How can you just do things?

Why do some people seem to create opportunities wherever they go while others spend years waiting for the right break? According to — lawyer turned poker player turned drug addict turned CEO of a $3B foundation — the difference isn’t luck. It’s the ability to question assumptions, reject the default path, and realize the world is far more malleable than it seems.

In this episode, Rufus and Cate explore what it really means to become a high-agency person — a.k.a. someone who just does things. Together, they unpack why ambition isn’t the same as agency, how fear of embarrassment and an obsession with hard work hold us back, and why curiosity, unconventional thinking, and expanding your “surface area for luck” are the keys to creating extraordinary opportunities.

Cate’s new book, You Can Just Do Things, is out now. Check out our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or watch it on YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

How can you achieve true tranquility and authenticity?

Lasting wellbeing isn’t about finding the perfect advice or transforming your life overnight. It’s about practicing small evidence-based habits that fit your unique life. Matt Bloom is a social psychologist and emeritus professor of business at the University of Notre Dame where, for almost thirty years, he studied the wellbeing of people who work in the helping and healing professions. He is cofounder of Ritual, a mobile app that offers a living library of evidence-based wellbeing practices.

Check out five key insights from his new book, Lasting Wellbeing: Science-Based Practices for Tranquility, Authenticity, Meaning, and Joy on the Next Big Idea app.

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This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

What are the best tools to improve your life?

You don’t need hundreds of self-help ideas—you need the right techniques. Nearly every effective approach to personal growth can be traced back to just 12 core strategies that give you a practical framework for improving your life.

Below, Jeremy Stevenson and Spencer Greenberg share five key insights from their new book, The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit For Improving Your Life. Jeremy is a clinical psychologist. Spencer is a psychology entrepreneur and mathematician who is founder and CEO of ClearerThinking.org.

Pick up a copy of their book on Amazon or listen to their big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Fora, a travel agency platform designed for entrepreneurs who want to build and scale their own travel business. Become a Fora Advisor today at foratravel.com/idea

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors get to celebrate the publication of their books today--congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

Trevor Harley, Head in the Clouds: How the Weather Affects Our Minds and Mental Health

Annie Jacobsen, Biological War: A Scenario

Flyn, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness

Spencer Greenberg & Jeremy Stevenson, The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit For Improving Your Life

Why It Matters: The design and architecture fields remain roughly 80% male, so products and spaces keep defaulting to a male standard. The result is a world that treats women’s discomfort, and sometimes their safety, as an afterthought.

Try This Today: Pick one everyday object—a bag, a tool, a seatbelt, a chair—and ask who it was actually designed for.

These ideas come from Man-Made: How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out, and How We Can Make It Right by . Karen spent decades as a designer for globally recognizable brands like Nike and Reebok, and today works as an activist focused on ending gender bias in the built world. Read on for five of her big ideas.

1. “Shrink it and pink it” and other foolish ideas.

I don’t remember exactly when I heard it for the first time. Certainly, it was early in my design career—before Nike. In all likelihood, I was a young, impressionable college student when I heard the insidious little earworm first: “Shrink it and pink it.” Don’t let the cuteness fool you. It’s a euphemism for biased design and a blatant lack of consideration for women. Unfortunately, it’s a common phrase in the lexicon of design and marketing jargon, and often one that manifests as a legitimate strategy whereby a product originally designed for a male user is made smaller and in a stereotypically feminine color, like pink, to become viable to female consumers.

There exists a spectrum of gendered design examples in the built world—what we wear, use, and what surrounds us—that have resulted in consequences that range from insulting to deadly. Although shrinking something shows an acknowledgment of differences between male and female bodies, women are not just smaller men.

“Shrink it and pink it” doesn’t consider the user at all, failing to respect and address the distinct anatomical and functional needs of women. This all-too-common tactic, along with other foolish ideas that ultimately ignore women during the design process, from “unisex” apparel to menstrual products designed by men, manifests in products that are misleading, compromising, and undignified. “Shrink it and pink it” is not merely a flawed approach to product design; it is emblematic of a broader systemic issue that reduces women’s experiences to afterthoughts, and worse, commodities. The result is a daily reality where women are conditioned to accept less: less functionality, less dignity, less confidence. Each time our bodies meet a built world that doesn’t fit, we pay a price.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Karen herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

2. Thought it had to be this way.

We seldom notice the physical contortion that is constantly required and tolerated by women to get through the day. It’s everywhere: the woman struggling to reach and hold on to the strap on the moving subway car; the corporate attorney changing her gait to avoid blisters from her heels; any woman choreographing her every move inside a public restroom stall, accommodating a space designed to be barely sufficient. We fail to scrutinize these daily discomforts and instead accept them as more of life’s subtle disappointments. But they whisper to us in tenuous ways.

The distraction caused by an ill-fitting built world has a tangible consequence: headspace that would otherwise be focused on a goal or fulfilling one’s potential is wasted on silly workarounds. This is a headspace that our male counterparts have available to them. I call this the headspace gap. It perpetuates the man-made world, and it is a product of design.

“Headspace that would otherwise be focused on a goal or fulfilling one’s potential is wasted on silly workarounds.”

I’ve spent decades collecting anecdotes and evidence about gender bias in product design, focusing largely on products and environments that cater to male end users while leaving women behind, as well as the systems that enable and perpetuate those designs. Most of those products neglect women because they are designed first and foremost by and for men, occasionally with a last-minute “Hail Mary” size or color adaptation to make it more viable for women. What would a world look like if women didn’t have to expend time and energy on workarounds? If women’s voices were heard at the design table? I believe it would look quite different. More productive, happier. Safer. But if you still need convincing, let’s raise the stakes.

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3. Labor pains.

Danger is inherent to life, but it exists in greater quantities and higher frequencies for women. My parents started a roofing company in the northwest corner of Indiana in 1960. They were first-generation Greek Americans who grew up with very humble beginnings. Both worked hard, but my dad did the physical labor of roofing in the cold days of winter and in the brutally hot days of summer. I remember a photo from when he was still employed by another roofing company in which he was standing near his truck, his arm in a sling. The kettle that kept the tar boiling hot, at over four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, had splashed onto him and covered his arm as he lowered the hundred-pound brick of asphalt into the tar-filled kettle. He kept working because he didn’t want to lose the wage. When he went to see the doctor at the end of the day, the hardened tar was still on his arm. Years later, he told me the doctor had told him that leaving the hardened tar on his injured arm had been a good thing because it protected the wound. I believed him then, but I don’t believe it now. The fact that he was in this dangerous situation in the first place is something we wouldn’t accept today. My dad was proud that when he opened his own company, it was a union operation that worked to secure a living wage and safe conditions for everyone. And they were all men then.

I didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps, but I maintain the deepest respect for the trades. Our world can’t operate without them. A shortage of labor in the skilled trades compromises the ability to rebuild—from paving the roads we travel to constructing and maintaining the roofs over our heads. To overcome this challenge, we must embrace a workforce that has historically been absent from these essential, well-paying jobs.

Women represent an immense and largely untapped pool of available talent. The trades remain highly male-dominated. Women still make up only 10 percent of construction workers in the U.S. in 2024, and although 10 percent isn’t a lot, it does equal 1.2 million women. This trend of women joining the field will need to continue to grow in order to support the massive work on aging infrastructure needed in the U.S. and Europe. So we should make sure our 1.2 million and growing tradeswomen are empowered, supported, and safe—that their protective gear helps rather than hinders.

“There really is no excuse for failing to provide items that keep women safe, focused, and productive at work.”

Why, then, do only one-third of female industrial trade workers report access to female-specific PPE? Why do nearly all have challenges finding PPE that fits properly? Why aren’t employers providing them with the right gear? Claims of volume discounts and inefficiencies are no longer tenable. There really is no excuse for failing to provide items that keep women safe, focused, and productive at work. Whether safety boots, safety harnesses, earplugs, or earmuffs—if PPE is not worn and worn right, it endangers female workers. My dad’s accident, which left him scarred, probably wouldn’t happen to men today. But why can’t we say the same for women?

4. Scarcity by design.

How does this man-made world get built in the first place? And why does it fail women? It’s not only about the actual products and places we create; it’s about the invisible fabric of societal norms and expectations, especially who holds the power to design and build. Many people believe that the professions of design, architecture, and engineering today are more equitably split between the sexes, and that we have more equality and equity than what really exists. We’ve certainly made progress, but equality in these fields lags behind other stereotypically male professions like medicine, law, and software engineering.

Female creatives experience a double bind: having to navigate both the ingrained gender biases of a workplace that still operates far too often as a “boys’ club” and the broader tension between creative innovation and technical pragmatism. Like me, those who rise to leadership encounter a triple bind: facing bias as a woman, as a creative, and as a leader—a role where women are judged more harshly, compensated less, and offered fewer opportunities. These biases compound into barriers that are too often insurmountable, diminishing the impact of female designers. Their perspectives are systematically eroded and become invisible in the structure of a built world, which remains inhospitable toward women, dismissive of their needs, and at worst outright dangerous. It should come as no surprise that with approximately 80 percent of practicing industrial designers and licensed architects being men, studios employ a homogeneous, primarily white male approach to problem-solving and innovation.

With the promotion pipeline still favoring men at twice the rate, even if female designers remain in organizations, they are unable to make changes, affect decisions, or contribute their much-needed perspective in lasting ways. Talented female design leaders are being left behind in compensation, in promotions, and in opportunities. This workplace bias leads to women exiting the field, perpetuating the cycle of inequality. Slowly but surely, women internalize that they do not belong at that table. Women are still challenged with solving for the fundamentals—getting through the door in the first place—when our world deserves our focus on bigger challenges. The women bringing parity to design professions take giant leaps of faith every day. There are too few of us, and we are spread too thin. Too many of us, still, are “onlies”—maybe no longer in industries or at companies, but definitely among teams. It is a difficult place to survive, let alone thrive, and often an impossible place from which to challenge the status quo.

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5. The end of average.

Women and men inhabit the same world, yet it doesn’t suit them both equally. Women may not always notice the extent to which their physical ecosystem is ill-fitting, as they’ve become so accustomed to discomfort that it is accepted as fact. As a designer, I know it doesn’t need to be this way. Opportunities for improvement abound once we recognize that one size does not fit all, acknowledge women are not simply smaller men, and stop minimizing their distinct physicality. The promise of a safe, hospitable, and comfortable built world starts with dismissing the myth that designing to a male standard is sufficient.

“Progress for women won’t come from denying difference, but from embracing it.”

In an era characterized by rapid technological progress, we’re no longer constrained by the methods of measure that were established decades ago and are still in use today. But dismantling the persistent “law of averages” –the tendency to treat the male body as the default, or the “happy medium” when setting standards for physicality, design, and performance—continues to be an uphill battle. The widespread belief that “one size fits most” is often treated as objective truth, when in fact it reflects and reinforces a male-centered norm. The good news is that norms are not fixed. When new evidence disrupts accepted truths, belief systems can shift and the built world that rests on them. To build a more hospitable world for women, we must definitively acknowledge there is no standard or “happy medium” for human body dimensions.

Messages of women’s empowerment shaped my own life. Like many women, I’ve experienced moments of true empowerment, and I’ve also watched progress slip away. But there is no speech, protest sign, or knitted pink cap that can erase the physical differences between women and men. Progress for women won’t come from denying difference, but from embracing it.

The challenge facing us is reconciling the importance of gender equality and equitable treatment while acknowledging the biological and biomechanical differences that inform the design of the built world. This does not mean that female bodies should be valued any differently from men’s—quite the opposite: they should be valued equally, which demands design that accounts for their specific realities. Only with this understanding can we accept that biological and biomechanical differences are real without reinforcing harmful stereotypes, power imbalances, and social inequality. Understanding that will awaken a movement to end “average.”

The Big Idea: Sleep isn’t a skill you master. It’s a biological process that works best when you stop trying to control it.

Why It Matters: Sleep culture has turned rest into a performance metric. Trackers, supplements, and rigid rituals promise control, but they often build the very anxiety that disrupts sleep. Understanding sleep as a resilient, adaptive system removes the pressure that can fuel chronic insomnia.

Try This Today: Get outside within 30 minutes of waking. Mornings, not nights, set the sleep clock.

These ideas come from Think Less, Sleep More by Stephanie Romiszewski. Stephanie is a sleep physiologist who served as the sleep expert on Channel 4’s Secrets of Sleep and the BBC’s Insomnia and Me, and has appeared on Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett. Read on for five of her big ideas.

1. Sleep is a biological process, not a skill.

Sleep is not something you learn to do. Nobody teaches a baby how to sleep. Nobody practices sleeping. Sleep is a biological process, like breathing, digestion, or healing a cut on your finger.

Despite this, when people come to see me, they often feel as though they’ve somehow lost the ability to sleep. They tell me they are trying harder than ever, which tends to make it worse. Sleep is something your body already knows how to do. In fact, it is remarkably difficult to stop yourself sleeping indefinitely. The body will always try to find a way to sleep. It may not happen in the way you want, at the time you want, or for as long as you want, but the biological drive for sleep remains.

It can be helpful to stop viewing sleep as a performance. You are not trying to become good at sleeping. You’re trying to create the conditions that allow your sleep to become more predictable for your lifestyle.

“The body will always try to find a way to sleep.”

When people stop treating sleep as a skill they must master, they often feel an enormous sense of relief. For some, this mindset shift is enough to get them sleeping the way they want to again. Instead of asking, “How do I make myself sleep?” they begin asking, “What might be getting in the way of sleep?” That is usually a much more useful question.

2. Sleep anxiety is one of the biggest sleep problems we have created.

Many people assume that worrying about sleep is a natural consequence of not sleeping. What I see in clinic is often the opposite. The worry becomes part of the problem.

You might have a few disrupted nights because of stress, illness, a new baby, menopause, work pressures, or any number of normal life events. Initially, the sleep disruption is understandable. The difficulty comes afterward. They begin monitoring sleep closely. They start checking the clock. They calculate how many hours remain before morning. They become convinced that tomorrow will be ruined if they don’t fall asleep soon. Sleep slowly becomes something that needs to be controlled and protected.

The irony is that the more important sleep becomes, the harder it often is to achieve. The brain starts treating the bedroom as a place of alertness and monitoring rather than rest. Sleep becomes associated with pressure rather than safety.

At the same time, we are surrounded by messages telling us that every aspect of sleep needs optimizing. We are told to track it, improve it, and worry about it. Many people end up spending a lot of time thinking about sleep, spending money on sleep, and manipulating all sorts of other behaviors to sleep. What began as a desire to improve sleep can eventually create insomnia, anxiety, and a surprisingly fragile relationship with sleep and life itself.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Stephanie herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

3. Your morning matters more than your evening.

When people want better sleep, they almost always start by looking at bedtime. They ask about supplements, herbal teas, strict routines, sprays and gadgets, breathing exercises, or elaborate rituals. What often surprises them is that I spend much more time talking about mornings and asking them to liberate themselves from all this other noise.

Sleep is strongly influenced by two biological systems. One is sleep drive, which builds the longer we are awake. The other is circadian rhythm, our internal body clock. Both systems are heavily influenced by what happens after we wake up. Getting up at a reasonably consistent time, exposing ourselves to light, moving around, and beginning the day sends powerful signals to the brain about when it should be awake and when it should prepare for sleep later.

