I got a lawyer from Chicago to sue the schools for their incredibly poor compliance with IDEA. I flew to LA for haircuts. I refused to stop flying American Airlines even though smaller, scrappy airlines had more flexible schedules out of Wisconsin.

But the truth is that you do become who you live with, and the maximizer is slowly being knocked out of me. Which has been my goal all along. Research shows that people are happier in rural towns than in cities, primarily because there is no way to be an maximizer. (I have argued before, many times, that people who live in cities don’t care about happiness, so it doesn’t matter that they are not happy.)

In the maximizer world, I live in the 1-5 range right now. Where I live I look like a crazy maximizer, because everyone here is a 1-5 and I’m a 5. When I visit my friends in New York City, I seem a little bit off.

The best way to see myself in relation to city people is to recall common conversations. Here are questions that city people ask me all the time:

1. Do you have real animals?
I could answer this question a million ways and the city person would get no information. For example, I can say, “yes, sheep, pigs, cows, chicken.” You don’t know how many. I could have 100,000 chickens and two lambs for example. Also, you don’t know what kind. I could have wool sheep or dairy sheep, I could have meat cows or dairy cows. So it’s a question that has no answer. I say yes.

2. Do the pigs smell bad?
This is always the followup question to the more general animal question. People want to talk about how bad the pigs smell. City people love talking about manure. They think it’s funny. It’s like Captain Underpants—The Adult Version. But if someone chooses to live on a pig farm, they are obviously not bothered by the pig smell. And probably, a pig farmer looks at pigs and things they’re cute:

So asking about the pig smell would be like me saying to a New Yorker: “Does the noise bother you?” Of course it doesn’t—they live in NYC.

3. How are the schools?
Bad. The answer is bad. Because a city person is not asking while placing their kids in one of those high schools with a 48% dropout rate. People ask this question while walking through their suburban sprawl kitchen into their media room. And the tax base they create with this house makes the tax base of a rural farm community seem like a third-world country. So, it’s true, the schools are not good. But there’s a price you pay no matter where you live. The corollary would be, “Do you live next door to Central Park?” No. Of course you don’t. You gave up living near nature in order to live in the inherent excitement of NYC in a place you can afford.

4. Do you want to go out for dinner?
No. That’s why I live in the country. There is nowhere to go that is as good as my house. And we grow our own food. And we eat at 5pm so don’t ask me at 5pm if I want to go out. Dinner is already made.

5. How many bedrooms?
This is the question that follows, “I got married and moved to the farmhouse with my kids.” A New Yorker thinks, “Upstate NYC with a dining room to serve 50 people plus the photographers from Country Living magazine to document it.” Newsflash: Real farm houses are small because they are heated with either gas, which is very expensive for a farm, or with wood, and no one wants to have to chop the wood for a fifteen room house.

I have found that the biggest cultural gap between rural life and city life has been the maximizer mindset. To a maximizer, a rural person looks stupid, or delusional. And to a rural person, the city person looks insecure and uptight. Both assessments are right, really. But I have found that it’s more interesting to try to understand both sides than criticize both sides.

It’s easy to criticize someone else for having no clue about diversity. It’s hard to really spend time understanding someone else’s situation in order to see the gaps between you and that person. Really understanding cultural diversity is really understanding the gaps. And in those gaps is where you gain a better understanding of yourself.

Penelope Trunk Blog

So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »

Sunday, Feb 12, 2012

Info

Posted by Admin ()

To trackback to this post please right-click on this url: Trackback

Post belongs to the Work Advice category

Tags: ,

Last fall I took my kids to Hermosa Beach. It was a big moment for me because the whole time I was playing professional volleyball, in my 20s, I dreamed I would have a family and live in Hermosa.

It’s a great beach town with top-notch volleyball. There’s proximity to good career opportunities in the LA area, and a culture of kids growing up with sand in their hair.

The day we arrived I realized that it might be really hard to leave. I worried that maybe I’d never go back to the farm. And the more the kids loved  the water, the more closely I looked at For Rent signs. I thought maybe I could split my time between the beach and the farm.

But then something happened. We didn’t miss only The Farmer (who doesn’t like to leave the Farm).  We missed the animals, and the feeling of being in a cozy warm house surrounded by snow.

Which made me realize that when we think about relocation, we think about the wrong stuff.

1. We focus on what we gain instead of what we lose.
When people think about relocating they think almost exclusively about what they will gain by going to the new city, but psychologically we are affected much more by what we lose.

For example, if we sell stocks high and win, the emotional impact is less than if we sell stocks low and lose. We hate losing, and we are hard-wired to care more about what we lose. So instead of thinking about what you’ll gain by moving, think about what you’ll lose. What will you miss? Because that’s what you’ll think about the most.

Think about what you are actually willing to give up. Each relocation is really about giving up stuff that you have now that you won’t have later. Getting new, fun stuff is going to be great. But knowing what you can do without is more important. And more mature. Because the most adult decisions in your life are ones that put severe limits on other possibilities.

2. We underestimate the commute.
I know this one very well. You think you have something that outweighs everything—the big house, the fun job, the good schools—for me it was living on a farm.

But if that entails a huge commute in order to get everything you want, well, then the truth is you can’t have everything you want. The commute makes you more unhappy than any of that stuff can make up for.

