This is the 8th edition ofThis is Not Advice, my "not-advice" column for premium subscribers ofWhat Works. Today, I'm talking about our over-reliance on metrics and how easily we're seduced by reductive data. When does a metric turn into an incentive fo

Making work for the public seems to come with a slew of fuzzy social expectations. What do we owe our readers, listeners, viewers, and followers? What more is expected beyond the post, episode, or video? How do you navigate the tension between care and bo

The media give us wildly exaggerated images of wealth and consumption. And even if we recognize that a tv show or an Instagram account is more fantasy than reality, those images impact what we believe we should be earning and buying. MoneyZen author Manis

At age 50, Manisha Thakor realized that she'd sacrificed her life at the altar of work. How did that happen? And what was she to do about it? Manisha's new book tackles how to unwind a toxic relationship with work and money.Footnotes: MoneyZen: The Secre

This is an excerpt from the 7th edition ofThis is Not Advicea not-advice column exclusively for premium subscribers. In this episode, I take a closer look at flexibility. When is it a feature? When is it a bug? When does flexibility create more opportun

This episode originally ran on May 25, 2022. It's been lightly remixed for today's release!Rugged individualism is the very language we speak in America. It shapes the way we approach work, family, and society. And rugged individualism has a direct impa

So much of our modern discourse around productivity, empowerment, entrepreneurship, and personal growth includes messages about our bodies. These messages might not be explicit, but the messages are there—and our brains pick them up loud and clear.Similar

This is an episode of "This is Not Advice," a bonus podcast I do for premium subscribers of What Works. Instead of just a teaser this week, I wanted to share the whole episode with you. If you'd like to receive future episodes, go to whatworks.fyi/subscri

This is an episode about Meta's new app, Threads. It's also about Substack and Substack's new-ish feature, Notes. But really, it's an episode about what we're looking for from the category we call "social media" and how we think about achieving those ends

"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," say Frederic Jameson and Slavoj iek.Capitalist liberal democracy is construed as the "end of history"the culmination of millennia of civilizational progress, the inevitable outco