All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 30 of 405 in total
EP 497: Please Support My Work
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....
EP 496: What to Do When Things Get Messy
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 docume...
EP 495: Ann Leckie vs. The "Well, Actually" Bros
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...
EP 494: How Structure Transforms Ideas
"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 ...
EP 493: The Prescription Economy
"No one is ever completely safe from the critical gaze of a culture steeped in the makeover ethos." —Micki McGeeI have a theory that you can measure the decline of any...
EP 492: How We Realize Higher Values Through Enabling Structures
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...
EP 491: Meet Your Tiny Capitalists
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 ...
EP 490: Standardize Me
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,...
EP 489: Temporal Bandwidth
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 abil...
EP 488: Honeydew (Or, 3 Biases That Derail Remarkable Projects)
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...
EP 487: Rethinking Our Tech Mythology
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...
EP 486: How Knowledge Really Does Become Power
What does my new website, the TikTok "ban," and the ongoing purge of "woke" from government websites have in common?The power to decide what content counts and what do...
EP 485: Broken Links
I'm back! Maybe you noticed or maybe you didn't—but the show (and my newsletter) has been on its longest hiatus since its inception. In the final quarter of 2024, I de...
EP 484: The Freedom to Buy
So, health insurance is in the news. And so is Americans' feelings about it. I got to wondering how we ended up with this terrible health insurance system in the Unite...
EP 483: Avoiding Acquiescence Bias
A problem, question, or challenge is often more than meets the eye. But we're biased to accept how an issue is initially framed. We acquiesce to the original terms. Th...
EP 482: Seeing Software
Do you see your software?Do you see how it influences how you run meetings, brainstorm ideas, fulfill your responsibilities, and communicate with others? Do you see ho...
EP 481: Preservation in the Post-Information Age with Sari Azout
Stop me if you've heard this before: we're overloaded and overwhelmed by information. There's more content than you could ever hope to consume. More scientific theorie...
EP 480: Exceedingly Complex Systems
In management cybernetics, there are 3 types of systems: simple, complex, and exceedingly complex. The systems we pay the most attention tend to be, you guessed it, ex...
EP 479: A Theory of Resourcefulness
You've probably heard of a scarcity mindset. Maybe you've even been accused of having one! In this short, I explore the false binary of scarcity and abundance mindsets...
EP 478: Data Never Speak For Themselves
We're constantly bombarded by data. And it's easy to think that with the right clues, we could answer the ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything.But ...
EP 477: Here's a tip
Today's episode is about tips. As in gratuity. Wait, wait, wait! Where are you going?I know, you probably don't receive tips for your work. Maybe you don't live in the...
EP 476: Cult Value
If a chatbot writes your novel, did you really complete NaNoWriMo?Two niche internet panics caught my eye over the last couple of weeks: a bungled AI policy by the org...
EP 475: Values aren't chains; they are wings
Inspired by the current vibe shift, I'm interrupting my rebroadcast of the Self-Help, LLC series with an interlude about values—personal values, business values, Ameri...
What Does Power Sound Like?
This is the 6th installment in the Self-Help, LLC series, which originally ran in October 2022. Today's episode has been revised and re-engineered!We form an impressio...
The Spectacle of Influence(rs) with Sara Petersen
How influencers, well, influence the way we see the world, our work, our families, and ourselves? And how does the spectacle we immerse ourselves in daily contribute t...
What's Your Type? with Steph Barron Hall
This is the 4th part of my series Self-Help, LLC, which I'm replaying over the summer! Enjoy!If your Instagram feed or Explore page looks anything like mine, then you ...
The Paradox of Self-Help Expertise with Patrick Sheehan
This is an updated version of the 3rd installment in my series Self-Help, LLC, from 2022. Enjoy!Our quest for self-improvement requires us to decide who (or what) to t...
"She Looks Like an Instagram" Or, How Empowerment Became a Brand with Kelly Diels
I’m continuing my rebroadcast of a series I did a couple of years ago called Self-Help, LLC, and asked the question, "Are we all in the self-help business now?" Today’...
How Advice Culture Makes Us Winners (And Losers)
This is Part 1 of a series from 2022 called Self-Help, LLC. This summer, I’ll be republishing this series as I work on new essays and episodes. There’s a good chance t...
EP 474: Making Non-Obvious Choices at Work with Samhita Mukhopadhyay
For justice-minded people, navigating the world of work in the 21st-century economy can feel... impossible. A real no-win scenario. There's a constant tension between ...