3. We waste time visiting in person before moving there.
When you decide where to live, it should be based on the essential issues—proximity to people you love, ability to earn a living, and so on. These are questions you can answer online, or with a phone call to a friend or relative.

To try to find out if you are a cultural fit by visiting is absurd. It is impossible to get the sense of a city from just one visit. A large city is different block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and you could not get a taste of all of them in a visit. You will have to read about them and trust statistical analysis in order to choose.

So a visit to a city gives you a skewed view and will simply mess up your decision-making process by giving too much weight to sketchy data. Wherever you decide to move, a good real estate agent will know exactly where in the area you should live.

4. We overestimate the raise.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman summarizes decades of happiness research this way: “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.” (via Jonah Lehrer in Wired)

So then it should come as no surprise to you that if you are relocating away from people you love in order to get more money, you should think twice.

Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London did the computations to show that you need to get a raise of 0,000 to compensate for the happiness you will lose by moving away from friends and family.

5. We think we are an exception.
Look at the demographics of the city. You are normal. You are regular. You are going to become the mean of your demographic. It’s the law of nature. Average is average because that’s what most people are. You make your life overly complicated by living in a fantasy world where you are not typical.

Once you accept that, you can use research to its full benefit. For example, even if you earn 0,000, you will not feel rich if all your neighbors earn a lot more than you. This is the law of financial happiness – that it's relative, not absolute, and you feel best when you are an average earner in your community. Too high and you feel like an outcast, too low and you feel desperate.

The same is true of city living. Cities are not appealing to normal parents. This is because marriages do not stay together when two parents need to earn huge incomes. Women simply do not want to have their kids raised by nannies. This means that only families where there is a single wage earner in the very highest of brackets does city living look appealing. Otherwise, the compromises a family makes to live in a city leaves them short on benefits. (If nothing else, parents who work all day and tuck kids in to bed every night have no time or energy to enjoy the cultural benefits of a big, expensive city.)

6. We trust a cost-of-living calculator. 
The problem with this tool is that it gives you information you can't use. You need to know which city will make you happy, not which city will save you ,000 in housing costs.

Let's say you're thinking of moving from San Francisco to New York City. They're both really expensive to live in, so the difference in your salary isn't going to matter. You should probably think harder about their cultures than about money; very few people fit in well in both cities, and most feel like they belong in one or the other. A calculator can't tell you that.

Now let's say you're moving from New York City to Los Angeles. You'll save money on housing, of course, but you'll need a really good car.

In L.A., a BMW is totally reasonable. You'll end up spending more time there than in your apartment. In NYC, however, owning a BMW is commonplace only among millionaires. For most New Yorkers, having a car like that is absurd—they just don't drive enough. But cost-of-living calculators don't have a "BMW: yes or no" option.

7. We overlook key research.
When I relocated from NYC to Madison, I did tons of research. I knew everything about happiness and economic development and I knew what I was getting into even though I never stepped foot in Madison before I moved there.

But I ignored a crucial piece of research: The schools. I simply could not believe that the schools were as bad - relative to the rest of the country – as all the data showed. It’s a university town, I reasoned. It’s liberal. They must raise taxes a lot for schools. I couldn’t believe it. But it was true. And I ended up having to leave Madison because the schools were so bad.

Then I moved to the country. I paid a lot of attention to the research about optimizers. People in the country are generally content with a relatively simple life with few options. City people complicate their lives with lots of choices for all the best stuff, but that doesn’t make them happy. And you become like the people you live with. Really.

So I decided to become a content, country person by moving to where they live.

It turns out that choosing a location is a lot like choosing a mate. What you decide to overlook ends up being the most important part of your decision. You know what is going to be hard about the life you are choosing and you know that you are deciding to ignore it and go ahead with the choice anyway. We never really know if we are making a good decision or if we’ll have to get over it.

 

Penelope Trunk Blog

So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »

Thursday, Feb 9, 2012

Info

Posted by Admin ()

To trackback to this post please right-click on this url: Trackback

Post belongs to the Work Advice category

Tags: , ,

In therapy lately I am learning to identify my feelings. Maybe you’re thinking this is elementary, but did you know that envy is about wanting something you don’t have, but jealousy is the fear of losing something you already have?

I am thinking about those two things. I am almost never envious, but I am often jealous. Most of my emotions, in fact, are rooted in fear.

I am thinking a lot lately about where my joy comes from, and one thing I love is writing well. When I have a blog post that people love I am happy for weeks. And the excitement of doing good creative work gives me energy to do more.

So I have been thinking about how to get better at writing, and I’ve been trying to notice stuff that I wish I had written. The process teaches me a lot about identifying my own emotions.

1. A New Yorker article.
There is not much in the New Yorker I wish I had written. Most of it I think is too long and could use a stronger editor. (Like this article about Ikea.) But there is a piece in the Nov. 28 issue that is just one page, and so funny that I carry it with me and make people read it just so I can watch them laugh.

It is We are the One Percent, by John Kenney. Will you click to read it? Go read it now.

I'll wait.

I am not funny. I mean, I am funny but in an unintentional way. When I try to make a joke it is usually a pun. I love puns but I have realized, late in life, that people do not think puns are funny.

