All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 20 of 424 in total
Wait... what?!
You’re going along, minding your own business, and then it hits you: “Wait, what?!” Your expectation or assumption bumps against the facts. Things aren’t the way you t...
Rethinking Higher Ed for the 21st-Century Economy with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd
It's no secret that one of my, let's say, special interests is higher education. The reasons for this are at least threefold. First, I have a kid heading off to colleg...
Grieving The Future Self
A brief meditation on grief at the loss of one's future self and how often that loss passes unacknowledged.Footnotes:Read the essay version of this episode.“10:00 am” ...
Circling Back
How often do you revisit old work? Do you have systems for circling back to what you've created in the past to see how you could improve upon it or take it in a new di...
Making Intelligence Masculine Again
I've had all the various parts of this episode swirling in my head for months—from The Paperclip Maximizer to The Great Feminization to Meta's Masculine Energy to mind...
What Else Must Be True?
Have a big decision on your mind? Trying to choose between a bunch of good options?Today, I'm talking about decision-making… not so much how to choose, but the context...
Getting My $#*! Together: A Messy Review of 2025
Here we are at the tail end of 2025. I just "opened" my Spotify Unwrapped... And after 3 years of burnout recovery, I’m finally ready to figure out what getting my shi...
On Getting Attention, Encoding Messages, and Diving into the Deep End
How do you get people to care about what you care about?It's a marketing question. A movement-building question. A question at the heart of the attention economy. And ...
Drifting Toward the Status Quo
If you’ve ever chosen an ambitious, unconventional, or deeply meaningful aim only to see your plan devolve into something far more run-of-the-mill, this one is for you...
Rethinking Busyness (With Help From HBO's The Pitt)
Try as we might, many of us can’t shake the overwhelming sense that we're just too damn busy—that feeling that there’s something we’re forgetting about, somewhere we s...
Delightful Misdirection (Or How to Rethink Your Options)
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 ...
We Can't Quit Turning Leisure Into More Work
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 T...
The Spectacle of Competence
"Competence porn" is an indistinct genre of media that showcases people doing their jobs (loosely defined) exceptionally well, often using niche skills or uncommon exp...
3 Ways I Make Sense of the Unexpected & Perplexing
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 mismat...
Make It Make Sense
"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 t...
EP 500: What if you're not off track... and never have been?
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...
EP 499: Reduction in Force
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 adm...
INTERLUDE: The Pleasure & Promise of Re-Reading
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 t...
EP 498: Breaking The Validation Spiral
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 deplete...
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....