Escape Diet Prison by Anne-Sophie Reinhardt

Interview with Penelope Trunk


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I have a confession to make: I am terrified of calling people. I don’t why, but something about not seeing people’s faces and expressions when talking to them makes me feel extremely awkward. At the same time, I am actually quite shy and often at a loss for words and those weaknesses are magnified when being on the phone.
However, I set myself a challenge and interviewed a few brilliant minds in the blogosphere and business world and I will give you excerpts of those interviews here on the blog and on the podcast. If you’d like to read the entire interviews you should wait no longer and join my email list.
The series is being kicked off by no other than Penelope Trunk. It was a huge honor to be talking to her and to say that I was nervous would be an understatement. However, the interview turned out great and I had tons of fun hearing her unique perspective on following your passion, life and doing work you love.
I remember the exact moment I first heard of Penelope. I was talking to Torre DeRoche at a meet up in Melbourne hosted by Farnoosh Brock. She was mentioning how Penelope Trunk had given some extremely honest advice to someone on a Podcast. I had no idea who Penelope was, shamefully, but ever since that moment I read her blog and was very intrigued by her brutal honesty.
Penelope is the co-founder of Brazen Careerist, which is her third startup and a networking tool for young professionals. So, the topic of finding work that you love and finding a career that fits your lifestyle are topics she is an expert at.
Does the topic of living your passion matter to you at all or is it something that is foreign to you?
Well, I’ve always had to support myself and I’ve never been married to a guy who can support the kids and me. So if I had unlimited money I would have a Pilates teacher and a yoga teacher live at my house and I’d probably have a chef that would be next to me while I cook so I learn to cook really well. And I also would have two full time nannies living in the house. So it’s hard to say this like I’m living my passion. I think people mistake living their passions for their dream life. Like what would we do if we had unlimited money is so, so different than what we would do if we had to support ourselves.
I don’t actually think there is any evidence that people who have unlimited money make better decisions about how to be happy. So then, the whole thing about living your passion, I don’t know it just seems like a lot of bull shit. We should all just try to do something that we are engaged in all day and support ourselves so we don’t starve to death and be surrounded by people who love us. I think doing that is super, super hard to do. No one has time to worry about if they are living their passion or whatever, it seems like a question out of a Mel Gibson movie. Is that a terrible answer?
No, absolutely, that’s a great one. Actually you kind of went into the next one too. That was, is it even realistic to do meaningful work and to do work that you are very passionate about? Do you think we can pursue that? Or is it like you said, just stuff that happen in movies?
There’s no evidence that people need to do work that they are passionate about. There’s very good research about what makes the best workers because it’s so cost effective for companies to dump money into that research because then it gets more work out of employees. This is extremely well research terrain here. What makes the best employees are the happiest, most engaged, most connected employees – obviously those are the ones that want to work. The way you get those employees is by creating challenging goals for them to meet and giving them control over their workload.
So that’s all people need it is absolutely, completely irrelevant if you’re working at something you are passionate about. It’s relevant if you’re doing something that’s challenging and interesting and it’s relevant if have goals that you can meet, but the whole passion thing,
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Escape Diet Prison by Anne-Sophie ReinhardtBy Anne-Sophie Reinhardt

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