When people read my writing and say that I am funny, I feel lonely, because I know better than to try to be funny on purpose. So honestly, I don’t feel that funny. It’s a lot like when people say that I write stuff just to get a lot of traffic. If I knew how to churn out a 300-comment post on demand, don’t you think I’d do it every day?

In fact, it’s like funny. I have no idea when it’s coming. Feeling: Lonely, because I’m always surprised.

2. An email from Melissa.
I wrote to Melissa that I messed up my PayPal account and I hit my limit on money I can transfer to my checking account and I wanted the money right then, while I was in Florida, with the kids. We were at the Waldorf in Boca, which I would have never chosen, but there was a wedding.

And actually, in the list of things I wish I had written should be the pricing plan for this resort. It reminds me of buying a printer. They seem so reasonably priced until you get killed on the ink. And that’s what happens here—when you have to pay five dollars for an apple juice, and to get the hotel to remove the juice from the fridge in the room so the kids don’t drink it.

Anyway, I asked Melissa if I could pay her through PayPal and use her credit card at the hotel. This is the sort of fucked up behavior that Melissa and I have done in the past, so it seemed like a reasonable request.

Melissa wrote back, “No. I’m not doing stuff like that anymore.”

And I thought, “She is really smart. Of course we should not do stuff like that anymore.” It is bad boundaries and I am working on having better boundaries with everyone, even Melissa.

I am hoping she will send me an email asking for something bad so I can write a response that blows her away with my ability to establish good boundaries. Feeling: Determination to change and excitement about what my life could be like with good boundaries.

3. The ad copy up there.
The girl. In the hot outfit, with all the guys around her. Do you see her? It’s an ad for work clothes, of course. But it’s an ad that gives women the freedom to use their sexuality to get everything they can get. I love that. Women are doing better than men are at work in their 20s. Women earn more and women are less likely to get hit in layoffs.

OK Cupid – one of my favorite blogs for the combination of amazing data and amazing analysis, and really, that should be on my list of stuff I’d like to write too, except that the guy who writes it – Chris Rudder – has his personality all over it which makes me just want to enjoy it and not be it. Like Joel Stein’s column in Time magazine. It’s too too too him for me to want it to be me. But I love reading it.

Anyway, OK Cupid concludes that women are in highest demand when they are in their late 20s. Which makes sense to me—they are high earning, stable, and still very hot.  So women should leverage their sexuality to get promotions, make sales, get high-earning husbands—great legs help with all that stuff.

I want to write advice like the advice in this ad. Be great. Reach high. Inspire people around you by being inspired yourself. And when you don’t feel that way, at least look that way and eventually that good look will get you back on track.

Feeling: Hopeful. The ad reminds me of all the positive psychology research – that you can create hope in yourself by giving it to other people.

If I focus on what I wish I'd written, I realize that what I'm scared of  has nothing to do with other writers. What I'm scared of is not growing. It's freeing to recognize that, really. Because I can't control what other people write. But I can control how much I push myself to grow. And I'm convinced that jealousy and envy — whichever is your sin of choice  - have very little power over us when we are growing fast enough to surprise ourselves with what we can accomplish.

Penelope Trunk Blog

So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »

Wednesday, Feb 8, 2012

Info

Posted by Admin ()

To trackback to this post please right-click on this url: Trackback

Post belongs to the Work Advice category

Tags: , ,

After the Facebook IPO, Sheryl Sandberg will become number two on the list of richest self-made women. She is the COO of Facebook.  For those of you not familiar with her career, there’s a nice summary in the New York Times. But the bottom line is that she is really smart (Harvard), a really hard worker (startups, Google, Facebook), a great speaker (here’s a commencement speech) ,and she’s married to a guy who is also making tons of money in startups.

There is nothing, really, that is bad to say about Sandberg. And she works very hard to encourage other women to go as far as she has gone.

The problem is, very few women want to be Sandberg, but there is very little discussion of this.

Sandberg has two young kids. She runs a company that is very public about having “lock-ins” to move fast enough to compete with Google, and they have open hours for kids to come to Facebook offices to say goodnight to their parents, who are working very long hours.

She encourages women to have ambition and “never take their foot off the gas pedal,” but very, very few women would choose to do this after they have kids. Pew Research shows that the majority of women would like to work part-time after they have kids. So it’s hard to tell that demographic that they should work 100-hour weeks at startups instead.

It’s revealing that the New York Times profile of Sandberg shows her surrounded by men who are only marginally involved in raising their kids.

Obama, for instance, is shown kissing her on the cheek. At that moment, presumably, Michelle Obama was with his kids. Because Michelle has been very clear that he is almost never with their kids, and she’s pissed, and she has confessed to screaming at him that she didn’t sign up to be a single mother. In fact, she quit her job so she could manage the family while her husband’s career took off.

Sandberg is also pictured with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. I was so struck by his lack of involvement with his kids that I wrote a whole post about it, here. He has a wife at home taking care of his kids.

Sandberg is pictured with Mayor Bloomberg, who is divorced and single, and left raising his daughters largely to his ex-wife.

Sandberg’s husband is not a stay-at-home husband. He has a big career of his own. Meg Whitman also had a husband with a big career, but when she became the very high-profile CEO of eBay, he stepped down to take care of their sons. Sandberg’s husband doesn’t appear to be doing that.

