Penelope Trunk

A classic of this genre from 2011: https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/29/voices-of-the-defenders-of-g…

Also a good read: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2014/11/06/7-ways-to-have-a-good-marriag…

Penelope is known for throwing out controversial memes and running with the ones that get attention. This idea got her some pageviews last year and she's been rewriting the same article over and over again ever since: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/09/women-startups-childre/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505143_162-47140168/are-startups-better-as… http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/16/blueprint-for-a-womans-life/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/29/woman-problem-what-woman-problem/ And now, of course, today's link bait. As with other trolls, the best thing to do is to just ignore her.

The article is also missing something vital: medicine shuts down so many options. By the time you're down, you're so indebted that residency is the only thing that makes sense. Penelope Trunk gets this: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/30/the-best-alternative-to-grad-… , but few others do. I'm dating a newly minted resident, and she's inspired me to start my own essay and why not to be a doctor. Her, and a lot of the freshmen I teach who say they want to be doctor. If you want to work in medicine, be a nurse instead. If you're the sort of person who'd like to see a draft, send an e-mail to seligerj [AT] gmail ((dot)) com .

To see why women focus on children I'd recommend this article by the same author: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2006/06/01/get-married-first-then-focus-…

The most common advice is to think about pain points: what in your day to day life or the life of those around you is an annoyance and how could you code something to fix it? The main problem with this approach is that the fix might not be worth a significant amount of money to people. Assuming this is only for a school project that aspect shouldn't matter and you might find some great ideas. A couple resources that might help: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2010/08/05/how-to-get-good-ideas-for-sta… and http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

The author of the piece, Penelope Trunk, has a well-established pattern: write a highly flammable headline followed by a long, off-the-cuff piece intended to grab attention and generate page views via controversy de jour. The article does not even broach any of the important issues being discussed around telecommuting: trust, productivity, team gelling, etc. But instead takes advantage of a recent controversy and adds a little spin from Trunk's tired routine in order to generate page views and comments. She once wrote that travelling is a waste of time (for her, but she projects it to everyone). After reading this a few years ago, I actively started to dislike this person immediately. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/08/17/4-reasons-travel-for-fun-is-a… Let's discuss the actual message of the post. Two paragraphs in I'm already in full rage mode. Giving up your life for a company is ok? I understand dedication, even the occasional extra few hours, but what Mrs. Trunk is proposing is literally living at work, which we all know is unmaintainable and unhealthy for most of us. Research has shown that there is a tiny portion of the population that can get 4 hours a sleep and maintain 16 hour days, but that's only about 1% of us. The rest of us have bodies and lives to maintain.

My theory is this post, along with this woman's online identity, is an elaborate troll on feminism. Let's explore. "Here is a Blueprint for a Woman’s Life which I published. It is full of recommendations for how to make choices based on what we know women really want for themselves. It does not involve getting VC funding." Hmm. It's kind of weird for anybody to pretend they can tell anyone else how to live their life, since figuring out how to life your life in your own way is what makes it your life and not someone else's. But whatever. Let's read a bit into this thing and see what she talks about... She posted a list of things all women should be doing with their life. Here's the list verbatim (from http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/16/blueprint-for-a-womans-life/)… 1. Do less homework. 2. Get plastic surgery. 3. Go to business school right out of the gate. 4. Start early looking for a husband seriously. 5. Milk maternity leave for all it's worth. 6. Guard your marriage obsessively. 7. Practice austerity. 8. Do a startup with a guy. 9. If you can't get men to do a startup with you, do a lifestyle business. 10. Homeschool. Your kids will be screwed if you don't. 11. Spend money on household help and Botox to keep more doors open longer. 12. Break the mold in your 40s. All of that sounds like wonderful advice. It's a really thought-provoking and insightful read. Her only problem is she doesn't go far enough. First of all, you want to marry…

Besides the excellent advice, I enjoy this article quite a bit: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2006/08/20/9-tips-for-quitting-a-job-gra… Truncated: __ "1. Go before things get bad. .."I realized I was hitting a point where I was going to start acting out." Like Lynn, you need to know yourself and be honest about how you're feeling on the job so you don't let your emotions get out of hand. 2. Make a good first step. "The very first person that you should tell you're leaving is your boss,".. 3. Leave the door open a crack. If you've done good work, there is no reason you couldn't come back later.. 6. Trust that the company can continue without you. "People think the world is going to end if they quit their job," says Lynn. "In my last job, everyone who quit thought everything would go wrong, but it's easily fixed and everyone's replaceable." 7. Set yourself up for a good reference. .."You want to be sure the trail you leave is a positive one,".."I have never, in my 20 years of recruiting, had someone not answer questions about references." [I can attest to this..regardless of legality] 8. Manage the in-between time carefully. "Burn no bridges," warns Brendon Connelly, author of the popular blog Slacker Manager. Sometimes quitting a job is as loaded as dumping a lover. .. This is one of those times we tend not to see ourselves clearly, writes Daniel Ames, professor at Columbia Business School. Hitting the right note of assertiveness — not too much and not too…

Wow, this is horribly bad advice and the examples provided to bolster it appear disingenuous. Sure, Mark Cuban lived on bar food and crashed on a single couch in an apartment shared with a number of other guys, but that was before he'd even started as an employee selling software at a small tech shop! As soon as his means let him live better, he did. The example provided for Penelope Trunk is even worse: The temporary blindness, stress-induced pain, and apparent psychosis seems to have cropped up just as her latest company started accelerating down the road to ruin ( as told at, http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/05/7-things-to-consider-before-l… ) I don't know how long the author's been in business but, if you follow your own advice, your body is likely to give out before your company has an exit. Your company exists for your benefit, not the other way around.

