What Works

How we think about a problem or goal really matters. The variables we include, the relationships we draw between them, the flows of influence or resources—they change the interventions we choose. The…

I'm pretty sure The New York Times is trolling me.

Footnotes:

• Read the written version of this episode.
• "Hobbies Too Relaxing? Try 'Leisure Crafting'" by Lora Kelley in The New York Times
• "Research: How …

"Competence porn" is an indistinct genre of media that showcases people doing their jobs (loosely defined) exceptionally well, often using niche skills or uncommon expertise. You've no doubt seen it …

In the last episode (written version), we talked about how "sensemaking starts with chaos" and that chaos arises when our expectations don't match reality. That mismatch occurs because the mental mod…

"Sensemaking starts with chaos," says organizational theorist Karl Weick. Chaos is the confusion and frustration we feel when things don't turn out the way we expect them to. To make sense of the cha…

If you're like me, you often think about what you would have done to prepare for... this job, this economy, this political climate, this financial situation, etc... if only you'd known. But you didn'…

No job is safer than a government job, right? Well, not anymore. At least not in the US.

I’m paying special attention to the fight over government jobs (or, as the administration might put it, “bloat…

I wanted to drop in with a quiet interlude about re-reading (or re-watching, or re-listening) and its value in a world obsessed with new and different.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode…

Why is it that it seems like no amount of work, accolades, or achievement is enough? Why do we keep signing up for more, even as our capacity becomes ever more depleted? Why do we settle for mediocri…

If you subscribe to newsletters, listen to podcasts, or watch videos on YouTube, I've no doubt that you’ve been asked to support the person or people who created them. You can always support with a l…

No matter how fastidious you are about creating and executing a plan, working toward any big goal will require adjustments. No matter how diligent you are about documentation and maintenance, any pro…

Is an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, a search engine? Does it scour the internet for helpful information so that it can respond to user queries?

These questions were at the heart of a small kerfuffle on B…

"I have so many thoughts and not enough time to think them," I recently blurted out to my husband. For me, "thinking thoughts" means scribbling notes or writing messy paragraphs about whatever is on …

"No one is ever completely safe from the critical gaze of a culture steeped in the makeover ethos." —Micki McGee

I have a theory that you can measure the decline of any social media platform by the ti…

Intractable challenges are often the result of a lack of imagination. That is, our solutions are constrained by existing systems and structures that likely created the problem in the first place. To …

Many of us (most?) have an inner voice that loves to remind us that "If there's time to lean, there's time to clean" or that "Coffee is for closers." We nag ourselves about being more productive, wor…

Standardization is one of those ideas that, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's a mental model that can explain, at least in part, many of our social, political, and personal challenges. Whethe…

This episode is about the long term—the commitments, projects, and relationships we can work on when our "temporal bandwidth" widens. How we perceive time and our ability to do what's meaningful to u…

Most of the work I do that's not this revolves around coaching, editing, and/or thinking with people who have meaningful ideas they want to better express to the world. In this work, the question I h…

The tech industry has a central role in shaping our work, our communication, and even our identities. Its mythology is woven into the products and services we use on a daily basis. So understanding h…