I have a friend who was a direct report to Sandberg. He had nothing but good things to say about her, but when I pressed for how she could possibly be getting this done with young kids, he said there are multiple nannies.

This makes sense. When I had a big job—nothing compared to Sandberg’s—I had two nannies. Because if you travel you have to have around-the-clock coverage.

Sandberg wants to be a role model for women who want big, exciting careers. But here’s the problem: women don't want to be Sandberg. It’s no coincidence that the number-one woman on the list of self-made millionaires is Oprah. She has no kids and no husband. She’s fascinating, nice, and smart. But few of us would really enjoy her life.

Sandberg and Oprah represent extreme choices in life. The things they give up are not things that most women would want to give up in exchange for the wild career success they could have.

Sandberg’s right when she says that the thing holding women back is women’s ambition. But I don’t see that changing any time soon. Even after the Facebook IPO. I’m afraid that what the Facebook IPO means for women is nothing. Sandberg is not a role model. She’s an aberration.

You can't have small kids and a startup if you want to see your kids. I wrote about this on TechCrunch and I got skewered for being bad for women and being a downer in general.

But this week Jeff Atwood wrote in Tech Crunch that he’s leaving his startup because it’s impossible to see his kids if he stays. And I don’t see anyone complaining about his declaration.

So probably Sheryl Sandberg is not doing much for women, but I'm pretty sure Jeff Atwood is, because it’s not as hard to say “The startup is too hard on my kids” when men are saying it, too.

Penelope Trunk Blog

So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »

Tuesday, Jan 31, 2012

Info

Posted by Admin ()

To trackback to this post please right-click on this url: Trackback

Post belongs to the Work Advice category

Tags: ,

Sunday nights at our house are dinner with me, the kids, the Farmer and the Ex. They are always fun dinners, and I always feel very lucky for that.

My six-year-old talked about his new baby cousin, Eva (who is pictured, in utero, above). "She has a terrible name," he said, "for Pig Latin. Its Vaeay. It doesn't work."

We all do the vowel arranging in our heads and agree, Eva is not a good Pig Latin name.

"Mom has a great name! It's Enelopepay."

The Farmer says, "It sounds like it could be the name of her next company."

The Ex says, "Yeah, emphasis on the pay."

The three adults laugh.

And then I get nervous. About what I'm going to do next. If you have had three companies, people assume you will have a fourth. So I assume that, too. Which makes me nervous.

When I was in the doctor's office with my son, he was playing his DS and I was looking for something to read to distract myself from the urge to rein in his video game time (I decided that parents who limit video games are delusional.) And I saw this pamphlet that looked like a food pyramid so I grabbed it to get some insight into how to use the food pyramid to make myself not want to eat and lose weight overnight.

What I thought was a food pyramid pamphlet was actually a mental health pamphlet. It was a pyramid that had taking care of life goals and meaning of life stuff on the bottom, and the middle part was daily routine mental health stuff like exercise and talking to friends—the stuff you already know you should do every day. And the top was the immediate stuff. Ways to calm yourself down in the moment. For the most part, the top part was positive self-talk.

I am good at the first two, but the immediate stuff I'm not good at. In fact, I eat when I am anxious. I found, actually, that drinking is more calming when I'm anxious, but eating is more socially acceptable. Xanax is always good, but only if I can sleep the rest of the day. And really, if I have a day where I can sleep then I'm probably not anxious. Not that I would ever know. Because I haven't had a day where I can sleep the whole day since I became a mother.

Anyway, I am trying to find good ways to calm myself down when I'm nervous. And I took the pamphlet home to make myself more conscious of what I do in the moment when anxiety arises. Mostly this means that I've started to tell myself, "Oh, look. I must be upset becacause I'm eating." But in this moment, at the dining room table, while the kids talked to the dads, I went into the kitchen to calm myself down. And I didn't eat. I practiced positive self-talk.

I had rehearsed it before, which is how to prepare for the moment of huge self-doubt. Here are the five points I've come up with:

1. Stay confident that I am making good choices based on good data.
When I started having kids I dropped out of the software industry and the startup world.

The moment was similar to me deciding that homeschooling is a non-negotiable. Everyone told me not to drop out and that I was crazy.

But I had read a lot about attachment theory—that kids need one, single primary caregiver for the first two years. I realized that it's common knowledge among child development experts that kids need a single caregiver for the first two years, but no one wants to be the bearer of this bad news. Because daycare means there are two primary caregivers, at least, which jeopardizes a baby's ability to attach. So sending a kid to daycare was out of the question for me.

And that's how I feel now, about homeschooling. Even though it's wreaking havoc on my career.

2. Remember the times I felt like a failure when it was not true at all.
This research made me intensely committed to finding work I could do from home to support the family. Which lead to temporary financial ruin. And I felt like a failure.

All my friends in the software industry disappeared because we had nothing to talk about. The writers I met earned so little money that I worried hanging out with them was bad for my career.

After a few years, I launched this blog. It got big enough that people who make a lot of money started paying attention to me again. And I didn’t feel like a failure anymore.