“Many of the foundations of good sleep are laid during the day rather than in the final 30 minutes before bed.”

I am not suggesting that mornings need to become another perfect routine. Quite the opposite. What I want people to understand is that many of the foundations of good sleep are laid during the day rather than in the final 30 minutes before bed. When we focus exclusively on bedtime, we have little influence over sleep quality, duration, or wake-ups. And when the evening rituals do not work, it only feeds into this idea that you have lost the ability to sleep, when really the advice might be what’s a little topsy-turvy. Sleep starts when we wake up.

4. A good sleeper is not someone who sleeps perfectly.

One of my favorite questions to ask is, “What do you think a good sleeper looks like?” The answers are usually very similar.

Someone who:

• Falls asleep quickly.

• Sleeps through the night.

• Never wakes up.

• Gets exactly the right amount of sleep every night.

• Wakes feeling refreshed.

The problem is that this person doesn’t exist. Even healthy sleepers wake up during the night. Even healthy sleepers have poor nights. Even healthy sleepers sometimes take longer to fall asleep. They don’t become alarmed by normal sleep experiences.

To me, a good sleeper is somebody who trusts sleep. Somebody who understands that sleep can vary from night to night without that meaning anything has gone wrong. They don’t assume tomorrow is ruined because they had a difficult night. They don’t feel compelled to compensate, fix, or analyze every fluctuation. Good sleepers tend to have a flexible relationship with sleep rather than a perfect one and they have fairly consistent sleep behaviors which focus on their morning routine.

This isn’t to undermine those who have sleep disorders, and indeed there is evidence-based treatment for those, but in order for us to try to avoid them and not fear sleep, it is helpful to understand normal sleep.

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5. Sleep is flexible and adaptable.

Variation is built into sleep. Sleep changes across the week. It changes with age. It changes during pregnancy, parenthood, illness, stress, grief, travel, and major life events. You will not sleep the same at 50 as you did when you were 20. It changes because we are human beings living human lives. Yet many people expect sleep to be identical every night. When it isn’t, they assume something is wrong.

“The sleep system will alter itself to give you what you need.”

Variation is often evidence of a healthy and adaptable sleep system. Your sleep is constantly responding to your environment and your needs. If it didn’t do this, we would not be able to recover from illness and things like jet lag. Some nights you may need more deep sleep. Some nights you may need more dreaming sleep. Some nights may feel lighter or more fragmented. That doesn’t necessarily mean sleep has failed. The sleep system will alter itself to give you what you need.

You can strengthen your sleep baseline with a strong morning routine, but even this will not stop the normal variations of sleep. The more this is understood, the less likely sleep variation turns into chronic insomnia. One of the most reassuring things is that good sleep does not mean sleeping perfectly every night. It means having a sleep system that can adapt to life’s ups and downs.

The Big Idea: Data is one of humanity’s oldest tools for governing people. Every system built with it reflects choices about who is seen, who is ignored, and who holds power.

Why It Matters: Governments now depend on private companies to run core public functions: cloud storage, AI, health records, national security infrastructure. Public authority and corporate power are increasingly the same thing. Who controls data infrastructure is no longer an abstract policy question. It shapes who has power over daily life.

These ideas come from Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate by Roopika Risam. Roopika is a professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College. Her research explores how histories of race, empire, and technology shape the modern world. Read on for 5 of her big ideas, or listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Roopika herself—in the Next Big Idea App.

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1. Data built civilization.

Most people think data began with computers. In reality, data is one of humanity’s oldest technologies. Nearly five thousand years ago, someone named Kushim carefully recorded deliveries of barley on a clay tablet in ancient Mesopotamia. Kushim wasn’t a king or a priest. He was an accountant—and he is the first person with a name in recorded history.

Usually, we imagine history beginning with rulers, battles, or monuments. Instead, the first named person is someone doing paperwork. Kushim was tracking grain because survival in the ancient world depended on it. Cities needed to know who had contributed food, how much was stored, and how it would be redistributed. Without records like these, large settlements simply couldn’t function.

We tend to think of data as something abstract or digital. But from the very beginning, data was about solving a practical problem: how to coordinate thousands of people who no longer know one another personally? The answer was creating records that could outlast human memory. And that meant inventing new ways to record information.

We often think writing emerged so people could tell stories or preserve great works of literature. But some of humanity’s earliest surviving documents didn’t contain poetry or philosophy. They were inventories, receipts, and tax records. Writing emerged because growing societies needed reliable ways to keep track of grain, land, labor, and trade.

Once people could record information outside the human mind, they could coordinate increasingly complex forms of cooperation. Those records made it possible to collect taxes, manage trade, and govern growing cities. Data helped make civilization possible. Computers transformed the speed and scale of data. But they didn’t invent it.

2. To count is to govern.

One of the most important political decisions any society makes is deciding what to count.

After invading England in 1066, William the Conqueror ordered a massive survey of nearly every village, field, animal, and household in his kingdom. The result became known as the Domesday Book. It wasn’t created out of historical curiosity. It was a tool for taxation, administration, and control.

That pattern repeats throughout history. Colonial governments counted populations. Property records determined land ownership. Tax rolls established obligations. Every system of recordkeeping makes some people visible and others invisible.

“One of the most important political decisions any society makes is deciding what to count.”

The British Empire took this logic to an extraordinary scale in colonial India. Officials counted people, mapped land, classified castes, recorded religions, and cataloged languages. Those records didn’t simply describe Indian society. They reshaped it. Categories like caste that had once been fluid became fixed in bureaucratic forms, influencing political representation, access to resources, and even how communities came to understand themselves.

Counting changes the world it measures. Data has never simply described society. It has helped govern it.

3. Crises create data revolutions.

Many of the databases we rely on today were born during moments of crisis.

During the Great Depression, the United States realized it couldn’t solve unemployment because it didn’t even know how many people were unemployed. New surveys and statistical methods became essential for understanding the economy.

A few years later, the creation of Social Security required the federal government to identify and keep track of millions of Americans over the course of their entire working lives. That challenge demanded entirely new administrative systems.

World War II accelerated those developments even further. Governments developed new ways to coordinate troops, supplies, and logistics across continents. During the Cold War, they expanded those capacities again to model nuclear conflict, forecast economic trends, and support scientific research.

Again and again, crises transformed how societies gathered information—and how governments exercised power. The information age wasn’t simply the product of technological innovation. It was also built through political responses to extraordinary moments.

“Crises transformed how societies gathered information—and how governments exercised power.”

We often talk about technological change as though it unfolds naturally. History tells a different story. The biggest leaps in our information infrastructures often happened because societies confronted problems they couldn’t solve with the tools they already had. Technology mattered, but so did politics, public investment, and collective decisions about what information governments needed in order to act. The data technologies being used today are products of those choices, not simply the inevitable result of scientific progress.

4. Data is not objective.

When we discover bias in a tool like ChatGPT, it’s tempting to think the problem began with the algorithm. But AI is built on data, and data carries history.

Take the Dewey Decimal System. In 1876, a young librarian named Melvil Dewey set out to organize all human knowledge into a single classification system. It became one of the most successful information systems ever created and is still used in libraries around the world.

The categories looked like objective numbers, but they reflected Dewey’s own worldview. Christianity occupied seventy detailed classifications, while other religions were compressed into a single catch-all category. Western philosophy and science received expansive treatment, while Indigenous knowledge and many non-Western traditions were pushed to the margins.

Every system of classification reflects human choices about what matters and how the world should be organized. Artificial intelligence works the same way. Before an AI system can recognize patterns, it depends on categories, labels, and datasets that people have created. AI inherits centuries of human decisions about how to organize knowledge and classify the world.

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5. The new data empire is corporate.

Every empire has had its signature technology. All roads led to Rome. The British Empire had the telegraph. Today’s empires run on data.

For most of history, governments built and controlled the information infrastructures that organized public life. Today, many governments depend on private corporations to store public records, provide cloud computing, develop artificial intelligence, and build the digital infrastructure behind everything from healthcare to education to national security.

Governments increasingly rely on companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Palantir to perform functions that were once carried out primarily by the state. In many countries, public institutions can no longer function without technologies designed and maintained by private corporations.

“The future of democracy depends on who controls the data infrastructure behind it.”

That represents one of the biggest political shifts of our time. You often hear that technology companies are the new empires because they extract data the way earlier empires extracted land, minerals, or other natural resources. But corporations aren’t simply collecting enormous amounts of data. They are increasingly building, owning, and operating the technologies that nations use to exercise political power. As countries outsource more of their core administrative functions to private companies, public authority becomes increasingly entangled with corporate power.

The defining question of our moment isn’t simply how much data is being collected. It’s who controls it, who profits from it, and who is accountable when tech companies have a direct hand in governing us. The future of democracy depends on who controls the data infrastructure behind it.

History reminds us that none of this was inevitable. It is the result of people making political choices. And if people built these systems, people could change them. That means holding political leaders accountable for their choices about which companies gather our data, who regulates them, whose interests they serve, and what kind of digital future we want to build.

The Big Idea: Nearly every effective self-help technique falls into one of just 12 broad psychological strategies. Learn these levers, and improving your life becomes a lot easier.

Why It Matters: Self-help can be overwhelming. Countless books, podcasts, and therapies each push their own vocabulary, much of which repeats the same handful of ideas under new names. Without a map, it’s nearly impossible to tell which techniques are real and which are repackaged filler.

Try This Today: Pick one hard feeling you’re carrying right now. Write down the automatic thought behind it, then ask: is this actually true, or just how it feels? Rewrite the thought to be more accurate. That’s cognitive restructuring (one of the tools taught in the book) in under five minutes.

These ideas come from The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life by Jeremy Stevenson and Spencer Greenberg. Jeremy is a clinical psychologist. Spencer is a psychology entrepreneur and mathematician, and founder and CEO of ClearerThinking.org. Read on for 5 of their big ideas.

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1. Self-help is overwhelming, but you can simplify it by focusing on the techniques.

The other day, I was browsing the self-help aisle of an airport bookstore. There was advice on everything:

• How to build good habits.

• How to transform pain into purpose.

• How to stop sweating the small stuff.

• How to have the courage to be disliked.

• How to reset your vagus nerve.

And it’s not just books. There are millions of podcast episodes and YouTube videos with neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, life coaches, and other gurus telling you how to improve your life. On top of all that, there are dozens of therapies, like acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy, that can also be used as self-help.

What are we supposed to do with this ocean of information? How do we make sense of it all and figure out what’s useful? We propose that you focus on the most important ingredient of self-help: the techniques.

Self-improvement resources contain various ingredients, like theory, stories, research, and case studies. But the techniques matter most. They’re the answer to the million-dollar question: what do you actually do to fix your problem? What do you do to reduce your anxiety or depression? What do you do to improve your happiness or productivity? What do you do to deepen your relationships?

Techniques matter because you control them directly. You can’t necessarily choose your feelings, beliefs, or circumstances, but you can always choose to try a technique. And effective techniques cause change—they can produce the outcomes you want, like greater fulfillment or stronger relationships.

2. Effective techniques can be surprisingly hard to find.

When I was younger, one pivotal discovery in my life was the concept of shame. It was a single word for an emotion that captured so much about my deepest struggles: feeling inferior, inadequate, not good enough.

You can imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon a book specifically on shame and how to overcome it. But that excitement didn’t last long. As I delved deeper into the book, all I found was page after page of theory—what shame is and what causes it. Even when I reached the final chapter on healing shame, there were no clear instructions on what to do.

It was a frustrating experience because I was left empty-handed. This is common in the self-help world. It can be hard to find effective techniques because they can be buried beneath piles of complex theory or scattered across different books and therapies.

“Even when I reached the final chapter on healing shame, there were no clear instructions on what to do.”

Sometimes, useful techniques are only known to therapists, or even worse, only known to a small number of therapists with a specific type of training. There’s no single place where you can find all the best techniques. Which means you’re likely unaware that highly effective techniques (that might perfectly match your circumstance) exist.

And even when you do have access to a promising technique, the instructions can be unclear or difficult to follow. You might be told to do things you can’t control, like “believe in yourself” or “stop thinking negatively.” Despite the abundance of self-help resources, almost no one knows the full range of effective techniques and how to apply them.

3. A lot of techniques are repackaged under different names.

Spencer and I have both had life-changing experiences from applying self-help techniques. We know firsthand the potential of good techniques. But we discovered that there’s a lot of overlap between self-help resources. You might have found this too. Once you get past the theory, stories, and motivational material, you often arrive at techniques that seem familiar.

You can even find this in therapies (which is where a lot of self-improvement techniques come from). When I was doing my PhD in clinical psychology, I was starting a placement in a PTSD clinic, and I was eager to learn about cognitive processing therapy. To my surprise, the core technique in cognitive processing therapy is the same as one of the core techniques in cognitive behavioral therapy. (The technique I’m talking about is cognitive restructuring, which involves reframing your thoughts to make them more accurate and helpful.)

Now, that doesn’t mean that this technique or those therapies don’t work. Far from it. Both cognitive processing therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy are gold-standard therapies. But this is a good example of the patterns in the self-improvement world. Even if the terminology differs, many techniques are repackaged or recycled. And the same techniques are often used for many different problems.

For example, cognitive restructuring, can be used to help nearly any difficult feeling, like depression, anxiety, shame, and even behavioral problems like procrastination. Or take mindfulness. Mindfulness can be used for many issues, from chronic pain to excessive worry. In the world of psychology, we call these techniques “transdiagnostic” because they can each be used to treat many different issues. There are a handful of techniques for a bucketload of problems.

4. All self-help techniques boil down to just 12 broad strategies.

After years of observing these patterns in self-help techniques, my coauthor Spencer and I decided to embark on a massive research project studying self-improvement resources. We went through famous books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Atomic Habits, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. We did this for less famous books, too. Every time we came across a technique, we extracted it to a database.

“After two years of research, exploring 106 self-help books, 23 therapies, and numerous journal articles, videos, manuals, and other materials, we hit a saturation point.”

We also studied the protocols for therapies like acceptance and commitment therapy, compassion-focused therapy, and schema therapy, extracting whatever techniques could be applied as self-help. That database grew until we had a list of nearly 500 techniques. After two years of research, exploring 106 self-help books, 23 therapies, and numerous journal articles, videos, manuals, and other materials, we hit a saturation point. We stopped finding meaningfully new techniques, only variations of ones we’d already captured.

From there, we began to synthesize. We carefully reviewed each technique and grouped them into categories based on their similarities. This is where we made the central discovery: All the hundreds of techniques fell into just 12 distinct categories. We called these categories “The 12 Levers” because they reflect the broad strategies for improving your life—the Levers you can pull to create change. By contrast, we use the word techniques to refer to the specific ways one can implement each Lever.

Take Lever 3: Actualize your Guiding Foundations—that’s the broad strategy, which is about acting in line with your values. One specific technique within this Lever is habit formation. Levers are the macro. Techniques are the micro.

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5. Knowing the 12 Levers can meaningfully improve your life.

When my coauthor Spencer was younger, he suffered from intense social anxiety. The mere idea of talking to a stranger would fill him with dread.

In his 20s, he decided to seek help. He saw a psychologist and learned a technique called exposure therapy. This involved gradually confronting his fears by doing challenges assigned by his psychologist. The challenges started simple, like asking strangers for the time. But they became increasingly outrageous, like walking up to random men in bars and politely asking for a hug. At first, these challenges filled him with terror, but remarkably quickly, they helped him overcome his social anxiety.

