It is harder to know who you are than it is to be who you are. Everyone says, “The important thing is to be yourself!”  I say that when I give them career advice. People like you better when you are being authentic. Gay people do better in their careers when they are out of the closet. Women do better at work if they are feminine at work instead of trying to be like the guys.

But there is very little advice on HOW to be yourself.

1. Don’t be boring.

On the way to our board meeting today, it was me, and Ryan Paugh, and Ryan Healy, in a car, running late. Ryan Healy told me not to write about him on the blog anymore, but I think only because I used to write about him like he was my little brother or something. At this point, Ryan Healy is COO of the company, so I think I can write about him because really, how can I undermine him when I’m agreeing to report to him?

So I’m riding in the car with Ryan and Ryan and I finished my needlepoint and I didn’t have  anything left to occupy my hands during the board meeting. I know that as a board member, and the majority shareholder in the company, I’m supposed to be enthralled at these meetings, but honestly I find them largely very slow and repetitive. (I know I am not the only one who feels this way because another board member went to the bathroom and when he came back and found out that we waited for him, he was disappointed.)

Anyway, I was in the car with them and I was panicking that I didn’t have anything to do in the board meeting except listen to the board meeting. Then I said, “I think I’ll pop a Xanax.”

And no one said anything. Ryan and Ryan are largely bored with my antics.

But when I’m anxious I’m chatty, and they had already said no to playing the license plate game. So I said, just to make casual conversation, “What do you guys think would go well with Xanax, because I don’t think this is working. And pharmaceuticals have been such a disappointment to me.”

Ryan Healy said, ‘You sure are a late-bloomer to this. By the time you’re going to board meetings you’re supposed to be done with this stuff.”

In fact, I am enthralled with mixing pharmaceuticals off-label. I am also enthralled with trying new things, learning what I’m like with new things so I know who I am.

But it gets old. Not knowing who I am. And anyway, it’s boring for other people when you don’t know who you are. I know that because when I was dating the twenty-five-year-old with the perfect butt and long, thick, curly hair, he had no idea who he was and it got boring, very boring very fast.

(Links about boringness: People do not want to know all of you. Some of you is interesting, some of you is boring. This is why confessional blog posts mostly stink. And it’s why you need to omit most of your life from your resume.)

2. Try a range of tools to express who you are.

I like to think that I know myself well enough to present a consistent and insightful portrait of myself. And when Eva, from Songza, emailed me to see if I’d put together a playlist that they could use on their music streaming site, I said sure. (By the way, if you want to get me to do something, make it fun. People ask for posts all the time, but few people ask for playlists.)

So I start doing my playlist and I think: People judge other people by their playlists. (Which is why Ramones t-shirts outsell Ramones albums ten to one.)  I want people to think I’m fun and edgy and self-confident.

(Ad for my company: It think about this issue a lot because my company, Brazen Careerist, is basically a tool to let people know who you are by showing your ideas and potential. The tools on the site encourage you to display your best self in a professional, online setting. And every time I pitch my company, I end up telling people that you can’t show your true self if the tool you’re using is wrong for who you are.)

3. Understand how people perceive what you put out there.

I picked Moby and TruSkool for edge. I picked Beastie Boys and Arrested Development because I read that people who like hip-hop tend to have high self-esteem. And I picked Fergie for fun. I think when people say she’s for girls, they mean that she makes guys think of girls dancing while they watch.  Then I picked Lilly Allen, Regina Specktor to say that I didn’t feel too much like an old-school Gen X-er. I picked Kings of Leon because Lilly and Regina are both girls.

It turns out that I would have done fine just picking out all Miles Davis, which would have probably been my instinct, but I thought it would be boring and pedantic (which is almost redundant but mildly nuanced instead, I think). It would have been just fine because people have positive impressions of people who like jazz.

This is surprising to me because people do not have positive judgments toward blog posts that are like jazz—complicated and difficult. In fact, my editor will probably slash this whole paragraph because it is off topic and difficult to read and jazz is not writing and so what if my brain runs like an Ornette Coleman composition?

When I sent my song list to Eva I asked her to analyze me. I said, “I bet you read song lists like I read resumes, so can you tell me what you see?”

She said she usually doesn’t see such a wide a range of songs on one list.

On a resume, lack of focus is bad. And in a life, doing many different things at once is bad. And in fact, I’m a stickler for focus because I love knowing one thing well, so it’s counter-intuitive to me that I would have such an eclectic list. In fact, it’s the result of me being scared to just be who I am and accept that I’ll be judged for it.

But P.S. Here's the playlist I made at Songza. And here's my favorite Miles Davis CD.