If I could go back to that time, I'd tell myself to stop worrying about failure.  The worry just makes the change harder, and no one is a failure in the middle of a big change. You can't fail if you're moving toward something. You fail only if you stop.

3. During big transitions, be clear on priorities.
I have a startup right now. I started pitching some top-tier VCs I'd like to work with and  they said the business idea would not grow big enough. So I showed how I can win at the whole online food business because the barrier to entry for selling meat and cheese online is huge and I have a way to get around that.

Everyone loved my marketing plan. Except that the business was too small to be funded. There would not be a big enough exit and I can’t get great business partners if I don’t have huge exit potential.

That's a problem because I want to work only with hotshots. I don’t want to work with moms who want jobs on the side. Please God do not strike me down for saying this, but as a mom who is trying to have a really exciting career, I don’t want to work with other moms. I want to work with twenty-something men who have no kids and have endless time to address their endless curiosity.

So I worked with an angel investor to craft a business plan that moves quickly from online food to online everything. I talk about the future of shopping . It used to be that shopping was exciting because you could find different stuff in different cities. Discovery and exploration are part of shopping. But online, everything is a commodity. People want discovery and they want to feel that what they are buying is special.

I say all this to show how my online food business will transform the consumer experience. You need to say that kind of stuff to get A-list partners and A-list funding.

4. Getting what you want means deciding what you'll give up.
So last month I got a great developer to agree to move forward with me. Last week there was no barrier to me launching my goat cheese business as step one to transforming the American consumer experience.

Except that I don’t think I can handle talking like this every day for five years. Which is what a startup is: talking like a manic dreamer with crazy ambitions that no one thinks you can really pull off, but some people will take a wild bet on. That’s what it would be.

It’s so fun. But not with kids. It’s so great to have an amazing business partner, but not if they have to chase you down in between playdates. They start to hate you.

So I have this business I’m not doing. And I'm banking on the advice I tell other people, that admitting what won't work to do right now is a step toward figure out what will work to do right now.

5. Keep moving forward and believe you'll go somewhere good.
I am at an in-between stage, and I’ve been here before, so I am going to have faith that I’ll come out okay. I am going to have faith that I am not going to wither away and lose my ability to earn a lot of money. I am going to have faith that when I am done with my current identity crisis there will be top-performers all around me.

I coach so many people in their 20s who are lost, and they are worried that their feeling lost will never end. And I tell them to just keep trying jobs until one sticks. Have patience and believe that you'll figure things out. This is true for me, too. Right now. The more times you live through that feeling of being lost, the more faith you have that you'll keep moving forward and come out fine.

You know what makes me happy right now? My sister-in-law had a baby after losing her first one. I'm really happy for her. And my small, odd family has fun dinners together. And focusing on the stuff that definitely feels good gives me faith to trust that eventually I can put the pay in Enelopepay.

 

 

 

Penelope Trunk Blog

So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »

Friday, Jan 27, 2012

Info

Posted by Admin ()

To trackback to this post please right-click on this url: Trackback

Post belongs to the Work Advice category

Tags: , , , ,

One of the keys to my ability to work 40 hours a week and homeschool two kids is that I have great time management. Which is to say, I say no to just about everything. But learning when to say no is still a work in progress. Here's what I know about saying no to phone calls:

1. It's more efficient to read the book than talk to the author.
I get about ten emails a day asking me if I want to talk to someone about their book so I’ll recommend it on the blog. My answer is always no.

I said yes once because it was Gloria Steinem. And it turned out to be a really disappointing phone call. If she is disappointing pitching to me, then everyone else will be, too.

Now I ask people to send me the book. If I like the idea of it, I’ll read it. I just read a book by Alexandra Robbins about why high school is destroying the kids who go there. She didn’t come to that conclusion, I did. But see, that’s why it’s good that I read the book myself instead of talking to her.

2. Interviews are a faster form of entertainment than going to a movie.
But I do try to say yes to all interviews. I like the Russian Roulette aspect of interviews in that I never know what I’ll get. I liked getting grilled on CNN about my miscarriage. They didn’t tell me that was the topic, but it’s okay. It was interesting to answer the questions.

And I didn’t like talking to Steve Roy about his career, but whenever I listen to the recording of the call, I laugh out loud, so in hindsight, even that was a good interview to say yes to.

So this guy, Michael Zenn, sent me this email:

Subject hed: Your Input

…I am currently in the process of producing a new edition of my book and reaching out to interview some of the leading female thought leaders in the nation, which I believe you are one.  

I will be adding a brand new material to the book and am looking for female influencers, bloggers, websites, resources and ideas that I could potentially feature in the new book that would benefit women readers.  

Please let me know when you might have a few minutes for us to chat.

I replied with a yes. I figured I’d give him 15 minutes, and anyway, people never call me about food, so it might be fun to answer questions about that.

3. Smalltalk goes faster with short responses.
Here’s what happened. He opened up with some platitudes. Like, who he is and that his book is sold in Whole Foods and it’s the only book the CEO of Whole Foods has ever endorsed.

I think a few things. I think, I hope he gets to the questions fast.  Then I think, he must be the illicit lover of the Whole Foods CEO to be leveraging the checkout counter in the way that he is. He is telling me how his first printing will sell out in one month. And I am thinking, something is fishy here.

