In 2009, our co-founder Rick Cecil interviewed Penelope Trunk as part of Ruzuku's "From There to Here" series — conversations about the realities of dream-chasing. Penelope had already lived several professional lives by then, and her story still hits hard for anyone who's ever wondered whether their winding path actually leads somewhere.
Here's how she introduced herself:
"I'm Penelope Trunk. I'm CEO of Brazen Careerist, a social network for young people to help manage their careers. I'm also a blogger myself and I write a syndicated column that appears in about 200 newspapers. Before that I had a few start-ups, I worked for Fortune 500, did some Internet marketing, and before that I was a professional beach volleyball player."
That's not a career trajectory. That's five careers stitched together by someone who kept following what fascinated her — even when it made no sense on paper.
Showing Up Before You're Ready
One of the most striking moments in the interview is how Penelope got into interactive media. In the early days of nonlinear storytelling, there were salons in Los Angeles bringing together entertainment, tech, and film school people to figure out what could be done with this new medium. Penelope wasn't invited. She just showed up:
"They had these salons in Los Angeles where they would get entertainment industry people and UCL Film School people and Phillips Media people. They would all sit in a room and try to figure out what could be done with nonlinear media. One day, I just showed up. After all, I didn't have anything to do at night because I was a volleyball player. It turned out I had all these great ideas and I just totally got it."
I've seen this pattern over and over with course creators. The ones who build thriving businesses aren't the ones who waited until they had the right credentials or the perfect plan. They're the ones who walked into a room — or onto a platform — before they felt fully qualified. The expertise was already there. What was missing was the context to recognize it.
Your "Scattered" Background Is Nonlinear Material
Penelope made an observation that I think about constantly when talking with first-time course creators:
"I already had a lot of nonlinear material — I just didn't know that's what it was. I had been writing nonlinearly before there was a way to do nonlinear media."
This is one of the most common things I encounter at Ruzuku. Someone will tell me they don't have "enough" expertise to create a course. Then they'll describe fifteen years of experience spanning therapy, coaching, group facilitation, and content creation — and they genuinely don't see it as a body of knowledge. They see it as a scattered resume.
But that scattered resume is nonlinear material. It's the exact kind of cross-disciplinary thinking that makes for genuinely distinctive courses. The yoga teacher who spent a decade in physical therapy brings something no pure yoga instructor can. The leadership coach who used to be an engineer thinks about systems in a way that sets her apart. Your unusual path isn't a liability — it's the thing that makes your teaching impossible to copy.
I'll be honest: I'm not sure most course platforms are set up to help people see this about themselves. We try, but the industry's obsession with niche-picking and "ideal client avatars" can actually make the problem worse — flattening a rich, multi-layered expertise into a marketing-friendly tagline. The real work is helping people recognize what they already know.
Radical Honesty as a Differentiator
Rick Cecil captured something in his editorial notes that deserves highlighting:
"One of the best things about her interview is her honesty. Not just that she calls it like she sees it, but that she is incredibly, honestly blunt with herself about her personal and professional life."
Penelope didn't curate a polished origin story. She told the messy version — including the part where a career pivot happened because of a crush:
"After my boyfriend dumped me, I had this huge crush on this guy in the computer science department. I stopped going to the English department and I would only go to the computer science department where I learned to hand code HTML. In the end, the guy didn't really like me. However, it wasn't a total loss. I did get a great job hand coding HTML."
This kind of honesty isn't just entertaining. It's a strategy — even if Penelope would probably bristle at calling it that. When every course landing page promises transformation through a carefully scripted hero's journey, the person who tells you "I learned HTML because of a crush and the crush didn't work out" stands out. You trust her. You remember her.
The courses with the highest completion rates on Ruzuku share this quality. The instructors aren't performing expertise — they're sharing what they actually know, including how they came to know it. Students can tell the difference.
What Reinvention Actually Looks Like
Penelope's path — volleyball to book packaging to HTML coding to syndicated columnist to startup CEO — doesn't fit any standard career narrative. There's no clean "I always knew I wanted to..." thread. Each transition happened through some combination of curiosity, accident, showing up, and being willing to start over.
That's what reinvention actually looks like for most people. It's not a dramatic pivot announced on LinkedIn. It's a series of small bets where you bring what you already know into a new context and see what happens.
If you're thinking about creating a course but you can't quite articulate what makes you qualified — if your background feels too scattered, too unconventional, too hard to explain in a neat bio — take that as a signal, not a disqualification. You probably have more nonlinear material than you realize. The question isn't whether you have enough expertise. It's whether you're willing to show up to the salon before anyone invites you.
This article is based on a three-part interview conducted by Rick Cecil, Ruzuku co-founder, as part of the "From There to Here" series (July 2009). The conversation has been edited and reframed for today's course creators.