For me, my life changed when I read a book called A New Guide to Rational Living. The book taught cognitive restructuring, and it blew me away. It gave me a tool that reliably relieved my misery. The impact this book had on me is a big reason why I became a clinical psychologist in the first place. It showed me the power of a good technique.

“Different techniques will resonate in different situations and during different phases of life.”

But cognitive restructuring won’t work for everyone. Likewise, the technique Spencer used, exposure, won’t work for every problem. That’s why we need more than one technique.

I see this in my clinic. Certain clients gravitate toward cognitive techniques, like cognitive restructuring, whereas other clients gravitate toward physical techniques, like controlled breathing. Not only that, but different techniques will resonate in different situations and during different phases of life. I’ve been through phases where it really clicked to clarify my values, and other phases where it was more helpful to use attentional techniques like mindfulness. It’s valuable to have access to the full range of effective techniques.

Sorry, skeptics — AI is not a bubble.

First, a few numbers. This year Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta will spend more than $700 billion building AI infrastructure. There are 1,500 data centers in development across the country. AI-linked stocks make up at least 40% of the S&P 500.

These are the kinds of numbers that make some economists jumpy. If this whole AI thing doesn’t pan out, they warn, we’re headed for the mother of all crashes.

But is not one of those economists. He and his team recently spent months turning the AI economy inside out, and they just released a report called The State of the AI Economy. It contains surprising answers to what has become an increasingly pressing question: is this the biggest bubble ever blown, or are we building the durable machinery of a radically more abundant world?

In this conversation, Azeem joins Rufus to unpack why AI adoption is growing faster than the internet or mobile, what Wall Street and Silicon Valley may still be getting wrong, and why the most important skill in an AI-powered future may have nothing to do with AI. Along the way, they explore energy, jobs, investing, AI safety, and what exponential change means for the next generation.

Check out our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or watch it on YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

What is data doing to us?

Data isn’t a byproduct of modern technology. It’s one of humanity’s oldest tools for governing ourselves. Every system we build reflects choices about who is seen, who is ignored, and who holds power. Roopika Risam is a professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College. Her research explores how histories of race, empire, and technology shape the modern world.

Check out five key insights from her new book, Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is No Experience Necessary by Ronnen Harary, co-founder and former CEO of Spin Master. At 23, fresh out of college and living at home, Harary built what became a global powerhouse behind PAW Patrol and Bakugan — and he argues his inexperience was the secret. Structured around eleven principles, the book reframes youth’s risk tolerance, energy, and openness as superpowers that young dreamers squander at their peril. Publishers Weekly calls it “a powerful corrective to the myth that experience is a prerequisite for success.”

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

What does it take to perform at your highest level?

The life you want isn’t built through talent, luck, or fleeting moments of inspiration. It’s built by fully committing to what matters and showing up for it every single day.

is the host of The Learning Leader Show, a podcast where he has interviewed more than 700 of the world’s most impactful leaders over the past 11 years. Recently, it was ranked the #1 business podcast in the world by Apple Podcasts.

Pick up a copy of his new book on Amazon or listen to his big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Fora, a travel agency platform designed for entrepreneurs who want to build and scale their own travel business. Become a Fora Advisor today at foratravel.com/idea

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors get to celebrate the publication of their books today--congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

, You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life

, The Price of Becoming: The Compounding Practices of High Performance

, Why We Fight: A Transformative Road Map to Healing Conflict in Any Relationship

Emily Eakin, The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory

The Big Idea: Joy is the most powerful tool for solving climate change.

Why It Matters: Climate guilt burns people out fast. Happiness sustains behavior change long after willpower fades. The choices that cut carbon most (things like what you eat, how you vacation, even how you bank) tend to boost daily well-being. That overlap turns individual action into something people actually keep doing.

These ideas come from Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species by Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao. Elizabeth is a happiness researcher and professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. Jiaying is a climate behavioral scientist and professor at UBC. Read on for five of their big ideas.

1. Happiness is our best weapon to fight climate change.

The topic of climate change can be pretty depressing. But it doesn’t have to be. In fact, many of the changes that we need to make in our lives to tackle climate change can make us happier. One recent study found that engaging in pro-environmental behaviors, like walking, can boost our happiness as much as traditional self-care activities like taking a bubble bath. It’s much easier to stick with lifestyle changes we enjoy than those we dread.

Not only that, but when people feel happy, they tend to be more creative. They are better at finding novel solutions to hard problems. And that’s exactly what we need when it comes to fighting climate change.

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2. Small tweaks to your eating habits can cut your carbon footprint and make you happier.

You don’t have to give up meat to fight climate change. Just eating meat a little less often can make a real difference. My research shows that having foods we enjoy less frequently can actually enhance our ability to enjoy them.

If you love meat, though, think about eating white meat rather than red meat. Choosing chicken or pork instead of beef makes almost as much difference as going vegetarian.

“Think about eating white meat rather than red meat.”

That said, compared to eating meat, it’s true that fruit, vegetables, and other plant-based products are best for the environment. The surprising thing is that eating more plants might also make you happier. New research shows that when people start eating more fruits and vegetables, their happiness levels rise. And there’s even some evidence that eating a little bit more produce can make people more physically attractive.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is No Experience Necessary by Ronnen Harary, co-founder and former CEO of Spin Master. At 23, fresh out of college and living at home, Harary built what became a global powerhouse behind PAW Patrol and Bakugan — and he argues his inexperience was the secret. Structured around eleven principles, the book reframes youth’s risk tolerance, energy, and openness as superpowers that young dreamers squander at their peril. Publishers Weekly calls it “a powerful corrective to the myth that experience is a prerequisite for success.”

3. Where you stash your money matters more than what you buy.

The internet is loaded with tips on how to make more environmentally friendly shopping choices. Most of these choices don’t make a huge difference, though. But where you keep your money really matters.

If you have a thousand dollars tucked away in a savings account at a typical U.S. or Canadian bank, it’s generating about as much carbon each year as a one-way flight from New York to Seattle. This is because most big North American banks use your money to invest in the fossil fuel industry. But there are plenty of other options out there. To find banks in your area that won’t use your money to fund the fossil fuel industry, check out the nonprofit As You Sow.

Of course, as a happiness researcher, I will be the first to admit that changing banks probably isn’t the most fun way you could spend a Saturday. But you only have to do it once, and then you can feel good about reaping the carbon savings for years.

4. Exploration close to home can boost happiness (almost carbon-free!).

Staycations emit far less carbon than flights to a faraway destination. Exploring tourist attractions close to home may boost happiness while minimizing the unpleasantness of devoting a vacation day to getting there.

Are there popular tourist attractions nearby that you’ve never visited? It turns out that many people miss out on the tourist attractions in their own backyards. They only get around to visiting these attractions when out-of-town guests come to visit or when they themselves are about to move away. So, consider becoming a tourist in your own hometown.

If you don’t have much time, simply treat the weekend like a vacation by staying in a hotel in a part of town you haven’t visited before. Check out the shops, restaurants, and the scenery for a renewed sense of connection.

“Staycations emit far less carbon than flights to a faraway destination.”

If you are going to fly, it’s worth splurging on a nonstop flight whenever possible. The most carbon-intensive part of a flight is takeoff. So, don’t do it twice. Also, fly with only carry-on baggage. In terms of carbon, packing a typical checked bag is equivalent to bringing an extra six-year-old child with you.

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5. If you make joyful changes, other people will follow suit, quickly.

You don’t need people to do the right thing for the right reason; you just need them to do the right thing. And the best way to get them to do the right thing is to model your own behavior.

How many people do you need to change the system? Not one person, not 51 percent; it turns out that number is around 25 percent. Damon Centola and his colleagues have conducted carefully controlled experiments to show that when 25 percent of people in a group change their behavior, it can trigger the rest of the group to follow.

It can be tempting to tell people about the hard things you’ve done. But telling other people about changes you’ve made that were easy will make them more likely to copy you. For example, if you found an easy way to eat more fruits and vegetables, share your recipes or strategies with other people.

And if you did something harder, like installing solar panels or buying an electric vehicle, sharing your knowledge with others can make it much easier for them to follow in your footsteps. I recently bought my first EV, and I love it, so I’ve been telling everyone. After all, happiness is contagious.

The Big Idea: The biggest obstacles to the life you want aren’t usually external. They’re the stories, blind spots, and fears you’ve never questioned. There’s transformative power in seeking out uncomfortable truths, learning to tolerate rejection, and walking toward what feels most cringe-worthy.

Why It Matters: Most people limit themselves by avoiding what scares them, taking only the most obvious path, and staying silent when speaking up feels awkward. While that way of living may feel comfortable, excess caution compounds over time, and you may find your life is nothing like the one you wanted.

Try This Today: Ask one person what they thin is your most obvious flaw. Then actually listen to the answer instead of explaining it away.

These ideas come from You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life by , with Sasha Chapin. Cate is a writer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist whose career has spanned corporate law, professional poker (where she reached the top female ranking in the world) and nonprofit leadership, including serving as CEO of one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations. Read on for five of her big ideas.

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1. Living without feedback is like cooking without tasting.

Most of us have at least one limiting flaw we don’t know about—something obvious to most people within the first 10 minutes of meeting us. Don’t you want to know what that is? This is the lowest-hanging fruit in self-improvement.

You can collect real feedback by asking for it in your closest relationships, but not everyone will give it to you honestly. Even those who know you intimately may find it hard to be fully candid. This is why I have an anonymous feedback box attached to my social media, where anyone can leave me comments. I get some unhinged messages, as you’d expect, but the results have been life-changing. Coworkers have kindly informed me about rough edges in my management style. Someone recently wrote me a harsh message about how my wardrobe needed improving, and I realized they were right. Now I’m that much more stylish.

The most transformative thing about it, though, hasn’t been any single piece of advice. It’s been knowing that I’m no longer hiding the truth from myself. If you don’t actively collect real feedback, you’ll never know where your blind spots are—and they’ll keep quietly shaping your life without your permission.

2. Remove your rejection-sensitivity goggles.

Most of us fear rejection. We’re overly sensitive to social disapproval even when we intellectually know it is not the end of the world. As a result, we view the world through rejection-sensitivity goggles. We decide what to ask for by trying as hard as possible to avoid rejection. We ask to be paid only what we know everyone will be happy to pay. We invite people to hang out with us only when we’re sure they’ll say yes. The problem is you don’t know what’s reasonable until you run up against rejection.

“We’re overly sensitive to social disapproval.”

The less you fear rejection, the less stress you will transmit while making a request, which makes it more likely to be granted. I’ve sent some truly audacious emails in my life. When I was job-hunting once, I emailed someone who ran a nonprofit and essentially said: “I’m considering starting an organization like yours. What if I ran yours instead?” The reaction was not as negative as you’d think. Being borderline delusional on occasion has helped me make requests that are bold and sometimes granted. You won’t know if your ask is unreasonable until you try.

3. The abyss is your friend. Stare into it.

For a long time, I ignored the question of whether I actually wanted to be a lawyer. I raced through law school and climbed the ladder simply because I was desperate for approval and prestige—until I’d nearly made partner at one of the country’s top law firms. If I hadn’t finally, one day, fully confronted the question—Do I actually want this?—I’d be like a lot of my former peers: at the top of the legal profession, rich, comfortable, and miserable.

Most of us push hard questions out of our heads. Is this creeping unhappiness telling me to change careers? Is this activity I call ‘self-care’ actually a harmful addiction? Would I want my future children to know I’m making this ethical compromise? Sitting with uncomfortable questions like these is a skill that you can hone. It takes patience, quiet, and the willingness to be uncomfortable. If you can do it though, you’ll either come away with the motivation to change your life or assurance that your life actually does measure up to your conscience.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is No Experience Necessary by Ronnen Harary, co-founder and former CEO of Spin Master. At 23, fresh out of college and living at home, Harary built what became a global powerhouse behind PAW Patrol and Bakugan — and he argues his inexperience was the secret. Structured around eleven principles, the book reframes youth’s risk tolerance, energy, and openness as superpowers that young dreamers squander at their peril. Publishers Weekly calls it “a powerful corrective to the myth that experience is a prerequisite for success.”

4. You don’t have to live in movie logic.

Many film plots only work because characters are terrible communicators. Romantic comedy plots, for instance, hinge on protagonists’ inability to discuss their feelings. This makes for good screenplays, but you shouldn’t live as though you’re waiting for a plot twist to reveal the truth.

And yet, in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages, people almost never name the uncomfortable dynamic that everyone in the room is already feeling. What does the alternative look like? It looks like stepping outside the frame and saying what would be obvious to the observer. Things like:

• I always feel a little awkward around you and I’m worried it comes across as me not liking you. I just wanted to say that’s not the case.

• I’ve been sensing some low-level tension between us. Maybe we’re quietly annoyed at each other but trying to stay polite. Is that just me?

• It sometimes seems like when I push back in meetings, it changes the energy in the room—like maybe you’re afraid to engage with me as directly as you do with others. Does that feel true?

Naming awkward dynamics almost always brings relief. Everyone is already feeling and living through the dynamic. By bringing it out into the open in a non-aggressive way, you can address it rather than mistaking silence for diplomacy.

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5. Cross the cringe minefield.

People naturally double down on their strengths. Why wouldn’t they? Energetic, disciplined types gravitate toward punishing exercise routines and demanding jobs. Novelty seekers move to new cities and become bartenders or traveling salespeople. And this applies to self-help, too: We read books and take advice that flatters our default style.

The problem is this eventually leads to dead ends—places in life where it feels like you’ve tried everything. But you haven’t tried everything. You’ve tried everything that doesn’t require feeling the forbidden feeling—the one core fear your whole adult personality is built to avoid. Maybe it’s worthlessness or loneliness or mediocrity. Whatever it is, any path that runs through it gets rejected out of hand or never even seen as an option. I call this barrier the cringe minefield.

“Your core fear walls off the parts of you that you’ve never let develop.”

For me, the fear is being selfish or corrupt. For a long time, that fear made me unable to compliment my own husband, because some part of me insisted that doing things he would enjoy was manipulation. It made negotiating for pay more difficult, because asking for what I was worth felt like confessing filthy greed.

Crossing those minefields was mortifying. It was also where my fastest growth came from, because your core fear walls off the parts of you that you’ve never let develop. Figure out what your core fears are and get suspicious that there might be treasure lurking on the other side.

The Big Idea: Talent doesn’t build the life you want. Showing up does. High performance comes from full commitment to what matters, repeated every day.

Why It Matters: Almost everyone knows what works. Almost no one does it consistently. The gap between knowing and doing is where careers and reputations actually get built.

Try This Today: Pick one commitment and remove the negotiation. Set a fixed day and time for it right now.

These ideas come from The Price of Becoming: The Compounding Practices of High Performance by . Ryan hosts The Learning Leader Show, ranked the #1 business podcast in the world by Apple Podcasts, where he has interviewed more than 700 of the world’s most impactful leaders over the past 11 years. Read on for five of his big ideas.

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1. Selling is leading.

Leaders who claim they’re “not salespeople” are usually bad at getting anyone to follow them, because leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. It’s about persuading people to buy into a vision they can’t yet see.