Then he says he reads my blog, and he wonders if I have always been so direct and unfiltered.

I say, "Yes."

He asks, “Do you know why?”

I say, “Yes. I have Asperger's Syndrome.”

He has never heard of it.

“It’s like autism,” I say. “But with a high IQ. I’m smart about some things, but not social skills. So I have no patience for you making small talk with me.”

He laughs.  He says “Oh, it’s like you can’t tell a lie.”

“Yeah.”

“I wish I had more people in my life like that,” he says.

“No you don’t,” I say. “You’d get sick of it.”

Pause.

4. Tirades take too long (and they're hard to stop once you get going) 

He asks, “What is your goal? What do you want to tell the world?”

“I don’t want to stand in front of everyone and tell them what to do. Because I don’t know. Life is hard. I’m trying to figure out how to deal with the difficulties of life, and I like that people do that with me, on my blog.”

He says, “Yeah, it’s much better to just be honest about what you’re doing.”

Pause.

Then he asks me if I have written at all about the food I eat.

I think to myself that he is either illiterate or a liar. I say, “Yeah, I live on a farm. With animals that we eat. I write a lot about that. With pictures.”

I can’t remember what happens next. I think I decide to tell him that all of the goat cheese that’s labeled by Whole Foods is made by killing the boy goats as soon as they are born. I hear nothing on his end. So I add that they are crushed underfoot, in the snow.

I tell him people need to pay a lot more money for pork if they want to have pork from mothers who are not chained like prisoners while they are having their babies. It costs a lot more money to raise pork if the farmer lets the mom roll on top of some of the piglets, but it’s what she would naturally do.

5. A fast way to feel good is to attack a caller you're sick of. (Childish but effective.)
I don’t know what he says next. He is saying something about how I have strong opinions or something. He is not used to this.

I tell him people don’t have enough money to pay 50% more for groceries at Whole Foods. I tell him that group child care for kids under two is very bad for the kids and people should spend their money solving that problem. It’s a lot more important than not having food additives.

He says his book tells people to do small steps.

“Like what?”

“Like eggs.”

I say, “Do you buy your eggs at Whole Foods?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they suck compared to my free range farm eggs.”

“The eggs at Whole Foods are free range.”

“What does that mean? Free range for one day a year? Who regulates the words free range? Free range on sawdust? You can look at my eggs and the eggs you eat and you can see a huge difference in how yellow the yolk is.”

“People need to know what they are eating.”

“You don’t even know what you’re eating. This is a black hole for spending and it’s not appropriate for poor people. You can buy pork at Whole Foods where the moms are chained at birth and the pork could be organic.”

5. Get off the phone as fast as possible. 
Then I tell him it’s time to go to skateboarding. I tell him that my son gets more out of the money I spend on skateboarding lessons than the money I spend on organic juice with 50% less sugar which he thinks taste terrible, by the way.

The guy says, “Can I send my book to you?”

I can’t believe it. I want to tell him that he should have just sent that email to me, instead of wasting my time talking to me about his book. I would have said yes to just an email but now I hate him. I hate that he told me he wants to interview me for his book but he doesn’t. He’s a lifestyle guy, really. He’s telling people how to have a good life. And he’s lying to me.

So I say, “Why do you need to pitch your book to me? You have a monopoly in Whole Foods checkout lines. Your book is selling out it’s first printing. Why don’t you do something more interesting than marketing a book?”

He says, “I want to change the world. Obesity is a huge problem in this country.”

“You’re going to solve obesity by telling people to buy free-range eggs?”

“Yes. Education is the key to curbing obesity.”

“You think fat people are too stupid to know that if you pay double for your food you get better food? I think they know that. Try being a single mom with two jobs and four kids and then tell her she has weight problems because she doesn’t buy free range eggs.”

He asks, “Well what do you think is the panacea?”

And I say, “Panacea? You are looking for a panacea? There aren’t those in this world.”

 

Penelope Trunk Blog

So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »

Tuesday, Jan 24, 2012

Info

Posted by Admin ()

To trackback to this post please right-click on this url: Trackback

Post belongs to the Work Advice category

Tags: , , , , ,

5,000 new jobs are going to be made available to Filipinos in Singapore’s island resort of Sentosa. This was announced yesterday by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as she spoke at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City.

PGMA said that Labor Secretary Marianito Roque was able to secure 5,000 job openings in Sentosa. “We’ve lost 5,000 jobs abroad, but Secretary Roque was able to get openings in Sentosa for 5,000 jobs,” PGMA said.

At the event in the SMX, SM Group of Companies executive Teresita Sy-Coson lauded PGMA for the fiscal policies she implemented and said that they have insulated the Philippines from the global economic crisis.

The Resorts World at Sentosa Private Ltd. Has announced also that they would be hiring approximately 20,000 people by the middle of the year.


Incoming search terms:

  • jobs in singapore for filipinos
  • workabroad singapore
  • work abroad singapore
  • singapore jobs for filipinos
  • agencies in singapore for filipinos
  • www workabroad singapore
  • hiring in singapore for filipinos
  • companies in singapore hiring filipinos
  • singapore careers for filipinos
  • sentosa job vacancies for foreigners

Work Abroad

So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »

Thursday, Jan 19, 2012

Info

Posted by Admin ()

To trackback to this post please right-click on this url: Trackback

Post belongs to the Work Advice category

I have never been great at picking my own clothes. I’m great at interior design, but I have a blind spot for clothes. So I email Melissa photos of my outfits, and she uses her photographic memory of my closet to edit my outfits.