So, I am lost. But I need to be useful more than I need to confess feeling lost. So, here I am, telling you what I'm doing to get through this, because I think you and I have an agreement that you'll put up with me being lost and not posting very often, as long as I'm useful.

1. Find beauty in the process of being lost.
So here it is: New York Magazine. I love it so much. Some people turn to alcohol when they are lost. I wish I could use that. Or drugs. I wish I thought it would work. But nothing works better for me than words. I will read anything. Here's an article I read in The Atlantic that calmed me down when the farmer had a fit that I left the bottle calf out in the hay field for three hours.

But New York Magazine is the best at taking my breath away, every time. Jennifer Senior is so good that I save every issue with her story on the cover. (Here's one: All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting.) Also, the ads in the back of the magazine for things that cure ailments like sagging labia help me to keep perspective on problems coming in the pipeline.

But the thing right now that is saving my life is an article by Jerry Saltz. He is their art columnist, and last week he wrote a roundup about his favorite paintings in New York. (Click that link for a great slideshow.) I wish I could reprint the whole thing here. I have memorized it.

There are photos of nineteen paintings, and the captions he writes are phenomenal. For this Malevich painting

Saltz's caption includes, "the Cubo-Futurist masterpiece depicts gleaming robot peasants in curved metallic shards.” Who has been more poetic about Malevich? Ever? (more…)

Feeling lost is part of being great. If you are forging your own path then you are often lost. Because you have not seen this route before. I wrote my book because I did not have a road map and I am wanted other people to have a road map to do a career like I did.

I have been thinking about this because I am really lost right now. I'm going to show you something. Here is stuff that's going well. The farmer is totally hot, and he tries so hard to get along with me, and his singing voice is the kind that allowed him to hook up with any girl after his band played a gig. And he matches my wall:

Another good thing is that he lets me do whatever I want with the house. See? In the background? We definitely needed a hutch in the dining room. It's exactly what fit with the decor. But I thought if I bought a hutch I'd just start buying stuff to fill it with. So instead, I drew a hutch on the wall. I showed it to the farmer and he said, "I really like the undulating lines. They have confidence." (more…)

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.

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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. (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

Five ways to be less annoying

5 Ways to make telecommuting better

Why I'm difficult at meetings

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: (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. (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: (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. (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.

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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?”) (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.

(more…)

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:

Meanwhile, Ben Casnocha sent this link to me about sexual harassment at work. I write a lot about harassment (like you should not report it) because the rules of harassment fascinate me. What is harassment? And what is “I love you?” For someone with Asperger Syndrome, it is not obvious. Also, like all women, I have had to deal with my fair share of harassment.

It turns out that men and women in their 20's report the same levels of harassment. Some cases are considered harassment when a female manager calls a male subordinate "sweetie." And because showing any porn at work sets the tone for disrespect among co-workers, (a big problem at the SEC,) this post might pass for harassment if I called a male subordinate in to my office to look at it.

But now I'm thinking about distractions. Sexual harassment is really only a problem to you if it distracts you from what you’d rather be doing in your life. The same way you judge if alcohol is a problem is, maybe, the way you judge everything. I am so easily drawn into an email like Ben's. I click his link, then links within his link, and then, six hours have passed and I'm an intelligent conversationalist on a topic I had never heard about before that morning.

To the farmer, the farm is like the Internet–a tunnel of treats to fall into instead of getting back to work. There are the blackberries and deer and barn swallows and the frogs. But the farmer has self-discipline. He carries a camera, snaps a picture of the frogs, and then gets right back on the tractor.

My transitions are much more leisurely and, to be honest, I never know if I will make it to my intended next task. So I have started chanting a mantra to myself, (which I found on Lifehacker), that I think is going to help. The chant is all the productivity books in the world, distilled down to eleven words:

One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.

Now that I am committed to living on a farm which is sort of the anti-New York City, visiting New York City no longer brings up flashbacks to a really, really difficult lifestyle. Instead, New York fills my head with ideas.

The first one is a billboard I saw as soon as I got off the plane: A good question is the new answer.

That rings true to me. I have been writing about asking questions for a long time. It’s the best way to have a meaningful conversation and it’s the best way to rope in a mentor or look like a star performer. People spend more time thinking about answers than questions, but it’s the questions that make you look smart.

1. Good questions require creative thinking.
This has always been true, I think. Good questions are fundamentally creative. But today, when all facts are available to all people, it’s the questions that have become most important. To get to the answer, you have to ask the right question in a search bar. But also, to differentiate yourself in the workplace, you need to focus on questions, since answers are a commodity.

2. When you're lost, look for questions, not answers.
As my career shifts, I find that the key to keeping the shift moving in a productive way is to ask good questions. It’s ironic, because one of the most frequent questions I get from people is “what’s the best way to make a career change?”

