What Works
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What Works
Work is central to the human experience. It helps us shape our identities, care for those we love, and contribute to our communities. Work can be a source of power and a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, that's not how most of us experience work—even those who work for themselves. Our labor and cr...
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Technicians, Visionaries, and the Myth of Going Solo
To the uninitiated, "being your own boss" sounds pretty nice. Of course, the moment you go into business for yourself, you realize the wide variety of...
This Process is a Mess
I live for people explaining how they approach analysis and critique. I desperately want to know how other people think about things so I can learn to...
How I Learn a New Skill
So a couple of weeks ago, I downloaded Final Cut Pro and committed to learning how to use it. Despite logging hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in...
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 are...
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 head...
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:
More from Tara:
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 ta...
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 Masculi...
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...
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 wh...
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...
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, th...
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 abou...
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 resou...
We Can't Quit Turning Leisure Into More Work
I'm pretty sure The New York Times is trolling me.
Footnotes:
Turn your meaningful ideas into remarkable media—and help others make sense...
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 skill...
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 rea...
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 th...
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 sit...
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 governm...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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?
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...
EP 493: The Prescription Economy
"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 me...
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 l...
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."...
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 s...
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...
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 exp...
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 ser...
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 co...
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 quar...
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 sy...
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 o...
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 communi...
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 s...
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, y...