I spent the first 12 years of my career as a new business sales professional at LexisNexis and then Elsevier Clinical Solutions. I went from sales rep to manager to director, and my last job in corporate America was as the VP of Sales. Leadership is all about selling. We are all in sales every day.

2. The hard is what makes it great.

There’s a great scene in the movie A League of Their Own. Geena Davis is with Tom Hanks, and she says, “It just got too hard.” Tom Hanks pauses, then looks up at her and says, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”

This reminds me of looking at the AllTrails app when going hiking. You can choose from a variety of hikes which are labeled either Easy, Moderate, or Strenuous. The biggest difference between the difficulty levels is what you earn when you choose the Strenuous hikes. The suffering, the increase in elevation, the tired legs—when you get to the top, you earned that view. That feeling of accomplishment doesn’t happen on Easy hikes. The hard is what makes it great.

3. Be grateful.

Adam Sandler tells a great story about an acting teacher he learned from at NYU. One day the professor said, “Adam, I’d like to take you out for a beer.” While there, the professor said, “Adam, listen, you’re a great guy, but this acting thing. You don’t have it. It’s not going to work for you. Find a different profession.”

Many years later, Adam Sandler was out at a bar with his friends. This was after he had made a number of hit movies and was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. That night, his college acting teacher happened to be at that bar too. This was his opportunity to rub it in his old teacher’s face. When the teacher walked up to Adam and his group of friends, Adam stood up, introduced the acting teacher, and said, “This was the only teacher in my life who was nice enough to buy me a beer.” And they had a great laugh together.

We get to choose what we bring forward. We get to choose if we need or want a chip on our shoulder. We get to choose if we feel the need to rub it in someone else’s face. Part of what made Adam Sandler such a success story is that he is notoriously a grateful person who is a joy to work with and be around. Gratitude and joy are more powerful than spite and resentment.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is No Experience Necessary by Ronnen Harary, co-founder and former CEO of Spin Master. At 23, fresh out of college and living at home, Harary built what became a global powerhouse behind PAW Patrol and Bakugan — and he argues his inexperience was the secret. Structured around eleven principles, the book reframes youth’s risk tolerance, energy, and openness as superpowers that young dreamers squander at their peril. Publishers Weekly calls it “a powerful corrective to the myth that experience is a prerequisite for success.”

4. Consistency beats intensity and motivation.

Consistency beats motivation because it removes the daily negotiation. I don’t decide whether to publish a new podcast every Sunday night at 7 p.m. I’ve done it for more than 11 years. That’s just what I do. There is no negotiation.

I don’t think about whether I should write Mindful Monday every week. That is just my Monday. I’ve done it for 540 weeks in a row. No misses. That’s just what I do. “Should I?” is off the table. Make the commitment, then do it.

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5. Don’t just dabble.

At the 2025 Learning Leader Growth Summit in Scottsdale, I hosted Ed Latimore for a surprise live podcast—heavyweight boxer, physics graduate, competitive chess player, bestselling author. At one point, Ed talked about wanting to “beef up his obituary.” I thought, what a cool way to talk about living an impactful life. So I asked him what he actually wanted written in it. He paused. The room went quiet. Then, with total conviction, he said, “I didn’t just dabble.”

We live in the golden age of dabbling. Endless options, endless flexibility, and a thousand other lives on display any time you open your phone. Keeping your options open sounds smart. But there’s a hidden cost that compounds over years, and that’s the opportunity cost of depth. Real freedom comes from commitment. When you go all in on something, you unlock a level of mastery and satisfaction that is not available to people who keep one foot out the door.

Business author Jim Collins told me something similar. The best companies weren’t the ones juggling the most options. They found their hedgehogs—that one thing—and went all in, and stuck with it relentlessly.

When I think about my own life, I hope the evidence shows that I understood what mattered. That I committed fully to being a good husband, a good dad, and a good friend. That I did work worth doing and did it well. That I created more value than I captured. In other words, I hope they’ll say I didn’t just dabble.

The Big Idea: Turning an idea into a product has never been easier. AI, robotics, and automation make building fast and cheap. Success still comes down to how you think, not what you build. Stay playful. Know your why. Test relentlessly. Never fall in love with the idea itself, only the instinct behind it.

Why It Matters: Most failed products don’t fail because the tech was hard. They fail because the founder fell in love with an idea instead of the instinct driving it. As building gets cheaper and faster, it’s more important that ever to separate your winning instincts from your losing ideas.

Try This Today: Write down your “why” in one sentence. Check today's calendar against it. Cut whatever doesn't match.

These ideas come from Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love! by Mark Pincus. Mark is the founder of Zynga, the pioneer of social mobile games, and one of the tech industry’s most prominent entrepreneurs, known for repeatedly spotting and shaping the internet’s biggest hits. Read on for six of his big ideas.

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1. Life at the speed of play.

“Life at the speed of play” is an approach, an energy, I want to encourage everyone to take toward how we turn ideas into products or businesses. It’s about approaching the idea with a playful, light, fun attitude and not making it so heavy.

With AI, robotics, and automation, it’s never been easier to turn ideas into real products. We’re barreling toward living and working at the speed of play.

2. Get grounded in your why—your North Star.

I encourage everyone to create their own book of life. It is a practice that I’ve been doing for 30 years. Every year, write down your why and hold yourself accountable to it. Take a close look at whether your actions, ideas, and pursuits align well with that why. It’s essential.

3. Isolate your winning instincts from your losing ideas.

This is the basis of the Stanford Business School class I created. We all have core human instincts that drive us, and the more skillful we become at identifying and isolating those from the idea that we happen to be building right now, the more successful we can be, because we tend to fall in love with an idea that’s not quite right. If we can kill our ideas, which are usually wrong, while trying to go after that winning instinct, which is almost always right, you’ll massively increase your chance of success.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is No Experience Necessary by Ronnen Harary, co-founder and former CEO of Spin Master. At 23, fresh out of college and living at home, Harary built what became a global powerhouse behind PAW Patrol and Bakugan — and he argues his inexperience was the secret. Structured around eleven principles, the book reframes youth's risk tolerance, energy, and openness as superpowers that young dreamers squander at their peril. Publishers Weekly calls it "a powerful corrective to the myth that experience is a prerequisite for success."

4. Start with “proven” before new.

This is a framework I invented while building Zynga. It goes with this idea that you have winning instincts and losing ideas. If you commit to this, you can change your odds of success in creating hit products.

The idea is to start off by being master students of what is already proven in the product we’re building. Only after succeeding with what is proven do we then look for what is clearly better. Start with the things that ten out of ten of existing users will say, “Fuck yeah.” Do not start with the reach idea you think is better, because starting with ‘new’ will probably end in failure.

You will want to test the novel idea on a stable foundation. We don’t want your product to fail for the wrong reasons: because you went and did something that wasn’t in your innovation zone, you did it badly, and you didn’t create it as well as the best products already out there.

5. If everything goes right, be ready for success.

There’s a chapter in the book I call “Fuck Scale.” What I mean by that is we can boil down management. I got a Harvard MBA. I can save you two years and a lot of money and time. Basically, management is just trying to get people to do the right thing when you’re not in the room.

The first principle of that is to be in the room, don’t delegate. You want to understand the tasks you assign to workers, so gain proficiency in as many as you can before replacing yourself in that equation. Management and scale are just the mechanisms or processes you put in place to get people to do the right thing when you’re not there, and to guide them, you need to give them specific instructions and connect them to the big picture. That could be having a real commitment to a clear underlying mission. To me, it’s usually things like making people CEOs, giving them clear hills to take and getting out of their way before holding them accountable.

If you hire people and you’re going to delegate to them, you should challenge their assumptions but not their judgment. That means challenging them on what it means to do the job right, technically speaking, but giving them more leash when it comes to their opinions on what’s the right call. It’s fine to poke at all their assumptions, but if you get to a point where you don’t trust their judgment, then you should probably change them out.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at shopify.com/nbi

6. How ambitious are you?

Everyone will say it’s a ten out of ten until they consider the sacrifice that number implies. What if I told you that you could be successful beyond your wildest dreams, but you’d have to toil in obscurity for nine years and then have success in the tenth year, and you wouldn’t know you’d be successful until year ten? Most of us wouldn’t take that deal. We might take it if we knew we’d be successful in year ten, but most of us aren’t willing to go through ten years of wandering in the desert. But often, that’s what it takes to achieve massive success doing something nobody else believes in.

It’s okay if you’re not a ten out of ten on ambition. Some people just want to prove that they can create a successful product or business, and they want a first base hit and that’s good too, but being realistic about that upfront is going to make you more successful.

What would it mean to live at the speed of play?

Podcasting is lousy with guests who peddle advice about starting businesses, building careers, and living full lives. Few of these gurus have actually accomplished anything. Fewer still have advice that comes anywhere close to revelatory.

Mark Pincus is the rare exception.

The founder of 10 companies, Mark is best known for Zynga, the gaming juggernaut behind FarmVille and Words With Friends. At its peak, Zynga was valued at more than $12 billion and accounted for 20% of Facebook’s page views. It was so big, in fact, that Mark Zuckerberg once admitted to Mark Pincus, “Zynga is the only company that is capable of being an actual Facebook competitor.”

Across his 30-year career, Mark — Pincus, not Zuck — developed a cheat code for building products people love and living a life anyone would admire, and that cheat code winds its way through his new book, Life at the Speed of Play.

Today, he shares how he learned to trust his gut, why most founders build too much and test too little, and how failure taught him to move faster, pivot sooner, and search for real signals instead of hope.

Check out our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or watch it on YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

What if you could just do things?

The biggest obstacles to living the life you actually want aren’t usually external, they’re the stories, blind spots, and fears you’ve never learned to question. By seeking uncomfortable truths, tolerating rejection, and walking toward what feels most cringe-worthy, you can reclaim far more agency over your life than you realize.

Cate Hall is a writer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist whose career has spanned corporate law, professional poker—where she reached the top female ranking in the world—and nonprofit leadership, including serving as CEO of one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations. She has also spoken and written widely about agency, self-knowledge, and unconventional paths through life.

Pick up a copy of her new book, You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life, or check out her key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Human Raised by Dana Suskind, the New York Times bestselling author and University of Chicago pediatric surgeon. AI is poised to become one of the most powerful influences on childhood—but no algorithm can replace the human relationships that build a developing brain. Suskind offers a science-backed framework for using AI to strengthen, not substitute for, the messy, irreplaceable connection kids need to thrive. Adam Grant calls it “a stunning book about how to protect our children—and our humanity—in the age of AI.”

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

What can we learn from the failure of Hooters Airlines?

We treat failure as something to prevent at all costs. But failure is simply one possible outcome of anything worth doing. The real skill isn’t avoiding it, but recovering quickly when it comes.

These ideas come from How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks by Steve Kamb. Steve is the founder of Nerd Fitness, where since 2009 he has published research-backed essays and a weekly newsletter on failure, self-compassion, and making change that sticks. Read on for 5 of his big ideas. Pick up a copy of his new book on Amazon or listen to his big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Fora, a travel agency platform designed for entrepreneurs who want to build and scale their own travel business. Become a Fora Advisor today at foratravel.com/idea

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors get to celebrate the publication of their books today--congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

Jia Jiang, Easy Discipline: An Unconventional Way to Achieve Ambitious Things

Lauren Collins, They Stole a City: Wilmington's White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy

Dana Suskind, Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity & Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI

Roopika Risam, Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate

Lucy Schiller, Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old

The Big Idea: Authoritarianism doesn’t last because most people agree with it. It lasts because most people believe they’re alone. The antidote isn’t heroics. It’s trusting your gut when something feels wrong, finding others who feel it too, and discovering that a single voice can start a chain reaction.

Why It Matters: In 1989, months after communism fell in East Germany, pollsters asked residents if they’d seen the revolution coming. Only 5% had — including the very people who caused it. Change looks impossible right up until it feels inevitable. What flips the switch is ordinary: neighbors who know your name, a place to gather with people who share your values, one person willing to say the thing out loud first. Fifty years ago, half of Americans saw their neighbors regularly. Today it’s one in four — and that missing connection is exactly what makes people feel alone.

Try This Today: Think of one moment recently when something felt wrong but you stayed quiet. You probably weren’t the only one who noticed. Next time, find one other person who saw it too. That’s how the train leaves the station — one person starts running, then another, then everyone.

These ideas come from On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear by and Julia Angwin. Ami is a political strategist and former White House senior policy advisor and speechwriter. Julia is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and a regular columnist for the New York Times opinion section. Read on for 5 of their big ideas.

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1. Fighting back against authoritarianism begins with listening to your gut instinct.

We call the decision points that come from following your gut moral collisions. We heard about this kind of moment from a mild-mannered lawyer inside a federal agency who was asked to do things that he thought were profoundly unethical. We heard it from a longtime MAGA supporter who started to have doubts about the movement when the governor of his state started platforming anti-vaxxers during COVID.

All of us have these moments when we think, “This really doesn’t feel right, but if I speak out and dissent, then I’ll be at risk.” Maybe it’s financial security, maybe it’s social stature, maybe it’s something more serious, but because of what we’d have to put on the line, most of us don’t follow that voice. Most of us suppress the voice because it is the easier and more natural choice for human beings to make. It’s a survival instinct.

But surprisingly, people who were most effective at fighting back against authoritarianism—and even staying safe under it—were those who didn’t suppress that voice in their heads but followed it instead.

Authoritarian conditions can put us in oppositional terms. They can define us by who and what we are not, but the most effective dissent emerges from being clear about who you are, what you believe, and what your fundamental vision for the world is. Having that clarity doesn’t necessarily make things easier, but it makes your choices clearer and helps put the risks that you might take into their proper context.

2. Dissent becomes easier and more effective when we do it with others.

Almost never in our reporting for this book did we hear about truly solitary acts of dissent. The dissidents we spoke to here in the United States and all over the world were emboldened to take risks. They were empowered to fight back by surrounding themselves with people who could take those steps with them. Many of them described what we call a political home, meaning a place to regularly gather with other people who share their values, a place to process the dizzying events of the world and strategize about what to do next.

There is something a bit strange about the idea of a political home. Think about other kinds of crises that we experience in life. We have a whole social safety net. We have doctors in case of a health crisis. We have spiritual, social, or faith communities to turn to in a personal crisis, such as losing a job, the end of a relationship, or grieving a death. For most of us, it would be crazy to try getting through any of those crises on our own. But as the U.S. is living through a massive, long-lasting season of political crisis, most Americans don’t have a political safety net. Most Americans don’t have a core political community. It’s just not part of the box set of institutions that commonly make up daily life. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

“Most Americans don’t have a political safety net.”

People all over the world are repurposing their existing networks as instruments of political resistance. When the Trump administration started coercing universities into signing what were effectively political loyalty oaths, professors at universities across the country used their faculty associations—their academic senates—to push back. When the Israeli government banned displaying the Palestinian flag, or even the colors of the flag, in the occupied territories, Palestinian women repurposed their embroidery collectives into machines of civil resistance and started sewing symbols of Palestinian identity into the garments that they wore. And when ICE started rounding people up in communities across the country, groups of neighbors started using the networks that they had already built to keep people safe. Dissent becomes easier and more effective when we do it with others and when we expand the contours of our community.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Human Raised by Dana Suskind, the New York Times bestselling author and University of Chicago pediatric surgeon. AI is poised to become one of the most powerful influences on childhood—but no algorithm can replace the human relationships that build a developing brain. Suskind offers a science-backed framework for using AI to strengthen, not substitute for, the messy, irreplaceable connection kids need to thrive. Adam Grant calls it “a stunning book about how to protect our children—and our humanity—in the age of AI.”