When I sent her this photo, she said: “What is this?”

I only wanted her opinion about the color of the shirt, so I thought it was okay that it was blurry. But the more I look at the picture, the more I think that it’s how I feel about myself right now.

I am not quite sure who I am, right now. And given the current career climate, this is actually how most people see themselves, too—blurry from constant movement, settled on the basics, but unclear on the specifics.

And then I read an article in Fast Company this month titled Generation Flux. The article is about how careers are constantly moving and our identity is therefore moving as well.

So I am focused on how to make myself more clear about what I look like. At least right now. And here are things I think we each need to do to pin down our moving-target, career-jumping selves.

1. Get a plan for post-35.
This is a great post by Matt Heusser, from Google, that outlines why you only have fifteen years to put a plan together.  By the time you’re 35 you have to get out of any career space that is for young people and settle into an older person job.

Want to know what young people jobs are? Making sales (as opposed to managing), writing code (as opposed to managing), working across three time zones. These are jobs that middle-aged people do not get. Mostly because no one would respect a person who has worked for 15 years and still has to take a job like this. These are not good jobs for having a life. These are jobs for working long, hard hours with the intention of laying the groundwork for a better career.

Sara Horowitz, writing in the Atlantic, suggests that the new jobs will be independent, short-term and maybe even coffee-shop based. Others, like Cathy Benko at Deloitte, suggest there will be a series of lateral moves that will somehow become respectable. Anya Kamenetz, writing in Fast Company, says this will look like continuous, back-to-back career change, so that job hopping begins to look tame and totally normal.

At any rate, you can’t get through the second part of your career doing the work you did in the first part. So there is not time to rest in a safe spot for your career.

The other reason you only get 15 years is that your salary tops out in your late 30s. (Actually, age 35 for women and 40 for men.) Statistically speaking, you are extremely unlikely to earn more than you are earning at that age.

2. Get good at setting boundaries.
In the old workplace you could take one job, on an established path, and move forward in a predictable way. The average job today lasts four years. (And other research shows that people who are staying a lot longer than four years are probably getting themselves into trouble.)

If you are changing jobs every four years, you are going to have to manage lots of close relationships with co-workers and bosses. This requires being very good at setting boundaries, which, in turn, requires good self-knowledge.

I have a bookshelf full of boundary-building books right now, and I’m blown away by how relevant they are to careers. (Examples: I Hate You Don't Leave Me and Stop Walking on Eggshells).

Most of our career problems have, on some level, a boundary component. For example, many people in their 20s know what they’d like to do but they cannot separate the dreams of their parents from their own, and so they make bad choices for themselves that they spend a decade undoing.

In other cases, career choices are clear and good, but a spouse has dreams that are incompatible with this choice. For example, the spouse wants a income, or more attentive child care, or a relocation that is not possible. In this case there would need to be a family talk about boundaries and how one person’s dreams cannot depend on impossible career feats by the other person.

The better we are at managing boundaries in our personal relationships, the better we’ll be at managing our career decisions. And as careers become more dynamic, this equation becomes more true.

3.   Get tons of coaching.
I have always been a huge fan of coaching. It’s not only that I have hired people for help with what to wear. In fact, I think one of my biggest strengths is to get coaching from a wide range of people.

As a result of realizing this personal strength, last year I started doing a lot more coaching for other people, and I started reading more about coaching as well. For example, all high performers get a lot of coaching. And the need for coaching does not wane as you get better and better at your job.

So many people told me that the coaching session I did with them changed their life that I decided I wanted to get that. I wanted a coaching session that changed my life. So I asked Christine Carter to do a coaching session with me. She wrote the book Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents. She coaches families on how to create systems that promote family  happiness. She helps them restructure schedules and priorities, which are exactly the things I’ve been having trouble with since I moved to the farm and started homeschooling.

We dealt with fundamental decisions like when I will do my work each day and how the family can be more predictable. And you know what? She changed my life. Because she took questions that are difficult and complicated for me and she was able to find good answers quickly. Which, by the way, is exactly what I am able to do when I coach people about career decisions.

A coach works on the same problem with hundreds of people, so the coach is great at seeing how to solve that one problem for you. For anything. I’ve written about coaching for mental imaging, coaching for more optimism, coaching for gait. Each of those coaches have blown me away by teaching me something totally new about myself and helping me solve problems related to that area.

So I can’t stress enough how much I recommend that you get coaching this year. You cannot rely on your company to teach you what you need to know to manage your career. Because first of all, no one knows that answer except you. But also, a company cannot make that kind of investment in employees when the average tenure is four years.

And one more thing about coaching: It's very hard to know what question to ask. Which may make you think that this is a reason to not get coaching. But in fact, learning to ask good questions is something you can get coached for as well.

 

Penelope Trunk Blog

So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »

Thursday, Jan 19, 2012

Info

Posted by Admin ()

To trackback to this post please right-click on this url: Trackback

Post belongs to the Work Advice category

Tags: , ,

I have never been great at picking my own clothes. I’m great at interior design, but I have a blind spot for clothes. So I email Melissa photos of my outfits, and she uses her photographic memory of my closet to edit my outfits.