And the answer is to ask much more insightful questions than that one. For example, I know I want to write about the farm, but I’m not sure how to do it. So I’ve been asking questions about how photos fit into blogs and what is the intersection of farming, family, and business?

3. Think of your career path as a question path.
I am also spending time redecorating the farm house. Actually, to call it redecorating is a stretch, since the farmer moved in twenty years ago when the couple living there died, and did not do one, single thing to redecorate. So the house is a time capsule from the 1940’s when it was designed.

Anyway, I wouldn’t say redecorating is a career change, but maybe just a vocation vacation. Do you know that term? You try out a career for a few weeks? That’s what I’ve been doing.

And I realized that I’d only want to be an interior designer for my own house. But I like learning about interior design. And I am realizing that any career shift is about learning and exploring until you land in the right spot.

Questions I am asking lately:

What is Steampunk Style? (Turns out I adore it.) Here’s an example from the movie The Golden Compass:

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Guess what? I'm going to Seth Godin's house for my next webinar, which is super exciting to me because I've never met Seth, but I love his ideas. (It's 1p est on April 29. Sign up here.) Seth and I will talk about his book, Linchpin. And I will thank him a thousand times for the encouraging emails he sent to me when I was moping on my blog that I was in my dip and I was worried that I couldn't make it.

And you guys will ask questions that we will answer.

When I was talking with Seth about what we will talk about he wrote this back to me:

My take is that [generation Y] is the last one that will be as totally brainwashed by the system, by the schools and by companies and by society to believe that the industrial age (and compliance) is their ticket to the carnival. The smart ones will see that and play a different game, and the sooner they realize how bad the scam is, the faster they'll recover.

I'm excited to hear him talk about this. And I'm excited to hear the questions you'll have for him.

Sign up here.

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

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

1.     Email is inefficient.

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

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

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

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

(more...)

Coats are very important on the farm. Mine are always not dry enough, not warm enough, or not dirty enough for going into the chicken house. So when I’m on the farm I just wear one of the farmer’s coats.

1. Clarify personal needs that are threatened by the conflict.
And hats. Do you see the red hat in the picture? It’s from Amsoil Lubricants. When I first met the farmer I thought it was hilarious to have a hat that said lubricants. So the first time he dumped me I tried to get the lubricants hat as a relationship souvenir.

Later I realized that he would dump me a lot. It was his way of coping with the feeling that intimacy is scary. So then I focused more on learning conflict resolution and less on who gets the hat.

2. Accept conflict as a natural part of personal progress.
In fact, most of life is about conflict resolution. It’s either internal conflict or external conflict,  but if you don’t have conflict then you are probably not trying to do something interesting with your life. (Not that interesting is everyone’s goal, of course.)

Michael Stainer, who writes The Great Work Blog, once told me that if you are not annoying someone you are not doing anything new. I think this is true. (Sometimes I think it could all come down to this: you either scare your mom by creating an unstable life or you scare yourself that you are living merely the life your mom wants for you instead of the life you want for yourself.) (more…)

I’m getting married on Saturday. We will talk about that in a minute. First, I want to address the recent onslaught of complainers who have entered my life.

1. People who tell me I’ve jumped the shark.  Honestly, I had never even heard this idiom until people started writing it in my comments section. But I've been writing about my personal life for ten years, and anyway, the people who complain that I don't write enough career advice are always the people who most love to read my posts about sex.
2. People who tell me I should record the webinars. Look. I know I should. But I don’t control it. Ryan Paugh does. Fortunately, we have a bitch session network on Brazen Careerist, and Ryan is in charge of it. So you should go there and tell him to record the webinar this Friday.
3. People at my office who wonder why I’m not there. Have I ever told you guys how much I love waking up every day and having a wide span of time to be by myself? I wish I had paid more attention to recess. I always spent recess alone. Just to get a break from everyone. Nothing has changed since fourth grade except that it’s not the playground, it’s Starbucks.

Now. For the wedding. Here’s what I’m wearing:

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I have often thought that we choose to marry someone who has something we don't have, but we wish we had. So it makes sense that now that I feel secure in my relationship with the farmer, I am going to tell you what he has that I want: Photos for my blog.

I'm so bad at taking photos of the farm, and he is great at it, so I stole one of the photos he took to document the mud. He says March is the mud month.

I have tried a few times to take pictures of the farm. I am in love with the farmer, but also, I am in love with the farm. And the farmer will never let me put a picture of him on my blog, so I decided to show you how beautiful the farm is. But I am realizing that photos are like writing: You can only show a fresh perspective of something you know very well.

I remember when I taught creative writing to freshmen at Boston University. The first month almost every student wrote about sex. I went to my advisor and asked him why I am getting twenty stories about having sex. (more…)