3. The most important way to stay safe during authoritarianism isn’t some technical trick.

Having relationships with your neighbors is the most important way to stay safe during authoritarianism. Dissent can be dangerous. In an authoritarian environment, there are a lot of physical, psychological, and digital risks that come with dissent. It isn’t realistic to protect against every single one of those threats, but there are many ways to defend against the most likely ones.

When we asked people about staying safe, we expected to mostly get technical answers, and there are some technical things we can do. We can be cautious online. You can use encrypted technology to protect against surveillance. You can avoid sharing information with people you don’t really trust. But when we talked to dissidents about what helped them stay safe while advocating, we were surprised by how many of them pointed to their community.

During El Salvador’s Civil War, peasants in the countryside quietly organized to keep the rebels alive. Each household would contribute tortillas and water that they would carry through army checkpoints where, as one person remembers, “If they caught us it was death; they would cut off your head.” As we’ve seen in places like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, it’s always neighbors. It was a video captured by a neighbor that showed the world that a Tufts University graduate student had been taken off the street by ICE agents and gave America the first glimpse of the unprecedented ICE raids.

“Having relationships with your neighbors is the most important way to stay safe during authoritarianism.”

Data shows that these kinds of relationships are becoming rarer. Fifty years ago, almost half of Americans spent time with neighbors a few times a month, and today that number is barely one in four. That disconnect is a problem in an environment of growing daily stressors, from rising federal law enforcement presence to social welfare cuts, and for people who might be at heightened risk. An extra set of eyes and ears can be very important. People who know your needs, who have a sense of what your life is supposed to look like. When something goes wrong or something’s off, they can spot it.

4. There isn’t just one way to build a democratic movement.

Since the 2024 election and the assault on the tenets of constitutional democracy in America, a lot of concerned people in the U.S. have been inundated with theories about what will get us off the path of authoritarianism. There are political organizers who point to protests like the No Kings marches as the answer. There are others, like political strategists, who say that politicians should talk less about Trump’s civil rights offenses. Other strategists say it’s precisely those grievances that will drive outrage and push people to change their votes.

What we found is that coming back from the brink of autocracy and turning around democratic backsliding requires using every possible tool. The most important thing is to bring more people into the fight. Unlikely coalitions have coalesced not around specific policy proposals but around the idea of defeating a shared enemy. Growing our circles and our movements is like a long argument we’re making through the stories we tell, the pressure we create, and the strategic bridges we build.

5. One person’s dissent can start a chain reaction.

In repressive authoritarian environments, dissent is often a lot more widespread than it appears, but people are afraid to be the first person to say the thing out loud.

In 1989, a few months after communism collapsed in East Germany, a poll of residents asked: A year ago, did you see a peaceful revolution coming? Did you predict that there would be this massive, nonviolent social movement that would sweep the communist regime out of power? Of all the people polled, only five percent had seen it coming. That’s remarkable because those were the people who caused the revolution. Even they didn’t know it was coming. Even they didn’t know the seedlings existed.

“Of all the people polled, only five percent had seen it coming.”

There’s a concept in political science called a belief cascade, when many people privately disagree with a regime or feel that something is wrong, but they stay silent because they think they’re alone. Suddenly, somebody speaks up, which makes it easier for someone else to speak up, and then somebody else, and before you know it, the thing that once felt impossible starts to feel inevitable.

We saw this dynamic play out repeatedly, not just in the Soviet Union but all over the world. Hearing dissent in a repressive society is like standing in a train station when somebody suddenly starts running, and then another person starts running, and then everyone is running. And then even if you didn’t hear an announcement over the loudspeaker that the train was coming, you start running too. That’s how dissent spreads. That’s how democratic movements start—by showing people that the train is leaving the station and that nobody wants to miss it.

The Big Idea: We treat failure as something to prevent at all costs. But failure is simply one possible outcome of anything worth doing. The real skill isn’t avoiding it, but recovering quickly when it comes.

Why It Matters: When a gym routine collapses or a goal falls apart, it feels like you’re back at square one. But you’re not. You still know where the gym is, what didn’t work last time, which hours you’ll never stick to. When you’re overwhelmed, doing less on purpose isn’t giving up, it’s staying in the game.

Try This Today: Next time you feel behind on a goal, don’t ask how far you have to go. Ask “What needs to happen today to show I haven’t given up yet?” One walk, one healthy meal, one small rep — that’s enough to stay on track.

These ideas come from How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks by . Steve is the founder of Nerd Fitness, where since 2009 he has published research-backed essays and a weekly newsletter on failure, self-compassion, and making change that sticks. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

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1. Failure is one possible outcome for anything worth doing.

In 2023, I visited the touring Museum of Failure, packed with history’s most famous failures, flops, and frauds. Wandering around this museum was an absolute delight, as I got to see some truly baffling decisions. The Hula Chair worked more like a medieval torture device than a fitness product. King Gustav II of Sweden commissioned a comically expensive military warship that sank to the bottom of the harbor 50 minutes into its celebratory voyage. However, my favorite failure on display was probably Hooters Airlines. Yes, that Hooters.

If you ever feel like a failure for not making wiser decisions, just imagine how many people had to agree with the following statement: “We got rich making chicken wings; how hard could it be to run a profitable airline?”

The more failures I encountered, the more I came to understand failure differently. This museum didn’t only exist to poke fun at bad inventions. I mean, it did that too. I’m still laughing about Hooters Air. But it also showed the ways in which failure was one of many possible outcomes, and no company was immune to failed initiatives. In fact, most of the world’s most successful companies were on display too. Nintendo and the Virtual Boy, Microsoft and its Zune MP3 player, even Apple, whose Pippin videogame console was such a flop that I, proud nerd gamer, had never heard of it.

Interestingly, there were many products on display that were simply casualties of poor timing: early chatbots, multifunctional cell phones, personal digital assistants, and the first digital camera back in the 1970s that Kodak never released for fear of it cannibalizing their sales of physical film! The vision was there, as was the ambition, and once technology finally caught up, the road had been paved for companies to achieve far greater success.

“Rather than trying to prevent failure, we can instead decide to embrace it as a possibility and focus on recovering quickly after failure.”

We need to reframe how we think about failure. Rather than trying to prevent failure, we can instead decide to embrace it as a possibility and focus on recovering quickly after failure. Ed Catmull, one of the founders of the animation studio Pixar, said it best “Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.”

Many of the best rewards in life are only available to those willing to open themselves up to failure as a possibility. Our biggest success might be hiding behind our next failure, so let’s see what can happen when we embrace failure openly. Even if that failure is Hooters Air.

2. We never go back to “square one.”

No matter how far backward we’ve fallen after a setback, we never truly start over. Let’s say we tried to build a workout routine last year. We went to the gym a few times and then gave up. We’re demoralized that we’ve gone all the way back to “square one.”

Fortunately, we’ve also learned the most difficult parts! After all, going to the gym isn’t one decision. It’s multiple decisions. We had to research which one to join, find parking, and then go through the sign-up process. We had to learn where the locker room was, how the equipment worked, and where to fill up our water bottle. And then we had to find the courage to exercise in public. Most importantly, we had to do all of this within the confines of our busy lives. Just getting to “I went to the gym” takes a ton of mental bandwidth, effort, and courage.

So sure, we might be starting over with how much we can lift on the bar or how fast we can walk, but every past attempt is still with us. We know where the gym is. We know where to park. We know how the equipment works. We know what to wear. We’ve already navigated the toughest parts.

Furthermore, our hard-earned past failures might help us avoid the pitfalls we fell into last time. We learned what type of workout or routine didn’t work for us. Or what time of working out doesn’t work for us. That knowledge lets us use our precious energy to hopefully make it further on this next attempt. When viewed through this lens, each failure is not a step backward, but a step forward. We should be thankful for our past attempts, because they got us where we are today. Failure isn’t the end, but the beginning.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Human Raised by Dana Suskind, the New York Times bestselling author and University of Chicago pediatric surgeon. AI is poised to become one of the most powerful influences on childhood—but no algorithm can replace the human relationships that build a developing brain. Suskind offers a science-backed framework for using AI to strengthen, not substitute for, the messy, irreplaceable connection kids need to thrive. Adam Grant calls it “a stunning book about how to protect our children—and our humanity—in the age of AI.”

3. Treading water isn’t the opposite of progress; it’s the next best thing.

When we think about moving toward a goal, the first word we think of is “progress.” And boy, do we humans love progress. It makes us feel good! Seeing positive movement toward a goal gives us that warm, fuzzy feeling and a sense of control that we are making things better. And when we are not making progress? We feel like we’re falling behind. We feel “stuck.”

However, there’s an important third option we’re not considering. The opposite of progress isn’t stagnation or staying still. It’s “regress.” Moving backward. Away from our goal. When we find ourselves struggling, our inclination is to try again, but harder. Trying again or working harder might be the wrong move, especially if we’re trying again at the wrong thing, and we might be making things worse. So, compared to those options, “treading water” can be the best, most optimal decision. Allowing ourselves to do less is more than just okay. It can be life-preserving.

“Allowing ourselves to do less is more than just okay.”

When we feel weighed down with the pressure that we’re so far behind or that we’re not doing enough, we can pause. We can realize that what might feel like a “motivation” problem is actually a “resources” problem. We’re asking too much of ourselves, and we’re going to burn ourselves trying to continue doing it all. We need to redefine what “enough” is for us.

Instead of worrying about how much farther we need to go on a goal, or how far behind we feel, we can ask, “What needs to happen today to show I haven’t given up yet?” We can remind ourselves that an “all or nothing” mentality quickly becomes “all, then nothing.” In between those two extremes, “some” is a perfectly acceptable amount. And “some” can keep us afloat for a long time. One healthy meal, a single exercise, a five-minute walk reminds us that we’re still here, and still afloat. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

4. Acceptance isn’t giving up. It’s the only way forward.

No matter how much we want to have control of our future, we’ll never be able to accurately predict what life will throw at us next week, let alone next month or next year. Which leaves us with two choices. We can spend all day raging at the universe when things don’t go the way they should, or we can get to work on accepting things as they are now. We can get mad at ourselves for not magically developing the skills to plan better, or we can learn that life is going to remain chaotic and never go according to plan.

This requires acceptance. As a recovering overachiever, I used to believe that acceptance was a sign of weakness. I thought it meant giving up all ambition, letting myself off the hook, and enabling lazy behavior. So, I made things worse instead: I set ridiculously high standards and remained unbelievably critical of myself, always felt behind, and never felt “enough.”

Fortunately, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Acceptance is the only way we can finally start to see reality for what it is. We can stop waiting for “next week to get back to normal,” and accept that our life right now, warts and all, is normal. We can stop getting frustrated when our schedule falls apart and start expecting it. We can prepare for our plan not going according to plan. The sooner we accept that our current “normal,” with clothes on the floor and life being messy, is normal, the sooner we can choose to act differently.

Acceptance is the only way we can function in a world that feels contradictory, because it lets us embrace those contradictions. What’s the best way to do that? By practicing “yes and” thinking. Yes, we accept that life is challenging right now, and we have some real limitations. Here’s where we’re focusing our efforts today: on things we can control.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Northwest Registered Agent. They’ve been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/nbifree

5. Don’t just ask, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Make sure you like juice.

I love watching documentaries about amazing things I have absolutely no desire to do. My heart skipped two beats watching the Academy Award–winning documentary Free Solo about climber Alex Honnold scaling “El Cap” in Yosemite National Park without a safety rope. I’ll stick with my safe indoor rock-climbing walls, thank you.

Unfortunately, that reasonable mentality does not apply when I learn about things I kind of want to do, or think I could do, or think I should do. This is where I get myself into trouble. It’s unsexy to accept that success in anything requires sacrifices in other areas of life, and just because somebody else is doing it, and doing it well, doesn’t mean it’s the right path for me.

“When we see someone who has what we think we want, it’s tempting to assume they have found the one correct path and are living a blissful life without any problems.”

We humans are social creatures. We love learning how to be successful, happy, or healthy by copying others who we hope have all the answers. When we see someone who has what we think we want, it’s tempting to assume they have found the one correct path and are living a blissful life without any problems. That’s what the folks selling us the dream want us to believe, anyway. As long as we live like them, and buy their product or service, we can be successful too. No compromises required!

This is where we must be careful. When we take our life, motivations, and expectations, and compare them to others who are playing with a different scorecard, we forget that everything has a cost attached to it. We see a financially successful entrepreneur telling us to rise and grind. We don’t see that person working late nights at the office to avoid their family (because they are fighting with their spouse), their deep insecurities, or the void they’re trying to fill with just making more money. The truth is that we can never truly know what’s going on in somebody else’s life, especially when we only see their public-facing highlight reel.

Everything has a cost attached to it, and the cost of chasing greatness or trying to reach an arbitrary level of success might require more sacrifices than you or I are willing to make. That’s okay! I like it when people are honest about it. When the Smartless podcast hosts asked Ken Burns, arguably the most accomplished documentarian alive, how he manages to be so prolific and still keep a healthy work-life balance, he replied, “You’ll have to ask my two ex-wives about that.”

There’s nothing wrong with admitting to ourselves that we don’t want to do the work and make the sacrifices for the chance at succeeding. The problem isn’t that we lack the required dedication. It’s that we have the expectation that we should have that dedication or be willing to make those sacrifices. It’s perfectly okay that we don’t want those things, or that we’re not willing to go down that path.

We shouldn’t forget to ask, “What if this works?” When we encounter videos, interviews, or success stories, we can pause and challenge our thoughts. Instead of only asking, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” we should also ask, “Do I even want juice?”

The Big Idea: For all of human history, one thing was certain: children were raised by humans. But that assumption may not hold much longer, as tech infiltrates the classroom, the playroom, and even the nursery, where “smart cribs” are now a thing. It’s time to re-assess the importance of human connection in child-raising before it becomes a relic.

Why It Matters: The first five years of life is when the brain gets wired for future learning, and exposure to some kinds of tech can interfere with this crucial development. Learning how and when to expose our children to AI is becoming a crucial element of modern parenting.

These ideas come from Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity, and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI by Dana Suskind. Dana is a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon and social scientist at the University of Chicago, co-founder of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health, and the New York Times bestselling author of Thirty Million Words and Parent Nation. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

1. Never lose HOPE.

At the heart of Human Raised is a set of four guiding principles that I call the HOPE framework. It’s designed not so much as a rigid rulebook, but as a constellation of guiding lights to help parents make decisions about AI that align with what science tells us about healthy child development.

H: Human Connection is Irreplaceable. The developing brain is wired for interaction with other people. Eye contact, shared laughter, and the nurturing back-and-forth conversations between a child and a loving caregiver activate ancient neural circuits that no algorithm, however sophisticated, can replicate.

O: Own the Imperfections. Children don’t grow through perfect responsiveness. They grow through mismatches and repairs. When a parent missteps and then reconnects or when a child struggles with a sibling or disagrees with a friend, those moments of productive friction forge resilience, emotional regulation, and problem-solving capacity. Frictionless AI companions may seem appealing, but friction makes us human.