When I sent her this photo, she said: “What is this?”

I only wanted her opinion about the color of the shirt, so I thought it was okay that it was blurry. But the more I look at the picture, the more I think that it’s how I feel about myself right now.

I am not quite sure who I am, right now. And given the current career climate, this is actually how most people see themselves, too—blurry from constant movement, settled on the basics, but unclear on the specifics.

And then I read an article in Fast Company this month titled Generation Flux. The article is about how careers are constantly moving and our identity is therefore moving as well.

So I am focused on how to make myself more clear about what I look like. At least right now. And here are things I think we each need to do to pin down our moving-target, career-jumping selves.

1. Get a plan for post-35.
This is a great post by Matt Heusser, from Google, that outlines why you only have fifteen years to put a plan together.  By the time you’re 35 you have to get out of any career space that is for young people and settle into an older person job.

Want to know what young people jobs are? Making sales (as opposed to managing), writing code (as opposed to managing), working across three time zones. These are jobs that middle-aged people do not get. Mostly because no one would respect a person who has worked for 15 years and still has to take a job like this. These are not good jobs for having a life. These are jobs for working long, hard hours with the intention of laying the groundwork for a better career.

Sara Horowitz, writing in the Atlantic, suggests that the new jobs will be independent, short-term and maybe even coffee-shop based. Others, like Cathy Benko at Deloitte, suggest there will be a series of lateral moves that will somehow become respectable. Anya Kamenetz, writing in Fast Company, says this will look like continuous, back-to-back career change, so that job hopping begins to look tame and totally normal.

At any rate, you can’t get through the second part of your career doing the work you did in the first part. So there is not time to rest in a safe spot for your career.

The other reason you only get 15 years is that your salary tops out in your late 30s. (Actually, age 35 for women and 40 for men.) Statistically speaking, you are extremely unlikely to earn more than you are earning at that age.

2. Get good at setting boundaries.
In the old workplace you could take one job, on an established path, and move forward in a predictable way. The average job today lasts four years. (And other research shows that people who are staying a lot longer than four years are probably getting themselves into trouble.)

If you are changing jobs every four years, you are going to have to manage lots of close relationships with co-workers and bosses. This requires being very good at setting boundaries, which, in turn, requires good self-knowledge.

I have a bookshelf full of boundary-building books right now, and I’m blown away by how relevant they are to careers. (Examples: I Hate You Don't Leave Me and Stop Walking on Eggshells).

Most of our career problems have, on some level, a boundary component. For example, many people in their 20s know what they’d like to do but they cannot separate the dreams of their parents from their own, and so they make bad choices for themselves that they spend a decade undoing.

In other cases, career choices are clear and good, but a spouse has dreams that are incompatible with this choice. For example, the spouse wants a income, or more attentive child care, or a relocation that is not possible. In this case there would need to be a family talk about boundaries and how one person’s dreams cannot depend on impossible career feats by the other person.

The better we are at managing boundaries in our personal relationships, the better we’ll be at managing our career decisions. And as careers become more dynamic, this equation becomes more true.

3.   Get tons of coaching.
I have always been a huge fan of coaching. It’s not only that I have hired people for help with what to wear. In fact, I think one of my biggest strengths is to get coaching from a wide range of people.

As a result of realizing this personal strength, last year I started doing a lot more coaching for other people, and I started reading more about coaching as well. For example, all high performers get a lot of coaching. And the need for coaching does not wane as you get better and better at your job.

So many people told me that the coaching session I did with them changed their life that I decided I wanted to get that. I wanted a coaching session that changed my life. So I asked Christine Carter to do a coaching session with me. She wrote the book Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents. She coaches families on how to create systems that promote family  happiness. She helps them restructure schedules and priorities, which are exactly the things I’ve been having trouble with since I moved to the farm and started homeschooling.

We dealt with fundamental decisions like when I will do my work each day and how the family can be more predictable. And you know what? She changed my life. Because she took questions that are difficult and complicated for me and she was able to find good answers quickly. Which, by the way, is exactly what I am able to do when I coach people about career decisions.

A coach works on the same problem with hundreds of people, so the coach is great at seeing how to solve that one problem for you. For anything. I’ve written about coaching for mental imaging, coaching for more optimism, coaching for gait. Each of those coaches have blown me away by teaching me something totally new about myself and helping me solve problems related to that area.

So I can’t stress enough how much I recommend that you get coaching this year. You cannot rely on your company to teach you what you need to know to manage your career. Because first of all, no one knows that answer except you. But also, a company cannot make that kind of investment in employees when the average tenure is four years.

And one more thing about coaching: It's very hard to know what question to ask. Which may make you think that this is a reason to not get coaching. But in fact, learning to ask good questions is something you can get coached for as well.

 

Penelope Trunk Blog

So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »

Tuesday, Jan 17, 2012

Info

Posted by Admin ()

To trackback to this post please right-click on this url: Trackback

Post belongs to the Work Advice category

Tags: , , ,

Why does the confining upgrade grade the disorder?

Work Abroad

So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »

« Older Entries