Tim Ferriss has been called out on these "ironies" for years now: https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-l…

She's very well rounded, has homeschooled her kids, has founded companies, has run math-ed teacher resource company math.com, but I don't see where she's getting this from. https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/about-penelope-trunk/ She writes about individualized curricula, and identifies as Aspie https://education.penelopetrunk.com/2016/04/14/having-a-set-curriculum…

You're welcome. That looks like a nice resource and I've bookmarked it. I think it'll help going forward as I figure out how to build an income remotely from a variety of sources. Thanks :) With regard to your last statement, here's a (very) vaguely related post from Penelope Trunk who also writes about aspberger's and life. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/12/01/living-up-to-your-potential/

> But from about 9 months you could both work say 3 days a week if you wanted. TERRIBLE advice. In all things gender and money, Penelope Trunk is a goto: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2013/01/07/how-to-pick-a-husband-if-you-… > Don’t tell me that you want your husband to work part-time, because aiming for the impossible 50/50 split leads to divorce. First, because it’s the road to eternal poverty; part-time jobs are low pay, without advancement, and they are the first to go when it’s time to cut jobs. So you create massive financial instability by having two people work part-time.

This seems to be aimed more at humanities degrees than mathematics or computer science or other such technical degrees. I do still think applies in some cases to some jobs. Edit: looking at another post, http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/29/voices-of-the-defenders-of-gr… it's obvious that she is only considering humanities degrees and ignoring STEM fields.

Seth Godin has a blog that's short and sweet: http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/ is interesting when it comes to career advice. http://www.codinghorror.com - technology related. http://www.themiddlefingerproject.org/ - another smart blogger and not very mainstream. http://randsinrepose.com/ - writer of managing humans. has an impressive blog.

Here's another take on Sheryl: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2012/02/07/what-facebooks-ipo-means-for-…

I'm not sure why people still take Penelope Trunk seriously. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/16/blueprint-for-a-womans-life/ This should be enough to convince you that she is full of shit. She doesn't practice what she preaches and holds very strongly to the status quo. She actively discourages women from entering the startup world, so no wonder she is annoyed that some people are trying to encourage women. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/03/05/the-workplace-should-be-segre… She regards inequality and unbalance as a non-problem and generalizes that all women are the same. http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/29/woman-problem-what-woman-problem/ http://baileybear.hubpages.com/hub/Penelope-Trunk-Brazen-Careerist-or-… Listening to anything this woman says seems to do more harm than good.

I'll simply point out that this is Penelope Trunk, who previous wrote about how she had two abortions for her career. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/06/17/whats-the-connection-between-…

This blog is an entertaining rejoinder to Tim's claims and book. Tim's book is thought provoking, but don't take it at face value. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-le…

Anecdotes are hardly evidence, but here are some articles that I've found agree with my experiences and the experiences of others I know. http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2008/06/18/seven-reasons-why-graduate-sc…

Apparently you only needed $40,000 to be happy in 2004. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2004/08/01/you-only-need-40000-to-be-hap…

Penelope Trunk has written a bunch of articles on people who are interested in happiness vs living an interesting life. I can't speak to the validity of her sources, but it's something interesting to think about: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2010/01/14/do-you-overemphasize-happines…

Snagged this link from a previous HN entry on Tim: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-le…

here's some help: STOP WRITING. YOU ARE A JACKASS. sorry, but good God the planet would be so much better off without this douchegeyser. here is an article corroborating my opinion from someone who knows the guy: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-le…

Link to the original article being summarized and discussed in this blog post: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/03/dont-try-to-dodge-the-recessi… And the overall bullet points: 1. Grad school pointlessly delays adulthood. 2. PhD programs are pyramid schemes 3. Business school is not going to help 90% of the people who go. 4. Law school is a factory for depressives. 5. The medical school model assumes that health care spending is not a mess. 6. Going to grad school is like going into the military. 7. Most jobs are better than they seem: You can learn from any job.

If you liked this one, try the one about career women and oral sex:http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/06/high-income-women-get-more-or…

It's not an equal comparison. These links are more relevant: A post about blog syndication: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/01/17/make-money-from-your-blog-thr… Another competing syndication network: http://www.blogburst.com/

Good article, and even better if you link to the original: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/03/12/5-ways-to-stop-being-late/

> Or does a family spending most of their $75K income renting a 500 sf apartment in NY experience the same level of happiness as an equivalent family in a remote suburb with much more living space. There has been some research done around how some people who live in cities (especially those who can be paid a relatively high livable wage) are those who want the local optimum of their available choices (maximizers). [1,2] This tends to make them possibly less happy than those who have less choices. For instance, if you live in London or NYC, there are hundreds of options for nightlife and entertainment - and you might want to be somewhere else even if you are at club X (fear of missing out). But the reality is: "Happiness is complicated. Wherever you live." [3] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less [2] http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2012/02/14/the-real-value-of-diversity/ [3] http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2011/10/urban-rura…