P: Protect the Early Years. Older children encounter AI with already-built neural scaffolding. Young children are still wiring the circuits that will govern all future learning and relationships. Introducing AI during this sensitive period presents a fundamentally different set of risks than doing so later in childhood.

E: Enhance, Don’t Replace Adult-Child Interaction. Tools that lighten parental burdens or deepen understanding can be genuinely beneficial. But when AI begins to replace core human interaction—when it stops being a co-pilot and becomes the pilot—parents gamble with consequences that are both unknown and potentially irreversible.

The HOPE framework is also a reminder that parents have inherent wisdom, and they should rely on it to navigate this rapidly shifting landscape.

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2. Mind the social gate.

For the first time in human history, artificial entities have learned the passcodes to our most fundamental developmental gatekeeper. For millions of years, the infant brain’s social gate—the neural architecture that determines what experiences shape a child’s development—opened only for other humans. It was evolution’s way of ensuring that the most formative influences on a developing mind came from humans who could ensure that child’s survival.

Today, sophisticated AI systems and social robots have mastered the cues that open that gate. They can make eye contact, respond contingently, display emotional expressions, and engage in the back-and-forth dance that tells an infant brain: pay attention, this interaction matters.

Research shows that infants as young as six to eight months display physiological responses to robots that parallel their reactions to humans. Two-year-olds will mimic a robot’s failed attempts at a task—but only if the robot first establishes eye contact, mirroring exactly the social conditions required for human teaching. AI has not just entered the nursery; it has, in a very real neurological sense, entered the developmental process itself.

The danger is compounded by the extraordinary plasticity of the early years. What flows through the social gate during the first five years shapes the architecture of the human mind: the neural pathways formed, the attachment patterns established, the social expectations encoded during this period become the foundation for all future learning and relating. That’s why the intersection of AI and early childhood is the most important conversation we’re not having.

3. Find your Goldilocks zone of attachment.

Drawing on the foundational work of attachment experts like John Bowlby, I write about three core functions that a caregiver-child bond must fulfill to be secure:

• Proximity to Protection: the primal drive that makes an infant’s cry impossible to ignore and ensures access to nourishment and safety.

• A Secure Base for Exploration: the emotional foundation that allows a child to venture into the world knowing they can return to safety.

• Emotional Co-regulation: the thousands of soothing interactions that a child gradually internalizes, building neural architecture for lifelong emotional resilience.

Attachment is a spectrum. At one extreme lies insecure attachment, the product of inconsistent caregiving—a parent who is warm one moment, absent or harsh the next. At the other extreme is the risk for artificial attachment—a developmental hazard when a child’s relational expectations are shaped primarily by the flawless, endlessly patient responses of AI. These children may learn to expect instant gratification and perfect understanding, leaving them ill-equipped for the beautifully imperfect reality of human relationships. They may develop a preference for AI interaction and an intolerance for the messiness of genuine human connection.

In the middle lies the Goldilocks zone: secure attachment, which is built through consistent yet imperfect human caregiving. This is the “just right”—not too cold, not artificially perfect, but warm and real, with misunderstandings that get repaired and tensions that get resolved.

4. AI is like ultra-processed food.

Whole-wheat bread, canned beans, and frozen vegetables are processed, but they remain nourishing. Ultra-processed food is categorically different: it’s specifically engineered to override satiety signals, maximize consumption, and displace real nutrition. Human metabolism, which evolved during millennia of scarcity, is essentially defenseless against these products.

I see a direct parallel to the AI landscape. Some AI tools are the whole-wheat bread equivalent: technologies that help a parent understand a child’s sleep patterns or offer an overwhelmed teacher room to breathe. These support human connection without displacing it. But other technologies are the ultra-processed variety: systems engineered to erase natural stopping points, override the rhythms of boredom and curiosity, and smooth away friction.

The developmental parallel is uncanny. Just like a child raised on hyper-palatable food may struggle to enjoy an ordinary apple, a child raised on frictionless technology may struggle with the slower, messier pace of real life, like the classroom that doesn’t adapt to their every whim, the friend who pushes back, or the exhausted parent who can’t compete with YouTube. It took decades to understand what ultra-processed foods were doing to our bodies. We can’t afford that same lag time when the developing brain is at stake.

5. Channel your inner DETECT-ive.

Without practical frameworks for applying these insights, parents will still feel like they’re walking through a maze without a map. Every new toy, app, and educational tool in the maze may carry hidden developmental costs. So, I created a six-question framework for evaluating specific AI systems. It’s called DETECT:

• D: Design — What is this thing designed to do? Is it built for education, entertainment, or companionship?

• E: Ethics — Was this product ethically trained? Does the training data represent diverse backgrounds, abilities, and communication styles, or does it embed biases that will be invisibly transmitted to your child?

• T: Trouble — Are there signs of troubling unintended consequences? Have other children been harmed by this tool in ways marketing doesn’t mention?

• E: Evidence — Is there independent evidence it works? Is there research beyond the company’s own claims that supports the product’s advertised benefits?

• C: Confidentiality — How will my child’s data be stored and used? Will it remain confidential, and who profits from it?

• T: Teachings — What is this system likely teaching my child — not just in its stated purpose, but in the values and expectations it encodes through repeated use?

Parents don’t need to become data scientists to use this. A surface-level scan will often surface enough red flags or enough confidence to make a call. And, of course, even a product that passes every DETECT question with flying colors is never required. The ultimate question is not whether the technology is good, but whether it genuinely enhances your family’s well-being in ways that justify its presence in your home.

Why It Matters: See sex as gene-mixing rather than reproduction, and the tidy binary falls apart. Some mammals have no Y chromosome. The platypus has ten sex chromosomes. One common mushroom has 23,000 mating types. Nature didn’t design one clean system, it improvised thousands.

These ideas come from On the Origin of Sex: The Weird and Wonderful Science of Reproduction by Lixing Sun. Lixing is a Distinguished Research Professor at Central Washington University and a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard University. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

1. Sex isn’t about babies—it’s about mixing genes.

Most of us think we know what sex is for. It makes babies. End of story. But that’s only half right, and not even the interesting half.

If reproduction were the whole point, evolution had already nailed it billions of years ago. Single-celled organisms do it faster with far less effort. They just copy themselves. No partner. No courtship. No awkward morning after.

So why bother with sex? Because sex isn’t mainly about making babies. It’s about mixing genes. Think of your genome as a deck of cards. If you just copy it every generation, you keep dealing the same hand. The good cards stay stuck with the bad ones. Evolution can’t separate them.

Sex shuffles the deck. It breaks up old combinations and builds new ones. Good genes can escape bad neighborhoods. Harmful mutations can be flushed out. And every now and then, the shuffle produces a winning hand. That’s the real power of sex: not reproduction, but variation.

And variation is evolution’s raw material. It’s what allows life to adapt, outrun parasites, survive environmental change, and over time, generate the astonishing diversity of life, from microbes to large mammals. Babies are just the byproduct. The real game is reshuffling the genetic deck. And evolution is the dealer.

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2. We’ve been misunderstanding biological sex.

Ask what determines biological sex and most people give the same answer: chromosomes, gonads, genitals—XX or XY, ovaries or testes, female or male. It sounds clean. Almost reassuring. But biology is rarely that tidy. Across nature, these traits don’t always line up. Some mammals don’t even have a Y chromosome. The platypus carries ten sex chromosomes. In the spotted hyena, females look strikingly male, even having a pseudo-penis. Female European moles develop ovotestes—part ovary, part testis. In numerous reptiles, sex is determined not by genes, but by temperature.

“Biology is rarely that tidy.”

So, what exactly is sex? The usual definitions focus on visible traits. But those are just surface features—outputs of an adaptive system that doesn’t always follow a single script. Biologists use a more fundamental definition: sex is about gamete size. Small gametes are sperm. Large ones are eggs. That’s the core divide. Everything else (chromosomes, hormones, anatomy) typically lines up with this. But “typically” is doing a lot of work. Because once development begins, things get complicated. Modern molecular biology shows that many dozens of interacting genes shape sexual development in mammals alone. Variation isn’t a rare exception. It’s built into the system.

So, the problem isn’t biology. It’s oversimplification in our understanding. Sex is simple in appearance, but astonishingly complex in how it unfolds. What we learned as a neat binary is a dynamic and surprisingly diverse biological process, one that science is still catching up to understand.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is Human Raised by Dana Suskind, the New York Times bestselling author and University of Chicago pediatric surgeon. AI is poised to become one of the most powerful influences on childhood—but no algorithm can replace the human relationships that build a developing brain. Suskind offers a science-backed framework for using AI to strengthen, not substitute for, the messy, irreplaceable connection kids need to thrive. Adam Grant calls it "a stunning book about how to protect our children—and our humanity—in the age of AI."

3. Nature invented many versions of sex.

Beneath the familiar sex labels lies a complex developmental system. Now comes the bigger surprise: even that system is just one version among many.

Across the living world, sex takes forms that barely resemble our textbook picture of male and female. Take fungi. Many don’t have males and females at all. Their gametes are the same size. Instead of two sexes, they have multiple proto sexes formally known as mating types. The common mushroom you buy from a grocery store has 18 mating types. The split-gill mushroom has more than 23,000. It’s less like two sexes and more like a vast compatibility network.

In other species, sex isn’t fixed; it’s fluid. Some fish change sex during their lifetime. The clownfish is a classic case: the dominant individual becomes female, and when she dies, a male steps up and transforms. Sex follows social opportunity.

“Across the living world, sex takes forms that barely resemble our textbook picture of male and female.”

Then there are organisms that treat sex as optional. Aphids and water fleas clone themselves when conditions are good—fast, efficient, no partner required. But when the environment turns harsh, they switch back to sex, reshuffling their genes to hedge their bets.

Seen this way, sex is not a fixed category. It’s a flexible strategy. And once you connect this to the core idea from before—that sex is about mixing genes—the diversity suddenly makes sense. Evolution isn’t committed to one tidy design. It experiments. It improvises. It builds whatever system suited to pass on genes given the conditions. So, sex is not one thing. It’s a whole toolbox—different ways life has invented to mix genes, adapt, and thrive.

4. You don’t have to reproduce to pass on your genes.

We tend to think evolution rewards one thing: having children. More offspring, more success. Simple. But evolution is not that narrow. Take social insects like bees, ants, and wasps. In a colony, most individuals never reproduce at all. They spend their entire lives helping the queen produce offspring. At first glance, it looks like an evolutionary dead end. It’s not because they share genes with the queen. By helping her reproduce, they are passing on copies of their own genes. This idea—called kin selection—broadens the logic of evolution. Success isn’t just about individuals. It’s about genes finding ways to persist.

Once you see this, many biological puzzles fall into place. Why some individuals forgo reproduction. Why cooperation among relatives is so common. And this doesn’t stop with insects; it’s in many social animals as well. In humans, not everyone has children. But people invest heavily in siblings, nieces, nephews, and extended families. Those efforts can still carry shared genes into the next generation. So, the real question isn’t just, “Did you reproduce?” It’s, “Did your genes make it forward?”

Passing on genes without direct reproduction opens the door to understanding why a wide range of traits, including intersex variation and same-sex preferences, can persist in nature. Not as anomalies, but as part of a broader system in which genes have multiple pathways to survive and spread.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at shopify.com/nbi

5. Why beauty still rules us.

Why do beauty pageants exist? Why do people spend billions on cosmetic surgery? And why do looks shape so many opportunities? Part of the answer runs deep, back to evolution. In many species, one sex chooses, and the other competes to be chosen. The peacock grows an extravagant tail. Songbirds pour energy into elaborate performances. These displays are costly, even risky. But they work because they attract attention.

“In many species, one sex chooses, and the other competes to be chosen.”

Humans are no exception. We size up faces in seconds. And those snap judgments carry weight. Attractive people are often perceived as more capable, more trustworthy, and even more intelligent. They’re more likely to be hired, promoted, and paid more. Economists call this the beauty premium. The pattern has its own twists. For women, appearance often carries higher stakes. For men, height plays a similar role. Taller men, on average, are more likely to be seen as leaders and tend to earn more. This isn’t about ability. It’s about perception.

From an evolutionary view, these preferences are not random. They trace back to mate choice. Traits that signal health, status, or reproductive potential tend to be favored, and those biases can spill over into everyday decisions. But what began as biology is now amplified by culture. Media magnifies it. Industries monetize it. Technology edits and filters it. We end up in a feedback loop: biology sets the stage; culture turns up the volume.

Beauty feels natural. But it’s not neutral. It’s an ancient signal that has been reshaped, exaggerated, and broadcast in a modern world.

What if saving the planet could be fun?

Despite decades of urgency and alarm, progress on climate change has felt frustratingly slow. What if we’ve been going about it all wrong? Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying “JZ” Zhao think there’s a missing ingredient in the conversation: joy.

In their new book, Leave the Lights On, Liz and JZ draw on psychology, behavioral science, and sustainability research to argue that the most effective climate solutions aren’t rooted in guilt, fear, or self-denial. They’re rooted in easy choices that also make your life better.

Today on the show: why doom-and-gloom messaging backfires, what bacon dipped in maple syrup has to do with saving the planet, how buying more underwear might just protect our species, and why the choices that help most are also the ones that make us happier.

Check out our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or watch it on YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

How can your life be more gratifying?

We’ve become so focused on happiness and efficiency that we’ve forgotten how to enjoy the ordinary physical world. Gratification is everywhere—you just have to notice it. is a professor of computer science and engineering, film and media studies, and art and design at Washington University in St. Louis. A contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of eleven books, he explores how technology, media, and the ordinary objects of everyday life shape our experiences. Pick up a copy of his new book, The Small Stuff or check out his key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

What is your job for?

We’ve been taught to dream of jobs when what we’re really looking for is validation, purpose, and a lifestyle we actually enjoy. Getting ahead at work has a lot less to do with finding the perfect role and a lot more to do with knowing what you want, making your value visible, and remembering that your job is just what you do—not who you are.

Emily Durham, also known as Emily the Recruiter on social media, is a recruiter-turned-career coach with an audience of over three million people across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and her podcast. Pick up a copy of her new book Clock In: No-BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career (Without Losing Your Mind) on Amazon or listen to her big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Fora, a travel agency platform designed for entrepreneurs who want to build and scale their own travel business. Become a Fora Advisor today at foratravel.com/idea

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors get to celebrate the publication of their books today--congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

Thomas Moore, The Cure at Walden Pond: A Guide to Recovering Our Humanity

Karen Korellis Reuther, Man-Made: How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out, and How We Can Make It Right

Laura Mayer, Tryhard: A Cautionary Tale of Clocking In and Spinning Out

Stephanie Romiszewski, Think Less, Sleep More: From Panic & Perfectionism to Stress-Free Sleep

Ian Bogost, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life

The Big Idea: For most of history, old age was rare. Now it’s the norm, and that has reshaped who holds power, wealth, and opportunity in America. Without ever deciding to, we recreated humanity’s oldest political system: rule by elders.

Why It Matters: Americans under 40 hold less than 5 percent of the nation’s wealth. Those over 54 hold nearly 72 percent. The median primary voter is about 65. Our social contract was written for a world with far fewer old people and it’s due for a rewrite.

Try This Today: Look up the ages of your representative, your senators, and your mayor. Does the distribution of power look anything like the population it serves?

These ideas come from Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It by Samuel Moyn. Sam is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, cohost of the Digging a Hole podcast, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

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1. Our deaths have been postponed.

You know the old song that says that only the good die young? Well, almost everyone in the United States—and in most other countries—dies old, whether they’re good or bad. With this extension of life, there are now political consequences.

It is revolutionary that most of us live long lives. There have always been old people, just not so many. A Psalm of the Bible says you get 70 or 80 years if you’re lucky, and that’s still basically true. We don’t know if the average can be pushed higher, though there are always some super agers in every generation. The novelty is that so many are living in old age.

Élie Metchnikoff was a Russian-born Nobel Prize winner in medicine who coined the term gerontology. He went on a trip to find aging Bulgarian shepherds who he thought knew the secret of long life. He assumed it was because they ate yogurt, which was first widely eaten in Southeastern Europe before it conquered our food ways, too. He went on to counsel that if you had your large intestine removed, you could survive even longer. He didn’t do it and died at 71 of heart failure, but a Scottish surgeon did try that tactic.

Our societies, thanks to contributions of life extenders, are now very different than past societies. In 1920, only five million Americans were 65 or older, which was less than five percent of the population. Now there are nearly 60 million, and that’s about 17 percent of the population.

2. Getting older means accumulating power.

Most people in most places for most of history have been governed by old men. Probably the central political institution that humans have devised to rule themselves is the council of elders. Even our sci-fi commonly includes them as a governing body. In The Matrix movie series, there’s a council of elders in the last human city, Zion. In the Superman comic books, there is a council of elders on the foreign planet that Clark Kent comes from.

There have been councils of elders throughout human history all over the world. The most famous is the Roman Senate, which influenced the founders of the United States. In American politics, the upper chamber of our legislature is called the Senate, which means the “chamber for old men.” Gerontocracy, rule by elders, is a blast from the past that we’ve reinvented thanks to the extension of life.

“Most people in most places for most of history have been governed by old men.”

Old-school gerontocracy was just about putting elders—the ones closest to our ancestors—in charge, very openly. In the modern world, power consists of getting elected and serving in political office, but that means the citizens doing the voting are in power, and our voters are getting older. In the modern world too, power means having money, including to pay for those candidates in elections. And our money in America is old.

3. How old are our politicians and voters?

Everyone knows that our presidents (especially the last two) are up there in years. In fact, they’re the oldest ever elected. And yet, it’s really in Congress where there are so many aging politicians, including ones even older than Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

The risk isn’t just cognitive decline but death on the job, which can have big consequences. The same is true in the judiciary, where Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away at an advanced age with a lot of implications, including for abortion rights.

But everyone knows that we’ve got a problem in the United States with aging politicians. More deeply, and maybe more disturbingly, is how old the voting population is. The median age of Americans eligible to vote is 48 and rising, but actual voters are 52. If we exclude presidential elections, in which more people vote across generations, the median age of voters rises to about 55 or 56, and for some primaries, the median age is about 65. In New Mexico in 2024, the median age of voters was 71. Our voting population is heavily skewed toward older age groups.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

4. Who is wealthy in terms of money, employment, and housing?

We expect people to accumulate more as they age, but it was long expected that they would spend it at the end of their lives. But that’s not happening. The sheer proportion of our wealth that the aged control has reached staggering proportions.

In 2019, Americans under 40 (about 37 percent of the population) held only 4.9 percent of our wealth. Those over 54 (the same percentage of people) held 71.6 percent of the wealth. And it’s not just money. People are staying in jobs, whether that’s to make ends meet or because they want to, and that is creating pipeline and succession issues across many fields.

The best-funded lobby in world history is the American old folks’ lobby, the AARP. It successfully lobbied to end mandatory retirement. The consequences have been immense. Whether you look at CEOs or university professors, only a few professions like air traffic controllers or pilots are time-limited and age-limited. Supreme Court justices certainly aren’t. In fact, the Constitution says it can’t be age-limited.

“The best-funded lobby in world history is the American old folks’ lobby, the AARP.”

Then we look at housing, and an astonishing percentage of American housing stock is controlled by older people. That means our cities are graying because younger people, especially younger people with expensive families, can’t move into urban cores. Our whole lives together are being refashioned due to the aging of American society.

5. There’s hope for intergenerational rethinking.

I’m not against old people. I like them. I’m 54 years old, so, as my daughters always tell me, I’m one of them. And like everyone, I want to live as long as I can and enjoy the life I’ve been given for as long as I can. The question is about what’s fair.

In the U.S., we don’t have a very good welfare state for older people, especially when it comes to long-term care. Most people hoard or stash so many resources because they fear not having enough to live the very long lives that we now live. Of course, there are others who can’t imagine retiring because they’ve invested so much of their self-worth in their jobs and people are in love with the places where they live, their houses, even when others need those spaces.

There are many solutions for folks to consider. I’m trying to start a conversation, not end it. Whether it’s the age of politicians, the aging of the electorate, or the aging of wealth, I’ve got a list of possible fixes. It’s time to reimagine our social contract in a new situation in which there are so many more old people living so much longer.

The Big Idea: Therapy was designed to be something you graduate from, a tool for building agency to run your own life. But modern therapy culture has quietly inverted that mission: endless self-understanding has become a substitute for actual change, and a treatment meant to produce independence too often produces dependency instead.

Why It Matters: Therapy has never been more accessible, accepted, or destigmatized, and yet anxiety and depression rates remain stubbornly high. Meanwhile, clinical vocabulary has escaped the clinic: ordinary friction gets labeled “toxic”, and disappointing exes become “narcissists”. When every discomfort reads as damage, people get worse at the one skill mental health actually requires: moving through difficulty.

Try This Today: Take one conflict that’s been bothering you and ask the question good therapy always asks: What part might I be playing in this pattern? Sit with the answer before labeling the other person.

These ideas come from Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided by Jonathan Alpert. Jonathan is a psychotherapist with two decades of clinical experience whose analysis has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, and NBC Nightly News, and in The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

1. The rise of forever therapy.

More than a decade ago, I wrote a New York Times op-ed, “In Therapy Forever? Enough Already.” The argument was simple: therapy, as it was increasingly being practiced, was not helping patients move forward. In many cases, it kept them stuck.

I remember one new patient who captured the problem clearly. He had been in therapy for several years and was beginning to question whether it was helping. When he asked his therapist about spacing out sessions or trying a different approach, the response was immediate: “If you stop seeing me, you’ll get depressed.”

That wasn’t clinical judgment. It was a warning. And it worked.

What he had been offered as care had quietly become dependency. The message was not “you’re getting stronger.” It was “you can’t function without me.” That kind of framing doesn’t build resilience. It undermines it.

After hearing that story, and many others like it, it became difficult to ignore what was happening inside my own profession. A model of therapy that should have been oriented toward independence was, in too many cases, reinforcing reliance. Patients weren’t being helped to move through their problems. They were being conditioned to return to them, week after week.

From where I sat, this wasn’t a marginal issue. It was a shift in the culture of therapy itself. And in some cases, it wasn’t just failing to help people. It was making them worse.

That article served as inspiration for Therapy Nation. In the decade since it was published, the problems have only grown worse. Therapy has gone mainstream, becoming more culturally accepted, less stigmatized, and more widely accessible than ever before—all of which should have been good news. And yet, rates of anxiety and depression remained stubbornly high. The point of good therapy is to achieve growth, agency, and strength—not to endlessly dwell on our past and stay stuck. Somewhere along the way, therapy had become one of the only services people kept returning to without demanding results.

The pattern was familiar: patients would go in each week, vent about their frustrations, feel temporary relief, and return the next week to do it all over again. They felt better walking out of the office, only to fall back into the same arguments, avoidance, indecision, resentment, or fear as soon as real life resumed. The next session became another chance to unload rather than an opportunity to learn how to change anything.

“The point of good therapy is to achieve growth, agency, and strength.”

People began confusing length of treatment with depth, mistaking hours spent talking for proof that real change must be happening somewhere beneath the surface. While sessions continued, relationships went unaddressed, decisions were postponed, and ambitions stalled. The years people believed they were “working on themselves” were often the years they stopped fully living. The longer someone stayed in treatment, the harder it became to ask the most obvious question: Is this actually helping?

In some circles, long-term therapy has become a badge of sophistication, a signal of emotional seriousness and self-awareness. But sounding psychologically literate is not the same thing as growing. Endless introspection had taken on a kind of moral prestige that had little to do with actual change. And perhaps the most striking paradox: people became increasingly fluent in describing their own patterns, yet still avoided the hard conversation, the difficult decision, the necessary risk. Insight had become a substitute for change rather than a catalyst for it.

My critique of forever therapy had widened into an examination of how a therapeutic mindset was reshaping the culture itself, shaping how Americans argued, parented, dated, worked, and even voted. People increasingly approached ordinary life the way some long-term patients approached treatment: every setback needed interpretation, every difficult feeling demanded a backward search for origins.

That paradox became the foundation of Therapy Nation: how did a tool designed to restore agency weaken it? The answer lies in a culture that increasingly prefers endless understanding to difficult changes. Once that preference became normalized, forever therapy stopped being a clinical concern and became a national norm.

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2. How training programs lost the plot.

One of the most unsettling developments I’ve watched over the years is what’s happening inside therapy training itself. Graduate programs are increasingly producing not clinicians, but political activists with therapy licenses.

At its best, training demands that a therapist suspend judgment, resist the first satisfying explanation, and stay open to complexity. You are taught to be curious rather than certain, disciplined rather than reactive. To sit with a patient’s pain without immediately assigning blame. To challenge a narrative without abandoning compassion. That is what makes therapy work.

And it’s exactly what is now being lost. In too many places, students are taught a political lens before a clinical one, encouraged to interpret suffering first through identity, power, and oppression before ever examining agency, behavior, or the role a patient may be playing in the problem. Many young clinicians are primed to affirm rather than test, feeling compelled to view patients as either oppressed or oppressor, sorting by race, gender, and sexual orientation before they’ve fully understood the individual in front of them.

The therapist stops asking the most psychologically useful question: What part might you be playing in this pattern? And instead, begins reinforcing ready-made explanations that flatter the patient’s first interpretation. This robs therapy of its potential transformative power. Growth almost always requires some self-reckoning. It means asking whether our narratives are accurate, whether our grievances are exaggerated, and whether we are using ready-made explanations to avoid looking at our own patterns.

The profession has stopped asking: What is happening in your life, and how can we help you move forward? Instead, it now begins with a different question: Where do you fit in the hierarchy of power and oppression? Therapists trained to see people primarily through social justice categories can begin sorting patients into boxes from the start. Once that happens, therapy risks reinforcing identity scripts instead of helping people examine their own patterns, blind spots, and responsibility.

“Growth almost always requires some self-reckoning.”

The habits taught in graduate programs don’t stay in the classroom. They shape how millions of people will eventually understand their own conflicts, relationships, and suffering. A generation of clinicians trained to sort before they listen, to affirm before they examine, will produce a generation of patients who never learn to question their own narratives. When a helping profession teaches people to see themselves first as categories rather than individuals, the larger culture eventually begins to do the same.

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3. When politics entered the therapy room.

Politics has always shaped people’s stress, anxieties, family dynamics, and sense of safety. But in recent years, I began noticing politics is becoming the primary language through which many interpret their emotional world. Patients came in describing family conflict, friendship ruptures, workplace tension, and marital strain, only for those experiences to be filtered almost immediately through a political lens. A painful holiday dinner, a strained conversation with a parent, or a friendship under stress became proof that the other person was toxic, unsafe, irredeemable, or psychologically disordered because of how they voted.

People began cutting parents, siblings, friends, and even adult children out of their lives over politics, and on national television, so-called mental health experts openly advised them to do it, turning estrangement into a form of therapeutic wisdom. In some cases, therapists themselves refused to treat patients simply because of who they had voted for. Family bonds, long friendships, and years of shared history were suddenly reduced to a vote cast in November, without asking why the disagreement felt so threatening, whether older wounds were being stirred up, or whether the conflict reflected something deeper than politics. What might once have been approached as conflict to understand and work through was now increasingly framed as a mental health necessity.

Universities rolled out counseling resources, group processing sessions, and wellness programming as though the ordinary shock of an election result had become a mental health emergency. That response helped teach people to interpret political disagreement as personal harm and ideological difference as emotional danger. In many places, the message was unmistakable: political disappointment was something people needed therapy for to survive.

Therapy should be one of the places that helps people build that capacity, not lose it. Once people learn to interpret distress through ideological sorting, they begin applying the same habit to marriages, workplaces, friendships, and family systems. We need to get back to a culture where neighbors can disagree politically and remain friends, and where family and friendship are strong enough to outlast any political cycle. The ability to tolerate disagreement, question first impressions, and resist turning every conflict into a moral referendum is essential for a functioning society. We are losing it.

4. How therapy-speak took over culture.

Therapy-speak has escaped the clinic and lost much of its meaning. Words like toxic, gaslighting, boundaries, trauma, and narcissism were developed as clinical tools. In everyday conversation and on social media, they’ve been weaponized, used to win arguments, avoid criticism, and cast ordinary conflict as abuse. The result is that ordinary life begins to feel more pathological than it really is, and people become more likely to interpret frustration, conflict, or personality differences as signs of diagnosis rather than normal human experience.

A disappointing friend is called toxic. A selfish ex becomes a narcissist. A misunderstanding at work turns into gaslighting. An uncomfortable request becomes a boundary violation. A painful memory becomes trauma. These words were originally useful because they described serious, specific patterns, but when they become shorthand for every unpleasant experience, they stop clarifying reality and start distorting it.

Once therapy-speak becomes the dominant way people narrate relationships, the threshold for what counts as ordinary friction is reduced dramatically. Everyday disagreement starts to feel dangerous. Ambiguity feels intolerable. Every conflict is problematic. There is something particularly corrosive about vocabulary that makes people feel more sophisticated while actually making them less accurate.

“Everyday disagreement starts to feel dangerous.”

Patients often arrive with polished stories already built around therapy-speak: they know who the villain is and have the vocabulary to frame themselves as harmed. Clinical language, when misused, gives people a sophisticated language for grievance without any framework for resolution. Once someone decides whether a friend is toxic or a partner is a narcissist, the label itself shuts down any alternative explanation. The conversation is over before it begins.

One of the clearest signs of this shift is how often the phrase “my therapist says” now functions as the ultimate conversation-ender. It gets repeated almost like a moral trump card, a way of shutting down disagreement by borrowing the authority of therapy itself. Part of what makes this language so seductive is that it offers immediate validation. But when a culture mistakes validation for progress, emotional comfort can quietly replace the harder work of self-examination.

The healthier use of psychological language is not to turn ordinary life into pathology, but to clarify genuine patterns that help people respond more effectively. Used carefully, these words can deepen insight and strengthen relationships. Used casually, they trap people inside distorted narratives and keep them stuck. Good therapy sharpens perception. Therapy culture, at its worst, can blur it.

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5. The pathologizing of ordinary life.

The final and perhaps deepest consequence of therapy culture is the way it has encouraged us to reinterpret ordinary life through the lens of pathology. Every generation has had language for suffering, but what feels different now is how quickly normal human experiences are elevated into symptoms, syndromes, or psychological injuries.

Everyday disappointment becomes trauma. A difficult boss becomes abusive. A moody teenager is labeled disordered. A breakup becomes evidence of emotional damage. Ordinary anxiety becomes proof that something is wrong. This shift may seem compassionate on the surface—and that’s precisely what makes it so costly.

The more we pathologize normal life, the less prepared people become to handle it. Life is filled with discomfort. Rejection, frustration, uncertainty, heartbreak, and criticism are not signs of dysfunction. They’re very much a part of life. They are also the raw materials from which resilience, maturity, and growth occur.

When culture teaches people to interpret these experiences primarily as threats to mental health, something essential begins to disappear: frustration tolerance. People become more vigilant toward discomfort and less willing to ask what discomfort might be teaching them. The issue is whether we are helping people become stronger in the face of life’s inevitable difficulties or whether we are unintentionally training them to experience more of life as dangerous.

“The more we pathologize normal life, the less prepared people become to handle it.”

Some of the most important capacities we develop as adults come from learning that we can survive what we do not like. We survive embarrassment. We survive disappointment. We survive being misunderstood, criticized, rejected, or uncertain about what comes next. Those experiences are how character is built. When therapy culture encourages people to monitor themselves too closely for signs of injury, it can accidentally make those ordinary experiences feel more destabilizing than they need to be.

Real mental health is not the absence of pain. It is the ability to move through pain and the ability to separate temporary discomfort from actual damage. The future of mental health depends on helping people recover a basic truth: discomfort is often the beginning of growth, not a sign that something has gone wrong.

Feeling understood is not the same as getting better. Modern mental health culture has drifted toward treating validation as progress, but real progress is often uncomfortable. The hopeful alternative is courage: a vision of mental health grounded in greater capacity, not the avoidance of discomfort. The real measure of growth is not how well someone can describe their wounds, but how confidently they can move through the difficulties that every meaningful life will encounter. That is what allows people to truly flourish.

The Big Idea: Vaccination is one of the greatest acts of collective kindness humans have ever devised, a technology that only works because we agree to protect people we’ll never meet. But the very success of vaccines has created a new problem: we’ve forgotten why we need them.

Why It Matters: Before vaccines, one in three children died of infectious disease before age five; burying a child was a routine part of parenthood. That memory has vanished within two generations, and into the vacuum have rushed claims that the shot is more dangerous than the microbe. The consequences are no longer hypothetical: American infants are now dying of a preventable vitamin K deficiency because a benign newborn injection got swept up in anti-vaccine misinformation.

These ideas come from A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines by Thomas Levenson. Tom is a professor of science writing at MIT and the author of several books, including So Very Small, Money for Nothing, and Einstein in Berlin. He has also made 10 award-winning feature-length documentaries. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

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1. Vaccines are kindness in a syringe.

None of the characters in the first passage of my book has a name. They were all anonymized (rightly so) as participants in an early-stage clinical trial. 108 healthy adults had agreed to allow researchers to inject them with a new compound that hadn’t been tried on humans before.

12 went first—guinea pigs willing to risk unanticipated consequences. They and the other study participants then stuck with it through a lengthy nine-month protocol, all to test a candidate vaccine to protect against human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, the pathogen that causes AIDS. Those unnamed, unknown volunteers lent their bodies and time to a project that could potentially save millions of others from a scourge that no one in this original cohort was facing themselves.

Such courage shoots through the long history of vaccination. That group of people willing to put themselves on the line to help humans they will never meet remind us that the story of vaccines is a tale of kindness—and of one of the best of human qualities: a willingness to take a chance in the hope of defeating persistent and deadly foes.

2. Not all vaccine hesitation is created equal.

Some people in the anti-vaccine world are in it for the money, power, and clout they can gain from pushing repeatedly debunked claims about the hazards of vaccines. But over the long history of vaccine development, some fears were not crazy. In one of the most significant incidents, there was a brief period in the 19th century when the first versions of the smallpox vaccine accidentally transmitted syphilis rather than the benign cowpox virus that conferred immunity to smallpox. Those incidents were rare, but one is too many if it happens to you.

News of such cases outraged and terrified many people, and some of the responses to those fears were not particularly helpful to the pro-vaccine cause. Some defenders then, and still today, argued that the obvious overwhelming benefits of the smallpox vaccine as a shield against one of the most terrifying killers of the day justified ignoring those alarmed by the small but real risk of a loathsome, deadly disease. In the end, such easy dismissals led to anger among those afraid of the new procedure—and those grievances sparked riots in the streets.

“Some of the responses to those fears were not particularly helpful to the pro-vaccine cause.”

If people are concerned about a shot—even if it’s just the worry produced by all the noise from anti-vaccine voices—it doesn’t work to fall back on the (valid) cost-benefit statistics of vaccination. Instead, it’s vital to identify the roots of someone’s hesitation and tell the whole story—way back to syphilis and smallpox, if necessary—to address the fear behind the fear: a deeply human concern about sticking some invisible and potent substance into one’s body.

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3. It’s crucial—and difficult—to remember a past beyond lived experience.

Modern anti-vaccine activists are as adamant as their 19th-century predecessors about the allegedly fatal dangers of vaccines. For example, before Robert F. Kennedy became Health and Human Services Secretary, he asserted that kids “get the shot, that night they have a fever…and three months later their brain is gone.”

Kennedy was wrong, of course. The alleged connection between vaccines and brain injury has been repeatedly debunked and modern vaccines are the safest medical procedures available today. But when Kennedy and his allies assert that vaccines are terribly dangerous and riskier than any conceivable benefit they might convey, that sense of danger can come to seem plausible—because of what we no longer recall.

Before vaccines existed, one in three kids would die of a fever before the age of five. It was routine for parents to bury one or more of their children. But with the steady expansion of vaccines for previously unchecked diseases in the 20th century, childhood infectious illnesses in rich countries have been almost completely defeated. A single kid’s death from measles is so rare that when one does happen, it makes national news.

“Modern vaccines are the safest medical procedures available today.”

That triumph has made it easy for opponents to claim that a shot is far more dangerous than any seemingly negligible threat posed by some invisible microbe. That false narrative is persuasive only because the genuine and vast peril posed by pathogenic viruses and bacteria has been defeated by vaccines. Such amnesia defines the job for the historian. Memory is not automatic. It must be cultivated, sought out.

4. When we forget what our grandparents knew about infectious disease, tragedy follows.

In 1857, a senior British doctor, Sir John Simon, defended vaccine mandates when he wrote that vaccine opponents were prepared to risk allowing “unconscious infants to become the prey of a fatal and mutilative disease.” Then, unleashing the most memorable phrase in the history of vaccination, he named the crime thus committed: “It was this liberty of omissional infanticide which the law took courage to check.”

“Omissional infanticide”—murder, with the lethal weapon being inaction: the withholding of the procedure that could have saved babies from dying from a preventable disease. What’s frustrating, terrifying, and tragic about what Simon said nearly two centuries ago is that his indictment still holds. As I write this, news has broken of infants dying in the U.S. from Vitamin K deficiency bleeding disorder (VKDB). About one in 250 babies is at risk of the malady, and the resulting deaths are wholly avoidable.

It’s standard practice to give newborns an injection of vitamin K right after they’ve made their entrance. But increasingly, American parents are rejecting that shot. It’s not a vaccine—the immune system isn’t involved—but because a needle is involved, this utterly benign bit of prophylaxis has been swept up in the cacophony of anti-vax misinformation. Parents become persuaded that they’re avoiding an unnecessary medical procedure and then expose their children to potentially fatal harm.

“This utterly benign bit of prophylaxis has been swept up in the cacophony of anti-vax misinformation.”

The same thing happens when people reject the standard—and transformative—suite of vaccines against the once ubiquitous and often lethal suite of childhood diseases: diphtheria, pertussis, measles, and the rest. Omissional infanticide, indeed.

5. Vaccination and the kind of people we want to be.

Our choices about vaccination hold up a mirror to who we are or want to be, as individuals and a society. Every decision to vaccinate begins with self-interest; the calculation that the benefit of avoiding an illness or the worst of an infection outweighs the slight risks of getting a shot.

We bare our arms because the prospect of a sore shoulder is worth it to avoid an encounter with anything from COVID to mumps to yellow fever or measles. That’s the “profit” we gain in thinking of a vaccination as a purely private transaction.

But another way to understand our choices recognizes the possibility of both generosity and individual gain. Seen that way, vaccines against the common endemic diseases confer a benefit that is shared with everyone around us. At the population level, a high enough vaccine rate stops infectious diseases cold by making it impossible for a single case to spread into an epidemic. Sitting still for each of the jabs on the recommended list gives our neighbors an amount of security that none of us can secure for ourselves alone.

To be against vaccination is to isolate oneself, to be alone, and to reject the ties that could bind one to others. You, me, all of us don’t have to live that way. Recognizing the gift inherent in the choice to vaccinate demonstrates that there is another way to be: in the company of others, mindful of ourselves as they each are of themselves, and generous to them as they are to us.

Why It Matters: The idea that loyalty and hard work lead to security and advancement is out of date, but most of us act as if it still applies. To have the career you want, you need to learn how the game actually works.

These ideas come from Clock In: No-BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career (Without Losing Your Mind) by Emily Durham. Emily, known online as Emily the Recruiter, is a recruiter-turned-career coach with an audience of more than three million across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and her podcast. Read on for five of her big ideas.

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1. Forget a dream job. Why are you dreaming of work?

Many of us made pretty big decisions about our careers before we could even vote or order a beer. And yet, at the ripe age of 17, we were forced to pick an academic and professional path. I surely do not trust any decision 17-year-old me made, but here we are.

From the time we could read, we were asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. And often, the jobs we dreamed of were the jobs that we knew existed, that we saw ourselves represented in, or had education about. The dream job often isn’t our dream alone.

What you want in your career has largely been shaped by your environment, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s so much power in understanding that what we have always wanted and what we will want in the future may evolve alongside our environment, circumstances, and sense of self. And there’s even more power in bringing awareness to some of these self-beliefs and giving ourselves a chance to challenge them.

The worst thing you can do is be married to a path that one day may no longer be the path you want. Your career will become significantly less stressful once you detach your sense of self from your work. Because as much as our careers feel like an integral part of who we are, they’re just what we do. Although they influence us as people, they aren’t who we are at our core.

“There’s so much power in understanding that what we have always wanted and what we will want in the future may evolve.”

And because we’ve been conditioned to dream of labor—literally, it is so gross—we think we’re targeting a dream job alone. When the reality is that most of us are targeting these three core needs, and the job is just how we plan to get there.

As people, we are fueled by my Jersey Shore-style acronym, VPL: Validation, Purpose, and Lifestyle. If we stop targeting a dream job and start targeting a life that gives us the VPL we’re looking for, things start to feel just a little bit lighter.

2. Your job is never loving you back—like, ever.

Have you heard of love bombing? In short, it’s when someone tries to shower you with love and affection and praise super early on in a relationship so that you feel valued and ultimately really loyal to them. Eventually, once the love bomber gets what they want—often your unwavering devotion—they pull back and withdraw the positive affirmations and attentiveness they used to hook you.

Companies kind of do the same thing. They know humans have a desire to feel valued, so what do they do? They manufacture a sense of belonging in exchange for our loyalty. You’ll hear things like, “We’re a family at this company,” or “We’re the good guys.” Eventually, we start to believe them. We feel a heightened sense of responsibility and anxiety. We work late, we don’t ask for a raise—all to avoid letting the company that we love down.

But the truth is, it’s hard to get ahead without losing your mind when you’re expecting your company to love you back. You start to work overtime, lose sleep, and go above and beyond for a company that will pass you up for a promotion or lay you off if necessary. You may love your job, but much like my ex-boyfriend, that job is never loving you back. Ever.

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3. Your resume doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to not be bad.

With thousands of applications for every single job, how does a recruiter get through them all and read them all? On average, a recruiter looks at your resume for six seconds before they determine whether they move forward with you as a candidate.

Only six seconds. How are they reading everything you wrote down in that short a time? I have big news: they’re not. Baby, they’re not reading your resume at all. The average recruiter is skimming, not reading. So, your resume doesn’t need to be AI-proof or perfectly laid out to get ahead. It just can’t be bad.

“Baby, they’re not reading your resume at all.”

If your resume isn’t bad, then it’s good. If we know recruiters are skimming your resume, all we need to do is make sure the design, data, and details of your application align with how real recruiters review applications to get you ahead.

So please do not feel like you need to customize your resume. It is totally unnecessary. You don’t need to do it. You also don’t need to flood your resume with a whole bunch of buzzwords directly from the job description. All of that advice doesn’t actually help.

All you need to do is have one really strong resume that’s loaded with meaningful data that explains in detail the value and impact of your job, with a design that’s simple and easy to read. No crazy colors, no crazy design—something that a human person can scan easily in under six seconds, ideally.

4. Be liked and seen.

Have you ever noticed it’s almost never the smartest or most qualified person who gets the job or the promotion? It’s the most visible and the most well-liked. If you have limited time to invest in your career, I would genuinely rather you invest it in improving your likability and visibility than in your actual intellect and skill. And believe me, I know that’s messed up.

The ugly truth is that meritocracy is a myth. People are not hired, paid, and promoted based on skill, talent, and hard work. Of course, those things can be factors in success, and they often are. But in a world based on racism, capitalism, sexism, and every other “ism,” merit alone isn’t going to grow your career.

Ask yourself:

• Does my boss know what I’m working on?

• Is what I’m working on visible to senior leadership?

• Is the impact of what I’m doing visible to senior leadership?

• Do people like me?

• Do I make people feel valued and understood?

• Do I operate with empathy?

If the answer is yes, you’re light-years ahead.

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5. Be a little bit crazy.

I’ve seen this happen countless times with my clients. They do all the right things. They make a plan. They network. They develop their skills. And they’re passed up for opportunities, or they’re told to wait it out by a boss who clearly doesn’t have their best interests at heart. Sometimes this is because the work culture is toxic—that’s a whole other can of worms—but sometimes it’s because you need to be just a tiny bit crazier, also known as being a better salesperson.

Operating with a sales mindset in your career is literally life-changing. It doesn’t mean that you’re pushy or that you never take no for an answer, because that isn’t what great salespeople do. They don’t steamroll, get in your face, or force you to buy what they’re selling. What they are is consistent. Great salespeople aren’t scared to get creative and be persistent to get the job done. So, I challenge you to start thinking about your career through the lens of a salesperson.

Many salespeople live by the “rule of seven.” It’s a sales and marketing term that states a customer needs to interact with a brand seven times before they make a purchasing decision. This might mean a person sees two commercials on TV, sees an ad on the subway, sees a sponsored post on social media, gets a call from the sales team, hears a radio ad, and receives an email from the same sales rep they’ve been working with—all before they even decide to purchase the product.

“Operating with a sales mindset in your career is literally life-changing.”

Good salespeople know that asking you to purchase a product once just isn’t going to cut it. They need to influence you again and again. Think of your career as the product and your boss as the consumer. Your boss needs consistent and clear messaging that politely reminds them what you want. It’s as simple as that.

You asking for growth once isn’t enough. You need to have conversations about your ideal next career move at least once a month. Look for those opportunities to socialize your desires regularly. And don’t get discouraged if it takes a little bit of time.